Outside the Norms

Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church    Megan Phelps-Roper     (2019)

Take a deep breath before you start to read Megan Phelps-Roper’s powerful memoir. She’s unsparing in her descriptions of the militant anti-gay crusade of the Westboro Baptist Church, citing the many gross and disgusting slogans and songs that the cult used online and in demonstrations across the United States.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the activities of Westboro, Phelps-Roper’s first chapter, “The Quarrel of the Covenant,” explains the genesis of her grandfather’s crusade against homosexuality. Fred Phelps, who led Westboro until his death in 2014, began his national campaign in Topeka, Kansas, in 1989, by picketing a local park where gay people congregated. Phelps justified the picketing with fiery sermons in which he preached that God commanded believers to denounce the sins of those around them in society. One favorite Bible passage, among the many that Fred Phelps cited, was “Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and shew my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins.” (71)

The actions that got Westboro the most international press coverage were their pickets at the funerals of US military service members. Though this picketing seems to defy logic, Phelps wanted to proclaim God’s punishment of the US for promoting homosexuality and other practices that Westboro deemed sinful. In other words, the US had promoted sin, therefore God had purposely killed US service members, therefore Westboro had to draw attention to the connection. To be clear, the deceased service members were very unlikely to have been gay themselves.

In 1986, Megan Phelps-Roper was born into the Westboro Baptist Church, which has never numbered more than 100 members, most of whom are and have been members of Fred Phelps’s large extended family. Although he kept close control, insisting on absolute obedience and adherence to rules, Fred Phelps also required that members receive formal education in public institutions, including colleges and law schools. Thus Megan Phelps-Roper, a bright and diligent student, became an articulate spokesperson for Westboro, handling the cult’s online presence starting around 2008, when she was in her early twenties.

By 2012, Megan Phelps-Roper’s concerns about Westboro grew to the point that she and one of her sisters moved out of their family home and severed ties with the cult. Her agonizing decision was based on recognition of multiple inconsistencies in Westboro’s dogmas, plus an internal coup by men (“elders”) who displaced her grandfather:

“I couldn’t believe how our love within the church had been warped beyond recognition by the elders’ unscriptural will to punish. By their implacable demands for unquestioning obedience. By their pernicious need for superiority and control. They had developed a toxic sense of certainty in their own righteousness, seizing for themselves the role of the ultimate arbiter of divine truth—and they now seemed willing to lay waste to anyone who disagreed with them. It was a heinous arrogance and sinfulness that could not be denied. And in a moment of horrifying clarity, I finally saw what had eluded me for so long: We had all been behaving in the exact same way toward outsiders. It was as if we were finally doing to ourselves what we had been doing to others—for over twenty years.” (158-9)

As I read Unfollow, I tried to track the theological arguments underpinning Westboro’s despicable actions. One doctrine, among many, that I could not get my head around was their belief in double predestination—an unchanging decision of God to send a human either to heaven or to hell. If the sinners of America were totally doomed, what was the point of picketing? Such sinners could not be saved, even if they turned away from their wickedness. The picketing did attract media coverage of Westboro, but the group did not gain converts to their belief system as a result of that coverage.

You need not immerse yourself deeply in such theological conundrums to appreciate Phelps-Roper’s moving story. However, it may help to know that she puts the many biblical quotes used by Westboro in italics in her text. And all Bible passages are from the 1611 King James version, which is the only English version that Westboro accepts as inspired by God. (Phelps-Roper also uses italics liberally in her own, non-Biblical text.)

Phelps-Roper presents the evolution of her understanding of the world and of her family in painstaking detail. Despite the constraints on her, she felt deep love from her family within Westboro, and in turn she continues to express love for all of them, both those who have remained with Westboro and those who have broken free. For me, the most astounding component of Phelps-Roper’s life story is her relationship with Chad Fjelland, the man who would eventually become her husband.

Fjelland began interacting with Phelps-Roper online when she was still Westboro’s PR person. He didn’t send the kind of angry messages that she usually received through social media. Instead, he was patient and inquiring, trying to understand why Westboro rejoiced in military deaths and in other tragedies around the world, though he was unambiguous in saying that he would never espouse the beliefs of Westboro. Fjelland and a couple of other brave souls who debated reasonably with Phelps-Roper online were instrumental in her departure from Westboro. My one minor complaint about Unfollow is that Phelps-Roper did not carry her story a little further, to describe her deepening relationship with Fjelland after she finally met him in person.

Unfollow demonstrates that religious beliefs that are taken to extremes, that fall outside the norms of a civil society, are dangerous, not only to the individuals caught within those belief systems but also to the society at large. Social media can spread falsehoods, imagined conspiracies, and bigotry, but, as the case of Chad Fjelland demonstrates, social media can also provide a way for rational, concerned people to connect with some cult members. The undercurrent of hatred in the United States today is frightening. We owe it to our nation to understand groups like Westboro Baptist Church, and Megan Phelps-Roper offers us a clear window to that understanding.

[Please note:  I call the Westboro Baptist Church a “cult” intentionally. For an explanation of how I approach such groups, see this previous review of mine. Note also that mainstream Baptists have renounced Westboro.]]

Men. Hunting. Way Up North

Hunter’s Moon     Philip Caputo     (2019)

In seven linked short stories, Philip Caputo summons up the wild allure of the far northern regions of the United States. Six of the seven stories take place in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which hovers around the 46th parallel of latitude, and the seventh is set even farther north, in Alaska. Hunting and fishing are the prime attractions of Caputo’s settings. Each story revolves in some way around these outdoor sports: the appeal of rugged terrain, the terror of getting lost, and (yes) the reality of weapons violence.

I don’t hunt, and I don’t understand the technicalities of rifles, but as you read Hunter’s Moon you can set those components aside and revel in Caputo’s descriptions of the natural world, like these: 

• “The sky lightens from the gray of old asphalt to oyster and snuffs out the stars one by one until all are hidden in a canopy of brilliant blue. A hoarfrost glitters on the brown bracken fern matting the clearing across which the white pine’s shadow lies like a fallen spear.” (61)

• “This is a silence never broken by humanity’s clatter; it is layered, dense, virgin, alien—a disquieting quiet, if you will. All the otherness of the natural world is in it—a world complete unto itself, independent of man’s endeavor’s and conflicts, his plans, schemes, joys, griefs, his egoistic certainty that he is a child of God.” (133)

You can move past the brief scenes of violence in Hunter’s Moon, but you can’t escape Caputo’s exploration of distressing aspects of male experience. Characters include military veterans who suffer PTSD from combat and fathers and sons who have fraught relationships. Here’s one father, speaking about his son, who is on a hunting trip in Alaska after having been expelled from college: 

• “Being a male of the old school, the kind who prefers back slaps to bro hugs, I would welcome a mood of active aggressiveness, an air-clearing, spleen-blowing flight, albeit one that doesn’t turn physical. . . I’m a fifty-six-year-old Russian literature professor who hasn’t been in a scrap since I was his age, and maybe younger.” (113)

One particular character, Will Treadwell, appears in five of the seven stories and lends a unifying presence as he transitions from owning a small-town bar and craft brewery into retirement. Only one female character, appearing in two of the seven stories, has a substantial role, but I’m okay with that. Caputo’s understanding of his male characters is deep and rich. And, along with the best nature writers, he captures the very feel of those remote northern forests.   

