Friday Black: Stories by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Paperback, 194 pgs, Pub Oct 23rd 2018 by Mariner Books, ISBN13: 9781328911247, Lit Awards: Dylan Thomas Prize Nominee for Longlist (2019), Aspen Words Literary Prize Nominee for Longlist (2019)

I forget where I first heard of Adjei-Brenyah, but it was about the time of publication in 2018 and the name of his debut story collection was so similar to Esi Edugyan’s much-lauded Washington Black that I wanted to read both to make sure they were separated in my mind. Now it is difficult to imagine I would ever forget the title story “Friday Black,” about a young man in a retail store setting dealing with the sales and buying mania of Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and the official opening of the Christmas season. There is indeed something black in the American psyche, that would celebrate a day of such whipped-up and fruitless passion for more than we need or can effectively use.

I did not read the first story in the collection, “The Finkelstein 5,” until long into my perusal of the collection. Just as well, because it stares full-face into the racism we still see and hear all around us today. The characters who are black attempt to fit into white society, dialling up or down their overt display of “blackness” on a ten-point scale they believe the white overculture has created for them.

Adjei-Brenyah draws from the incidental murders of young girls attending Sunday school, of a young man shot as he walked down the night-darkened street of his neighborhood, of a young man so angry at the deaths of the others that he considers, for a moment, fighting back. There is a barely-disguised cameo of the talking heads on right-wing TV talk shows, with Adjei-Brenyah carefully picking out for us the most offensive and patently absurd of their comments regarding white fear of unarmed teens and children of color.

My favorite of the stories in the collection has to be “Zimmer Land.” In this significant piece, which I can imagine being chosen for Best-Of collections until Adjei-Brenyah is old and gray, a young man works at a kind of play-station where members of the community are given the opportunity to see how they would react when their fear or anger instincts are aroused.

Patrons are issued a weapon when they enter the play space set, a paint gun whose force can rupture fake blood sensors in the mecha-suit of the player. Mecha-suits sound like transformer kits, inflating to protect the torso, legs, and arms of players, and to intimidate patrons. Patrons are not told to use the weapons they are issued, but the mere convenience of the weapons is an opportunity, and the rush of shooting is like a fast-acting drug.

Isaiah is black and he is the player white patrons come to test their emotions against in a “highly curated environment.” When Isaiah complains to management that most of the patrons are repeats, coming frequently to fake-kill him and not learning anything new about the sources of their aggression, perhaps even “equating killing with justice,” his bosses tell him his heart better be in the job ‘cause there are others who’ll do the work with real aggression and commitment.

At least four of Adjei-Brenyah’s signature pieces in this collection describe the soul-destroying unreality of America’s retail space, where salespeople are rewarded for up-selling and given praise, if not bonuses, for selling the most [unnecessary] stuff to the most [psychically- or financially-vulnerable] people. We are reminded that there are several ways to make money while hoping to make a living writing, and in Adjei-Brenyah’s case it is retail sales rather than, say, restaurant work or construction. He gives us a look at what we never thought to ask as we made our way through the racks of shirts or stacks of jeans.

Highly praised by other acclaimed writers in front-page and back-cover blurbs, this collection heralds the arrival of someone we will continue to look out for. The ideas behind the work is what is impressive, besides just the writing skill. Adjei-Brenyah knows one doesn’t have to be sky-diving to make the work interesting. It’s about what you’re thinking about while sky-diving.

Late Night comedian Seth Meyers interviews Adjei-Brenyah about this collection:

Book Riot interviewed Adjei-Brenyah and one set of paragraphs stood out:

EM: Reading this collection, I could really feel a lot of non-literary influences in your writing. Like maybe a little bit of cinema and television crept in there as well.
NKAB: Yeah.
EM: Could you talk more specifically about what some of those influences were?
NKAB: Yeah, I grew up reading a lot of serial sci-fi and fantasy. I read Animorphs as a kid. I’m from the Harry Potter generation. But outside of books and stuff, I love anime, from Dragonball-Z to more cerebral stuff like Death Note or this anime called Monster. Miyazaki stuff as well. And what’s cool about that is I was made to view those things as valid for a lot of high-level thought. It’s funny because when you see parodies of anime, there will be people in the middle of fights having really philosophical debates. Anime is really big on that, and that was important to me. When there’s violence, it’s very much couched in “this is why,” and that rubbed off on me, I think.”

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Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas by Jane Mayer & Jill Abramson

Hardcover, 406 pgs, Pub Sept 18th 1997 by Houghton Mifflin (first pub Nov 3rd 1994), ISBN13: 9780395633182, Lit Awards: National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee for General Nonfiction (1994), National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction (1994)

This detailed account of the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991 was written by two experienced reporters, Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, then working for the Wall Street Journal. Their research suggests there is every indication that Clarence Thomas lied when asked if he made lewd remarks to Anita Hill, and there are plenty of people who can attest his general demeanor is in line with Anita Hill’s testimony. I read this book now because of a recent article by Jill Abramson in New York magazine making the case for a Thomas impeachment.

The authors begin with the news that George H.W. Bush promised his political supporters a conservative would be the next nominee to the Supreme Court after David Souter. It almost sounds quaint now, just twenty-five years later, that politicians at the time wished to preserve deniability when it came to appointing ideologues to traditionally sacrosanct areas of government that required evenhandedness. That is certainly over now, when Mitch McConnell last year withheld interviews for Obama’s SCOTUS nominee so that the GOP could wait for a conservative takeover of the executive and judicial branches.

The political behind-the-scenes machinations to appoint a forty-three year-old conservative neophyte to the Supreme Court in 1991 was interesting for what we know now that we did not know then about white people and racism. There was a legal requirement for government agencies and offices to diversify, and Bush had every intention of trying to find a minority or a woman for a place on the bench to replace retiring Thurgood Marshall, but finding a conservative black lawyer was, to say the least, difficult. White people were not considered for the post. But Clarence Thomas calculated and concluded that conservative Republicans were going to give him more opportunities than liberal Democrats. There was so much more competition among the Democrats.

