The Making of a Justice by Justice John Paul Stevens

Hardcover, 560 pgs, Pub May 14th 2019 by Little, Brown and Company, ISBN13: 9780316489645

Justice John Paul Stevens appears to me to be one of those old-timey conservatives, the kind whose judgment I may not agree with but whose opinions I can respect. It’s been awhile since I’ve seen such clear thinking on the part of anyone who calls themselves Republican.

Stevens served on the Supreme Court thirty-four years, from 1975-2010. He did an awful lot of deciding in all that time; what I notice most is that these decisions, or at least the ones he discusses in detail, are ones that made a big difference in the life of ordinary Americans. We all knew the Supreme Court was important, but how quickly the perception of partisanship has begun to erode their power.

Stevens names time periods in the court for the newest member because that individual alters the balance of power. He discusses important decisions each new justice has authored that might be considered to define that justice’s body of work and places his own assents or dissents beside them.

One of the earliest discussions he wades into is the abortion debate. Stevens was seated two years after Roe v. Wade and says at the time the decision had no appearance of being controversial.

Criticism of Roe became more widespread perhaps in part because opponents repeatedly make the incorrect argument that only a “right to privacy,” unmentioned in the Constitution, supported the holding. Correctly basing a woman’s right to have an abortion in "liberty" rather than “privacy" should undercut that criticism.

Just so.

The 2003 case involving a challenge to the constitutionality of Pennsylvania’s 2002 congressional districting map, Vieth v. Jubelirer, is close to my heart. Hearing Stevens articulate why deciding partisan gerrymanders are not a heavy lift gives succor to like-minded in light of the devastation of a final refusal by SCOTUS to hear any more such cases.

Why is it any more difficult than deciding a racial gerrymander, he asks. Why can’t the Court stipulate every district boundary have a neutral justification? There are no lack of judicially manageable standards; there is a lack “judicial will to condemn even the most blatant violations of a state legislature’s fundamental duty to govern impartially.”

Stevens remained puzzled by his failure to convince his colleagues on the Court of his argument, an early echo of Justice Kagan’s distress this year that the blatant partisanship of the Court has broken out into the open and split the harmony with which they argued for so many years.

Stevens does not leave out decisions he wrote that were disliked by the country. Time never disguised the ugly truth that in Kelo v. The City of New London , a multinational pharmaceutical corporation looking around for a new development used the notion of eminent domain to take the homes of two long-time residents of New London, and then, within five years, closed up shop and left town. “…the Kelo majority opinion was rightly consistent with the Supreme Court’s precedent and the Constitution’s text and structure [but] Whether the decision represented sound policy is another matter.”

After the Citizen’s United decision with which he disagreed, Stevens tendered his resignation.

“…it is perfectly clear that if the identity of a speaker cannot provide the basis for regulating his (or its) speech, the majority’s rationale in Citizen’s United would protect not only the foreign shareholders of corporate donors to political campaigns but also foreign corporate donors themselves.”

By hardly ever mentioning fellow Justice Sam Alito Stevens shows his animus. After this decision, Stevens describes Alito sitting in the audience during Obama’s State of the Union. When Obama mentioned that the decision allows foreign corporations to have a say in American elections, Stevens writes Alito “incorrectly” mouthed the words: “Not true.”

He revisits Alito’s record later, when he is wrapping up, to point out “especially striking” disagreements he had with him over interpretation of the Second Amendment. “Heller is unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that the Court announced during my tenure on the bench,” he says. [Alito] failed to appreciate the more limited relationship between gun ownership and liberty. Firearms, Stevens argues, “have a fundamentally ambivalent relationship to liberty.”

It probably wasn’t the Citizen’s United decision itself that brought the Stevens reign to an end; he may have had a small stroke after the pressures of that January decision and then playing a game a tennis. He was replaced by Elena Kagan, with whom he has professed to be delighted. Stevens didn’t so much change as a large portion of the country who once, and still do, call themselves Republicans moved to the right. Stevens never did and he was right where we needed him for thirty-four years.



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Let Her Fly: A Father's Journey by Ziauddin Yousafzai with Louise Carpenter

Hardcover, 170 pgs, Pub Nov 13th 2018 by Little, Brown and Company, ISBN13: 9780316450508

This book caught my eye across a crowded library. What must it have been like to experience the phenomenon that is Malala Yousafzai and what were the earliest manifestations of her exceptionality?