For similar themes and settings, read my reviews of Susan Bernhard’s Winter Loon, Leif Enger’s Virgil Wander, and Nickolas Butler’s The Hearts of Men.

Favorite Reads of 2019

Favorite Reads of 2019

photo by Ed Robertson

I’m a finicky reader. About 80% of the books that I check out from my local library never get a review, after undergoing my 50-page test. (To be honest, some don’t make it past page 10.) Reasons that I send books back unfinished and unreviewed? Oh, too much violence or an insipid plot or characters who are so disgusting that I don’t want to get involved with them. And remember, I don’t even check out books in the genres of horror or science fiction or fantasy.

In 2019 I reviewed 72 books on the Cedar Park Book Blog, and picking my favorites was a challenge. The sixteen below are the best of the best! Contemporary fiction rose to the top this year, with eight of the sixteen titles that I selected.

Here are the winners, in alphabetical order by title. The brief descriptions with each are totally insufficient, so be sure to click on the title to go to my full review.  

Becoming by Michelle Obama   The former First Lady recounts her remarkable life as if she’s sitting right in the room with you. MEMOIR

The Body in Question by Jill Ciment   In spare prose, the story of an affair between two jurors sequestered for a sensational murder trial. CONTEMPORARY FICTION

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng   An intimate family tale wrapped around a tragic death, probing racism and sexism in 20th-century America.  HISTORICAL NOVEL

The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling   Deftly deflates cultural beliefs about immigration law, motherhood, and rural California.  CONTEMPORARY FICTION

Henry, Himself by Stewart O’Nan   An introspective, naturalistic portrait of a retired engineer in Pittsburgh.  CONTEMPORARY FICTION

How Not To Die Alone by Richard Roper   A forlorn civil servant in London has a job searching the homes of the deceased for evidence of family. Can he find happiness?  CONTEMPORARY FICTION

The Lager Queen of Minnesota by J Ryan Stradal   A quirky take on the craft brewery phenomenon, featuring feisty women of the upper Midwest. CONTEMPORARY FICTION

Little Faith by Nickolas Butler   A family in rural Wisconsin becomes involved with a religious cult as they try to sort out their relationships. Poignant portraits of varying beliefs.  CONTEMPORARY FICTION

Normal People by Sally Rooney   Coming of age, falling in love, and confronting societal constraints, by Ireland’s hottest new novelist.  CONTEMPORARY FICTION

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout   Don’t miss this sequel to the Pulitzer-winning novel Olive Kitteridge. Linked short stories by a truly gifted American writer. CONTEMPORARY FICTION

Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield   A nearly drowned young girl is the center of a magical mystery that unwinds along the Thames in the 19th century. HISTORICAL MYSTERY

The Right Sort of Man by Allison Montclair   In post-WWII London, two bright women start a marriage bureau and end up solving a crime. Spunky and sparkly. HISTORICAL MYSTERY

The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna by Juliet Grames   A boisterous Italian family’s 20th-century immigration saga, starring the women. HISTORICAL NOVEL

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens   A “Marsh Girl” roams the lush swamps of coastal North Carolina and meets both friends and foes. Evocative prose. HISTORICAL MYSTERY

The Winter Soldier by Daniel Mason   A medical student assigned to an eastern European field hospital confronts the physical and mental damages of WWI. A bleak but rewarding read. HISTORICAL NOVEL

The Word Is Murder by Anthony Horowitz   An invented version of the author Horowitz helps solve a crime in this spritely metafictional British whodunit.  MYSTERY

Happy reading in 2020!  Check back with the Cedar Park Book Blog every Friday for curated recommendations of historical novels, mysteries, and contemporary fiction, plus an occasional social history and memoir. Follow the blog on Facebook to get a reminder.

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More by Elizabeth Strout

Olive, Again     Elizabeth Strout     (2019)

Olive is back, and you won’t want to miss her return.

Elizabeth Strout, the queen of linked short stories, has produced a sequel that matches or exceeds her Pulitzer-winning Olive Kitteridge of 2008. In thirteen succinct stories, each of which can absolutely stand alone, Strout unpeels life in the fictional rural town of Crosby, Maine. The crusty, candid Olive—a character in most of the stories—is sometimes intolerant and cranky but often kind. When her kindness is awkwardly expressed and causes offense, she’s surprised, and she tries to rectify her behavior. She’s mellowed as she’s aged.

The other characters in Olive, Again are townspeople whom Olive interacts with in some way. Their lives are intertwined with each other and with the inevitable sadnesses and transgressions and occasional triumphs of living on this Earth. There’s unfaithfulness, pedophilia, disease, and death (especially by suicide) aplenty. The surroundings of the town can reflect the despair of the inhabitants:

• “Around them a sudden gust of wind sent a few twigs swirling, and muddy plastic bag that had been run over a number of times rose slightly, then dropped back to the ground among slushy car tracks from the old snow.”(120)

• “As Denny approached the river, and could see in the moonlight how the river was moving quickly, he felt as though his life had been a piece of bark on that river, just going along, not thinking at all. Headed toward the waterfall.” (142)

Yet it’s not all bleakness. Strout's characters can also connect with the natural world in a way that lifts their spirits, if only briefly:

• “The field was darkening, the trees behind it were like pieces of black canvas, but the sky still sent down the sun, which sliced gently across the grass on the far end of the field.” (17)

The stories, which take place the very recent past, span more than a decade of Olive’s retirement from her school-teaching job. Early in the book, when she’s still mourning the loss of her husband, she marries for a second time. I was shocked by this plot development, not the least because Olive did not seem to me like someone who’d be considered a prize mate. I could hear Strout gently chiding me for my belittling thought. Though Olive doesn’t possess physical beauty and can be irksome in her bluntness, she is unfailingly honest. Honesty is a rare trait, and her second husband recognizes this.

Please read this book. It will open your eyes to components of the human condition that you’ve never thought about before. 

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I’ve reviewed two other excellent Strout linked-story novels: My Name is Lucy Barton (2016) and its sequel, Anything is Possible (2017), set in New York City and rural Illinois respectively.

(Non)Fictional Mathematicians

The Tenth Muse     Catherine Chung     (2019)

The nine Muses of ancient Greek mythology, all daughters of Zeus, traditionally provided inspiration for many different arts, from dance and music to history and lyric poetry. Catherine Chung tells us that, in addition to the nine Muses, there was once an unheralded tenth Muse, a woman who “did not wish to sing in the voices of men, telling only the stories they wished to tell. She preferred to sing her songs herself.” (1) The tenth Muse gave up immortality and came to inhabit the bodies of millions of women on earth who told their own stories. This novel is about one of those women, a mathematician of extraordinary abilities who speaks in first-person narration.