This is all documented, by the way, by speaking with Thomas’ classmates when he was trying to figure out his future. Thomas himself would often go into the story of his upbringing, “dirt poor and neglected,” and although he had help at various stages in his life which allowed him access to the upper echelons of the white world, he forever discounted that help and claimed a kind of self-reliance that does not appear to be objectively true. The first portion of the book deals with Thomas growing up and the next section deals with Anita Hill working with Thomas before the hearings.

Then comes the machinations behind the scenes to get a minority in place for a confirmation. The judiciary committee and the White House didn’t care who it was as long as he/she was a person of color. And this is the sharpest cut of all: Thomas didn’t want to work for government, but had a hard time finding work in the private sector after law school. He definitely did not want to work for any office commonly associated with black people or headed by blacks. He did not want to be an affirmative action selection. He wanted a job unassociated with race.

Every job Thomas got in Washington after law school was racially oriented, i.e., took a job with Missouri’s Republican attorney general Jack Danforth who went to Yale to recruit a minority lawyer, took a top civil rights post at the Education Department, and then moved to Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) with it’s responsibility for policing racial and other forms of discrimination in the workplace. Thomas was only considered for SCOTUS because he was African American.

The truth is that being the affirmative action hire is nothing to be embarrassed about: all candidates are eligible with good qualifications. The hire of a minority is redressing an imbalance and diversifying for the strength and welfare of the organization. It is requiring attention to racial diversity.

All of this says more about corporate America and top government than about Clarence Thomas; it should be noted that we were (are still?!) at such a rudimentary place when discussing race that many white lawmakers were unwilling to confront Thomas when he called challenges to his nomination a “high-tech lynching.” Even today there would be legislators unwilling to speak up about the inappropriate behaviors of a person of color, unwilling or unable to escape an unstated white guilt to speak credibly on racial justice issues.

Clarence Thomas may have been damaged as a result of his upbringing. He identified deeply with the Richard Wright novels, Native Son and Black Boy. Mayer and Abramson quote Thomas: "these novels of trapped and violent racial rage 'capture[d] a lot of the feelings that I had inside that you learn to repress.'" When speaking of Native Son, bell hooks in Salvation: Black People and Love tells us that

"Wright offered to the world in his protest novel Native Son an image of blackness that made it synonymous with dehumanization, with the absence of feeling. His character Bigger Thomas embodied a lovelessness so relentless it struck a chord of terror in the minds of black activists who had been struggling to counter similar images of blackness emerging from the white imagination.

In his autobiography, Black Boy, Wright dared to tell the world that he believed dehumanization had happened to many black folks, that ongoing racial genocide had left us damaged, forever wounded in the space where we would know love."

Anita Hill wrote her own book about the hearings from her point of view, called Speaking Truth To Power. This book is a good companion, for while Hill gives her motivations and how things looked to her, Mayer and Abramson cover the whole process from many perspectives in detail.

I have no idea if it would be possible now to bring a notice of intent to impeach Thomas but I would support it. I feel sure there was cause in 1991 to throw out his nomination but the need to ram it through was too great. Clarence Thomas may be damaged, and for that we can forgive him (and take some responsibility), but we do not need to further subject ourselves to him. It was wrong to put him on the bench, knowingly.

If we cannot get justice done with Clarence Thomas before he leaves the bench of his own accord, we can always take comfort in the fact that history will not be kind to him. He will continue to be reviled and his story told long past his time on earth.



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Destined for War: Can America & China Escape Thucydides' Trap by Graham Allison

Hardcover, 384 pgs, Pub May 30th 2017 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ISBN13: 9780544935273

Present foreign policy in the United States is examined in the context of one of the earliest consequential wars ever written about

“While others identified an array of contributing causes of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides went to the heart of the matter. When he turned the spotlight on ‘the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta,’ he identified a primary driver at the root of some of history’s most catastrophic and puzzling wars.”

Fear. Allison has the advantage of recent discoveries in behavioral science which show that “at the basic psychological level…people’s fears of loss (or intimations of ‘decline’) trump our hopes of gain—driving us to take unreasonable risks to protect what is ours.” Applied to the present day, America shouldn’t allow fear of China’s stupendous rise to make policy makers forget what is their strategic interest: preserving the free nature of their democracy and fundamental institutions and keeping its people strong and resilient rather than preserving a heretofore unchallenged primacy over the western Pacific. Allison asks why we think we need to preserve that primacy at any cost.

China has finally turned its face to the world and intends to engage. History shows us they have a core belief in the superiority of the Middle Kingdom, so we can expect a fierce nationalism. Allison suggests we need to dial back actions and policies that strengthen an unreasonable hard-line nationalism in China that brooks no opposition. We should be expecting to live with this new rising power and chill with rhetoric that clouds an understanding of what our goals actually are in a changing world.

JFK faced a threat that could have led to war and he persistently dialed down the rhetoric, ignoring advisors, saying the enduring lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis

“Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avoid confrontations that force an adversary to choose between a humiliating retreat and nuclear war.”

An example of the US not heeding this lesson came nearly twenty years prior to JFK’s lonely decision-making. Less than a week before the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, Tokyo had been complaining that they could not operate under the economic sanctions imposed on them by the U.S. and that they would prefer to fight, but the US ignored the ambassador’s message…

Allison teaches a class at Harvard which discusses instances of Thucydides’ trap—that is, when a rising power confronts a current power the result is war—playing out through history, so he’s had plenty of opportunity to hone his argument. It shows in the smoothness of the argument and clarity of the history he tells to bolster his thesis. We get examples of an established power feeling threatened by a rising power and the conditions under which this resulted in war and when it did not. Two recent examples would include England and Germany before WWI (1860-1913), and also the United States and the Soviet Union after WWII. One might argue relations between the two did precipitate an outbreak of hostilities: the Cold War. However, Allison argues the "cold" nature of the relationship during this period is an example that war is not inevitable.

