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I thought about Diane Arbus as I read this book. Arbus’s work forces me to look at and pay attention to people I might otherwise avoid, my eyes sliding away, consigning them to the crowd. Having to recognise the subject as an individual is unsettling and sometimes unpleasant, but ultimately edifying as it compels me to acknowledge the person’s humanity and appreciate his or her difficulties and concerns.

Oates’s work affects me the same way. Here, she has taken the JonBenet Ramsey case as a springboard for exploring the dynamics of a family caught up in a similar maelstrom: a personal tragedy turned into a media circus. Normally I avoid such distractions, preferring not to waste my time on the viral coverage of some self-indulgent celebrity heading to rehab or some non-public figure jockeying for fame, so I didn’t follow the Ramsey case. But Oates is too good a writer to let me off the hook.

Now 19, Skylar Rampike narrates the events around the death of his younger sister almost ten years earlier. At six, little Bliss Rampike—born Edna Louise Rampike—is already an ice skating prodigy with several local titles on her resume and a promising future, when she is found murdered in the furnace room of the family home in a prosperous New Jersey suburb. Although a convicted pedophile confesses to the killing, Skylar himself is widely suspected of being the culprit.

Skylar does not spare himself. He was an unattractive child, with fly-away fawn-colored hair, and an even more unattractive adolescent. In his desperation to please his demanding parents, Skylar injures himself in a gymnastics class, leaving him with a permanent limp and a tendency to wear what his parents criticise as “his pain face”.

I would like to think that Betsey and Bix are parodies of awful parents. Betsey’s obsession with Bliss’s career is rooted in her own frustrated dreams of glory. Although an outline description of Betsey’s actions would sound like the stereotype of the worst of stage mothers, or the recently celebrated Tiger Mom, Oates fills in this image with emotion and self-deception. Bix may be idolised by his young children, but he cannot be trusted, reneging on promise after promise to his son and daughter, even as he swears that they are what matter most to him. Behind Bix’s bluster, too, are shadows of uncertainty and baffled regret, as he consistently mispronounces clichés and foreign tags.

Betsey and Bix are not parodies, unfortunately, in spite of some reviewers' complaints that they are not sufficiently complex. Too many parents believe they can lie to children and control their futures without repercussions. Such parents don’t see their children as independent beings with their own hopes and fears and dreams, but rather as extensions of themselves. Their tragedy, then, is when these parents find that the love and devotion they assumed was theirs by right is not, in fact, forthcoming.

Skylar’s voice as narrator is perfectly pitched as a small child describing outings with his mummy and daddy, as an awkward pre-teen at boarding school experiencing friendship and romance for the first time, and as a thoroughly alienated adolescent. This is Skylar’s story and it has to do with what connection such a damaged soul can find in our fractured and selfish world.

We have a poetry discussion group that meets once a month. Members take turns leading the discussion, which can mean presenting a brief introduction to the chosen poet or simply identifying a selection of poems to be discussed. As you can imagine, our tastes vary widely, and we often differ in our assessments. This disparity has been helpful to me as a writer: seeing how one person can love a poem and another hate it, learning what appeals to various people. Some of our members are poets, but not everyone. The group has also been helpful to me as a reader, introducing me to new poets, forcing me to look harder at work I might have skipped over, providing new insights into poems I thought I’d plumbed.

For this month I selected Janine Pommy Vega who was unknown to nearly everyone in our group. Since Vega passed away recently (December 2010), it seemed like a good time to look at her body of work. Also, a couple of our members teach in prisons, as Vega herself did for many years. As a teenager, Vega ran off to Greenwich Village where she met Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, among others. Her early poetry reflects this Beat influence while her later poetry often seems centered upon her work in prisons and upon the spiritual quest that took her around the world. Mad Dogs is her twelfth collection of poetry and includes work selected from earlier volumes.