Women are distinctly a minority in the field of higher mathematics, where an academic can spend an entire career seeking to solve a single major mathematical problem. The character Katherine in The Tenth Muse comes of age in the 1960s, when mathematics was even more male-dominated than it is today, and she confronts exclusionary policies head on.

Complicating Katherine’s life is her heritage: it’s especially difficult to grow up in the mid-20th century in small-town Michigan when your father is white and your mother is Chinese. Katherine’s parentage turns out to be even more complex than the obvious mixed-race issues presented in her childhood. She’s determined to sort out her ancestry, and a graduate fellowship to study at a German university gives her access to first-hand information.

Katherine’s path, both in her mathematics career and in her ancestry search, winds and twists in unexpected directions. In reading The Tenth Muse, I occasionally thought that the turns of plot were not true to life. But then I remembered my own meandering path in academia, which no one could have predicted at the outset of my career.

Surely it’s not a coincidence that the given name of the narrator of The Tenth Muse is almost identical to the given name of the author of the novel. Novelist Chung  holds a degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago, so she knows the field of mathematics, and she draws into the story many real-life mathematicians. But she doesn’t overwhelm ordinary readers; she invokes mathematical terms only in broad strokes, so readers don’t have to drill down with the experts.

Do some of the scenes in The Tenth Muse reflect discrimination and harassment that Chung herself has suffered? Is the novel a call for mathematicians to wake up to the #metoo movement and clean up the discipline? A couple of statements by the character Katherine help to answer these questions:

• “I was so used to my perpetual status of outsider that I’d stopped questioning in each situation whether this time it was my femaleness or my Asianness or the combination of both that branded me different. Even now, I feel impatient when asked about what being these things mean to me—the expectation that because my race and my gender are often the first things people notice about me, they must also be the most significant to me. When I die, I know the first sentence in my obituary will read, ‘Asian American woman mathematician dies at the age of X.’” (162)

• “Here was the problem: I was ambitious. I wanted a career. I wanted accolades and validation. More than anything, I wanted to do something that mattered. At a time when it was unseemly for a woman to want these things (is it really so accepted now?), I wanted them desperately. I went after them openly.” (233)

In one scene, when young Katherine meets a female Nobel laureate, the older woman says to her, “’Life’s not fair . . I could have spent my time fighting the unfairness of it all, or I could dedicate my time to science. There wasn’t time for both.’” (119) This is the quandary that many women face.

I’ve reviewed quite a few books about exceptionally bright women, including Chemistry by Weike Wang, Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan, The Idiot by Elif Batuman, and Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple.

Ordinary Women in History

Tidelands     Philippa Gregory     (2019)

Philippa Gregory is best known for her 2001 historical novel The Other Boleyn Girl, which was twice made into a film. Throughout her long writing career, Gregory has fictionalized the lives of prominent women from the history of Britain, sometimes in the face of criticism that she’s distorted the facts. (Yeah, probably, but who knows the facts for certain, and Gregory’s books have always been labeled “fiction,” and, uh, Shakespeare.)

With Tidelands, Gregory embarks on a new series, “tracing the rise of a family from obscurity to prosperity,” as she explains in her Author’s Note. Her protagonist, Alinor Reekie, is both obscure and fictional, a wisewoman—a midwife, a healer, an herbalist—who poses a threat to the patriarchal religious beliefs of the seventeenth century, especially those of the censorious Puritans. It’s 1648, during the English Civil War, pitting Royalists who support King Charles against Parliamentarians who want to abolish the monarchy. This political polarization is overlaid on Catholic-Protestant religious polarization at a time when it was highly dangerous to be a Catholic in England.

Alinor is swept up in these national disputes that she cares little about; she’s mainly concerned about her status as neither wife nor widow, since her abusive sailor husband has disappeared. As the novel opens, she’s waiting in the graveyard of the local church at midnight on Midsummer’s Eve, when ghosts are reputed to walk. She hopes to see the ghost of her husband, to confirm that he’s dead. Instead, she meets a living man, James Summer, a high-born Catholic priest seeking a safe house in the area. She doesn’t yet know that he’s involved in a dangerous plot against the Parliamentarians, who are the dominant party in the tidelands, a marshy area on the southern coast of England.

Tidelands launches slowly, with plenty of atmospherics appropriate to a graveyard at midnight and plenty of exposition to set the political scene. But readers surely sense the frisson between Alinor and James from this very first meeting of theirs. She guides him along boggy pathways to the home of secret Catholics who will shelter him. Then the story turns to Alinor and her two young teen children, who scrape by on odd jobs and the occasional payments that Alinor gets for attending births.

There’s some lovely prose here, evoking the setting: “[James] shivered with distaste. He felt that he could not bear the ugliness of these people’s lives on the very edge of the shore, with their loves and hates ebbing and flowing like a muddy tide, with their anger roaring like the water in the millrace, with their hatreds and fears as treacherous as the hushing well.  . . . He wished himself back with his own people, where cruelty was secret, violence was hidden, and good manners more important than crime.” (190-1)

Tidelands also carries a strong message about the oppression of women, especially poor women, pithily expressed by an elderly seller of lace at the Chichester market: “’It’s a crime to be poor in this country; it’s a sin to be old. It’s never good to be a woman.’” (244) The male characters in Tidelands tend to be exploitive, gossipy, and fickle.

Since Tidelands is the first novel in a planned series, Philippa Gregory leaves readers with a “to be continued” feel at its close. I’m hoping that we hear more about the indomitable Alinor in the next book. Citing Gregory’s Author’s Note again, “For much of English history women have been legal nonentities. But they always lived as if they mattered. Alinor is a woman like this.”

For another novel about a strong woman living in marshlands, see my review of Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens.

The Language of the Internet

Because Internet:  Understanding the New Rules of Language     Gretchen McCulloch     (2019)

I’ve been involved with the mechanics of language on many fronts, especially as a lexicographer (for both medieval and modern English dictionaries) and as a teacher of writing. So a book that promises to steer me through the highways and byways of internet language naturally went on my library request list. Gretchen McCulloch does not disappoint.

As a linguistics scholar with credentials in more traditional language analyses, McCulloch is able to situate internet language within a larger framework. She starts her explorations slowly, explaining the differences between formal and informal writing and distinguishing both of these from formal and informal speech. She also provides useful background on the history of the internet, while refraining from disparagement of any internet users.

For example, the “founding population, the first wave of people to go online” (68), whom she calls Old Internet People, were amazing tech innovators, whether they were hauling around punch cards in the 1960s or coding HTML in the 1990s. Old Internet People aren’t necessarily elderly in age. They’re sophisticated in their programming abilities and proud of their online history, though they may not use more recent social media like Facebook. McCulloch goes on to describe

• Full Internet People (into the social internet, especially instant messaging)

• Semi Internet People (went online for work and only dip into the social internet)

• Pre Internet People (never really connected much)

• Post Internet People (can’t remember a time when they weren’t online constantly)

Having categorized those who use internet language, McCulloch gets to the core of her analysis, with in-depth chapters on

• typography, which conveys tone

• emoticons and emoji, which communicate physical gestures

• chat and posts, which carry conversations

• memes, which are just very odd.