America since the second world war took on alliances with Europeans mainly, but also Japan and Taiwan, which entailed an American guarantee of lethal force in the case of an invasion or attack. This guarantee of protection came with spoken and unspoken obligations that extended and enhanced America’s influence abroad. In a town hall meeting in 2016, Hillary Clinton explained that countries around the world were often eager and asking for US protection. Allison tells us that, in Thucydides’ time, the Greeks also had an empire

“That empire was acquired not by violence,” they later claimed to the Spartans, but instead “because the allies attached themselves to us and spontaneously asked us to assume the command.”

President Trump has made clear that the US will no longer, while he is president, take a leading role as protector without a kind of tributary role being played by smaller states. China is pleased to take on the role of protector that the U.S. appears no longer to want. In the end, the present American administration may simply move aside to accommodate China without a clear foreign policy strategy.

This book was surprisingly readable and a very good one for clarifying the failures of strategic foreign policy by recent administrations. Allison was able to cut away much obfuscating bluster by spokespeople to have us look at Xi Jinping and Donald Trump with history’s eyeglasses: we see them as leading actors who each personify his country’s “deep aspiration for national greatness.” In his last chapter Allison anticipated Trump’s speech in China this past month, suggesting that each country should pay attention to their own strategic interests. Allison’s words are

“China and the US would be better served not by passive-aggressive ‘should diplomacy’ (calling on the other to exhibit better behavior) or by noble-sounding rhetoric about geopolitical norms, but by unapologetically pursuing their national interests. In high-stakes relationships, predictability and stability—not friendship—matter most. The US should stop playing ‘let’s pretend.’”

However, American president Donald Trump is anything but predictable and stable. And, Allison reminds us, when states repeatedly fail to act in what appears to be their true national interest, it is often because their policies reflect necessary compromises among parties within their government rather than a single coherent vision. This is true right now in the U.S.; the thing that brings us down may be ourselves rather than China.

Thucydides himself believed fear was at the primary driver at the root of the Peloponnesian War, when a rising Athens threatened Sparta. Donald Trump went out of his way, during the 2016 presidential campaign at least, to hype a type of fear in America about China’s rising militancy and wealth. He almost seemed to open his arms to conflict. The destructiveness of such a contest between the East and the West would be so catastrophic as to be almost unimaginable. Of course Thucydides’ trap is not inevitable, but we must find leaders with great understanding.



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Judas by Amos Oz, translated by Nicholas de Lange

Hardcover, 320 pages Pub Nov 8th 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (first published August 2014) ISBN13: 9780544464049 Literary Awards – Haus der Kulturen der Welt for Mirjam Pressler (2015), Man Booker Int'l Prize Nominee for Shortlist (2017)

This is the third outstanding work I’ve read by an Israeli in as many weeks, and I find myself falling under a spell of admiration again for a culture that fights back against the worst aspects of itself, interrogates itself relentlessly, and creates humor around the morose recognition of man’s fallibility. Into a novel describing three generations living together in a small Jerusalem house, Amos Oz weaves history, religion, and politics into a meditation on the why and how of Jewishness and the concept of a Jewish state.

Not for a moment do we believe the characters have a life beyond that of describing a conflict. The generous nature of Oz’s characters make us willing to suspend judgment and place our trust in his hands awhile, to hear what he has to say. In our modern world one is rarely willing or able to hear an opposite view, but this seems a safe place to examine ideas. In a review in the New York Times, Oz speaks of this novel as a piece of chamber music. A grouping of voices influence one another, each different than the other, three generations of Jews in Israel.

The time is late 1950s or early 1960s. A student Shmuel has found his thesis, “Jewish Views of Jesus,” not as unique as he’d imagined and less interesting than something he'd bumped up against in research: “Christian Views of Judas.” Shmuel discovers that without the traitor Judas Iscariot, there would be no Christianity. Jesus and his apostles were all Jews. Without the crucifixion, there may not have been a rift in beliefs.

Needing to ponder this theory further, Shmuel has left his thesis unfinished and has taken a job as evening companion to learned old Gershom Wald in exchange for room and board. The old man spends his days arguing vociferously on the telephone with friends and enemies, and is a strong supporter of David ben-Gurion’s Zionism. Wald’s daughter-in-law Aitalia holds an opposite and more radical view that reflects her own father, Shealtiel Abravanel’s opinion that the concept of nation states and ownership of land and resources is a faulty one.

"Aitalia’s father was one of those people who believe that every conflict is merely a misunderstanding: a spot of family counseling, and handful of group therapy, a drop or two of goodwill, and at once we shall all be brothers in heart and soul and the conflict will disappear. He was one of those people convinced that all that is required to resolve a conflict is for both parties to get to know each other, and immediately they will start to like each other…"

The novel is a multi-layered examination of the idea of ‘traitor,’ and whether or not it is, in fact, an enlightened state “which really ought to be seen as a badge of honor:”

"Anyone willing to change," Shmuel said, "will always be considered a traitor by those who cannot change and are scared to death of change and don't understand it and loathe change…"
……Shmuel added in a hushed voice, as though afraid that strangers might hear: "After all, the kiss of Judas, the most famous kiss in history was surely not a traitor’s kiss…"

But old man Wald reminds us that it is the name Judas which has become a synonym for betrayal, and perhaps also a synonym for Jew.

"Millions of simple Christians think that every single Jew is infected with the virus of treachery…So long as each Christian baby learns with its mother’s milk that God-killers still tread the earth, or the offspring of God-killers, we [Jews] shall know no rest."

In a review for Riad Sattouf’s graphic memoir Arab of the Future, I’d expressed some concern that Arab schoolchildren in the Middle East were learning religious hatreds early, never considering that North American Christians were of course learning religious hatreds at the same age.

Oz makes no secret of his own opinions in interviews, but in this work he makes us puzzle it all out. He gives us the old conundrums in new ways, making us want to take them up again for examination. We question everything from the ground up. This work reminds me why I love literature: Oz is able to layer complex motivations onto history and take a stab at trying to explain what man is and what we should expect of him.

