grief

AfterMath, by Emily Barth Isler

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In this middle-grade novel, twelve-year-old Lucy starts at a new school in a new town, carrying a secret burden: she’s mourning the death of her younger brother Theo from congenital heart disease and the loss of the family environment she’s known all her life. Mired in their own grief, her parents pretend all is well, yet move to another state in hopes of a fresh start.

In a misguided attempt to place Lucy in a school that will help her deal with her grief, they enroll her in a school that suffered a mass shooting four years earlier and in the very class that suffered that trauma. As the first new member of the class since the shooting, Lucy faces a solid block of young people who have made their traumatic journey together, helped by therapists and hurt by public perception.

All except one girl, Avery, who is ostracized by the entire class. At lunch on Lucy’s first day, she can’t find an empty seat, so she sits at a table that is completely empty aside from Avery. Gradually Lucy begins to learn about this withdrawn girl, particularly through an after-school mime class.

As is obvious from this summary, the story tackles themes of grief, family, friendship, and mental health, and it does so in a sensitive way. The author’s extensive research underpins the story without loading it down. Of course, the experiences of Lucy and her classmates make for heavy reading– emotionally, that is; the prose flows well and the story unfolds naturally.

I especially enjoyed Lucy as a character. She likes math, its concrete answers that are either right or wrong, though she’s troubled by the concept of infinity. Each chapter is introduced by a math joke, which is fun. Lucy finds them in her room and wonders where they come from.

What kind of angle should you never argue with?
A 90-degree angle. They’re ALWAYS right.

Some readers may find these jokes and Lucy’s way of using math to understand the world intrusive or boring. I loved them, though, both for their welcome lightness and for the way they reflect her need for structure and certainty in a world where such things can be hard to find. I also loved seeing a girl who likes math and logic: such a rarity in stories, though not in real life.

In the mime class—which may appeal to readers who are more interested in the arts than in math—Lucy and her classmates find another way to interact. Communicating without words, trying something new together, putting on a show at the end—these are all effective tools for opening emotionally to each other. Or in other words, for becoming friends. We all could use a friend.

There are a few issues with the book, such as that, after the school where the shooting had occurred had been torn down and new one built, such a class would have been split up rather than kept together in isolation. Also, the school’s lack of interest in dealing with Avery’s extreme situation seemed unlikely.

Still, I highly recommend this novel for adults and—with care—for young readers. Grownups get a chance to experience these devasting attacks and their long tail of trauma from the students’ point of view. Young people can see their fears or their own experience reflected—and not resolved so much as coped with—in a story. Which is, after all, one of the great gifts bestowed by sharing stories.

Have you read a middle-grade story that impressed you?

Afterlife, by Julia Alvarez

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Afterlife

There are inflection points in our lives, moments when everything changes: What we thought of as our life now exists only as the past, and the future is about to begin. We meet Antonia Vega as she confronts such a moment.

A native of the Dominican Republic, Antonia came to the United States with her family and found herself teaching Americans about their own language and literary traditions. Now, not only has she retired from her work as a college professor, but her husband of over thirty years has died. “Who am I going to be anymore?” she wonders. As a woman with no profession, no husband, no children, she feels herself becoming invisible.

At the same time, she is haunted by words: those of her husband—a beloved doctor in their small Vermont town—and those of all the authors whose work she has read and taught over the years. She tells herself: “An afterlife? All she has come up with is that the only way not to let the people she loves die forever is to embody what she loved about them. Otherwise the world is indeed depleted.”

The world has not done with her, though. She becomes embroiled in the problems of an undocumented worker on the neighboring farm, whose fiancé is being held hostage in Colorado by coyotes who demand Mario send more money. At the same time, her older sister Izzy is behaving more and more erratically, and her other two sisters rope her into their schemes to force Izzy to get help. Then Izzy goes missing.

As both situations escalate, Antonia questions where her responsibility lies. Unlike her big-hearted, activist husband, she lacks the appetite for self-sacrifice that most women have had drummed into them. She turns to questions from a Tolstoy story she used to teach: “What is the best time to do things? Who is the most important one? What is the right thing to do?”

She reminds herself of the rampant individualism in her adopted country, that advises you to put on your own oxygen mask before attempting to help others. Yet she also conjures a saying her husband’s mother used when someone had a problem: “Let’s see what love can do.”