As one member of our group remarked, Vega’s work is uneven: some poems are transcendent while others seem flat. The poems I selected naturally reflected my taste, which is for unexpected images knocking up against each other, leaving lots of room for ambiguity. Consequently, a few people found the poems too vague. One that many thought remarkable though obscure was “The Traveler”. With references to Plato—cave, tunnel and sky—the narrator goes “on an outing in the home/of myself”. The poem is filled with images of things that do not work and the sound of things breaking. The ending is strange and ominous: “No snow crackles under the traveler’s feet/out walking without the body, sense peeled like/an apple to the deer nibbling down the sky.”

We all liked “Re-entry” which is about the difficulty of coming back from being away. She says, “One night the body went out to find/its darkness”. It doesn’t matter where the person has been, although that didn’t stop us speculating about possibilities—prison, sleeping, a drug trip. What matters is the inability to return: “you look at photos, memories of the mind/and can’t return to the places/you might have been”. Everything seems strange: “What will you do with your hair/your nails and eyebrows/what will you do with your hair?”

“May Day”, which examines the narrator’s relationship with her mother and their shared legacy of anger, sparked a long discussion. Some of us thought the anger the two women expressed was an inchoate rage without a specific target or rationale: “ancient woman/of the earth who comes up/howling, red, her hands running with lava”. Others thought the rage was at each other and talked about women’s anger with their mothers. If that is true, the ending moves to a reconciliation: “I can’t disown her/every shred of her dress is mine”. We disagreed as to whether anger can lead to regeneration, like forest fires enabling new growth, but were united in our appreciation of the title’s resonances with pagan rituals, S.O.S. calls, and revolution.

I’m grateful to the members of our group for their insights and suggestions which led me to a deeper appreciation of these poems and Vega’s particular talent.

In her Preface, Urquhart describes these stories as her first forays into fiction. As a poet, she had begun to find that her interest in narrative and “subtle explorations of character” demanded a different, more expansive form. She says, “I found that there was not enough physical space in a single lyric poem for what I wanted to say, and not enough breadth for me to get to know what I needed to learn.” Even narrative poetry proved insufficient, and I found it amusing that her first story is about Robert Browning.

I’ve been interested in writers who work in both genres—Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Hardy, to name just a few—exploring what they choose to write as poems and what as fiction. For myself, I sometimes write a story as a poem first, or perhaps after the first draft. By identifying what in the story creates the “concentrated resonance” Joanna Hirschfield attributes to Japanese poetry, I understand better how to focus the story.

I have remarked before how poetic Urquhart’s prose is. These stories, however, hover between poetry and prose, using the syntax and imagery of poetry within the narrative structure of fiction. Her imaginative leaps and way of telling it “slant”, as Emily Dickinson famously said, result in stories that are sometimes like dreams, mysterious and moving in indefinable ways. Some of them reminded me of Italo Calvino’s cities.

Other stories experiment with shifts in time. In “Forbidden Dances”, a woman remembers visiting her grandmother, moving back and forth between childhood memories, present-day adulthood, adolescence, her grandmother’s death. Urquhart eschews the usual structure of a present-day frame containing a chronological flashback, yet I was never uncertain as to when each scene was taking place. The scenes build from the grandmother’s story to her best friend’s story and then into the narrator’s story, all of them interpenetrating and illuminating each other.

The physical setting is important too. In the grandmother’s kitchen, the south window faces the fields of the farm where she spent her adult life, fields now worked by her son, while the north window faces the hill that was the scene of her childhood. I had the sense of an entire life contained in this single room, where she sits in her rocker working at a piece of appliquéd patchwork. Outside is a small wood with a creek which fills the narrator’s imagination. Hirschfield describes some poems as having a “painterly quality, the use of outward presentation to hold inner meaning” which perfectly captures Urquhart’s accomplishment. The first book of Urquhart’s that I read was The Underpainter and her partner is an artist whom I’ve mentioned here, making the quote even more apt.

