Applied Ethics in Scotland

A Distant View of Everything     Alexander McCall Smith     (2017)

The Isabel Dalhousie Series

The detective is a fortyish woman in Scotland who edits an academic journal about applied ethics. Seriously? Only Alexander McCall Smith could pull this one off, and he has, for eleven books in this bestselling series of mellow mysteries.

It all started in 2004 with McCall Smith’s The Sunday Philosophy Club, where we meet Isabel Dalhousie. Isabel is an independently wealthy divorcée, so she can afford to pursue her scholarly interest in ethics without pay, and she has the time to investigate activities she comes across that she considers ethically questionable. “There was no reason why she should become involved in the affairs of others, but she seemed to be irresistibly drawn into them. And every time that she did it, it was because she imagined that there was a moral claim on her.” (69)

You might just call Isabel a busybody, but she has many other defining qualities. She speaks Italian, attends classical concerts, collects fine art, and works crossword puzzles. She treasures her city of Edinburgh, though she’s half American: “Her own heritage, she thought, was enviable: Scottish commonsense philosophy on one side and American pragmatism on the other. That was a perfect combination.” (163-4)

Isabel can be stuffy. She muses on sundry subjects randomly, and she can go off into quotes from the poet WH Auden (whom she calls “WHA”) at any moment. She refers casually to the writings of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant. Since I live with a philosopher whose specialty is Kantian ethics, I have assistance with these references, but you can always Google them. The philosophy background adds considerably, I think, to the multifaceted personality that McCall Smith is building for Isabel. (Reader friends of mine either enjoy this approach or despise it.)

Where this series gets spicy is at the third installment, The Right Attitude to Rain (2006), in which Isabel enters into a love affair with Jamie, a handsome, kind bassoonist who’s fourteen years her junior—and also the former lover of Isabel’s niece. As with other aspects of the McCall Smith novels, you’re likely to find the Isabel/Jamie affair either charming or ridiculous. The vagaries of this relationship intertwine with the mystery plots through the rest of the novels.

The mysteries don’t usually involve death. In fact, in A Distant View of Everything, the most recent of the series, Isabel investigates whether a matchmaker’s pairing of a couple is suitable. This plot line is thin, but the ongoing saga of Isabel, Jamie, and their expanding family fills in. Yes, I’ll reveal that the cougar Isabel gets pregnant in her forties, and Jamie is a doting dad.

McCall Smith uses a fair number of Scots words and phrases to add Edinburgh flavor to these novels, but he’s usually careful to provide clues to his dialect choices in the context. In case you’re wondering, though, Scots slang for a toilet is “cludgie,” and in British slang the cheap theater seats, in the highest balcony, are called “the gods.”

And one more thing: the Sunday Philosophy Club doesn’t actually meet. It’s more a pleasant idea. If you want to catch up with the Isabel Dalhousie books, here’s the list to date: The Sunday Philosophy Club (2004), Friends, Lovers, Chocolate (2005), The Right Attitude to Rain (2006), The Careful Use of Compliments (2007), The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday (2008), The Lost Art of Gratitude (2009), The Charming Quirks of Others (2010), The Forgotten Affairs of Youth (2011), The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds (2012), The Novel Habits of Happiness (2015), A Distant View of Everything (2017). In addition, three shorter Isabel Dalhousie stories are available as e-books.

Glaswegian Misery

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine     Gail Honeyman     (2017)

Residents of Glasgow, Scotland, often get a bad rap from the rest of Great Britain. Their accents, their cultural scene, and even their weather are disparaged. Along comes Glaswegian Gail Honeyman with this exceptional novel set in Glasgow. Given the title and the cover art, it looks to be chick lit, but (whoa, baby) hang on for a wild ride of seething misery behind that cover.

Eleanor Oliphant is a 30-year-old accounting clerk with a degree in classics and a solitary lifestyle. “Awkward” doesn’t begin to describe her. She’s an outcast among her office mates and spends each weekend downing two bottles of vodka to fog the memories of horrific events in her past. (We don’t get the full circumstances until very late in the novel.) Eleanor speaks in first-person narrative, combining stilted language from her bookish background with comments that demonstrate how isolated she is. She doesn’t understand the basics of social interaction, having been raised by a barbaric “Mummy” and then, from the age of ten, shunted from one foster home to another.

As the action of this novel commences, Eleanor is trying to update herself in order to become appealing to a local pop singer whom she’s developed a crush on from afar. She gets a new hairstyle, a cell phone, and makeup to cover the scars on her face. (Did I mention that there were horrific events in her past?) The scenes in which Eleanor has to interact with salespeople and personal care staff are simultaneously hilarious and cringe-inducing. Here is Eleanor getting a bikini wax: “She painted a stripe of warm wax onto my pubis with a wooden spatula, and pressed a strip of fabric onto it. Taking hold of the end, she ripped it off in one rapid flourish of clean, bright pain. ‘Morituri te salutant,’ I whispered, tears pricking by eyes. This is what I say in such situations, and it always cheers me up to no end. I started to sit up, but she gently pushed me back down. ‘Oh, there’s a good bit more to go, I’m afraid,’ she said, sounding quite cheerful. Pain is easy; pain is something with which I am familiar.” (15)

As her self-improvement kick proceeds, Eleanor is, quite accidentally, drawn into potential friendships with several genuinely kindhearted people who look past her social faux pas and her physical disfigurement. Having friends is something that Eleanor can’t get her head around at first, and she resists. She also, embarrassingly, continues to pursue that worthless pop singer. More about the plot of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine would introduce too many spoilers. Instead I’ll tell you that I read this book around the clock, unable to put it down. I wanted to know more about poor Eleanor and about how she got to be such an outsider. I wanted to know if her newfound friends could help extricate her from her self-imposed exile in her grim flat.

At the end of the book, one of these friends smiles at Eleanor, and she describes how she feels: “The moment hung in time like a drop of honey from a spoon, heavy, golden.” Hope springs.

A Family in Distress

In Caddis Wood     Mary François Rockcastle     (2011)

With prose that is reminiscent of the writing of Barbara Kingsolver, Mary Rockcastle takes her readers into the forests and meadows of the upper Midwest for a plaintive story of a long marriage.

Carl Fens is an architect who’s put in long hours away from his family as he’s built a stellar career. Hallie Bok has raised their twin daughters while trying to keep her hand in with writing poetry and teaching. The couple have suffered more than their share of sorrows, the details of which are revealed over the course of the novel:  the early and sudden death of Carl’s father, the departure of Hallie’s mother when Hallie is young, a near-fatal accident involving one of their daughters, the death of a son-in-law. In flashbacks from old diaries, we learn that the previous owners of the family’s bucolic retreat lost a son in the Korean War. Readers need to keep track of all these side issues as the main plot unfolds.

In this main plot, Carl, at age 61, starts exhibiting unusual and troubling neurological symptoms. As part of Hallie’s search for a diagnosis, she inadvertently brings to light a near-affair that she had ten years previously, when she and Carl were briefly estranged. Carl and Hallie have to come to terms with this revelation at the same time that they’re dealing with Carl’s deteriorating health and his major new architectural commission involving redevelopment of a toxic waste site.