The translation of this work into English by Nicholas de Lange from the Hebrew is especially easy to enjoy. The Blackstone audio production is excellent, the work narrated on ten discs (11 hours) by Jonathan Davis. The hardcover published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is useful to return to some ideas. Though the novel is not difficult to read, the ideas challenge readers and may require a second or third look to tie the threads together. This is great stuff. Oz is seventy-seven years old. He should be proud of himself, and we should be grateful.



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So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood by Patick Modiano

This novella is Modiano’s first publication since he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014. Translated into twenty-five languages, it allows readers to become familiar with the haunting style that I predict is Modiano’s signature. In 2016 I plan to read the novel Villa Trieste, and the screenplay Modiano collaborated on with the filmmaker Louis Malle, called Lacombe Lucien.

This is a novel of remembrance, forgetting, and foreboding, aligning the present with the past and the future. Modiano illuminates how the shadows of memory keep us from knowing who we are.

I cannot provide the reality of events,
I can only convey their shadow.
--STENDHAL, Modiano’s epigraph

Monsieur Jean Daragane was dozing in his study on a hot summer day in Paris when the insistent ring of his telephone shatters his isolation.

"Almost nothing. Like an insect bite that initially strikes you as very slight. At least that is what you tell yourself in a low voice so as to reassure yourself."

The caller is unknown to him, but has a “dreary and threatening voice.” Monsieur Daragne has lost his address book, and the caller has his name, address, and phone number. He wants to come over and question Mr. Daragne about a name he discovered in the book—a name possibly associated with a murder.

It was all so long ago. Monsieur Daragne is old now, and he no longer cares about the address book, nor the lives represented within it. The numbers he remembers by heart will ring in places where no one will answer any more. The person the caller asks Daragne about he claims not to remember, though the caller points out that Daragne’s first novel references a man by that name. The caller’s insistence starts a landslide of memories, once long hidden, uncovering a past Daragne had buried.

This is a book short enough to be read in an evening, and when I was browsing in a bookstore on a day before Christmas, I was so struck by the menace in the opening lines that I knew this would be my introduction to the work of Modiano. Cheers!



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The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

This book so weighed on me that I couldn’t finish it the first time, so began again recently, to refresh his points in my mind. One might think I was depressed to hear his hypothesis, that there can be no God, but frankly, it was not that. I have tended to think in his direction for many years now. More, it was his description of the profound hatred those who profess religion exhibit towards others outside their sect. It is stomach-churning to hear the vitriol harbored by folks who believe themselves “chosen,” no matter which religion it is that believes itself the one, true religion. It is enough to make one despair of humans.

Humans should challenge their beliefs frequently to make sure they are not just spouting rote learning. We have brains capable of thought, so we should at least try to work it out. Why say, "these are things I cannot understand?" In that case, we would have more humility and doubt about our beliefs than the certainty too many exhibit. When one does the “homework,” one will turn in one’s mind many of Dawkins’ arguments, and his work will feel familiar, simple, and clear at first. The thing Dawkins does for which I am grateful is that he takes all baby steps that a questing individual must take, buttressing his points with work from those who have walked this questing path before as well as giving us sometimes amusing, sometimes heartbreaking examples of those who have not challenged received wisdom and who adhere violently to things they admit they do not understand but merely believe.

Years ago I read the Bible. A couple of things hit me: the source of much that is memorable in our literature is referenced from the Bible; The Old Testament documents revoltingly violent and cruel behaviors; both testaments are filled with superstitions and magic (call them miracles if you prefer) and stress the importance of faith over the evidence of our own experience. That’s why Dawkins’ examples roll off the backs of Christians. They were taught to distrust evidence and believe. The kindness and magnanimity taught in the New Testament did not take as well, clearly. Why? That is much harder to pull off than “not thinking.” Yes, I think many self-professed Christians are lazy. They are “saved” by virtue of “accepting God.” Why bother with goodness? But all they need to do is “confess” and they are forgiven. Again, why bother with goodness? You can say that is not what God intended, but what does that matter? it is how he is practiced.

How can we evolve (read: improve, for those who rankle at the thought of evolution) if we do not challenge accepted wisdom? Many of us learned religion as children, when we were accepting the teachings given us by adults, presumably wiser. By the time we reach our teens most of us have discovered wide disparities between the reality we experience and what we were told by adults. We begin to question. It is only much later that we can piece together our own beliefs. This should include religion since it is one of the more mysterious and irrational of our belief systems. It is always wise to check now and again what we believe when it comes to religion, especially now, in a time when the religious beliefs of others are once again threatening all we hold dear.

For a long time I thought the teaching of morality might be an important role of religion. My own experience has taught me, however, that self-professed Christians are among the least tolerant and accepting of those outside their religion (outside of ISIS now) of all religious folk. ("There is no hostility that exceeds Christian hostility."—Montaigne)
Surely this hostility is amoral. While I myself learned the beginnings of moral thought in a Catholic environment, I also learned many other questionable behaviors from the nuns, amongst them that creativity is not prized. Dawkins points out that morality and goodness can be taught outside of the constraints of religion. But somehow this seemed the least strong of his arguments: that “do not treat others as you would not like them to treat you” is good evolutionary behavior that will succeed where other behaviors will not. It seems amply clear to me that religious folk have a tendency to kill those who do not believe their brand of God, surely ending evolutionary advancement along those routes.

It matters, I suppose, whether or not there is a God, though I still haven’t figured out why. Truthfully, the first time I read Dawkins I put aside his book aside thinking, who cares whether or not there is a God? What difference does it make? God does not act in the world, or if He does, He is not orchestrating. That seems clear to me. So, if He exists, so what? We still have to get on with doing the best we can with what we have. Be moderate in all things but strive for goodness, kindness, generosity, creativity. It makes you live longer and feel better, and just in case, it may also be good evolutionary behavior.