This story is also a good example of how Urquhart uses imagery and colors to build character and theme. The grandmother, whose father forbade her to dance and insisted she do needlework, spends her time embroidering ladies in pastel gowns who look as though they are preparing to go to a dance. Given her lack of skill, the narrator notes that “the stitches that held them together were unlikely to endure long enough to get them there.” The specificity of imagery and the attention to word choice in this and the other stories add to their power and demonstrate the poet’s skill.

There is a raptor circling in the woods outside, a hawk of some kind. He glides just above the trees and then loops down a little ways into them, up, around, down, up, around. And then he plunges down, swiftly, into the tangle of grey branches and underbrush.

Gale’s poems appear modest and unassuming, yet with attentive reading, they open out into stories that wrap sensuality and concern around seeds of bitterness and grief. I love the space in these poems. They are like jasmine buds that, steeped in hot water, unfurl and blossom, infusing the cup with a heady scent.

She manages to tell whole stories in a few lines. Describing a marriage in “The Tomato Picker”, she says he “could not sleep in their bed/without dreaming of the house/vanishing . . .” and we know what is happening. Many of these poems are about the shifting lines of power within relationships, women who are betrayed by their own bodies as much as by the smiling men who touch them. She uses small, yet precise details to summon emotion, such as the man in “Outside the Window” who catches his breath in fear that the woman inside will touch the hair of the man she is with, just as she once touched his.

Other poems are about teaching, about the stories students tell her, about their own fears in the classroom. I love “My Children are Not Fig Trees” in which she answers the question as to why she does not write poems about her children. She describes caring for fig trees, vegetables, pansies. However, of her children, she merely says, “I hold my breath./I listen to their breathing.” In just two lines, she has captured the whole of my approach to parenting. Amazing.

I picked up the book at the AWP Conference, from the Red Hen Press table. Normally I do not purchase books on the basis of what company published it, but when it comes to poetry and Red Hen Press, I can be pretty sure that I will like the book.

The poem that moved me the most was “Snakes and Hawks”. After an evening with her lover, the narrator wakes to moonlight. From the doorway, she looks back at his boa constrictor and his chained hawk. As she walks outside, she thinks, “only my own body/does not leave me” and it is as if all those lazy, looping circles about coconut ice cream and Thai beer and his pets were a distraction, a preparation, and here is the plunge, and it goes straight to the heart of the matter.

I’m finding the Writer’s Almanac to be a fertile source of reading material. Through it, I’ve learned about many little-known authors, or authors like Jameson who were famous in their day but unknown now. In her long life (1891-1986), Jameson wrote over 45 novels and served as President of the London center of the P.E.N., the first woman to do so. Her first aim in writing this autobiography in the early 1960s is to capture the tumultuous times through which she has lived. Her second aim is to discover for herself “what sort of person I have been,” acknowledging that nothing would be easier than to fabricate, using only the facts of her life, a portrait which would be “intelligent, charming, interesting and a lie” but choosing sincerity instead. The resulting narrative sometimes suffers from this lack of a throughline, but captures the vitality of life as we live it: a jumble from beginning to end, sprinkled with mistakes, false starts, and moments of unreasoning joy.

I’m reading some of her novels, but it is really this autobiography that captivates me. The book clearly conveys the image of a strong-minded woman who is not afraid to admit her mistakes or to admonish others for theirs. Impervious to advice, bull-headed, Storm barges her way through life, making—and often suffering from—her own decisions. For example, as a young woman, she gives in to her mother’s loneliness and refuses a prestigious London job writing for The Egoist, a position that is then offered to Rebecca West, who of course went on to literary fame and a place in the canon. Still, Jameson says, “Believe me, who should know, The Egoist and the world of letters got a better bargain.”