The backdrop for most of the novel is the Caddis Wood of the title, a magical place in northern Wisconsin, the site of the family’s second home. Here are just two examples of Rockcastle’s lyrical descriptions:  

“[Hallie] rests her eyes on the late-summer glow of the meadow. The midday grasses are on fire: crimson bluestem, golden switchgrass, straw-colored sideoats grama. Blazing among the bronzed, stiff clusters of goldenrod and yarrow are hearty sunflowers and dogtooth daisies, coneflowers still in color. She sighs happily and drinks from her water bottle, loving the persistence of summer, the way it hangs on in the fading, somnolent heat.” (45)

“At the top of the hill overlooking Echo Pond, she gazes gratefully at the incandescent surface. Another week and the feathery larches will start to yellow, but not yet. Trees cast their shadows on the stippled surface. Water striders and whirligig beetles zigzag merrily.” (214)

A few scenes take place on Captiva Island in Florida, and this oceanside setting is also depicted lovingly: “Dozens of pelicans, more than Hallie has ever seen, are diving headfirst into the sea. When they surface, their beaks shimmer with silver, wiggling meat that is swallowed whole or spilled into the sea. Gluttonous gulls fight over the leftovers. A group of scarlet ibises land next to a crane, red legs aglow in the sunlight, and poke their long saffron beaks doggedly into the sand. The water shivers and pops as if charged with electric current.” (126)

After many heartbreaking life events, the family members in this novel still manage to treasure their time together and pursue their goals. The daughters of Hallie and Carl are named Cordelia (as in Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear) and Beatrice (Dante’s guide through heaven in his Divine Comedy). Perhaps these names are meant to point out that, despite tragic experiences, we can all find our way to happiness.

A Confused Hillbilly

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis     JD Vance     (2016)

JD Vance’s social analysis of “hillbilly culture,” using the lens of his own life story, has been widely credited with explaining why white working-class Americans voted for Donald Trump in November 2016. Vance’s book also topped several bestseller lists in 2016, and it’s been praised by political commentators on both the right and the left. I wanted to see what all the hype was about, so I checked Hillbilly Elegy out from my local library.

Hillbilly Elegy is meant to be both a memoir and a cultural commentary. The memoir component  is an “up by the bootstraps” tale of a boy overcoming incredible odds to escape from the dying Rust Belt city of Middletown, Ohio, in the early years of the current century. Vance is raised primarily by his maternal grandparents—“Mamaw” and “Papaw” in hillbilly parlance—since his mother is a substance abuser who cycles through five husbands and innumerable short-term boyfriends. The foul-mouthed but loving Mamaw is a strong influence on the young JD; she emphasizes the importance of education and shields him from many of his mother’s violent episodes. Vance graduates from high school, joins the Marines, serves in the Iraq war, gets through college at Ohio State in record time, goes on to Yale Law School, meets a brilliant and kindly woman who becomes his wife, and ends up working for a Silicon Valley investment firm.

Despite the jerky narrative style and the many clichés in the memoir portions of this book, I was drawn to some parts of the story. Vance’s experience in the Marines, for example, is a turning point in his life: “It was in the Marine Corps where I first ordered grown men to do a job and watched them listen; where I learned that leadership depended far more on earning the respect of your subordinates than on bossing them around; where I discovered how to earn that respect; and where I saw that men and women of different social classes and races could work as a team and bond like family.” (175) He cites specific incidents that taught him how to control his temper and interact peaceably with others.

Periodically Vance inserts into his memoir paragraphs of polemic against hillbillies, in the form of disconnected soapbox orations about working-class white people in Appalachia, the South, and the Rust Belt, whose culture “increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.” (7) Throughout the book, Vance presents the tendency to explosive interpersonal reactions as one reason for the low economic status of people of his background. He asks plaintively, “How much of our lives, good and bad, should we credit to our personal decisions, and how much is just the inheritance of our culture, our families, and our parents who have failed their children? How much is Mom’s life her own fault? Where does blame stop and sympathy begin?” (231)

Vance freely admits that he doesn’t have the answers to these questions, yet he presents contradictory arguments. He rails against lazy hillbillies who are “living off of government largesse” (139), not mentioning the fact that able-bodied adults haven’t been eligible for cash welfare for more than two decades. Vance doesn’t count himself as a recipient of “government largesse” even though he’s benefited from public schools, a public university, the GI Bill, and Pell grants. He assumes that hillbillies are the only people who’ve suffered from the loss of jobs that provide a middle-class lifestyle, when the millennial children of white professionals have endured similar downward mobility.

There is no discussion of the tremendous rise in income inequality in our country, and Vance ignores the plight of non-white working-class Americans. Significantly, he fails to address racism as a factor in the bitterness of the white working-class. (For a first-hand account of this racism, I can refer you to an African American friend of mine who was raised  in the same Middletown, Ohio, as JD Vance.) There’s a constant underlying assumption in Hillbilly Elegy that white working-class hillbillies are the only Americans who grow up in poverty-stricken or violent families. And that these hillbillies are the only ones who might be nonplussed by the elitism of the Ivy League and Wall Street. It ain’t so, JD.

Vance treasures his hillbilly background and yet despises it. He hasn’t quite figured out where he stands, though he aligns himself politically with conservative Republicans. Hillbilly Elegy is an imperfect book, with far too many contradictions and generalizations and cherry-picked citations. But you may want to read it because it’s become a highly influential book in our present-day political climate of angry polarization.

The Immigrant Experience

The Leavers     Lisa Ko     (2017)

Adoption has been the subject of several books I’ve reviewed recently, including Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo, Celine, Leaving Lucy Pear, and The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane. The yearning of some adopted children to find their birth mothers—or of birth mothers to find their biological children—can be a powerful theme for a novel. Lisa Ko takes a slightly different approach to adoption, and in the process she illuminates the lives of undocumented immigrants in the United States. The immigrants in this story work long hours in difficult jobs to provide food and shelter for their loved ones. They have to make heart-rending decisions in their struggle to survive. As the dust jacket tells us, “The Leavers won the 2016 PEN Bellwether Prize for Fiction, awarded by Barbara Kingsolver for a novel that addresses issues of social justice.”