I listened to the AudioFile audio production of this title, for which AudioFile won its coveted Earphones Award when it came out in 2007. What makes this such a rewarding listening experience is that the two readers, Dawkins himself and his wife, the actress Lalla Ward, take turns with the reading. The two voices break the text into digestible bits and refresh our listening every couple sentences so that we concentrate on what is being said. This is difficult material which might evoke strong reactions or may tend to make the mind wander off in different directions. The two voices help to keep our mind on what is being said. That must demonstrate a bit of evolutionary learning right there.


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Capital Punishment: Charles Boxer #1 by Robert Wilson

This is an interesting novel, if not always for the reasons Wilson hoped. It had me thinking back to my experience reading the new Richard Price novel, The Whites. Price admitted that he wrote that novel under the pen name Harry Brandt because, strapped for cash, he needed to write a pot-boiler that would sell fast and well. He wanted to keep his legacy as a literary writer under the name Price intact, but was finding it costing him audience.

Fortunately or not, Price’s Harry Brandt novel is a deeply plotted, psychologically dense, character-driven novel not unlike earlier Price novels. He missed his mark. The Whites is emphatically not a pot-boiler. Wilson may be feeling some of the same pressures. He seems to be trying something completely different in this first novel of a new series. He calls this work a “thriller” as opposed to characterizations of his earlier work as “crime” or “mystery.” I note that thrillers have evolved with the times: plots must be as sophisticated as the world is now, and readers must be willing to put up with what was previously thought to be unreasonable complexity. Life is complicated.

Charlie Boxer is a private security consultant based in London. He is hired to deal with the kidnapping of the adult daughter of an Indian billionaire business magnate in London just before the Olympic Games. Once word gets out, every far-flung contact of the billionaire is suspected and suspicious: they find themselves looking for their own advantage while looking at allies and enemies within and without their own organizations for perpetrators. The only thing we know for sure is that Charlie Boxer seems out of his depth with both the billionaire and the billionaire’s ex-wife.

This thriller actually has very little action and a whole lot of revenge plotting going on. The complexity becomes amusing. Wilson knew very well what he was doing by layering one set of potential kidnappers on the others, along with their attendant informants, security personnel, and hangers-on. The violence is fierce and gratuitous. As the body count mounts, readers might find themselves placing bets on which set of thugs will kill the others and would the overseas set arrive in time to participate in the melee? The whole circus became a murderous joke, all centered about a smart, beautiful 25-year old woman who made mincemeat of the men she encountered. It’s a riot, in all senses of the word.

That having been said, there were times when I wondered if I were the only one in on the joke. The first false note—Boxer falling into bed with his client, the wife of the kidnapped girl--had me curious what Wilson was thinking. As the number of investigators and their targets multiplied, I began to think of the whole construction as tongue-in-cheek. Wilson didn’t try to obscure the seams. It was a nightmare of connections and hitmen. I began to enjoy the ride to see how it would all unravel.

One character I wanted to survive the damage was Dan, alias for a nurse with an addiction that sent him to jail for a couple years, wrecking his legitimate career but placing him on the payroll of a thug lord. His restraint, sincerity, gullibility, skills, and skepticism made a complex character. A very good series could be made out of his adventures in the underworld. I note we did not get a sufficient description of his death.

In what becomes a large piece of the action, an Afghan terror group sidesteps the Indian Mafia (both Hindi and Muslim factions), the Pakistani Military Intelligence, and London’s drug lords and lowlifes to mix it up with MI5, MI6, the anti-terror units of the military, and the police. When Wilson tells us in his Acknowledgements that writing is the most "exquisite torture" but that sometimes one hits a gusher, our smile of recognition hides a wince. Yes, we agree, but perhaps we don’t need the whole nightmare.

Another thread, if one were needed, is the backstory of Charlie Boxer. He still works with his ex-wife and his daughter is an opinionated teenaged terror at seventeen. Apparently it is this thread that continues in the second novel in this series, You Will Never Find Me, due out next month.

Robert Wilson is an author I have followed from Africa to Seville to London. I have enormous respect for his talents. Wilson places the following in the mouth of one of his characters in this novel:

"The sad thing about goodness is that is it’s bland. Evil has the power to provoke extraordinary emotions. And we’re drawn to the excitement of the extreme, rather than the dullness of the everyday."

Wilson writes thrillers now. His earlier mysteries were more literary, but time marches on. He must feel the pull, like Richard Price, of financial considerations, eyeballs on the page, a larger audience. Unless Wilson meant to be humorous, I think he missed the mark on this thriller. It was complex--perhaps too much so. It was difficult to suspend disbelief.

Wilson has the talent and experience now to write whatever he decides he wants to write. If he has fun and satisfaction and lack of angst from writing novels like this, I totally understand. I don’t want to put the kibosh on a successful literary franchise. But Wilson is one who could go deep, if he wanted, on a literary thriller. I’ll probably check in regardless.


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Powers of Two by Joshua Wolf Shenk

Joshua Wolf Shenk, celebrated author of Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness, has a new book due out August 5 which focuses on the power of creative pairs. Using a number of compelling examples, Shenk posits that exceptional creativity is not the outcome of an individual mind, but requires the interaction of two minds. He will argue that three people change the creative dynamic. The concept of the “lone genius,” Shenk says, is overstated if not flat wrong.

Describing a phenomenon many of us have experienced firsthand, either personally or by observing others, Shenk posits that two well-suited creatives together experience a surge in their output that is greater than either individual could achieve on their own. He interviewed pairs who are not household names, but used mostly the examples of well-known creative pairs that each of us will recognize to illustrate the power of creative pairing. For this he mostly used the vast record that has grown up around such pairs as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, James Watson and Francis Crick. In each case, Shenk posits that each pair could be shown to have followed a set of stages that allowed and fostered groundbreaking creative output: 1) Meeting, 2) Confluence, 3) Dialectics, 4) Distance, 5) The Infinite Game, and 6) Interruption.