Her native Whitby is her great love, though restlessness repeatedly drives her to London and abroad. Being an admirer of that Yorkshire town myself, I was charmed by her descriptions of the town of her childhood at the end of the era of shipbuilding that supported her family and Whitby itself. Her relationship with her mother is as eccentric as everything else in her orbit. Acting almost as a bashful lover, she cannot resist giving expensive gifts to the perpetually dissatisfied woman. Twice married, Jameson later solves the parenting dilemma by boarding her young son with a woman outside Whitby while she herself lives in London, working and writing.

Jameson’s acerbic comments on writers and publishers whom she knew make me wish she’d expanded those sections. Many of them I’d never heard of and am now looking up. At one point she describes a meeting with John Middleton Murray, which gave me a start because I’ve also been reading Katherine Mansfield’s letters, spacing them out so I can savor them. I was shocked to realise the two women were contemporaries. Somehow I hadn’t made the connection.

The tale Jameson tells avoids bathos and hand-wringing; she’s too tough for that. Yet when, for example, her rage over the waste of the Great War slips out, it is profoundly moving. Moving, too, is her chagrin at having been too self-centered to appreciate her brother, killed just before the Armistice, while she had him.

Another section which brought me to tears was her visit to Prague in June of 1938 as a delegate to the P.E.N. Congress, just after Hitler’s invasion of Vienna. The Czech people she meets display a heart-breaking confidence that England will honor its promise to protect them, while Jan Masark, the Czech ambassador, cheerily says, “‘Who cares if you rat on us? . . . We have our army.'” Later, in the streets of Prague, she sees this army: “the Sokol striplings, carelessly lively and free-stepping, the girls hardly less broad-shouldered than the boys . . . Trained in groups, in villages and small towns, to the same music, when they came together for the first time in the Stadium they moved as a single body, a vast ballet.” She calls them “confident children” and her companion says, “‘See how gay they are . . . and proud, like dancers. When we train them for the Sokols we take care they are not stiff like Germans. It is a free discipline.'” Knowing what happened afterwards makes this hard to take.

I found Jameson’s personal view of the home front throughout this second war, its runup and its aftermath, enlightening and quite different from official histories. I’m not sure I would have liked Jameson if I had met her—she is very quick to voice her opinions—but I appreciate her lack of self-pity, her generous observations of others, and her flinty Yorkshire individuality.

This week I attended the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference for the first time and was blown away by the insights and camaraderie showered upon me. The book fair alone was rewarding enough: hundreds of literary magazines, presses, MFA programs, and literary organisations filled four large rooms. Finding time to wander the booths was a challenge given the many readings and workshops going on all day and into the evening, not to mention the parties and receptions and conversations in the lobby and hallways.

I enjoyed hearing many of my favorite writers read and talk about their work, such as Joyce Carol Oates, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Junot Diaz (see my blog about his first book here). Joshua Ferris, whose first book I blogged about here, read a new story in its entirety, and Salvador Plascencia, whose amazing People of Paper I blogged about here, gave a hilarious non-reading, in spite of the early hour in which he described being “barely literate”. Other readings I was sorry to miss included Rae Armantrout, Natasha Trethewey, Elizabeth Strout, Howard Norman, and Stanley Plumley. The WAMFest performance, featuring singer/songwriters and novelists John Wesley Harding (who writes as Wesley Stace) and Josh Ritter surprised and touched me with the intersection of music and prose. Stace’s new novel Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer about a folksong collector in the early 20th century was of particular interest to me given my interest in Cecil Sharp, Mary Neal and Maud Karpeles. Stace said that sometimes a story is just too big for a song, while Ritter described a song as a hallway with many doors, and said that in a novel one can open them and explore what’s inside.

The hardest part was choosing among the many enticing workshops in each timeslot. Some offered practical advice on issues such as copyright, while others explored aspects of the craft of writing such as the lyric essay and metafiction in Latino writing. As I’ve been interested in the influence of place on writing, I benefited from the workshop on the effect of the environment on Appalachian writers. As a poet, I enjoyed hearing poets talk about using the past in their work and the relation of new research on the brain to poetry. However, the workshop that most thrilled and inspired me was the one on Leaping Prose. Bly’s book Leaping Poetry has been a huge influence on me, so I loved hearing Peter Grandbois, Carol Moldaw, Kazim Ali, and Carole Maso translate Bly’s ideas into prose, using their own and others’ stories as examples.