In The Leavers, Deming Guo was born in the United States, but his mother, Polly/Peilan, is an undocumented immigrant from Fujian province in China. She owes large sums to the loan shark who brought her to New York. One day when Deming is in fifth grade in the Bronx, Polly fails to return from her job at a nail salon and disappears from his life. Deming is fostered and then adopted by a well-meaning but misguided white couple in upstate New York and renamed Daniel Wilkinson. Deming/Daniel is the only Asian kid in the quiet community where he spends his teen years, and he constantly longs for his old city neighborhood and for any information about what happened to his birth mother. As novelist Lisa Ko encapsulates the problem, “If he could just talk to his mother in person, maybe he could figure out who he should be.” (270)

As Daniel moves into his twenties, he becomes involved in the music scene in New York City, as a composer and performer.  He routinely experiences synesthesia: “Never had there been a time when sound, color, and feeling hadn’t been intertwined, when a dirty, rolling bass line hadn’t included violets that suffused him with thick contentment, when the shades of certain chords sliding up to one another hadn’t produced dusty pastels that made him feel like he was cupping a tiny, golden bird.” (71) And music keeps him going when he sees no other future for himself:  “A song had a heart of its own, a song could jumpstart or provide solace; only music could numb him more thoroughly than weed or alcohol.” (258)

Polly and Daniel both have their flaws—Polly is often self-centered, Daniel develops a gambling addiction. I think that these characteristics help to keep the novel from falling into clichés. The Leavers alternates between Daniel’s side of the story and Polly’s, between New York and China, gradually revealing what happened on that day when Polly vanished. Did she take the bus to Florida, where she’d talked about relocating? Did the loan shark send her back to China? Did she leave her son (as well as her kindly boyfriend) for a new lover? Did she get hit by a truck? I won’t spoil the ending. I will say that, although the reason for Polly’s disappearance makes sense, the reason for her long-term absence from Daniel’s life doesn’t ring true for me.

However, as usual, I loved the parts of The Leavers that were set in New York City, which is beloved by Daniel:  “Daniel saw the Manhattan skyline, recognized the sketched spire of the Empire State Building, the sparkle of bridges, and from this vantage point the city appeared vulnerable and twinkling, the last strands of sunshine swept across the arches as if lulling them to sleep, painting shadows against the tops of buildings. No matter how many times he saw the city’s outline he pitched inside.” (110)

There are many kinds of “leaving” in this novel. Polly leaves China, and then she leaves her son. Daniel leaves the Bronx, but then he leaves upstate New York to return to the city. In a way, all of us are “leavers,” since we make choices in life that involve leaving other options behind.

Prolix But Successful

The Nix     Nathan Hill     (2016)

Nathan Hill has written an excellent book. Remember this as you read my petty complaints, which I’m going to get out of the way first:

1—There are at least four separate novels crammed into The Nix, centered on (a) Samuel Andresen-Anderson, a college professor and failed writer who was abandoned by his mother, Faye, in 1988; (b) Faye Andresen-Anderson, a sweet Iowa girl who got involved with anti-war activists in 1968 Chicago; (c) Pwnage, a video-game addict who plays online with Samuel in 2011; and (d) Laura Pottsdam, a “college sophomore and habitual, perpetual cheater” in 2011. Plus there are several sub-plots. All that said, Hill pulls these disparate pieces together well.

2—About 100 pages could have been cut out of the 620 pages of The Nix. For example, in sections about video games, Hill goes out too far on the verbosity limb. The wordiness does tend to amplify Pwnage’s obsessions, but my head was swimming for many pages.

3—The Nix fudges the dates of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Yes, yes, I know about authorial privilege in creating a fictional universe, but it really messes up readers’ engagement with the story when the novelist plays loose with significant historic events in a novel that’s firmly entrenched in a particular period. (I’m fine with fudging obscure events.)

4—The title of The Nix refers to a Norwegian house spirit that appears at pivotal points in life. I like this conceit a lot, but I found Hill’s invocation of the nix sometimes strained.

So why do I still think that The Nix is an excellent novel? Hill’s vocabulary range is astounding, and his sentence structure is mesmerizing, recalling for me the work of much more seasoned writers, such as Michael Chabon. Hill can make the most mundane description remarkable, as in this riff on traffic in Chicago: “The closer he gets to the city, the more the highway feels malicious and warlike—wild zigzagging drivers cutting people off, tailgating, honking horns, flashing their lights, all their private traumas now publicly enlarged. Samuel travels with the crush of traffic in a slow sluggish mass of hate. He feels that low-level constant anxiety about not being able to get over into the turn lane when his exit is near. There’s that thing where drivers next to him speed up when they see his turn signal, to eliminate the space he intended to occupy. There is no place less communal in America—no place less cooperative and brotherly, no place with fewer feelings of shared sacrifice—than a rush-hour freeway in Chicago.”

Hill can even pontificate in a way that isn’t offensive. He examines the motivations of his character Faye at length. Here is a brief excerpt: “She knew that way down deep she was a phony, just your average normal girl. If it seemed like she had abilities that no one else did, it was only because she worked harder, she thought, and all it would take for the rest of the world to see the real Faye, the true Faye, was one failure. So she never failed. And the distance between the real Faye and the fake Faye, in her mind, kept widening, like a ship leaving the dock and slowly losing sight of home. This was not without cost. The flip side of being a person who never fails at anything is that you never do anything you could fail at. You never do anything risky. There’s a certain essential lack of courage among people who seem to be good at everything.”

Hill captures the mood and texture of historical periods exceptionally well, even though he’s too young to have had direct experience of those periods. His home economics classroom in 1968 Iowa, for instance, is priceless and spot-on. Even minor characters in The Nix come alive. Readers can, for example, deduce quite a bit about Faye’s college friend Alice from this description of Alice as an older woman: “She’d decided that about eighty percent of what you believe about yourself when you’re twenty turns out to be wrong. The problem is you don’t know what your small true part is until much later. . . She grew up and bought a house and found a lover and got some dogs and stewarded her land and tried to fill her home with love and life and she realized her earlier error: That these things did not make you small. In fact, these things seemed to enlarge her. That by choosing a few very private concerns and pouring herself into them, she had never felt so expanded. That, paradoxically, narrowing her concerns had made her more capable of love and generosity and empathy and, yes, even peace and justice.”

This sprawling, ambitious novel about small choices that have enormous consequences is definitely worth your time, and Nathan Hill is a novelist to watch.

Books in Brief, Part 4

Here are short reviews of three books that I buzzed through recently.

The Lost History of Stars     Dave Boling     (2017)

The background: The Second Anglo-Boer War (often known as the Boer War, 1899-1902) was fought to determine control of rich gold and diamond mines in southern areas of the African continent. The British Empire sent troops against the Boers, who were mostly descended from Dutch settlers in the region. The outnumbered Boers waged a guerrilla war that outraged the British, who expected to win easily. The British responded by burning Boer farms and herding the women and children from those farms into concentration camps. Twenty-seven thousand of them died. The Lost History of Stars tells of one fictional family’s horrific experiences during this period. I skipped over large chunks of this novel because the story, though well told, became too painful for me. Author Boling has illuminated a “lost history” of terrible suffering, in which the stars of the southern hemisphere and the love of family are among the few bright spots for the characters.

Difficult Women     Roxane Gay     (2017)

My husband prefers philosophy to fiction, but he picked up Difficult Women from the bedside table because he’d heard about Roxane Gay’s 2014 book of essays, Bad Feminist. Here’s his take on Difficult Women: “I used to think that the legislative bodies in the US would work to defeat rape culture and racism. Now we’re relying on fiction writers to draw our attention to the violence and bigotry in our society. These stories are grim—very dark. Almost all the male characters are creepy, and both the male and the female characters are obsessed with sex.” Of the 21 stories in this collection, I read a half dozen, recommended by my husband as the least brutal. For example, “Bone Density” is about a married couple who both have affairs. “The Sacrifice of Darkness” is a moving fable—or maybe a parable—about a miner who can no longer stand underground darkness and flies into the sun, with devastating consequences. Gay’s writing is sharp and slashing. 