One of the aspects of this book that I most valued turned out to be these contradictions and how we manage to live with them. For example, the farmer next door (whom Mario works for) loudly complains about illegal immigrants, yet he secretly hires them because he can’t afford to pay the salary a citizen would expect.

The themes here fascinate me: the identity crisis caused by your world flipping over; the way women are taught to sacrifice their own needs and desires to those of others; the immigrant experience, not just in the first contact with the new culture, but what happens after a few decades of steeping in it. I was surprised by how much this short novel resonated with me. And of course I appreciated the Vermont setting.

I love all the lines from stories that swarm into Antonia’s thoughts, their sources mostly not identified. However, that can cause danger for the author, similar to the danger of using such a generous amount of Spanish, especially in the dialogue. As a former English teacher and devoted reader, I recognised most of the quotes and, though not knowing Spanish myself, I could figure out what was meant by the context. But that will not be true for everyone. One reader on Goodreads thought that these quotes were just the author trying to be a poetic and instead, sounding like “word salad.” Reasonable enough.

I haven’t yet mentioned my favorite part of the book: the four sisters. Every scene with them explodes with life and emotion and—oh, golly!—the dialogue! Alvarez so beautifully articulates the shifting dynamic between them: alliances forming and reforming, ancient injuries resurrected, fierce loyalties and unquestioned support. Most of all, a secret language that only those you’ve grown up with can understand.

Luckily, I consumed this story as an audiobook, masterfully narrated by Alma Cuervo. I enjoy physical books—I’d better, since they threaten to overwhelm my home—but there are times when an audiobook works better, at least for me.

While I seek out stories about people and cultures different from mine, I’m also interested in books about women and men in the later stages of life. There are many ways to define these stages: Shakespeare’s seven stages of man, Erik Erikson’s eight stages, Gail Sheehy’s Passages. Mostly I think about the four stages of life as described in ancient Hindu texts (the Student, the Householder, the Hermit, and the Wandering Ascetic).

Whatever stage of life you’re in, I recommend this 2020 novel by the author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.

What novel have you read that surprised you? How?

The Friend, by Sigrid Nunez

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The friend

Nunez’s new novel, winner of the 2018 National Book Award, is a quiet and intelligent story of friendship, love and despair, tackling the questions most of us wrestle with at various times in our lives: Should I change my life? Is it worth going on as I have?

In examining these issues, the narrator addresses her longtime friend, a fellow writer and English professor, who has recently committed suicide. Closer than lovers, with a friendship more lasting than any marriage, the two had known each other for years.

He had been her own teacher once, a man who believed teaching to be essentially an erotic relationship, and in those days charmed his students into falling for him, drawing on his female students for one of his three wives and multiple lovers over the years. But he had grown old. Now physically unattractive, his student conquests no longer loved him, but relished the power of taming their teacher.

The narrator too is appalled by much of the younger generation she is teaching, though for different, more intellectual reasons.

She ranges over a variety of subjects, bringing in literary anecdotes and references—making it a joy for a fellow reader. But every idea she takes up is ultimately related to learning to live with loss. Already isolated by choice—unmarried and most often solitary—she is tempted by her pain to move even further away from the world.

The external problem she faces is her friend’s dog, a Great Dane. Wife Three, the final one, insists that he wanted the narrator to take the dog after his death, even though he’d never mentioned it to her. The narrator, a cat person living in a tiny, rent-controlled, NYC apartment where pets are not allowed, is horrified.

Yet she takes him. And a relationship grows between the two. The dog, renamed Apollo by the dead man, becomes one of the strongest characters in the book. Yet grief looms here as well, for the dog is already close to the end of its brief life span.

Obviously this book will appeal to anyone who has given their heart to an animal companion. For those, like me, who enjoy animal company without necessarily having an intimate relationship with them, will enjoy the intelligent conversation, the insight into the world of writers and of teaching at the college level. And everyone will enjoy the humor that leavens the narrator’s sometimes gloomy subjects.

It is the narrator’s voice that carries this story. In a dry, unsentimental tone and using straight-forward language, she investigates the most dire, emotional problems we face. How are we to live? What makes it worth going on? What do we leave behind?

The only time the tone falters, for me, is when the author briefly plays a bit of a game with the reader. But that aside, this is a remarkable book, unlike anything you’ve likely read before.

Have you read a quiet novel that surprised you with its power?