McCulloch makes some grand pronouncements about internet language, and I found her assertions solid and convincing:

• “From an internet linguistics perspective, language variation online is important not so much because it’s new (language has always varied), but because it’s only rarely been written down.” (56)

• “Regardless of the specific linguistic circles we hang out with online, we’re all speakers of internet language because the shape of our language is influenced by the internet as a cultural context. Every language online is becoming decentralized, getting more of its informal register written down. Every speaker is learning how to write exquisite layers of social nuance that we once reserved for speech, whether we mark them my switching alphabets, switching languages, or respelling words. All our texting and tweeting is making us better at expressing ourselves in writing.” (57)

• “More than two million people use emoji every single hour. Emoji didn’t succeed because they were a language, they succeeded because they’re not a language. Rather than try to complete with words on their home turf, emoji added a whole new system to represent a whole other layer of meaning . . . a way of representing our gestures and physical space.” (191-2)

• “The chat format’s astonishing durability signals the true birth of a new form of communication. Chat is the perfect intersection of written and informal language. . . . While emails and social media posts and website text can all lay claim to the title of informal writing by virtue of being unedited, chat is informal writing in its purest form . . . with chat, the audience is known and the time horizon is fast. The other person can literally see that you’re typing, so it’s better to just get something out there than worry about composing the perfect message.” (214-5)

• “What we’re arriving at, between typography and visuals, is a flexible set of ways to communicate our intentions and share space online. Not everyone uses every option: some people love emoji, some people prefer old-school emoticons or abbreviations, some people would rather do it with comedic timing in their vocabulary, linebreaks, and punctuation. But everyone needs something.” (195)

Because Internet is essential reading for anyone who uses the internet. I discovered, for example, that I don’t fit neatly into any one of McCulloch’s categories of Internet People. I worked for decades at a large university that was an early adopter of internet communication. I have my own website and blog. But I still follow the norms of offline authorities in my spelling and punctuation and grammar. My language seems to hybridize online and offline culture. I had to look up a few of McCulloch’s terms, but, hey, I could google them easily.

You’ll surely find some facts in Because Internet that fit your case. If you tweet frequently, you’ll learn why you punctuate the way you do. If you love Facebook, you’ll find out how your posts conform to internet language. Even if you’re not into memes, you’ll get an understanding of why others are: “The appeal of memes is the appeal of belonging to a community of fellow insiders.” (244) 

I can’t resist one final quote from Because Internet: “Language is a network, a web. Language is the ultimate participatory democracy. To put it in technological terms, language is humanity’s most spectacular open source project.” (267)

For another review of a book about the internet, click here.

Especially for Thanksgiving

365 Thank Yous: The Year a Simple Act of Daily Gratitude Changed My Life    John Kralik     (2010)

I first read the memoir 365 Thank Yous when it came out in 2010. It made such an impression on me that I decided to re-read it to review on this blog for Thanksgiving 2019.

In 365 Thank Yous, John Kralik recalls how miserable he felt when he set out to hike the Echo Mountain Trail above Pasadena, California, on New Year’s Day in 2008. His small law firm was in dire financial straits; he was going through an acrimonious, drawn-out divorce; his new girlfriend had recently broken up with him; he was living in a tiny, uncomfortable apartment; he was overweight and in bad shape physically.

During Kralik’s hike, a voice seemed to speak to him, saying, “Until you learn to be grateful for the things you have . . .you will not receive the things you want.” (14) Upon hearing this voice, Kralik began to contemplate the concept of gratitude.

The next day, Kralik received in his apartment mailbox a brief but kind note from his ex-girlfriend, thanking him for the Christmas gift he had given her. This piece of mail confirmed for him that he should be thanking the people around him, and he resolved to pursue gratitude in a specific way:  by sending handwritten notes, one for each day of the coming year.

Thanking people for Christmas gifts that he’d received was an easy start, but Kralik soon went far beyond this, thanking his work colleagues, his friends, members of his extended family, and even the barista who served him coffee. “Many of my notes were not about material gifts. In these notes, I tried to describe just what the other person had done for me and to show my understanding of that person’s effort.  . . .This was part of my shift of focus from the gift to the giver.” (213-4)

The logistics of Kralik’s thank-you project were pretty simple. He wrote two or three sentences in longhand on a plain note card that he mailed through the postal service, and he maintained a spreadsheet of his recipients, with annotations of what he’d written. In today’s advanced internet culture, handwritten mail is an extreme rarity, but even in 2008 people were surprised and delighted to receive Kralik’s thoughtful notes.

The details of the individual thank-you notes that Kralik wrote are really the heart of this book. Kralik includes the texts of many of his notes, reconstructed from his spreadsheet. His words are unpretentious and honest, and they elicit warm responses from the recipients.

Almost immediately, Kralik’s thank-you notes brought him small doses of good fortune. These could, of course, have been coincidences, but Kralik saw them as evidence of the power of gratitude. As just one example, he sent personal thank-you notes to fellow lawyers who had referred cases to his firm. These lawyers then referred even more cases to Kralik’s firm, helping him with his financial woes. Month by month, Kralik wrote his thank-you notes, connecting with people he’d gone to college with or worked with early in his career. He began to realize that he had a powerful network of supporters.

In the end, Kralik didn’t quite make his goal of writing 365 thank-you notes in the 2008 calendar year. It took him about fifteen months to reach this number. But he kept writing, and as a result of the notes, he overcame quite a few of the difficult situations that he had faced on that New Year’s Day. Toward the end of 2008, he took stock:  “If the voice I’d heard in the mountains had implied that I would get all that I wanted, it seemed, at least at this juncture, that it was a promise unfulfilled. Yet, by being thankful for what I had, I realized that I had everything I needed.” (187)

What was that voice that Kralik heard on his hike? Was his conscience telling him that he was an ungrateful wretch? Was Nature reminding him that he wasn’t appreciating the splendor of his surroundings? Was the voice of a deity speaking to him in the wind? It doesn’t matter. Kralik states straightforwardly that he heard a voice, and the thank-you note from his ex-girlfriend confirmed the message of the voice: Be grateful.  

May all of us, even in the face of adversity, be able to ascend into the mountains of gratitude on the upcoming Thanksgiving Day.

Breezy Beach Reads, Part 2

Heading to warm climes for a winter vacation? Here are a couple of novels that won’t demand much strenuous thought in the reading—in other words, beach reads. For more reviews of beach reads, click here.