Saints for All Occasions     J. Courtney Sullivan     (2017)

The plot of this novel is pretty predictable: Two young Irish women emigrate to Boston in the late 1950s, one of them gets pregnant, and fuss ensues. Stock characters from the Irish-American playbook populate the text:  the alcoholic bar owner, the stoic matriarch, the cruel nuns, the saintly nuns, the pitiful little brother, the dance hall cad, the faithful friend. What bothered me most, as someone who has lived in Ireland, was that the Irish-born characters talked like Americans. I’m not saying that the author should have thrown in “faith and begorrah” to establish Irish cred, but some representation of Irish idiom might have brightened up this serviceable but somewhat plodding family saga. For a much better fictional take on the Irish immigrant experience in the America of the 1950s, I heartily recommend Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (2009).

Procreational Shenanigans

The Heirs     Susan Rieger     (2017)

Five sons are the beneficiaries of the estate of Rupert Falkes, who dies in the first chapter of The Heirs. Or maybe there are seven sons, since it comes to light after Rupert’s death that he may have had a mistress and family on the side. But then again, maybe he didn’t.

This witty novel has a large cast of characters who populate its complex plot, which lurches back and forth in time. Novelist Susan Rieger fleshes out the personalities of the five sons quite well, but it’s the mother, Eleanor, widow of Rupert Falkes, whom readers come to know best.  “Rupert married Eleanor because she was the girl of the year in 1960, because all the other men he knew wanted her, because she knew the difference between sarcasm and irony, because she was a knockout, because she’d read George Orwell, because she was sexually electrifying, because he could talk to her.” (13) Later in the novel we learn that “she was a MILF before there was a word for it.” (205) Okay, then, you should get the drift: sexual adventuring is a theme in The Heirs.

The family doesn’t need the money that Rupert leaves. They’re all filthy rich in their own right. It’s the inheritance of uncertainty about Rupert’s past that dominates their discussions and Rieger’s analyses of their discussions. Rupert was a self-made man, an orphan who was left as an infant on a church doorstep in England in 1934 and rose to be a prominent New York lawyer. His family thought they knew him. Eleanor was from well-established American bloodlines and brought wealth to the marriage. She’s more inscrutable, but she’s fully adept at social graces, like knowing not to wear white shoes after Labor Day.

Rupert’s sideline in sons isn’t the only procreational plot in The Heirs. For instance, Rupert’s gay son, Sam, longs desperately for a child of his own. And the wife of an early boyfriend of Eleanor’s wonders if her husband might be the father of at least some of Eleanor’s kids. The liaisons get mighty tangled.

Like her characters, Rieger is acerbic and sophisticated, willing to insert barbs no matter how sharp and providing a glimpse into the lives of the elitist ultra-wealthy. Despite, or perhaps because of, the furious pace and the elements of retroactive continuity, The Heirs is deliciously entertaining. And if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that I’m a sucker for novels set in New York. Check out other reviews in the New York Novels category from the Archive of Book Reviews in the right column.

A Dystopian America

The Mandibles:  A Family, 2029-2047     Lionel Shriver     (2016)

Hang onto your hat. The year is 2029, and Russia and China now rule the world. The economy of the United States has crashed spectacularly, because of the national debt run up by the Latinos who control the federal government. All savings and investments are worthless, inflation is uncontrolled, jobs have disappeared, and ordinary citizens have become scavengers and thieves to stay alive. Guns, though forbidden, are essential. Despite the dire situation, elderly Americans continue to be cosseted, through programs such as Social Security and Medicare, because they are reliable voters. (Somehow, voting isn’t disrupted.)

Caught in this maelstrom are four generations of the Mandible family, New Yorkers who used to be upper middle class. Over the course of the eighteen years that this novel covers, most members of the Mandible clan survive and eventually escape to a locale (I won’t reveal where) that has created an isolationist libertarian paradise, basing its economy on the gold standard, with a flat tax and no social services. In other words, Lionel Shriver’s book is not just an echo of Ayn Rand but a loud, clanging reverberation.

A “mandible” is a jawbone, and in this novel the Mandibles exercise their jawbones frequently to expound on political and financial issues. I grew weary of the ultra-right-wing screeds against the Federal Reserve and against non-white people. There were even snide references to Chelsea Clinton and someone named (ha-ha-ha) Krugman. Almost all the characters whom Shriver presents as reasonable and civilized humans espouse views that are economically untenable and, to me, morally reprehensible.

Yet I kept reading through to page 402 in order to follow the threads of daily life in Shriver’s dystopian scenario. As housing becomes scarce in the years after 2029, more and more of the Mandibles crowd into one home, inevitably creating scenes of interpersonal conflict. What do you do when there is no more toilet paper and very limited water supply? How do you stretch a cup of rice to feed a crowd? These conundrums of human existence in a sadly debased America are sometimes solved in clever ways. And some of the future language that Shriver injects into the dialogue is amusing, if flippant. For example, since the very aged Baby Boomers are pariahs, the word that replaces “crap” is “boomerpoop.”

A couple of the characters in The Mandibles are intrepid in the face of disaster. The hero of the Mandible family turns out to be Willing, who is thirteen years old in 2029 and comes of age as he teaches himself advanced survival skills. He’s the one who leads the way to the promised land of libertarianism. Another Mandible, Avery, who is middle-aged at the start of the novel, blossoms: “Things seemed to matter again. It seemed to matter how she spent her time and what she told her children. Why, it was tempting to wonder whether, while the likes of the Stackhouses were musing idly over whether to cover the footstool in taupe or mauve, folks on the margins were living real lives, and making real decisions, and conducting real relationships, full of friction and shouting and moment—whether all this time the poor people had been having all the fun.” (188)

But mostly The Mandibles is a book about ugliness. Kindly people die. Hard-nosed scammers prosper. The only African American character has advanced dementia and is kept tied up.  As Carter Mandible, an unemployed economist, pronounces, “It’s the decent people who always get fucked.” (125)

The Mandibles did prod me to consider the place of the Unites States in history. Shriver puts these same considerations into the mind of my favorite character, Florence, early in the book: “She didn’t think about being American often, though that may have been typically American in itself. She didn’t regard being American as especially formative of her character, and that may have been typically American, too. . .  For years now it had ceased to be controversial to suppose that the era of the ‘American Empire’ was fading, and the notion that her country may already have had its day in the sun she didn’t find upsetting. Plenty of other countries had flourished and subsided, and were reputed to be pleasant places to live. She didn’t see why being a citizen of a nation in decline should diminish her own life or make her feel personally discouraged.” (74)

Pregnancy & Pear Trees

Leaving Lucy Pear     Anna Solomon     (2016)

It seems to me that about half the novels that I read have at the heart of the plot a single woman with an unintended pregnancy. Granted, I read a lot of historical novels, and historically the pregnancy of an unwed woman was a cause of anxiety, grief, distress, secrecy, scheming, and crime.