Ziauddin Yousafzai was unusual himself. He and his brothers all had severe stammers growing up, but not his sisters. Of course the boys bore the brunt of family expectations. He took on a challenge to become an outstanding public speaker, delivering a speech his father helped him to craft. When he won first place in the competition, he continued his effort to overcome his speech impediment through public speaking.

Ziauddin was a feminist before the word was popular in Pakistan and when he married and moved with his wife, Toor Pekai, to Swat, his wife took advantage of his encouragement to embrace small freedoms during their life there. Their first daughter would be a much more enthusiastic reformer, willing to cover her head but not her face. Malala often sat with her father’s friends and answered questions of opinion he would put to her. She became a skilled public speaker through his influence, and she won many public speaking awards on her favorite topic: the rights and education of girls.

Malala was exceptionally bright and curious from an early age and attracted the attention of visitors to the Yousafzai household. She also broke down the resistance to change by her conservative grandfather. She attended a school run by her father and excelled, far more than her brothers who were ordinary in schoolwork. The Yousafzai school encourage all local girls to attend, and had a large number.

The campaign in which Yousafzai and his daughter Malala engaged to save girls education had been going against the Taliban’s edicts for about five years when the attack on her occurred. She was fifteen.

There is detail about Malala being flown by helicopter from one hospital to another, to gradually larger ones with more surgical expertise, until she finally is set down in Birmingham, England, where they take off any blood pressuring her brain, happily discovering there was no impingement on her cognitive function. She began a long series of reconstructive surgeries to lessen the impact of the nerve damage to her face.

Living in England turned the family dynamic 180 degrees. Malala had been a strong presence and leader in the family. While she was incapacitated, her younger brothers took on critical roles interfacing with British culture. The parents admit they resisted the power inversion at first, feeling out of their element, but gradually they were grateful for the boys' facility in the new environment and relied on them. The family grew closer in crisis because everyone came to recognize and accept their strengths and weaknesses.

Malala’s recovery was undoubtedly due to support from her family, but also grew from her own inner strength. The damage inflicted on her gave her more opportunity to develop an extraordinary resilience, and the long recovery gave her the opportunity to concentrate on her studies.

Whenever anybody has asked me how Malala became who she is, I have often used the response "Ask me not what I did but what I did not do. I did not clip her wings."

The Yousafzai family members each have a quality of gratefulness that is so attractive, allowing each one to occasionally take a supporting role to another's exceptionalism. That less-lauded role is equally difficult to perform. The entire family deserves credit for surviving with such strength of character, but that specialness may stem from the leadership of Ziauddin Yousafzai, which is why this book is about him.



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An Unlikely Journey by Julián Castro

Hardcover, 288 pgs, Pub Oct 16th 2018 by Little, Brown and Company, ISBN13: 9780316252164

Memoirs are de rigueur for anyone aspiring to the presidency. And so they should be, to introduce themselves and to give us an idea from where their sense of duty emanates. Nonetheless, it is disorienting to read the memoir of someone in their forties running for president who never mentions travel abroad.

At least half this book is composed of Julián’s life before he was twenty. For those who argue that “youthful indiscretions don’t matter,” here is someone who clearly thinks one’s sense of self and others grows up with you.

While I might go along with that notion of human development, it is the time after age twenty when we have to make decisions that really show who we are. After graduating from Stanford University and Harvard Law, Castro returned to his home city of San Antonio, took a job with a law firm and promptly ran for San Antonio City Council in his home district and won.

Right out of the gate was a big conflict of interest. Castro’s law firm represented a developer who wanted to build a golf course over the city’s aquifer and get a tax break to do it. Castro quit his paying job with the law firm, ended up voting no on the proposal with the backing of 56% of San Antonio residents.

The initial project failed--not because of his vote--but another came right behind it, this time for two golf courses, but with stronger environmental protections and no tax breaks. Castro voted for the project the second time. He uses the example of this project to show the importance of local government work, but also what people can do when they have principled objections and work together.

The experience fueled Castro’s interest in higher office. He lost at his first attempt to run for mayor of San Antonio, and it looks like it was his first big public failure. He felt humiliated. But like everyone who eventually succeeds, he had to pick himself up and do it again, which he did, winning in 2009. After that, he went back and forth to Washington, as head of HUD under Obama, and then mentioned as vice-presidential pick during the run up to the 2016 election.