Summer of ’69     Elin Hilderbrand     (2019)

When I pick up a book, the first thing I always do is read any sections called “Acknowledgments” and “Author’s Notes,” which are usually at the end of the main text. I take the risk of running into spoilers, but I can’t help myself. I want to know where the author was coming from when he or she sat down to write. I want to know who helped with the research, the drafts, the final editing. I look for names of people I remember from my brief stint in the 1990s as the director of a graduate MFA program.

In the Author’s Note at the back of Summer of ’69, Elin Hilderbrand explains that she was born on July 17, 1969, six minutes before her twin brother, Eric, entered the world. This alone is a surprising fact—multiple births were not as common in 1969 as they are today with advances in assisted reproduction and in neonatal intensive care. Fifty years on, Elin is a prolific writer of beach reads. In this one (her twenty-third), she revisits the momentous events of the summer that she herself was born, including in her fictional narrative such actual occurrences as the spellbinding Apollo 11 mission to the moon; the tragic death of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick that derailed Ted Kennedy’s presidential hopes; the fabled rock ‘n’ roll encampment at Woodstock; and the continuing slaughter of troops and civilians in Vietnam.

Her main characters are the Levin family, who summer on Nantucket, the small island off Cape Cod. Blair, the eldest of the offspring, is recently married and is diagnosed late in pregnancy as carrying twins. Kirby, the rebel sister, takes a job on the nearby island of Martha’s Vineyard, where she is almost a witness in the Kopechne/Kennedy case. Tiger, the only son, is off fighting in Vietnam, driving his mother to drink. And 13-year-old Jessie, the youngest, gets invited to Woodstock. Hilderbrand takes us back to 1969 in all its glory and horror through the experiences of this family. Some of the plot twists will be obvious to any avid reader of mystery novels, and a few anachronisms crop up. But, despite the backdrop of the Vietnam War, Summer of ’69 is mostly brisk and cheerful, with wrap-ups of most of the plot lines by the final pages. You can have that second margarita and still be able to follow the story.

The Islanders     Meg Mitchell Moore     (2019)

Even more lightweight than Summer of ’69 is this novel set on Block Island, off the coast of the state of Rhode Island. The main character is Anthony Puckett, a writer who produced one best-selling novel and then became enmired in a literary scandal.

Anthony is hiding out on Block Island for the summer when he meets Joy Sousa, owner of a whoopee pie café and single mom to a teenage daughter, and Lu Trusdale, former lawyer now reluctantly staying home with her two preschool boys. These three characters have considerable substance, which is not the case for some of the lesser characters, such as Lu’s husband, who have the personalities of cardboard cutouts. The interactions of Anthony, Joy, and Lu drive the plot of The Islanders, and that plot won’t challenge your brain in any meaningful way as you sip your beverage of choice at the cabana. Just lap up the scenes of surf and sand.

What I’d like to mention, with a spoiler alert, is the uncanny similarity between components of The Islanders and components of three other contemporary novels, two of which I’ve reviewed on this blog.

1.   Beatriz Williams’s A Hundred Summers (2013):  a hurricane in the denouement.

2.   Ann Leary’s The Children (2017): a woman who writes a highly successful blog that has a major deception at its core.

3.   Meg Wolitzer’s The Wife (2003): an acclaimed male writer who takes the credit for his wife’s writing, with her assent.

I’ll concede that the 1. could be coincidence, since hurricanes are pretty common on the East Coast these days. But 2. and 3.—really?

Mysterious Places and People

The Clockmaker’s Daughter     Kate Morton     (2018)

All of Kate Morton’s trademark writing techniques are on display in The Clockmaker’s Daughter, especially her explorations of the linkages between places and the people who inhabit them. As usual, Morton leaps fearlessly from one time period to another, requiring her reader to keep track of innumerable interrelated characters, and her mystery tale turns on a modern-day character’s discovery of a piece of history.

Elodie Winslow is an archivist in 2017 London who is tracking the origins of a leather satchel that she dates to the 1860s. The satchel contains a photograph of a striking woman as well as a sketchbook with a drawing of house by a river. These objects will weave in and out of The Clockmaker’s Daughter, as will a large and valuable diamond. Elodie’s intuitive sense that she knows the house leads her to investigate the contents of the satchel far more than her job requires. And so the novel loops back to the nineteenth century, when the owner of the satchel, Edward Radcliffe, was an up-and-coming British visual artist whose fiancé was shot dead in an apparent robbery at his country house, Birchwood Manor, on the Upper Thames in the Cotswolds.

Ah, here’s the mystery, here’s the enticing location. But the novelist is not content to have Elodie discover her connection to Edward directly. Instead the story draws in many other inhabitants of Birchwood Manor, including a ghost. I’m not usually a fan of ghost stories, but I tolerated this ghost, who is Birdie Bell, a contemporary of Edward. The novelist’s device functions to give the reader an observational view of the activities in Birchwood Manor over the many decades since Birdie, the daughter of a clockmaker, came to haunt the house.

For example, at the end of the nineteenth century, a young girl named Ada lives in the house when it’s briefly converted to a school. In the 1920s, a scholar named Leonard visits as he researches a biography of Edward Radcliffe. During World War II, a woman named Juliet and her three children escape to the house when their home in London is bombed. All these characters, and many others, have their own subsidiary mysteries, and all the stories form a complex nexus. If you’re a reader who delights in such complexity, Kate Morton is the writer for you. She doesn’t provide pages of family trees, as some family sagas do, but figures you can keep all the characters straight in your head.  Do the 482 pages occasionally bog down? Sure, but when your attention starts to flag, Morton bustles you off to another storyline.

Anglophiles, take note that the archaeological history of England, the sense of the ancient inherent in every locale, is strong in The Clockmaker’s Daughter.

• Ada discovers fossils: “Every relic they unearthed came with a story, a secret life led long before the object reached their hands.” (165) 

• Leonard “felt a greater connection to the ancient people who’d tracked the very paths across the land that he followed now than he did with the bright young things dancing the nights away in London. He was aware as he walked of belonging; in an essential way he knew himself to be of the earth, and with each footstep he drew further solidity from it.” (217)

• Juliet muses on timelessness of the Thames: “No matter what else was happening in the world, regardless of human folly or individual torment, the river kept flowing.” (288).

Kate Morton’s novels are sui generis, with drawn-out, elaborate plots that are highly reliant on coincidence and unexpected connections over the course of history. Places—homes and natural environments—anchor them. 

For more Kate Morton, see my review of The Lake House, her 2015 mystery novel. Or check out another writer of historical mysteries, Diane Setterfield.

Another Great Horowitz Mystery

The Sentence Is Death     Anthony Horowitz     (2019)

I’m unabashedly a fan of Anthony Horowitz’s mystery novels. On this blog I’ve reviewed his 2017 offering, Magpie Murders, as well as the first of his metafictional Daniel Hawthorne mysteries, The Word is Murder (2018). With The Sentence Is Death, Horowitz presents the second volume that features the private detective Hawthorne, a former police officer now hired by the police to help on particularly challenging murder cases.