In the novel Leaving Lucy Pear, Beatrice Haven is the young single woman with an unintended pregnancy. She leaves her newborn daughter in a pear orchard in Cape Ann, Massachusetts, on a night when she expects that pear thieves will be present to find the bundle. All this is revealed in the prologue, set in 1917. The main action of the story occurs a decade later. Unbeknownst to Beatrice, the baby has been named Lucy Pear and has been raised by Emma Murphy, the mother of a large, impoverished Irish American family. Beatrice, who is from a wealthy Jewish family in Boston, continues to be tormented by her act of abandoning her child and spends much of her time at the home of the uncle who owns the pear orchard. The lives of Beatrice and Emma intertwine in complex ways as the plot works toward resolution of some, but not all, of the issues raised about motherhood, womanhood, sexuality, and family ties. 

The setting of the North Shore in Massachusetts is significant. This rocky peninsula between Boston and New Hampshire is rich with literary associations, from Nathaniel Hawthorne to TS Eliot. The time period is also significant, with the political backdrop of the Prohibition era and the controversial 1927 executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, professed anarchists who were accused of robbery and murder. Weaving in and out of the narrative of Leaving Lucy Pear are threads about the temperance movement, liquor smuggling, anarchism, communism, industrialization, labor unions, and social class. 

Anna Solomon’s writing is delicate and introspective. There are many sentences like this: “When she looked at him, her cheeks wrinkled and red from where her sleeves had pressed into them, her eyes pinned him to his chair.” (235) As a reader, I wanted to find out the next component of the plot, but I also wanted to linger on scenes in which character traits are revealed by family members discussing domestic matters. 

Beatrice abandons her baby so that she can move on with her life, go to Radcliffe, and perhaps become a concert pianist. But her plan falters, and that may have been the best outcome for her. Late in the novel, a minor character pronounces, “’Most people want to be extraordinary. Make a mark in the world. But for what? In my experience it’s the extraordinary people what aren’t happy, always expecting something better than they get. Whenever anything at all happens to me, I tell myself it’s happened to everyone else, too. It’s actually very comforting.’” (313-314)

15th-Century Mysteries: Part 2

The Roger the Chapman Series     Kate Sedley     (1991 to 2013)

Before reading this post, you may want to check out my essay “Reading Medieval Mysteries” in the Portfolio section of this website. It has a sidebar on the Brother Cadfael novels of Ellis Peters, set in the twelfth century. But moving on to the end of the medieval period . . . 

Roger the Chapman is an itinerant purveyor of small household goods and haberdashery in late fifteenth-century England. He tells his tales in first-person narrative, looking back, as an old man, on the adventures of his youthful travelling days. This narrative voice gives an immediacy to the novels, and I find Roger’s voice quite believable. 

The first couple of entries in this series have some weaknesses, with tangents about, for example, how to full cloth, but the series quickly picks up speed, with less didacticism and more challenging convolutions of plot. Roger is an engaging, burly fellow with a large backpack who tramps all around the country—and even to France—to unravel mysteries. His wanderlust allows him to get involved in murders near and far and even to work as an agent for the nobility. Still, he always returns home to Bristol, in southwest England.

Roger has a complicated family history, and the secondary characters such as his wife and his mother-in-law are well developed over the course of the series. If you start with a title later in this series, you’ll still catch on, since author Kate Sedley does a good job of filling in her readers about Roger’s family connections.

Sedley doesn’t affect fake medievalisms but still conveys a sense of the period. I especially enjoyed The Christmas Wassail, in which the murders are set against the festive late medieval celebrations of the Twelve Days of Christmas.

Kate Sedley is the pen name for Brenda Margaret Lilian Honeyman Clarke, who has written numerous other novels under different names. Here are the twenty-two books in her Roger the Chapman Series:  Death and the Chapman (1991), The Plymouth Cloak (1992), The Hanged Man aka The Weaver’s Tale (1993), The Holy Innocents (1994), The Eve of Saint Hyacinth (1995), The Wicked Winter (1995), The Brothers of Glastonbury (1997), The Weaver’s Inheritance (1998), The Saint John’s Fern (1999), The Goldsmith’s Daughter (2001), The Lammas Feast (2002), Nine Men Dancing (2003), The Midsummer Rose (2004), The Burgundian’s Tale (2005), Prodigal Son (2006), The Three Kings of Cologne (2007), The Green Man (2008), The Dance of Death (2009), The Wheel of Fate (2010), The Midsummer Crown (2011), The Tintern Treasure (2012), The Christmas Wassail (2013).

Soul Searching in Spain

Hot Milk     Deborah Levy     (2016)

Sofia Papastergiadis is at loose ends. She hasn’t finished her PhD dissertation in anthropology. She has a dead-end job as a barista. At age 25, she still lives with her mother, Rose, an insufferable hypochondriac whom Sofia waits on constantly. Sofia has long been estranged from her Greek father, who lives in Athens with his new wife and baby.

As the novel Hot Milk opens, Sofia is in southern Spain with Rose, who has taken out a large mortgage on her home in England to buy the services of a renowned doctor, Gómez, who she hopes will diagnose her ailments properly. While Rose undergoes medical testing by the questionable Gómez, Sofia roams rather aimlessly around the scorching beachfront town. She shatters her precious laptop, swims in waters infested with jellyfish, engages in varied sexual encounters—and then makes a quick trip to Athens to confront her father.

Sofia’s inner life and self-searching are at the heart of this tale, which is appropriately cast in first-person narrative. She constantly queries herself: “Am I self-destructive, or pathetically passive, or reckless, or just experimental, or am I a rigorous cultural anthropologist, or am I in love?” (175) It’s significant that Sofia has been trained as an anthropologist, since she often seems to be mentally documenting her own life for an individual ethnography. Novelist Deborah Levy has other characters analyze Sofia, too, as when Gómez tells her, “’You are using your mother like a shield to protect yourself from making a life.’” (111)

Although I found this novel meandering at times, the study of family dynamics is absorbing. And the evocations of the barren landscapes of southern Spain in late summer are excellent: “Cranes from the desalination plant sliced into the sky. Tall undulating dunes of greenish-grey cement powder lay in a depot to the right of the beach, where unfinished hotels and apartments had been hacked into the mountains like a murder.” (23) The wordplay is also amusing. For example, Sofia (whose name in Greek means “wisdom”) is repeatedly stung by jellyfish, called “medusas” in Spanish. When she arrives in Athens, she reflects, “Here I am in the birthplace of Medusa, who left the scars of her venom and rage on my body.” (138)

Bubbling under the surface of the story is commentary on the recent economic problems within the European Union. In Hot Milk as in real life, highly educated people are working in menial jobs, and austerity measures are crippling the Greek economy. Sofia’s father, a wealthy retired businessman, espouses his own form of austerity in refusing to help Sofia financially. One theme in the book is Sofia’s realization of the grim selfishness that is rampant in her world. Echoing her stepmother’s right-wing comments, Sofia asks herself, “Why would my father do anything that was not to his advantage?” (142)

I still don’t get the title Hot Milk. I’m guessing that it’s meant to conjure up images of a comforting drink that a mother might offer a daughter who is sick or distressed. Sofia won’t get any hot milk from her cruel mother, but readers may learn about something about themselves in this story.