Scattered through the schedule, too, were tributes to writers by those who knew them. I enjoyed the many personal anecdotes related in the celebration of Elizabeth Bishop and Ai, but most moving to me was the tribute to Paul Celan. John Felstiner and Susan Gillespie read letters, recently translated by Gillespie, between Celan and his friend, Ilana Shmueli, written during the last months of his life. Ian Fairley, who has translated several collections of Celan’s poems, used three poems to talk about the complexities of translation, exploring the multiple meanings of a single word and how alternate meanings can shadow the chosen one. Since I’ve been working on translating Italian poems, I listened open-mouthed to Fairley’s soft voice describing etymologies and shades of meaning, what influences a poem and what is left unsaid, how Celan uses poems to give himself a face and how every reader becomes a translator. Gillespie also discussed talked about translation, about needing to bear towards the words and take our bearing from them.

Every writing conference I’ve been to has energised me. Just being around and talking with other writers gives me boost, reminding me that I am a writer, one among many perhaps but nonetheless a writer. From AWP I brought home pages of notes, piles of books, many memories, and a recharged spirit.

What terrific stories! As Josephine Donovan points out in her introduction, Jewett is the bridge between the American “local color” writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Rose Terry, and the European realists, such as Flaubert, Tolstoy, Sterne and George Sand. Inspired by Stowe’s novel, The Pearl of Orr’s Island, Jewett sets her own stories in her native Maine, realistically capturing the flavor of life in the rural areas and small towns.

Many of these stories feature characters who are intensely individual, this from a time when towns and farms were more isolated. As Storm Jameson says of her own native Whitby, “Isolation . . . bred, in counterweight to its benefits, a crop of eccentrics, harmless fools, misers, house devils, despots, male and some female . . .” Jewett explores these folks in seemingly simple stories that pack a huge emotional punch. Most of the stories feature women and explore issues of power and powerlessness. “The Flight of Betsey Lane” describes three women in the local poor-house, many of whose residents only come there for the winter months: “far from lamenting the fact that they were town charges, they rather liked the change and excitement of a winter residence on the poor-farm.” The story captures the shifting currents of friendship between the three, their tolerance of each other’s eccentricities, their care for each other, their secrets.

In “Going to Shrewsbury”, the narrator meets up with an elderly countrywoman taking her first-ever train journey. Mrs. Peet has been tricked out of the small farm where she and her now-deceased husband had scraped a living for forty-five years and is on her way to live with a niece who doesn’t seem eager to have her. The mix of emotions—sadness, excitement, loneliness—struck me as genuine, reminding me of elderly parents of a friend who recently moved here, far from their friends and former life, in order to spend their last years near their children. At one point, Mrs. Peet says, ” ‘It may divert me, but it won’t be home. You might as well set out one o’ my old apple-trees on the beach, so ‘t could see the waves come in . . .'”

One area where Jewett excels is capturing the rhythms of speech without the excessive use of dialect that can be so annoying. She characterises her people not just through their speech and actions, but by how others in their small communities react to them and by small details of their clothing, habits, or homes. For example, “The Only Rose” begins “Just where the village abruptly ended, and the green mowing fields began, stood Mrs. Bickford’s house, looking down the road with all its windows, and topped by two prim chimneys that stood up like ears.”

Other stories are more meditative, even lyrical, descriptions of the place. Jewett’s familiarity with native plants and appreciation of nature inform stories like “An Autumn Holiday” and “A Bit of Shore Life”. These are also examples of the “village sketch” format developed by Mary Russell Mitford, where a narrator wanders through her village describing birds and plants and conversing with the unconventional people she meets. Perhaps the most famous story here is “A White Heron” in which a young girl is torn between devotion to the bird and a desire to help the young man who wants to shoot and stuff it to add to his collection.