It takes a special personality to want the blood sport that is politics. Castro learned the power of the people from his mother, who was known for her organizing work. He has a twin brother who absorbed the same lessons and worked alongside him to set up and win elections while they were in college and after. But what makes one reach for the highest office?

We all have to find the answer to that one, and while I am not impressed with those who want to see their names in lights—or gold letters eight feet high—there are people who are at least as capable as the rest of us but who want the limelight. I’m willing to give it to them if it makes sense for the direction we need to move.

Julián Castro is not ready, to my mind, to run for the presidency. I do not get the reassurance he even knows what it is. I don't mind some learning on the job, but look at what Teresa May just went through. There is a largeness to the job that will always exceed our best attempts to put our arms around it. Do I think he would be worthy some day? Maybe.

What we are doing now in our presidential slates--going as old as we can and as young as we can--is unappealing to me. Precociousness is a real thing, and I don't want to stand in the way of talent. To me, Castro for President is premature, but I have to admit the world belongs to the young now, who are going to have to find a way to live in it.



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In the Fold by Rachel Cusk

Hardcover, 262 pgs, Pub Oct 1st 2005 by Little Brown and Company (first published September 2005), ISBN13: 9780316058278, Lit Awards: Man Booker Prize Nominee for Longlist (2005)

This book, like so many of those by Cusk, interrogates the nature of ‘artist’ and ‘art,’ but also the nature of marriage and personal fulfillment, of love and desire. Unlike any of Cusk’s novels, the main character is a man, which complicates the interpretation for so many who draw a straight line from narrator to author. This work, which might seem a puff piece by anyone else, is difficult, thorny, a nervous system of connections that raises questions about how we should live.

What does the title mean? Does it mean in the arms [fold] of the family, in the fold of female genitalia as in birth, or in the fold of a letter, opened, to discover something dreadful has come to pass? For each of these suggestions there is some support in the book.

Our narrator, Michael, and Adam Hanbury lived next door to one another at school. Adam’s sister Caris invites Michael to her eighteenth birthday party at the family pile—a farm overlooking the sea—called Egypt. The family is large and constantly in motion. Someone is always saying or doing something to provoke another.

Michael is accepted and admired by the family, drawing him in. The moment catches in his imagination as though in a photograph, illuminating the potential in family relationships. He is experiencing a stumble in his own marriage some years later, but when he once again visits the Hanburys in Egypt, he does not feel the love.

I love watching Cusk navigate the male imagination. She is restrained: she tries not to step outside the lines into “that definitely wouldn’t be so” territory. But perhaps even more fascinating is her look at the female imagination. Michael’s wife Rebecca recently had a child. She is struggling with her ‘art’…she is a painter who paints very little indeed. She instead takes a job in an art gallery and seems to find her niche. She is confident, smooth, successful. Except that she is unhappy with her faithful husband, new child, lovely home, fulfilling job.

Throughout the novel are seeded mentions of gruesome murders of one spouse by another that happened in history. The houses of Rebecca’s parents are a factor in how Michael perceived them…he has an allergic reaction to their moral ambivalence: not only did they have no interest in being virtuous, “they concerned themselves with domineering feats of patronage and ostentatious magnanimity.”

Rebecca is trying to escape her parents’ life but is their daughter, after all. She wanted a child, but that child Hamish would become Michael’s responsibility

“like the pets people buy their tender, clamorous children; children who then harden, as though the giving, the giving in, were proof in itself that in order to survive and succeed in the world, you must be more callous and changeable than those who were so easily talked into accessing to your desires.”

This novel, as a novel, has some difficulties, but Cusk’s perceptions and humor are intriguing enough to carry us over any rough spots. In fact, it may be her very perceptions that make this ride bumpy. We spend lots of time reconciling her vision of who these people are and almost miss the car crash of a marriage breakup unfolding in slow motion before our eyes.

So what is this book about? It involves what people do to one another, even while professing love. We have to make sure to “ask questions” of our partners, of ourselves, to get to the heart of our feelings. The book is about family, how damaging it can be while appearing to provide succor, and how difficult, if not impossible, to break free. Always, the self-examination, the questions we ask ourselves, are key to some degree of autonomy.

For those familiar with the story, I wonder why we only got a glimpse of Beverly, the one figure in the book who appeared autonomous.