As with The Word is Murder, The Sentence Is Death features as first-person narrator a character named Anthony Horowitz, who bears a startling resemblance to the real-life Anthony Horowitz in his work life and in his family configuration—hence, metafiction. Watch for zingers that play off the insertion of the author into his own fiction. For example, the fictional Horowitz notes that Jill Green, actual wife of the author Horowitz, “has made it clear that she’s uncomfortable being a character in my book. Unfortunately, truth is what it’s all about.” (303) Uh, “truth” in this case is a fictional narrative about a fictional murder.

The case involves the murder of a prominent divorce lawyer in London, with red herrings and potential suspects abounding. Key clues include an overheard doorway conversation shortly before the murder and the number “182” painted on the wall near the corpse. Throughout his writing career the author Horowitz has been captivated by word play—mistaken similar names, anagrams, homonyms, crosswords, multiple meanings, and such. Word play often has an important plot function in the episodes of Foyle’s War, the World War II mystery series (2002-2015) that he wrote for British television. Fictional Horowitz also loves words, as he transcribes the details of the murder case that Hawthorne is investigating in The Sentence Is Death. Hawthorne says to fictional Horowitz, “You’ll choose all the right words and you’ll make it come to life. There’s no way I could do anything like that. Which is why it’s such a great partnership. I do the legwork. You do the rest.” (358)

Fictional Horowitz also chastises writers who break the “fair-play rule” of mysteries:  “Whenever Hawthorne saw anything or worked something out, he deliberately kept it from me as if the whole thing was some sort of game. This is often the case in detective stories and I always find it infuriating . . .” (164-65) Of course, author Horowitz leads his readers down many cul-de-sacs before he reveals the solution to the crime. This is despite his avowed approach:  ”In a museum, a department store, a theatre, a Tube station, I’ll find myself wondering what goes on behind those locked doors. I sometimes think that it’s actually a good definition of creative writing: to unlock doors and take readers through to the other side.” (131) Multiple doors in The Sentence Is Death open and shut and then open again.

Mystery lovers, don’t miss this one.  

Loneliness in London

How Not to Die Alone     Richard Roper     (2019)

In 2017, I posted a review of Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, and that novel also made it to my exclusive list of favorite books of the year. In Honeyman’s story, an awkward and abused woman in present-day Glasgow faces her demons and seeks to change her life.

Richard Roper’s How Not to Die Alone, set in London, has as its central character the forty-two-year-old Andrew Smith, who is another lonely soul, desperate for connection with other human beings. Although the premises of the two novels are similar, Roper’s book is by no means a clone of Honeyman’s. His narrative voice is distinctive and powerful, treating the issue of trauma and its resultant isolating consequences. Roper also succeeds in making How Not to Die Alone uproariously funny.

Andrew is employed in an unusual civil service job: he searches the dwellings of deceased people who have no known family, trying to find any evidence of relatives who can (1) be notified of the death and (2) pay for disposition of the body. If he can’t find anyone related to the deceased, the local government must foot the bill for a basic funeral and cremation. As you might expect, the bodies of people who die alone are sometimes not discovered until long after they expire. The coroner removes these bodies before Andrew shows up to comb through the possessions of the deceased, but the sites of death are often grim—cluttered, filthy, and malodorous. Nevertheless, Andrew seems to get satisfaction from his work, even going the extra mile by attending the funerals of those who have no discoverable relatives.

The novel opens at one of these funerals, and we immediately get a picture of Andrew’s fragile mental state. He has an obvious case of PTSD—with terrifying episodes being triggered whenever he hears the song Blue Moon—but we don’t learn about the initial traumatic event until late in the book. Meanwhile, Andrew becomes friendly with Peggy, a new employee who joins the eccentric Death Administration staff. Peggy could be Andrew’s ticket to better mental health, but unfortunately a longstanding lie on Andrew’s part blocks romance. As Andrew explains, “It came from a misunderstanding, but then I kept the lie going, and the longer I did the harder it was to tell the truth.” (245)

As the tension resulting from Andrew’s lie grows, the novelist injects humor that defuses the morbid aspects of the death scenes. Roper also has some lovely descriptive passages, like this one: “She’d fiddled with one of her earrings so much that it came free in her hand and bounced onto the table like a little blue tear that had frozen as it fell.” (245)  And I found Andrew’s obsessions with model trains and with the discography of Ella Fitzgerald endearing.

As the novel wraps up, Andrew observes, “Life, just sometimes, can be wonderfully, beautifully simple.” (308) By this point I was really rooting for ol’ Andrew, wanting a sequel to How Not to Die Alone, to find out what the next chapter would bring for this forlorn yet appealing character.

A Cross-Atlantic Immigrant Mystery

Searching for Sylvie Lee     Jean Kwok     (2019)

Jean Kwok sets up a tantalizing mystery while at the same time constructing a moving story about an immigrant family in today’s highly mobile global economy.

The mystery:  Successful 30-something New Yorker Sylvie Lee has disappeared on a trip to the Netherlands to visit her dying grandmother. Her younger sister, Amy, flies to Amsterdam to look for her. This mystery component keeps the pages turning as chapters skip back and forth in time, presenting alternating narrators.

The immigrant family:  Originally from China, the extended Lee and Tan families emigrated to the Netherlands and to the United States more than a quarter century ago. Members of the younger generation are assimilated and fluent in multiple languages but still face bigotry in both countries. As one Chinese American character puts it, “I think that wherever you are, to live in the world as a white person is a completely different experience than a person of color. Discrimination is invisible to them because it does not affect them. They are truly shocked.” (227)

The dual settings (Amsterdam and NYC) add a layer of interest, since the attitudes toward immigrants have both similarities and differences. Social class is another factor. Even though Sylvie attended all the right schools and landed high-paying jobs, she laments, “I never mastered the art of the graceful shrug, the careless indifference of those who summered on private islands and tied clove hitches on sailboats.” (198)

I found the syntax and word choice in this novel particularly arresting. With each chapter, the language changes to suit the narrator of that chapter. So, when Ma, the mother of Sylvie and Amy, narrates, the sentences are shorter, with nouns often lacking articles, because Ma speaks very little English. The invoking of proverbs—such as “Those who wish to eat honey must suffer the sting of the bees” (198)—also varies. Ma’s narrative is chock full of traditional sayings, but the more Westernized Sylvie and Amy cite proverbs somewhat less often. The characters whose native language is Dutch speak in sentences that mimic the patterns of that language. Of course, we’re reading the words of fictional Dutch speakers, who are speaking Dutch that has been “translated” by Jean Kwok into English.

The fine character development in Searching for Sylvie Lee overshadows any deficiencies in the plot department, so I won’t downgrade the novel for its few melodramatic twists. In the end, Amy concludes: “How my knowledge of Sylvie, of Ma, of myself has changed. We had all been hidden behind the curtain of language and culture: from each other, from ourselves. I have learned that though the curtains in the Netherlands are always open, there is much that can be concealed in broad daylight.” (312)

For reviews of other fiction about immigrants, click on Immigrant Stories in the Archive column on the right. For another novel that combines mystery with the immigrant experience, see my post reviewing The Other Americans by Laila Lalami.