As it happens, I had never read anything by this well-known author of the late 19th century, not even her most famous book, The Country of the Pointed Firs. I came across her name again last year when I was reading Willa Cather, for Jewett was a mentor for Cather and was much appreciated by the younger writer who named The Country of the Pointed Firs one of the three works of American literature that would be classics, the others being Huckleberry Finn and The Scarlet Letter.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the influence of place on writers, even as our places become more homogenized. Jewett’s writing has the grit and get-on-with-it nature of Maine’s rocky, stubborn land. Her work has the stripped-down barrenness of Maine’s long snowbound winter, the darkness of its lonely woods, and the astringent sweetness of its spring. I recommend these stories and will be looking for more of her work.

This fascinating book has found a well-deserved place on many Best-of-2010 lists. In compelling prose, Skloot tells the story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman from rural Virginia, who died of cancer in 1951 in Johns Hopkins Hospital. Cells harvested from her tumor, in accordance with the standard practice of the time, became the first cells that could be grown in a laboratory, a huge advance for medicine because they enabled researchers to run tests in laboratories instead of on live people. HeLa cells, named for Henrietta Lacks, are today used in laboratories around the world and have led to such benefits as the vaccine for polio, a better understanding of cancer, in vitro fertilization, and gene mapping. Just before her death, Henrietta was told that her cells would help save lives and she said that “‘she was glad her pain would come to some good for someone.'”

Yet Henrietta’s family knew nothing of the continued existence of her cells nor of the contributions to society they enabled. Scientists from Hopkins contacted them occasionally over the years, partly in order to see if other family members could provide cells with similar benefits, but the Lacks family could not follow the technical discussion, thinking instead that they were being tested for cancer and baffled when no one at Hopkins could give them their test results.

The medical profession and hospitals are mistrusted by much of the black community, and no wonder considering such abuses as the Tuskegee syphilis study. Yet, Hopkins was founded with the intention of providing medical care to all, regardless of ability to pay, and, indeed, Henrietta was treated for free. Hopkins has not made any money from Henrietta’s cells. Rather, they gave them to labs which have made a lot of money over the years growing and selling HeLa cells to meet the huge demand in the medical community. Meanwhile the Lacks family have lived in poverty, often without health insurance themselves, receiving neither recognition or compensation for Henrietta’s contribution.

Should they have? Skloot explores this and other complicated ethical issues in this fascinating book, while giving us the story of Henrietta’s life and the subsequent lives of her family. Skloot relates the convoluted progress of her attempts to contact the family and her eventual partnership with Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah. Together they uncovered Henrietta’s story, sharing their different pieces of that story.

Full disclosure: I heard Rebecca speak and met her briefly at one of Lee Gutkind’s Creative Nonfiction Conferences at Goucher College. I had gone looking for anything that would help me figure out how to write my memoir (which is coming out later this year from Apprentice House). I found help in abundance and also a deeper understanding of this relatively new genre of creative nonfiction, i.e., applying the techniques of fiction (e.g., narrative, description, dialogue) to nonfiction. This well-written book is an excellent example of the genre, being as exciting and as readable as any novel, while managing to inform at the same time.

I also attended the first annual Henrietta Lacks Memorial Lecture at Johns Hopkins, a gracious if belated expression of the huge debt owed to this woman. Hopkins went all out, providing a background on the science involved, a presentation on the history of HeLa cells, announcing scholarships in Henrietta’s name, and inviting her family, many of whom were present, to speak. The Hopkins representatives welcomed questions and took their hits fairly, discussing the pros and cons of the issues involved. Rebecca herself spoke and read from the book, the moving passage when Deborah first holds her mother’s cells.