The book uses the outline to structure his narrative, and though he occasionally uses the results of psychological/sociological studies to buttress his argument, this is not a formal proof. It is the presentation of an idea. Shenk also suggests that pairs take the form of The Star and the Director, The Liquid and the Container, The Dreamer and the Doer, or Generator and Resonator, or all of these at different times. Shenk sidesteps the debate between “Collaboration is good” and “Creators need time alone” by recognizing people vary in their needs and no one can prescribe the proper conditions for collaboration from afar. “…Complex interdependence—one with real room for idiosyncratic individuality and enmeshed identities—is characteristic of the best collaborations…The conditions required for human beings to thrive in one another’s company are…a function of balance.”

There is often an obvious power disparity between partners in creative pairs. Shenk points out that “the chief advantage of power clarity is absence of strife.” When both sides of the pair recognize which of the two is stronger, there need be little argument about it. But, Shenk follows, “To be a strong pair, both members must be able to lead and follow.” This also seems like something we probably have witnessed in our own experience. Strong husband-and-wife pairs, for instance, inevitably switch dominance roles often in their interactions, yet each feels confident of their role at any particular time. “The necessary flexibility in power can manifest in a variety of ways…The ultimate irony of extreme alphas is that they often have someone who dominates them.”

Shenk brings his thesis full circle, describing events that may precipitate a “system failure” or an interruption of the creative outpouring. Ironically, this may include success. “As the world around the pair changes, the experiences of the two within it are naturally affected too…Success can bring to the surface quarrels about credit that would otherwise remain underground” or irrelevant. “The most common wedge comes in the form of a third person who gets between a pair.”

Shenk’s theory is not as obvious as it appears at first blush. After all, he is saying creative genius does not stem from the individual alone. He allows us to consider this radical idea in the context of his many examples of successful creative pairs, either cooperating or in competition (Larry Bird and Magic Johnson), and gives us space to consider that this model may be the prevalent one for creative output, while the “lone genius” model (Einstein) is the exception that proves the rule.

For those of us who relish contemplating the creative process and that magic moment when the lightbulb comes on, Shenk’s discussion of the creative interaction between Lennon and McCartney or between Picasso and Matisse is revealing and utterly fascinating.

“For fifty years, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso pushed each other, goaded each other, drew from each other, and tried to best each other. It may not be too much to say that, over the course of their careers, they made each other—and shaped the standards for modern art in the twentieth century.”

I immediately applied Shenk’s thesis to my [admittedly limited] knowledge of Harper Lee and Truman Capote working together on the groundbreaking non-fiction fiction In Cold Blood. It could be possible that the two friends created a competitive environment that pushed each to exceed their already considerable talent to contribute material that resulted in that unforgettable book. The competition between the two may have also spurred them each individually to excel. Marja Mills, in her recent The Mockingbird Next Door (July 2014) talks a little about the relationship between the two authors.

Shenk uses his own experience with his editor as an example of the creative power of pairs, insisting that he is more clever and capable and productive when he is working directly with his editor, Eamon Dolan, whom he credits as co-creator of this book. It is a far more personal and reflective statement of theory rather than proof. Whether or not we believe this thesis to be true is hardly the point. We ourselves probably have examples of creative pairs we could consider within his outline. But whether it is true to the exclusion of the concept of “lone genius” is another matter.

My mother once told me that “Nobody is successful on their own.” This always rang true to me, since “success” can only be realized in society. Joshua Wolf Shenk’s theory focuses on the creative spur to success and his thesis states that groundbreaking creativity also requires society. He says we can do something about our creativity by facilitating the conditions for its flourishing by finding someone with whom we resonate. It makes sense. More importantly for readers, perhaps, is that it is interesting.

I am happy to offer a giveaway of this hardcover to an interested reader until August 5, when the book is published. (U.S. respondents only, please.) If you are interested in this title, you may fill out the form below. I will use a random number generator to choose a respondent. That reader will have two days to respond to my email with an address to which the publisher will send a hardcover copy of the book. Good luck and good reading!

A winner has been chosen. Thanks for your participation!

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Mystery Girl by David Gordon

Gordon has written two novels that I know about. In each the main character is a failed or failing novelist with characteristics that range from gullible to gleefully, monstrously domineering. What am I supposed to think? About halfway through this second novel, [stomping about in rubber boots] deep in descriptions of satanic porn films, I get the distinct impression I am in some kind of weird therapy session—but not for me.

”In A Difficulty in The Path of Psycho-Analysis (1917). Freud introduces the concept of the Third Wound to describe the repeated assaults that scientific knowledge had inflicted on human conceit: first, Copernicus discovered that the sun does not revolve around the earth and that man is not in fact the true center of the universe. The second blow was delivered by Darwin: man is not set apart from the animals, not formed by a creator in His image, but is in fact a creature among others, a variation on a theme, and no longer the center of life on earth either. The final, vanquishing blow, was of course Freud’s own: his discovery of the unconscious—that immense internal sea, full of fears and wishes, memories and fantasies, whose depths remain largely unsounded—revealed the truth, that our inner world is as alien as the universe without.”

Amen to that.

Gordon could probably write anything he wanted but he decided to write a mystery novel centered on a beautiful, sexy, and mysterious mixed-race woman who, after copulating with our narrator, disappears. I am not kidding. I am not going to tell you what to think about that, but he does spend much of the book alternately dreaming about her and looking for her. Along the way we get deep in [his subconscious] Black Arts films and murders and arson.

And oh, by the way, his wife is also beautiful, sexy, mysterious, and mixed race, and she has disappeared also. And no wonder. Our failed novelist, whose taste in literature has devolved to the “funny, violent, dirty, and fast…[of] crime novels, newspaper, fashion magazines, comics and porn” serves only as breeding material but not as provider or protector. It seems he doesn’t have the goods to hold onto a wench of her proportions.

“Why can’t you write normal stories, that people want to read?” queries one of the several mixed-race babes that our unpublished novelist fantasizes about: “Why not write regular realistic stories?” Ah, but life is not realistic, our novelist argues. “Does your life have a plot?” Does time shift and “does the past erupt into the present?” Good point.