Novels about Paintings, Part 1

A Piece of the World     Christina Baker Kline     (2017)

Novels that prominently feature a painting (fictional or real) are not a new idea. In 1891, Oscar Wilde published The Picture of Dorian Gray, a horror story about a portrait that ages while the subject of the portrait remains youthful—but gets nastier. More recently, Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring takes a different tack. In her 1999 novel, Chevalier imagines a life story from the actual portrait of an anonymous young woman. In this case, the art work, by the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer, is real, hanging in the Mauritshuis in The Hague. The fictional story by Chevalier evokes the period of the painting’s creation beautifully. (See the Vermeer portrait here.)

Christina Baker Kline’s A Piece of the World has an approach similar to that of Chevalier. Baker Kline conjures up a fictional memoir by the subject of Christina’s World, a 1948 painting by the American artist Andrew Wyeth that hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In this case, some facts about the actual subject, Christina Olson, are known. Olson really was descended from one of the judges at the Salem Witch Trials of the late seventeenth century. She was born in 1893 and lived on a farm near Cushing, Maine, suffering all her life from a disability that affected her ability to move her limbs. In 1939, she became friends with Andrew Wyeth, who summered in Maine and frequently painted her, her brother, and scenes from their farm. As Olson grew older, she became more disabled and moved from place to place by crawling. In his painting Christina’s World, Wyeth places Olson on the ground, with her back to the viewer, clawing the soil as she twists to look at her farmhouse, which is up a hill from her. (See the Wyeth painting here.)

Beyond the historical facts, Baker Kline weaves a fictional life, narrated by a fictional Christina Olson but quite believable. (The only parts of the narrative that I found somewhat strained were the dialogues between Wyeth and Olson.) Baker Kline invents a full life for Olson, from her birth until the unveiling of Wyeth’s expressive painting of her. The onus of disability for those in rural areas and without access to current medical treatments is clear. (For another novel about disability, see my review here.)

Christina Olson and her family live a life of austerity, particularly during the Great Depression, without electricity or running water in their house. Their daily existence is like that of a pioneer family in the nineteenth century. Baker Kline describes their chores in detail:  the stoking of the wood burning stove, the lighting of the kerosene lamps, the hand harvesting of the blueberries. These activities, and the grim farmhouse, attracted the eye of Wyeth, who painted a vanishing way of life with its surrounding stark landscapes. It strikes me that A Piece of the World has many characteristics of a Laura Ingalls Wilder novel, albeit set in Maine and written for adults.

As I was reading A Piece of the World, I turned frequently to the reproduction of the painting Christina’s World bound into the back of the book. This tender novel about a woman’s simple life complements Wyeth’s haunting work of art.

Rodeo for Russian Americans

Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo     Boris Fishman     (2016)

Despite the title, this novel is not primarily about rodeo, but it does have something to do with babies—specifically babies who are adopted. It’s also about the experience of Russian and Ukrainian émigrés in the United States and about a road trip through the American West. Novelist Boris Fishman assembles all these pieces skillfully.

Maya Shulman, a Ukrainian exchange student, and Alex Rubin, the only son of Russian immigrants, meet in New York in 1992. They marry and settle in New Jersey but are unable to have children. Over the objections of Alex and his parents, Maya pushes for adoption. The baby they adopt is the biological son of teenagers in Montana; the baby’s father is a rodeo cowboy. The one request of the biological mother to the adoptive parents is “Don’t let my baby do rodeo.”

By the year 2012, Maya and Alex begin to interpret some of the actions of their eight-year-old adoptive son, Max, as a reversion to his genetic origins. Maya especially becomes alarmed when Max runs away from home and when he “consorts with wild animals.” She worries that he’s becoming “feral” and insists on a car trip to Montana to seek out Max’s biological parents, hoping that they can shed light on Max’s “wildness.”

Readers may not see Max’s habits as particularly unusual for an inquisitive child. Max likes to sleep in a tent in the back yard, chew on various wild grasses, and put his face in river water to look at the pebbles and fish. One scene, in which Max cavorts with some deer in his back yard, could be taken as a bit of magic realism or could simply reflect the ubiquity and tameness of urban deer in New Jersey.

Around the main plot of the trip to Montana Fishman weaves subplots, particularly related to the influence of Alex’s parents on the marriage of Maya and Alex. Fishman pokes fun at his own Russian heritage in his portrayal of Alex’s immigrant parents. The elder Rubins have built a successful business and assimilated into American culture in many ways, but they eat traditional Russian foods, quote Russian proverbs, and oppose the adoption of Max for patriarchal cultural reasons. Maya struggles with her identity as an American wife and mother, always seeking to add new words to her English vocabulary, for example, yet chafing under some of the Old World attitudes of her husband and in-laws. In the end, she rebels against her family in a startling way.

Fishman’s writing is dense with words that are often crammed into tight sentences. This style can be rich, as when he is describing the dawn in South Dakota: “. . .the subfusc prologue of the morning was pushing up the black sky with impatience.” (249) And here is a vista in Montana: “First, there were hills, patchy and tentative, then, all of a sudden, mountains upon mountains. Maya eyed them with gratitude; she willed them to keep rising. Even Max stirred at their sight, leaning into his window. Emerald firs rose off the flanks in neat rows like heads in a choir, the cottonwoods among them so gold they looked like bullion bars.” (260)

My eye did catch occasionally on oddities of English word choice—“custom” instead of “habit, “unexisting” instead of “nonexistent,” “self-made” instead of “homemade,” and so forth. I expected these choices in the dialogue of characters whose native language was not English, but they cropped up in non-dialogue. This is a minor quibble about a book that forthrightly tackles such fraught issues as infertility, parenting an adopted child, and adapting to a new culture.

Two Books by Strout

Anything Is Possible     Elizabeth Strout     (2017)

My Name is Lucy Barton     Elizabeth Strout     (2016)

Before you read Elizabeth Strout’s 2017 short story collection, Anything Is Possible, you might want to check out her 2016 novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton. The two books are interconnected and can be read as a cohesive whole.

In My Name Is Lucy Barton, Lucy is a writer in New York City in the 1980s, with a husband and two young daughters. When Lucy is hospitalized for many weeks with a mysterious illness that arises after an appendectomy, her estranged mother travels from rural Illinois to her bedside. The two women reach an uneasy peace with each other, especially as they tell stories about the folks back home, in the (fictional) Amgash, Illinois, a depressed rural area that’s a two-hour drive from Chicago.