My book club was lucky enough to have Henrietta’s granddaughter, Jeri, attend our meeting. She passed around articles about Henrietta and patiently answered our questions. Publicity is not always welcome, but Jeri said that the younger generation is grateful for the knowledge of their family history that has been pieced together and documented by Rebecca and others. She also noted that the book expresses Deborah's point of view, which is not necessarily shared by other members of the family. This was especially interesting to me because, in writing my memoir, I struggled a lot with the issues around telling someone else's story.

Rebecca Skloot has started a nonprofit foundation in honor of Henrietta Lacks, which “strives to provide financial assistance to needy individuals who have made important contributions to scientific research without their knowledge or consent. The Foundation gives those who have benefited from biological contributions — including scientists, universities, corporations, and the general public — a way to show their appreciation to individuals like Henrietta Lacks for their contributions to science.” Recent grants have gone toward education and health care for the Lacks family. Donations may be made at henriettalacksfoundation.org/.

Second books can be terrifying for the writer and a disappointment for the reader. The author usually cannot devote to a second book the long years of revising and polishing that went into selling the first book. And if that first book was a huge success, as was Walls's The Glass Castle, then the author carries the burden of expectations and is hampered by the fear of not being able to live up to them. A memoir of her childhood, The Glass Castle was one of the very best of all the many memoirs I read that year. In fascinated horror I read on as Walls was tossed here and there at the whim of her feckless (if fun) parents, certainly neglected by today's standards, often starved enough to steal food from the school trashcans, but still fondly appreciative of her father's quirky ideas.

Half Broke Horses, Walls's second book, is a fictional treatment of her grandmother's life, based on family stories and supplemental research. Growing up on ranches in Texas and New Mexico during the Dust Bowl years, Lily endured hardships that she perceived as privileges, such as living in a mud house that was cool in summer and warm in winter, though sometimes unstable in the rare heavy rains. As the oldest of three, she acted as her father's best hand, breaking the horses he then trained as carriage horses, gelding the male horses, selling eggs in town, and bargaining with the shopkeepers.

Walls does an excellent job of capturing the voice of this idiosyncratic woman and maintaining it throughout the book. While the book lacks the intensity of the earlier memoir, I cherished the opportunity to spend time with the practical and philosophic Lily. She takes every setback as a lesson to be learned and is harder on herself than anyone.

An all-too-brief year at boarding school instills in her a lifelong love of learning, which she pursues in fits and starts, whenever time and money can be spared from ranch life. Tough as she is, there is no doubt from her actions how much she loves her two children, Rosemary (who would be Jeannette’s mother) and Little Jim. I also appreciated the chance to learn more about Rosemary’s early life, which puts some of her later, seemingly bizarre parental behavior into some kind of context.

In spite of her lack of credentials, Lily works as a teacher when she can, though she continually gets into trouble with the authorities for teaching children what she thinks they should know. She also loves flying, though she can rarely afford the lessons, and enjoys watching the westerns that her husband, Big Jim, despises. While agreeing that the cowboys are unrealistic with their spotless ten-gallon hats and spirited sing-songs around the campfire after a long day on the trail, she argues that no one would want to see stories of real cowboys.

Maybe not in the movies, but I sure enjoyed these stories of real life in the West. Lily embodies not only the independence we associate with the West, living her life in a way that is orthogonal to American society, but also the can-do spirit and work ethic necessary to survive in a place where you only have yourself to rely on. Lily is the kind of woman I always wanted to be and I’m tremendously grateful for this chance to get to know her.