But the argument continues, this time from another character: “Let’s face it. No one was ever going to read [your novels.] People need hope and comfort. Real stories that give them a sense of meaning. Boring books like yours just upset and confuse people…” The novelist concedes this character critic has a point, but concludes that one has “to do something to fill one’s time on this planet,” and since he would not do well doing anything else, some “suicidal car salesman or lonely oncologist…would come across something I wrote in a dusty, bankrupt used bookshop, and recognize the message I left just for them…”

Well, maybe not just for me, but I get the gist. And I like it. I like him. I like this writing. He’s crazy, and funny, and has some very strange tastes in movies, but sitting in on a therapy session with him, just me and the page, is a little like watching a peep show of the human heart…its weird desires and fears. We have here a man, a novelist, at his most vulnerable. He is published but not yet “successful” in the commercial sense. And he insists on telling us how it feels. It sounds pretty realistic to me.

Keep your eyes on David Gordon. He is sui generis.


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The Heart of the Plate by Mollie Katzen

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt deserves much credit for making this book as beautiful as it is. They have really made it the standard to reach. Katzen has done her cool line drawings--now in color!--on the endpages so with her tasty, (can I say thoughtful?), modern recipes her unique talents are again on display.

Now that I have had a chance to work with it a bit, I decided Katzen has chosen some real winners here. Her soups and salads are lovely to look at and probably worth the price of the book alone. She guides the beginner through the steps so that success can be yours right from the start.

I will say that she picked already favorites of mine, e.g., I cook greens almost every night and I often use the onion, garlic, red pepper combination that she recommends. I don't know if it is really appropriate to complain that some of the dishes are so simple as to make the cookbook shortly irrelevant. Most people are actively looking for simple and memorable and so great we can eat it again and again without dragging the cookbook out each time. She gets that and delivers.

But Mashed Parsnips? She has a whole section about mashing things up...cauliflower, broccoli, peas. At first I thought: if it is fresh, it seems a sin to mash it up. It was such a mystery, I tried it...three vegetables: carrots, parnips and peas. Let me tell you something: it was terrific! I especially liked it left over, room temperature, as a dip for crackers. It is infinitely more interesting, pretty, and exciting than any of the usual dips featuring cheese or (god forbid!) sour cream. And for lunch or as a snack as you are preparing a real dinner, this may just the thing to make you a happy person.

She has an interesting sauces and dressings section which is useful for folks on the go. You can dip crudités or drizzle over roasted veggies...(what is better tasting and easier to cook than roasted veggies?) I like her use of pomegranate molasses. What else I like: sometimes folks have difficulty figuring out what vegans eat. She very naturally makes meals of vegetables and grains that do not include cheese or dairy and reminds us that, by the way, this is vegan. It is a very unobtrusive way to introduce vegan entrees to the mainstream and show everyone how really very simple it can be to cook for vegans.

I also like the "light" quality of the recipes. There were one or two recipes that gave me pause: Bulgur with Spaghetti, and Banana Cheese Empanadas. I think she is just daring us to try them. She also has one that sounds kind of intriguing: Toasted Barley Dumplings. As a side, it can take care of the carb portion of a vegetable meal.

Truth is, The Moosewood Cookbook: Recipes from Moosewood Restaurant, Ithaca, New York was something like the second cookbook I ever owned. Katzen therefore had an outsized influence on my eating habits. I still admire what she can do. What she has produced here is exciting because it gives new clues to intriguing combinations of things I like already.

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Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer

Lehrer comes at this topic with a goal: to see what we can and should be doing to improve the innovation successes in the United States. He tries to explain moments of inspiration and examples of ongoing innovation and uses anecdotes to illustrate. He has an easy style, tackles a very big subject, and comes at it from many angles. It’s interesting. Best of all, his work can be discussed, refuted, and improved upon. That’s where he was leading us all along.

There is something very sexy and energizing about the topic itself. We all like to think of a moment or two when we had a creative breakthrough. Some people have a lot more of them than others. Some actually take their moments to the bank. What does it take, and do we have it?

I grew up in a time when it seemed prudent to be cautious about talking about one’s great ideas. This book says that in fact, we’d do better to share our ideas as much as possible, since interactions improve the product and/or chance of success. Our great idea might lead someone else to make the breakthrough product or service, but hopefully our interactions with others will fine tune our idea to better serve its purpose.

Lehrer’s main point is that interactions and collaboration are essential to a flowering of inspiration and innovation. Companies that force interaction by their layout, or studies collaborated by several authors in frequent face-to-face interactions, intensify the creative atmosphere and may more often develop a product that will be widely accepted. On a larger scale, cities force face-to-face interactions among all kinds of people we wouldn’t ordinarily run into in our daily routines, and thus foster a creative atmosphere that cannot be replicated.

Lehrer takes a stab at a subject bound to create some controversy. He posits that Shakespeare was a great playwright, but his particular genius was only possible at the time when he wrote: playwriting was flourishing, and there was much Shakespeare learned (and stole) from his contemporaries and from enthusiastic audiences. But Shakespeare usually improved upon the ideas he appropriated. From here Lehrer makes a case that copyright laws in the U.S. should be loosened so that people can improve upon out-of-date patents or patents that slightly missed their target audiences.

Finally, he deals with failure. Every creative person fails. It’s part of the process. If eighty percent of success is just showing up, the rest is perseverance. “Art is work” and breakthroughs often come when we give our brains a rest from rigor and give it time to process all it has taken in. The rigor is first, the idea second, the solution last. But in the end, there may still be a little bit of magic.


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Wake of Forgiveness by Bruce Machart

Hardcover, 309 pages Pub October 21st 2010 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ISBN13: 9780151014439 Literary Awards: San Francisco Book Festival Prize Nominee for General Fiction (2011)

The book is a western in the broadest sense. It is really literature. The language is lush, exquisite, and unforgettable. The work is the debut (!) novel of a young man, but reads as if it were written by a much older man. If I tell you the book is black…dark like I have rarely read, you may be reluctant to dip your head in. But the title has the word forgiveness in it, and it is so. Forgiveness that falls like drops of rain on a parched and cracked soil. It is so unexpected, I didn’t trust it at first. But as one cruelty begets another, one kindness begets another, and so it is with forgiveness. It’s a lesson we need to see again and again to believe.