Jury Duty Intrigue

The Body in Question     Jill Ciment     (2019)

If you read this novel, you may never want to be selected as a jury member on a serious criminal case. In fact, you may get several ideas for how to disqualify yourself, so that you don’t have to deal with confusing and contradictory evidence, seemingly capricious legal rulings, morbidly curious spectators in the gallery, members of the press trying to get a story, and fellow jurors who are disinterested or foolish or rude. You may squirm at the thought of being a jury member on a sensational case and being sequestered for the duration of the trial with your fellow citizens. Oh, and you may vow that, even if one day you do end up on a jury, you will not, under any circumstances, enter into a sexual liaison with a fellow juror.

Jill Ciment draws out all these thoughts in the 174 pages of this novel/novella, as she chronicles the experience of jurors C2 and F17, who are asked to decide a case of murder: a teenager is accused of killing her infant brother by setting him on fire. The details of the death are gruesome, laid out dispassionately in courtroom scenes by the witnesses who come forward to testify. The murder case is by no means straightforward, as the actions of the teen’s identical twin sister and of that twin’s boyfriend are revealed.

The behind-the-scenes affair between C2 and F17 (whose names we don’t learn until late in the book) is also complicated. Juror C2 is a highly successful photographer, age 52, who is married to a renowned journalist 33 years her senior. F17 is a professor of anatomy in his early forties, unattached at the time of the trial. C2 and F17 are immediately attracted to each other during the jury selection process, and they go on to have an affair that they must hide from the other jury members and from the officers of the court. This isn’t easy, since the jury members are under constant surveillance—in the courtroom, in the greasy spoons where they’re fed, and at the seedy motel where they’re kept isolated from the press and from the public at large.

As C2’s backstory is revealed, we learn that her marriage is strained by the increasing frailty and neediness of her elderly husband. She’s been tending to him, but this very caregiving points out to her the indignities of old age, which she herself will have to face eventually. Perhaps this is why she decides to have a fling with F17—to assert her own attractiveness and vigor. Perhaps the challenge of keeping the affair secret during a lengthy jury sequestration makes the sex more titillating. 

With spare language and a driving plot, Jill Ciment gives readers a ring-side seat in the courtroom and in the motel room. Read this riveting book in one sitting, and remember your civic responsibility if you’re called for jury duty.  

Mental Illness in the Family

Ask Again, Yes     Mary Beth Keane     (2019)

Francis Gleeson and Brian Stanhope meet in the police academy in New York City in the early 1970s. After they each marry, they end up buying adjoining houses in a leafy suburb, commuting to the city to pursue their cop careers. This could become a pretty idyllic tale, especially when Kate, one of Francis’s three daughters, forms a deep childhood friendship with Peter, Brian’s only child. But mental illness is no respecter of happy endings.

We know from the start that Brian’s wife, Anne, is unconventional and taciturn, and Brian “always seemed to want to defuse things by agreeing with her.” (73) After Anne loses a baby, her mental state becomes dangerously explosive. (A word of warning that Anne’s turn to violence results in a distressing scene, though it’s very brief.) Anne’s actions have long-term consequences for both families: the teenage Kate and Peter are torn apart, and adult careers are shattered.

The novelist gives her story a long arc of many decades and handles it with sensitivity. Anne is not cast as a villain but rather as a suffering soul whose mental illness needs treatment, not contempt. Her actions are hurtful to others, physically and emotionally, but these actions don’t arise out of malice.

Despite the difficult subject matter, the tone of the novel is steady and even, probing family interactions with subtlety, holding the attachment of Kate and Peter as a spark of hope.

What about that title? The phrase “Ask again, yes” is plucked from an exchange, late in the book, between Kate and Peter, and it hints, from the time that you first see the cover, that they may eventually be reunited. Other than that, I didn’t find the title particularly illuminating. Still, my need to learn how life turned out for the members of the Gleeson and Stanhope families kept me moving from chapter to chapter in this immersive, well-wrought novel.

Brexit's Effects on Britons

Middle England     Jonathan Coe     (2018)

The Brexit crisis in the United Kingdom fascinates me. I’ve been following all the convoluted negotiations by reading the Guardian news online, and I’ve learned more about arcane parliamentary practices than I ever thought possible. So when I noticed that a recent novel by Jonathan Coe was billed as a satire on Brexit, I immediately reserved it at my local public library.

Fear not, however, if you have little interest in Britain’s attempts to leave the European Union. Since Coe is an accomplished writer, Middle England is a perfectly fine family drama, set against the background of contemporary British cultural and political events. (The extended Trotter family and their friends have been the subject of two previous novels by Coe, but it isn’t necessary that you read those novels to follow the family dynamics.) The 50-something siblings Benjamin and Lois Trotter are depressive types even in the best of times, and Coe’s exploration of their relationships is compassionate.

Starting in 2010, Coe traces eight years in the lives of Britons of all political stripes, from bigoted, anti-immigration Brexiteers to self-righteous left-wing crusaders. He skewers them all, even as he demonstrates how the Brexit issue has divided people and damaged relationships. Friendships are shattered, and one married couple in the novel actually separate because of their political differences. Yet other characters refuse to allow Brexit to enter their bedrooms. Some scenes in Middle England are played straight, and others are piercingly satirical. The chapters that feature a left-wing newspaper writer interviewing an obfuscating communications staffer from the office of former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron had me laughing out loud.

In current British political writing, “Middle England” is somewhat analogous to “Middle America,” referring to middle-class and lower-middle class citizens who do not live in urban centers—in this case, London. Some find that “Middle England” also refers to a geographic region in the Midlands region of England. For me, the title of Coe’s work has additional resonances:

• JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth (mentioned several times in the novel)

• Political moderation (as distinct from rabid right-wing or left wing stances)

• Middle English from the Middle Ages (evoking the glorious literary heritage of Britain, hence nostalgic nationalism, hence isolationism, hence Brexit)

Jonathan Coe writes in a British tradition of razor sharp observers of the contemporary human condition. If you like his approach, you might also like the work of Penelope Lively or Margaret Drabble or Joanna Trollope. Or use the new Search Box at the top of this page to find all the British novels I’ve reviewed.

Pies and Brews in the Upper Midwest

The Lager Queen of Minnesota     J Ryan Stradal     (2019) Midweek Bonus Post!

Stereotypes are by definition oversimplified and formulaic, and stereotyping of any large population is particularly problematic, since variability among individuals is much more likely than conformity. Still, we all know what’s meant, for example, by “Southern hospitality,” even if not every person who lives in the southern United States is hospitable.