There have been a spate of articles, including a report from the U.S. National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2025, predicting that the U.S.‘s reign as a global superpower will be over by 2025 or sooner. The reasons are the usual suspects, succinctly summarized by Alfred McCoy in an article in Salon: “Today, three main threats exist to America’s dominant position in the global economy: loss of economic clout thanks to a shrinking share of world trade, the decline of American technological innovation, and the end of the dollar's privileged status as the global reserve currency.” The trade deficit drives the first threat, along with the movement of production overseas. The poorly ranked U.S. educational system is not turning out the scientists and mathematicians necessary to continue our role in technological innovation. McCoy says: “The World Economic Forum ranked the United States at a mediocre 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010.” The third threat is due to the lack of confidence in the U.S. economy, not just because of the recent banking crisis, but also because of the huge national debt which exploded during the Bush/Cheney regime. A large portion of that debt is held by China, which along with India, Russia and Brazil are overtaking or surpassing the U.S. in key economic areas. In addition, McCoy points out that the U.S.‘s declining economy has already decreased the country's ability to control global oil supplies, which will exacerbate the coming energy crisis.

With these predictions in mind, I turned to this 1988 account of Theroux’s travels in China. A reliably excellent writer, Theroux describes the places he goes, the trains he uses to get there, and the people he meets in brief anecdotes, so that reading the book is like listening to a most entertaining dinner guest. He does not hide his own bad behavior, such as asking politically sensitive questions of people who do not want to answer; refusing to use anything but the old versions of city names such as Peking, Canton, Shanghai; and giving out forbidden portraits of the Dalai Lama in Tibet.

Theroux does not paint an attractive picture of Chinese life. Heating and lighting are luxuries. In Manchuria they don’t wash because they don’t have hot water or bathrooms, and the houses are kept so cold that they wear coats and hats even inside. Toilets in the trains are holes in the floor. People spit all the time and everywhere, inside and out, leaning forward to dribble it onto the floor or ground and then wiping at it with their feet. The Chinese have much catching up to do with the modern world: the trains, even the new ones, are steam locomotives.

Of course the book is outdated, but the poverty of the people is shocking nonetheless. There are just too many of them, and they use every inch of space for living or growing food. Forests and wild animals are wiped out, songbirds shot for their scrap of meat, and mountains made into terraced gardens and caves into homes. Of Gansu, Theroux says, “. . . everything visible in this landscape was man-made.” Outside Shanghai, they use human excrement as fertilizer. “It was all used. Farm yields were high, but the place epitomized drudgery. Everyone’s energy was expended on simply existing there, and every inch of land had been put to use. Why grow flowers when you can grow spinach? Why plant a tree when you can use the sunshine on your crop?” People live in caves and those too poor to own oxen pull the plows themselves. Theroux observes that “If there were enough of you, it was really very easy to dig up a continent and plant cabbages.”

Much of his conversation with people centers around trying to measure the extent of the then-new capitalism and the attitudes toward the recent past. He finds everyone intent of making money and trying to repair the ravages of the Cultural Revolution. They are starting businesses, rebuilding monasteries to attract tourists, converting communes into more profitable cooperatives. He finds few with a good word to say for their previously revered leader, and when he visits Mao’s birthplace, it is deserted and the gift shop no longer carries Mao’s picture, his badge, or his little red book. Still, people are surprisingly forgiving, or perhaps they deliberately set aside the abuses and cruelty of that time. Theroux asks one man if he is bitter. The man replies, “‘No . . . They were young. They didn’t know anything.'”

Although the government repression we hear so much about is omnipresent—people don’t believe the government radio broadcasts and refuse to speculate about possible political changes over which they have no control—Theroux again and again finds an optimistic spirit: children playing in the snow, ice sculptures in Harbin with fluorescent tubes frozen inside, a manager bragging about the productivity of his cooperative and plans for future expansion. For the Chinese, every train journey is a big pajama party, though it means leaving the car trashed after even the shortest journey.

McCoy’s article scared me, not because I hadn’t already pieced together those same threats that will reduce the U.S. to a second-class country, but because I hadn’t thought about how quickly it can occur or what might happen afterwards. When the British empire faded, it was replaced by the U.S. empire: a soft landing indeed due to the similarity between the two cultures. We will not be so lucky. How much of Theroux’s picture of Chinese life is our future? It is not a comfortable thought.