In Anything is Possible, set in a recent time period, we meet many of the characters mentioned in My Name is Lucy Barton, both in Amgash and in other locales:

• Pete Barton, Lucy’s reclusive and oddly childlike brother, who still lives in the old Barton house.
• Tommy Guptill, the friendly janitor from Lucy’s elementary school, who is now in his eighties and who keeps an eye on Pete.
• Charlie Macauley, a Vietnam veteran with PTSD, who gets himself into a bind over a prostitute.
• Patty Nicely, a contemporary of Lucy’s and now a high school guidance counselor, who tries to help Lucy’s difficult niece, Lila Lane.
• Mary Mumford, the neighbor woman who left her husband of 51 years to run off to Italy with a younger man.
• Vicky Lane, Lucy’s sister, who reminds Lucy about some of the horrors the siblings endured in their childhood.
• Abel Blaine, Lucy’s cousin, who has built a successful business in Chicago.

Lucy herself enters the linked stories of Anything Is Possible in many ways. She’s become an acclaimed writer and has published a book that the people of Amgash can buy at the local bookstore. Chicago is one of the stops on Lucy’s tour to promote her book, so she stops in Amgash to see her siblings, Pete and Vicky, in one of the stories. Take note that the fictional Lucy’s fictional “memoir” seems to be very much like Elizabeth Strout’s novel My Name is Lucy Barton.

Strout toys with the vagaries of memory in both these books. In Anything Is Possible, we get much more detail about the childhood suffering of the Barton kids—details that were glossed over and somewhat sanitized in My Name is Lucy Barton. The other residents of Amgash are also revealed to have their share of specific miseries, including sexual abuse, mental illness, and crushing poverty. The power of money emerges as another theme. Lucy Barton, who had to scrounge in dumpsters for food as a child, lives the up-by-her-bootstraps version of the American dream when she gets into college and becomes a successful writer. Others in her small town remain impoverished. Sometimes people are poor simply because of bad luck, and money certainly does not buy happiness or stability for the characters in Anything Is Possible.

The prose in these two books is spare, with every word well chosen. The emotions are raw but presented with subtle empathy. Strout’s previous books include the Pulitzer-winning Olive Kitteridge (2008), which is, like Anything Is Possible, set up as linked short stories, and the novel The Burgess Boys (2013). Basically, read anything by Elizabeth Strout that you can get. You won’t be disappointed.

An Unlikely Marriage

This Must Be the Place     Maggie O’Farrell     (2016)

Maggie O’Farrell trusts her readers to catch on to what’s she’s doing with her oblique plot lines. She trusts that readers won’t jump ship when she suddenly shifts the setting to another hemisphere. She especially trusts that readers will take note of her chapter titles, which include the name of the person whose point of view is adopted for that chapter, as well as the city and year in which that chapter takes place. It’s dizzying at first, but once you get used to it, there’s a bit of a reader buzz at the beginning of each chapter. Oh, now you’re in Donegal, Ireland, in 2010, with Daniel narrating in first person. Then, hello, Brooklyn 1944! It’s a third-person narrative about Teresa, who turns out to be Daniel’s mother. And welcome to Goa, India, in 1996, with a third-person narrative about Claudette, Daniel’s second wife. Decades and continents whizz past as you put the pieces of the plot together.

This Must Be the Place ends up being a character study of two people who both have immense talents and big hearts but also serious flaws. Their lives are messy, peopled by previous lovers and by children with problems of their own. Daniel Sullivan is an American linguistics professor who has lost custody of his children in a contentious divorce from his first wife. On a trip to Ireland to retrieve his grandfather’s ashes, Daniel comes across a young boy on the roadside in Donegal. This is how he meets Claudette Wells, the boy’s mother, who is a recluse in the mountains, having fled a life of international stardom and infernal paparazzi. Daniel and Claudette fall in love.

Readers get the life histories of both Daniel and Claudette through those chapters that flash back and forth in time. Some of the chapters border on gimmicky, especially the one that’s a catalog of Claudette’s personal objects that are put up for auction, complete with inset photos. Some of the plot assumptions are wobbly. I doubt that Claudette could really have kept her presence in Ireland a secret for years—in rural Africa or South America, perhaps, but not in Ireland. And I can’t see how Daniel could get work permits for whatever country he was in. None of that matters, however, as O’Farrell reveals more and more about Daniel and Claudette, drawing readers into their struggles.

Along the way, O’Farrell’s descriptive passages work well. Here is Daniel narrating: “Winter is the best season to see Paris, I’ve always thought, when the pavements are sheer with frost, when the sun in low in the sky, when the Seine is swollen and brown, twisting fibrously beneath the bridges.” (266)

And here is Daniel being described when he is in a depressive state: “He is watching the red digital numbers of his alarm clock mutate into their successors: 5 gains an extra descender on its lower-left corner to become 6; to become 7, the 6 must lose almost all of itself, all its left-hand side, all its lower and middle strokes; the only consolation, he tells the 6-soon-to-be-7, is that you’ll get them all back for the full house that is 8. He watches the numbers tot themselves up, then spill over into another hour . . .” (295)

This Must Be the Place offers particularly excellent insights into the interdependence of partners in a marriage, and the portrayals of Daniel's and Claudette’s children are moving and believable. Overall, it’s a satisfying read. I plan to watch for future offerings from O’Farrell.

Two Views of a Marriage

Fates and Furies     Lauren Groff     (2015)

The characters Lotto and Mathilde, the protagonists in Fates and Furies, are not endearing to me. They are very tall and way too beautiful—a glamorous couple right from the day that they meet in 1991, when both are about to graduate from Vassar. I kept reading Fates and Furies out of weird fascination, or perhaps voyeurism, wanting to know what happens to these exceptionally gifted but egotistical and exploitative people.

The first 206 pages of the 390-page novel constitute the “fates” section, telling the story of Lotto’s early life and then his married life with Mathilde. Lotto’s given name is Lancelot, his father is Gawain, and his mother is Antoinette. Right there novelist Lauren Groff has set us her readers for high drama in the manner of Arthurian legend or French history. Lotto is born to wealth, but he’s disinherited upon his marriage to Mathilde, whom his mother disapproves of. He assumes the struggling actor role in New York, dependent upon Mathilde for sustenance, until, in a drunken stupor, he dashes off the first draft of a play. Behold! Lotto becomes an internationally acclaimed playwright. Mathilde continues to serve Lotto’s needs, handling the business side of his amazing career.

With the shift to the “furies” section of the novel, readers get the seamier side of the couple’s story. We learn that Mathilde was born in France and named Aurélie. At age four, she was involved in an accident that killed her baby brother, so she was sent away to live with relatives, ending up in Pennsylvania with an uncle who is some sort of gangster. Many additional secrets about Mathilde are revealed in this half of the novel, putting her marriage to Lotto in a totally different light. I would note that the entire novel is written in third person, not first person, so it isn’t as if Groff is presenting the personal viewpoint of Lotto (“fates”) and then the personal viewpoint of Mathilde (“furies”).