“Beverly was the healthiest human I had ever laid eyes on. She was twenty-five or so, and she looked as I imagined people were meant to look. Her broad brown body was distinctly female and yet there was nothing slender or shiny about her. She was like a piece of oak. Her hair was light matte brown and curly and her eyes were bright, friendly lozenges of green. I didn’t think she was married, I imagined her associating with a menagerie of animals, like a girl in a children’s story.”

We cannot call Beverly a goddess, unless she is one type of goddess while the youthful Caris is another. Beverly might be the goddess of fertility while Caris is the goddess of desire. The older Caris has become disillusioned and vengeful, quite like Greek goddesses of old, and the shifting nature of the Hanbury family has something tragic in its outlines.

The dogs that terrorize Vivian in her own home might be the multi-headed dog Cerebus, who guarded the Gates of Hell to keep the dead [Vivian] from leaving. In the end, she kills the dogs and escapes.

This novel feels more a tragedy than other Cusk novels I have read. Those other novels, by some lightness of attitude, made us feel a kind of camaraderie with the human condition. We do not want camaraderie with these people. We do not want to be them. It is more a warning Cusk is giving us. Question everything.

Reviews of Cusk's other books:
Saving Agnes, 1993
The Temporary, 1995 (not reviewed yet)
The Country Life, 1997
A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, 2002
The Lucky Ones, 2003
In the Fold, 2005
Arlington Park, 2006
The Bradshaw Variations, 2009
The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy, 2009
Aftermath: On Marriage & Separation, 2012
Outline, 2014
Medea, 2015
Transit, 2016
Kudos, 2018
Coventry: Essays, 2019






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Jackrabbit Smile & Edge of Dark Water by Joe Lansdale

Hardcover, 256 pgs, Pub March 27th 2018 by Mulholland Books, ISBN13: 9780316311588, Series: Hap and Leonard #12

The Hal & Leonard series is full up with crazy male bravado and vulnerability, pressing hard on our moral, sexual, and racial understanding until we squeeze out a guffaw and decide to fall for these guys sitting on our faces. These two take on challenges others would let fall into a fast-flowing river, and now that the series has become a regular gig on Sundance Channel as an Original Series, starring America’s own brilliant, tough-seeming, and comedic Michael Kenneth Williams and British star James Purefoy, hopefully Joe Lansdale will get more airtime .

Lansdale barrels ahead riding roughshod over anyone who hasn’t updated their hard drive with new information about the lives of gays, trans, and people of color. No more excuses will be made for those faltering on the road to total acceptance of these folks living in America. Lansdale doesn’t make any bones about it, just assumes the bad guys are the unreformed who ‘haven’t quite gotten there yet.’ There is damage being done daily to the psyches of ordinary folk with extraordinary skills who have to put up with crippling prejudice.

This fast-paced addition to the series addresses white supremacy head on: WHITE IS RIGHT is emblazoned on the T-shirt of a young man seeking the investigative services of Hap & Leonard, not knowing Leonard can be rattlesnake mean to those who disparage him for his color...or any old thing he might take it in his mind to do. This is the book #12 in the series so Lansdale doesn’t spend much time explaining the two main characters. The chapters are short and speedy, racing to a gruesome dénouement that features a hog farm, some mean twins, and a jackrabbit smile.

This is the kind of book one can read in a day, relaxedly, since it is mainly composed of dialogue and a few hard whacks of a rifle butt. But it will put you in a good mood since the bad guys get theirs and the good guys, well, they may not ever get paid, but think of what they’re doing for the planet! I ❤️ Joe Lansdale.

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Hardcover, 292 pgs, Pub Mar 27th 2012 by Mulholland Books, ISBN13: 9780316188432

Is there a more prolific writer of Westerns than Joe Lansdale? Endlessly inventive, Lansdale has both a series featuring Hap & Leonard, and a slew of standalones in which he shares the way even good people can get themselves in a bad way in a world with evil in it.

In this standalone novel, published in 2012 by Mulholland Books, 16-year-old Sue Ellen is narrating. She lives in a small southern town and has two friends her age: a white gay boy named Terry who is reluctant to let anyone know his inclinations, and Jinx, a black girl friend since childhood. Lansdale is so natural in his use of skin color that he can teach us things we never knew we needed to know.