In The Lager Queen of Minnesota, J Ryan Stradal gives us a good portrait of “Minnesota nice,” the stereotype of that state’s residents that includes characteristics such as avoidance of conflict, social reticence, and a surface politeness that can mask passive aggressiveness. Of course, not all Minnesotans fit this profile, but the fictional Edith Magnusson certainly does. In 2003, when the fruit pies that she bakes at a rural nursing home garner statewide attention and paying dinner guests, the 64-year-old Edith shrugs off fame and is afraid to ask for a wage increase. Over the ensuing years, she doesn’t parlay her culinary genius into a job that can pay the bills, even when she has to take over raising her teenage granddaughter, Diana.

Edith’s struggles seem grossly unfair, considering that her estranged sister, Helen, inherited all the proceeds of their family farm years before and used the money to launch a successful brewery. That’s the setup of this novel, which gently pokes fun both at Minnesotans and at the currently trendy craft brewery phenomenon. The supposedly evil Helen’s non-craft  brewery is named  “Blotz,” with echoes of the slang term for drunk, “blotto.” The craft brewery where the young Diana works part-time is named “Heartlander,” with echoes of beloved farmland and amber waves of grain.

In much the same vein as Stradal’s previous novel, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, The Lager Queen of Minnesota features strong women who survive and thrive in business despite the appalling family situations that they have to contend with. In Kitchens, the arena for success is hyper-gourmet pop-up restaurants. In Lager Queen, it’s breweries. In a delightful twist, several of the successful female entrepreneurs portrayed in Lager Queen are well past the age when they’d qualify for Social Security. Pies might have been a more conventional route for Edith to achieve financial salvation, but Lager Queen doesn’t take the predictable plot turns. In the end, Stradal finds a way to combine Edith’s pie-baking and beer-brewing talents.

Yeah, it’s a quirky book, but the quirks are droll and entertaining. If you’re a Midwesterner or a friend of a Midwesterner, check it out. And if you’d like to read reviews of other books set in Minnesota, try the new Search Box at the top of this page!

A Classic Russo Novel

Chances Are . . .     Richard Russo     (2019)

Novelist Richard Russo was born in 1949, so he has first-hand knowledge of the worlds of his characters who were also born in 1949 and who are turning 66 in the year 2015. That’s when Chances Are . . . opens, as three friends—Lincoln, Teddy, and Mickey—get together on Martha’s Vineyard over Labor Day weekend. Haunting them is the unsolved disappearance of Jacy, a young woman they all went to college with. Jacy has not been seen since Memorial Day weekend of 1971, right after the four graduated from the fictional Minerva College in Connecticut.

The 1957 pop hit from Johnny Mathis, “Chances Are,” threads its way through this novel. The song itself is mentioned several times, but the operation of sheer chance also affects each of the characters.

For example, males who were born in 1949 were subject to the first national draft lottery, which occurred on December 1, 1969. This spectacle, which was broadcast live on television, determined which men would be inducted into the military, and its primary purpose was to provide soldiers for the escalating Vietnam War while also responding to complaints that wealthier, more educated young men received preferential treatment in required military service. The lottery was a wrenching event for those whose birthdays were being drawn, supposedly randomly. Men who had a low number among the 366 birthdays would be drafted and very likely sent to a brutal jungle war zone in southeast Asia. Those who had a high number were spared. Those with a number somewhere in between didn’t know what direction their lives would take.

Lincoln, Teddy, and Mickey learn their draft fates in front of a grainy black and white television set on that day in 1969. But other chance encounters and near-misses also shape this story, which moves effortlessly between the late 1960s-early 1970s and May of 2015. Russo is masterful in portraying the interior states of contemporary American men—unsparing in revealing their weaknesses but also unapologetic in showing their strengths. All three men in Chances Are . . . were in love with Jacy, and inevitably their return to the site of her disappearance stirs up memories both painful and sublime.

The final resolution and revelation of the Jacy mystery is a little more pat than I usually expect from Russo, but the character studies in this novel demonstrate complete command. He situates Lincoln, Teddy, and Mickey on a gorgeous island, hangs over them some ugly unknowns, and then shows how these ordinary though distinctive guys react.

Richard Russo is one of my favorite authors; you can read my reviews of some of his other works here.

"Workers of the World, Unite!"

Deep River     Karl Marlantes     (2019)

Although many Americans now work more than 40 hours a week, either because they need to make ends meet or because their job demands it, the 40-hour work week and the eight-hour work day are well accepted as standard in the United States. This was not always the case.

Until the early twentieth century, when labor unions started challenging the draconian demands of employers, workers in factories, mines, logging camps, stores, offices, private homes, and other workplaces were required to put in far more than eight hours a day, six or seven days a week. The fight for a reasonable work week, for fair pay, and for safe working conditions was a bloody one, waged by courageous people who risked their jobs and often their lives by joining a labor union, by attending union rallies, and by striking. These workers were accused of being communists –or at the very least unpatriotic and lazy, unwilling to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Deep River is a fictional treatment of the labor movement in the Pacific Northwest, from 1904 to 1932, with an opening section set in Finland from 1893 to 1904. Labor organizer Aino Koski is an admitted communist, agitating for revolution by rallying loggers, many of them new immigrants, to join the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), familiarly known as the Wobblies. Stick with me here! Deep River is not a dry account of speeches, picketing, and protest marches.

Despite the theme of worker empowerment, you can read this novel solely for the drama of an immigrant family, followed over several decades, as they struggle with learning a new language and carving out an existence in one of the last wildernesses in the continental United States. The Koski siblings—Ilmari, Matti, and Aino—draw on “sisu,” an untranslatable Finnish word for the characteristics of their ethnic heritage. It includes perseverance, fortitude, and stoicism. These Finnish Americans, especially the highly independent women, sure need sisu as they forge their way into the modern era.

You can also read Deep River for the lyrical descriptions of the magnificent old growth forests of Washington and Oregon, harvested by loggers who worked in an exceedingly dangerous environment, felling and then moving trees that were often 15 feet in diameter. “They watched the tree go down, hearing the wood creak, then crack, then sigh, the tree gaining momentum, falling faster and faster, the air rushing through the branches . . . cracking and squealing with the force of hundreds of tons of wood that for several hundred years had fought against gravity and was now hurling toward the ground from where it came.” (286)

There are a few brief scenes of violence, when union members are attacked by police, hired thugs, and deputized citizens who have been convinced that all unions are anti-American. The IWW is in fact one of the most radical of the unions of this period, bringing the spirit of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 to the American workforce. As one fellow organizer tells Aino, “’The government is going to crush the Wobblies. The people hate them.’” (453) Even Aino’s supportive sister-in-law repeatedly speaks warnings: “’Aino, revolutions require visionary leaders. In America, the visionary leaders go into business.’” (463) “If you tell me you love the IWW, I’m telling you that you’re fooling yourself. You can’t love an ideal. You can only love people.” (533)

At 717 pages, this novel requires commitment. I committed to it over Labor Day weekend, when the history of the labor movement was especially poignant, and I wasn’t disappointed. For another novel about the history of logging in North America, try Annie Proulx’s Barkskins. For reviews of other immigrant stories and family sagas, click on the category in the Archive in the right-hand column.