I found the revelations in the second half of the novel oddly disconcerting, feeling that I’d been cheated of information when I was reading the first half of the novel. I did keep reading, however, to the end, drawn in by Groff’s intensity of language, astonishing metaphors, and brisk narrative pace. A couple of examples:

“The women around her were phantom people. Skin taut on their faces. Taking three nibbles of the chef’s fine food and declaring themselves full. Jangling with platinum and diamonds. Abscesses of self.” (341)

“It occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloons lowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges.” (354)

Fates and Furies was the book that President Obama named as his favorite novel of 2015. I speculate that the novel provided him some insights into how an intelligent, supportive spouse can help the career of a similarly intelligent person, as the two marital partners navigate the difficult shoals of power and fame. But I do hope that Obama’s marriage is working better than the one that this novel depicts!

Koreans in Japan

Pachinko     Min Jin Lee     (2017)

“Pachinko” is a popular Japanese slot-machine game. You may wonder, until well past the halfway point of this novel’s 485 pages, what pachinko has to do with a saga about four generations of a Korean family in the twentieth century. Have patience.

First you have to be well steeped in the story of Sunja, a poor teenager who is seduced by Hansu, an older Korean gangster, in her village in what is now South Korea. By chance, Isak, a Korean Christian minister, passes through the village. He rescues Sunja from the ignominy of an unwed pregnancy by marrying her and taking her to Japan, where he will work as a missionary. The year is 1933.

Historical events of the turbulent twentieth century constantly buffet Sunja, Isak, and their extended family and friends in Japan, where the bulk of the story plays out. Japan’s expansionist wars of the 1930s and 1940s fuel nativist sentiments in the Japanese  populace. Korean immigrants, who are “zainichi” (foreign residents), are relegated to the most menial jobs and are paid less than Japanese for the same work. Korean children born in Japan do not become citizens—they’re essentially countryless. As one character pronounces: “’This country [Japan] isn’t going to change. Koreans like me can’t leave. Where we gonna go? But the Koreans back home aren’t changing, either. In Seoul, people like me get called Japanese bastards, and in Japan, I’m just another dirty Korean no matter how much money I make or how nice I am.’“ (383)

Once Korea is partitioned into North and South in 1948, the situation gets even murkier: “After the [Korean] peninsula was divided, the Koreans in Japan ended up choosing sides, often more than once, affecting their residency status. It was still hard for a Korean to become a Japanese citizen, and there were many who considered such a thing shameful—for a Korean to try to become a citizen of its former oppressor.” (441)

A few ethnic Koreans living in Japan figure out that they can become entrepreneurs in the pachinko business, and a well-run pachinko parlor can turn a nice profit. Proceeds from pachinko parlors, plus help from that gangster Hansu, pave the bumpy road out of poverty for some characters in the novel. Other characters hide their Korean ethnicity, dressing like the Japanese, learning to speak Japanese without an accent, taking a Japanese spouse. This subterfuge is possible because the physical characteristics of Japanese people and Korean people are often very similar.

The straightforward, direct sentence style in Pachinko suits the themes of the novel, and the Korean and Japanese words in the text give the flavor of the setting without weighing down the narrative. I caught the simple ones, like “kimchi” (the Korean dish of fermented cabbage and radish) and “hanko” (a hand stamp of one’s name, used throughout East Asia). The meanings of other words were obvious from their context, but I had to look up a few as I read.

It would have been easy for novelist Lee to paint the Japanese as always the bad guys and the Koreans as always the good guys, but she does not adopt this dichotomy. Although she lays out the Japanese discrimination against Koreans clearly, her long list of characters includes both Koreans and Japanese who are deceitful and honest, talented and mediocre, wise and foolish, lazy and hardworking, compassionate and heartless, selfish and generous, prejudiced and open-minded. She pulls into her story subplots that touch on issues such as the status of minority Christians in Japan and the evolving attitude toward the place of women in the family and in the workplace over the course of the twentieth century. 

Above all, though, this is a universal story about the immigrant experience—about taking a job that’s far beneath your skill level because you don’t know the language, about being segregated into a slum area, about being subject to complicated rules that you don’t understand, about living constantly with fear. Immigrants enter a game of chance, stacked against them, much like pachinko players.

In her Acknowledgements, Lee tells us that it took her nearly thirty years to write this impressive novel. It was well worth the time.

North Woods Morality

The Hearts of Men     Nickolas Butler     (2017)

“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?”  This line from the 1930s pulp fiction radio drama The Shadow captures the theme of Nickolas Butler’s probing new novel.

The hero of The Hearts of Men is Nelson Doughty, his surname perhaps chosen by the author because it’s an archaic English word meaning “fearless” or “persistent.” We first meet Nelson in 1962 at a fictional Boy Scout campground, Camp Chippewa, in northern Wisconsin, where he is a nerdy, bespectacled thirteen year old who is constantly bullied by the other campers. He does, however, find a savior—the elderly scoutmaster who runs the camp—and also strikes up a somewhat tentative friendship with a popular, athletic older boy named Jonathan.

I cringed in horror at the cruelties Nelson endured as a teenager, but his adult life holds even further unhappinesses, in Vietnam as well as back at Camp Chippewa. I won’t spoil the plot, which unfolds over the ensuing 57 years, until the year 2019. By that year, the evil lurking in the hearts of men has intensified: “There seems an atmosphere everywhere these days in America, a malevolent vibration in the air, every citizen so quick to righteous rage, some tribal defensiveness, seeing the fault in each other's arguments, rather than some larger common field of compromise, if not agreement.” (278)

Novelist Butler unfurls the secrets of both men and women as Nelson, Jonathan, and their families seek the standards by which they’ll live out their lives. “A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.” Will this Boy Scout Law serve the purpose? Or is there an Army code that one can follow? Organized religion doesn’t seem to have the answer, at least in Butler’s Wisconsin. Some of his characters have an innate sense of fairness and generosity, but many of them are seriously flawed. The men, in particular, struggle with how to define themselves as males in American society. Are you a real man if you hold your liquor, beat your kids, frequent strip clubs, and cheat on your wife?

Throughout the book, Butler tosses off similes that stop you in your tracks: “The beer is ever so cold and bright, like swallowing winter sunlight carrying a memory of summer wildflowers, resting hay.” (149) His descriptions of summer in northern Wisconsin, viewed from a car window, are perfect: “Fields and fields of waist-high Cargill corn and knee-high Pioneer soybeans, muddy barnyards of shit-splattered Guernseys and Holsteins, sun-bleached and woebegone trailer parks, falling-down barns begging for a splash of gasoline and a match, cemeteries ringed in browning arborvitae and chain-link fences, derelict stone silos, small to middling northern rivers, forests of maple and oak and red pine sliding by at fifty-five miles per hour.” (154) Similarly, I know exactly the kind of place that Butler’s characters are in when he places a scene in a supper club, a dining establishment peculiar to rural areas of the upper Midwest.

The choice of Camp Chippewa, mosquitoes and all, as a primary setting for this epic is inspired. When you’re camping in northern Wisconsin, you’re far away from the cares and distractions of city life, forced to confront elemental truths. At one point, the young Nelson comes out of the woods into a clearing, and this is what he sees:  “A star sliced loose from its berth and went scuttling out into the void, turning and turning without ever a hope of gaining traction again. I am cut loose, he thinks. And, To hell with them all.” (95)