Sue Ellen, Terry, and Jinx discover the town’s beauty, May Lynn, killed and submerged in the river, tied by the ankle with wire attached to a sewing machine. None of the grown men in the town seem to want to pursue the matter, but merely shove the body in a casket and cover up the evidence. We get a bad feeling, but mostly we sense any sixteen-year-olds ought to pack up & leave that place, so when the kids decide that’s what they’re going to do, we’re onboard.

They’re floating, by the way, on a wooden raft, and along the way they pick up more than one who decides to go with them. Seems like practically everyone who knows their plans—to go to Hollywood—wants to go with them, if not the whole way, at least far enough to get out of town. There’s a posse of folks, more than one, following behind, looking for them, so it gets hectic and dangerous and the hangers-on fall off, one by one.

Lansdale always seems to get the tone right, however, and when there is a chance for evil to thrive he makes us question whether or not that’s the way we want things to play out. After all this is kind of a crime novel, kind of a police procedural, kind of a mystery, but it’s got heart…more heart than we’ve come to expect of the genre. I like the way people think and make choices that seem fair and right and good.

Lansdale himself is really kind of a standalone guy. As far as I know there isn’t anyone else doing this kind of crossover writing with lessons on race, human nature, and on right and wrong. It is never sappy, often funny, and always deeply thoughtful. He is not religious: “I got misery enough in my life without adding religion to it,” says a character in one of his later novels. The language he uses is country, and can be extremely descriptive, if not entirely proper: “Expectations is a little like fat birds—it’s better to kill them in case they flew away” or “certain feelings rose to the surface like dead carp.”

The Hap & Leonard series has been made into a TV series starring Michael Kenneth Williams and James Purefoy. It is a rich stew of southern storytelling, darkened by reality but leavened with laughter. I don’t think I need to state how difficult it is to create new characters, new language, and new situations every year (sometimes more than once a year? is it possible?) and hit the bell each time. I’m a fan.



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Transcription by Kate Atkinson

Hardcover, 352 pgs, Expected pub: Sept 6th 2018 by Transworld Publishers Ltd, ISBN13: 9780385618724

Not all of Kate Atkinson’s novels have been what she calls historical fiction, but the last couple have been. This novel may hew closest to the truth, though like she says in the Author’s Note at the end, she wrenched open history and stuffed it with imaginative reconstruction, at least one fantasy for each fact.

The author tells us afterward what her intentions were. This is particularly delicious, and I argue, respects the reader. We get to look into her construction and think. She answers questions we've formed, and instead of farming out possible answers to various reviewers, she’s blunt with us about elements we’d been wondering about. There is something comparable in theatre, when the actors takes off their masks for the final bow and we all celebrate together.

Atkinson returns to the Second World War, periodic releases from the National Archives of secrets from that time fueling her creative process. When she discovers [true fact] an ordinary-seeming bank clerk was a major cog in rounding up British supporters of Nazis, her story had a frame. When she discovered [true fact] hundreds and hundreds of pages of transcripts of conversations of dissident groups in London, her story had a heart.

What Kate Atkinson does is not necessarily unique (using historical documents to create fiction), but what she does with it is unique. Her style, tone, and characters are recognizably hers. She is funny: one knows there are people out there whose droll delivery of witty responses to ordinary questions is quintessentially British but we don’t come across it enough. Atkinson can do repartee.

By now Atkinson may be incapable now of writing fiction with a chronological timeline. This novel has only three time periods to work with and really only one central character, which simplifies the action enough that I only had to reread an earlier section once. This was partly due to my surprise, maybe a little exasperation, and finally willingness to be led out of the action at what seemed like a critical moment…again! I was burrowed in like a tick, and am yanked to a later, earlier, whatever time. (I didn't really mind...stretching out the experience of reading Atkinson again, luxuriously.) Atkinson manages to satisfy and confound a reader at the same time.

Atkinson’s characters always have the ‘ghost of Jackson Brodie’ about them. This is a very good thing, considering how much we liked Brodie and wouldn’t mind having him resurrected. We could make the case that the main character in this novel, Juliet Armstrong, is a female Jackson Brodie—honest and therefore vulnerable, she doesn’t have so high an opinion of herself that she is insufferable. In the end she is well able to take care of herself. She’s smart, and a very good liar, and keeps herself a little distant. After all, who can one trust?