The main character, Karel, is the youngest of four brothers born to a Czech immigrant farming in Texas at the turn of the twentieth century. Karel’s birth killed his mother, leaving the family warped for the cooling comfort of a loving hand. Life was hard and could be cruel: the boys pulled the plow in the crusty ground until there was a permanent cant to their necks. The family has amassed a large landholding from neighboring farmers when Karel wins land bets jockeying ranch horses. One day a wealthy Spaniard with three nubile daughters makes a race wager.

There will be inevitable comparisons with Cormac McCarthy. Hardscrabble lives lived on the border is the same. The density of feeling is the same. The darkness is the same. I would like to make the case that McCarthy’s work has a lyricism when describing the nature, and the natural way of things, that seems age-old and universal while Wake... focusses more on the blackness in family relations, in men’s hearts. That is not to say Machart doesn’t “do” nature. He is more than skilled in describing the rain, the territory. But nature is not a character, the way it is so central in McCarthy’s work. Machart’s “black”:

“If anything, this was what Karel missed about the company of his brothers—their hardness and loathing had shored up his own, given him title to his own hatred. But there was something else: The older boys had also admired their father—his stubbornness and sharp tongue, the way he refused to beckon the help of other men—and so had Karel, and it was this admiration that he couldn’t cotton to. The reverence for a man you surely hated, the hard plaque of respect that all the bad blood couldn’t scour from your heart. This, too, he and his brothers had shared, and the bile of a common indigestion that rose from the two brands of unsuited feelings had been easier to swallow when there were others around who were burning inside with the same struggle to choke it down.”

Wake... reminds me of a New York Review of Books book that will be republished in 70 years to accolades. “He tells it like it was….” they will say, “A master of writing style…” It is classic, in the ways authors with great skill can paint pictures that seem indelible. But there are reasons why we would not want to wait 70 years to read it. We need to carry the lesson of forgiveness with us every day.

If you read and liked this book, I urge you to pick up another novel by a debut author that I was reminded of while reading Wake...: American Rust by Philipp Meyer, published by Random House. ...Rust won numerous awards, i.e., New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Economist Book of the Year (2009), A Washington Post Top Ten Book of (2009), Kansas City Star Top 100 Book of (2009), Newsweek's "Best. Books. Ever", but I don't think it made the bestseller lists. Don't let these great books languish.




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The Return of Captain John Emmett by Elizabeth Speller

A schoolboy’s scarf, a hair clasp, and an old photograph are practically all that remain of a young soldier’s life when he returns to Britain after the First war. His family and his neighbors all suspect that even his sanity is lost. After Captain John Emmett’s apparent suicide, his younger sister contacts an old school chum, Laurence, to see if he can tell her why young Emmett had to die. The author, Elizabeth Speller, manages to evoke a period of time when life was different and yet familiar. She adds another important figure to the mix who feels as real as the triptych described above: Chas, another boyhood friend of Laurence, and an acquaintance of John’s. Chas is both explainer and finder of obscure links. He is indispensable, because shortly we discover that John’s death is not as it seems.

Based on several true stories of soldiers serving the British army in World War I, The Return of Captain John Emmett tells a tangled tale of love, murder, and revenge. Slow-paced and literate, this invokes all the pain and heartbreak of the time, introducing us to the lost men who returned from the trenches without the strength of spirit they’d gone with. What gave the novel its depth was the evocation of the poetry that was created at the time. I left needing to read again the lines penned by the broken men who survived the trenches, only to succumb to the peace.

Readers who relish the work of Charles Todd, and Jacqueline Winspear will find this a welcome new voice.




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The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary by Andrew Westoll

Years ago I lived a long time in a populous third-world country. I remember saying to a friend living in the U.S. that a focus on animal rights seemed a distraction in view of human living conditions around the globe. She gave me a look I can still see to this day and have thought about many times since. "Why are we more important than every other living species?" and "What would our lives be like without other species?" she could have asked. There is no doubt in my mind that we must be more mindful of species living on the planet around us and treat each with great care and respect. That is also the theme of this fine documentary about research chimps living out their final days on a farm in Canada.

Westoll was a scientist first, but changed his focus to writing later in his career. He urges us to look at the evidence and acknowledge that we have a duty to restrict testing of animals in the name of science. And he urges us to insist Congress pass the Great Ape Protection Act (GAPA) which has been on the roster for discussion and passage for years now. Once again we lag behind other Western nations who long ago restricted the use of primates for research. Apparently studies using primates have determined that primates are sufficiently different from humans as not to be of great use in providing useful information for medical use. But the studies continue, Westoll suggests, perhaps because they are so lucrative to the grantees receiving federal monies.

In the meantime, social animals of great intelligence and emotional range are subjected to lives of captivity and the cruelties of isolation; are introduced to disease and treated with disregard. This story tells us mostly of what it is like to live with the animals now, their research days behind them (several were smuggled out of research facilities by sympathetic caregiver scientists). One is struck anew how little we know, and how barbaric we seem. Surely the rights demanded by groups of the disenfranchized over the years should have taught us how cruel and thoughtless we seemed before finally recognizing the rights of different groups (the poor, women, blacks). This is not a screed, nor a diatribe. It is a man reflecting on meeting some unusual characters who have a history, and with our help, a future.

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer

Fascinating. The introduction has this author in a flight simulator in Canada. The first chapter discusses Tom Brady of the Patriots making a Superbowl decision. Lehrer goes on to discuss the problems one man had making decisions after the "emotional" portion of his brain was impaired.

While some of the examples Lehrer chooses to illuminate his thesis are familiar from other books on psychology and neuroscience, many are new and absorbing. I came away with insights on how we make decisions under stress, and how psychology experiments are devised to test decision-making.

Lehrer discusses his work: Jonah Lehrer at Powell's.