At eighteen, Juliet is parentless: "her mother's death had revealed that there was no metaphor too ostentatious for grief." Young and alone, Juliet was not, however, callow. She lied like crazy through a job interview with a flippant and overly-inquisitive young man who interviewed her for a job, which she was surprised she got. Later she learned he'd known every lie, and appreciated the ease with which she misled him.

This book is about spies, spies working in the service of the British government, or so we believe. What is special is that we see what is British about them—what is ordinary, patriotic, courageous, honorable. But we also see a nation at war and we see duplicity, hunger, ambition, pettiness. Then we lay over that the work of the other nations at war, France, Germany, Russia, the United States and a few exceptional people emerge alive, not unscathed, but breathing at the end. The tension comes when we are not sure who will remain standing.

Atkinson writes about the middle of the twentieth century, but she could be talking about the twenty-first:

Juliet could still remember when Hitler had seemed like a harmless clown. No one was amused now. (“The clowns are the dangerous ones, Perry said.”)

and

Do not equate nationalism with patriotism…Nationalism is the first step on the road to Fascism.

One always senses the intelligence in Atkinson’s work. She not only writes a good story--which means getting the humanity right--she makes us think while we read. She’s unpredictable. And frankly, I like her politics. It’s always a pleasure to enjoy another of her books.

This novel is due out September 25th in the U.S., published by Little Brown; it looks like it will be out September 6th in Britain by Transworld. Preorder now!



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A Shout in the Ruins by Kevin Powers

Hardcover, 272 pgs, Pub May 15th 2018 by Little, Brown & Company, ISBN13: 9780316556477

At a time when our country is again in the midst of a noisy national conversation about race, Kevin Powers creates a powerful fiction to illuminate the not-so-distant terrors and strains of our Civil War. Powers touches our sensitive places and his sentences carry knowledge from which none of us can hide.

The work is a feast of imagination, packed full with exemplars of character definition, narrative structure, tone, style, language choice. Language is the first thing one notices. Each sentence conveys both a history and a future, though we won’t know that until later. Rounding back on the novel’s beginning after a time we realize how much we have already been told, by given- and place names, though we couldn’t have understood it. We grow watchful, anticipating these signposts, and read carefully.

The economy and poetry of the language gives our read a languor; we won’t rush to some conclusion because the journey is the point. We breathe in the foggy sea air, and the stench of rotting limbs. We note what the narrator chooses to notice: “Emily had been to Richmond only twice in her life. She found the endless stone and brick suffocating.” But of course. Only northerners or outsiders wouldn’t crave the breezy clapboards on tree-lined drives outside the city center in the heat of the summer.

Characters have real depth. We are introduced to the slave Rawls; at no time does this feel like appropriation of the black man’s experience. Rawls has a quiet unquenchable fury “inscrutable and vast,” but he determines to find something within himself his owners can’t touch. Levallois is Rawls’ white landowner near Richmond, Virginia in the mid-1860’s. The pathology of his character is sharp as a shard of untempered glass. He is calculating and exploitative, transactional only, sly in exploiting the human nature of others less damaged than himself.

The novel’s dreadful propulsion is because of this character Levallois: what horror he will perpetrate next, and will he get his comeuppance? How many will he infect with hatred or kill before he is stopped? The path to that answer winds through a later century that hints to some of what happened. We are introduced to a man called George Seldom, believed to be a Negro of ninety some-odd years in 1955, who carries a sharp, thin-bladed knife with a handle of elk antler with which we are already familiar. In 1863, Levallois used it to kill noiselessly, needlessly a ferry owner named Spanish Jim.

We read for voices like Rawls and his wife Nurse, strong and resistant yet vulnerable. They arouse in us a sense of justice, and give us strength in light of very poor odds, shades of the heroic classic Les Misérables. We know enough of Levallois to know his sociopathy and hollowness, his wife Emily not much better. Near the end of this small corner of Civil War history Emily begins to grasp responsibility for her role, but we can’t forgive her. She’ll have to carry her burdens alone in the many years she has to contemplate them in backward glances.

The timeline in the novel is ever-shifting, but that merely adds intrigue and mystery—the kind of the puzzlement books of history often leave us with. When George Seldom admits a kind of suspicion towards history, this reader is inclined to agree that fiction, done well, may capture more truth than some histories. We read to know why, not just how, and history doesn’t often give us that.

“The truth has not mattered for a long time…the only thing that matters here…is what people are willing to believe.”

Of the several lives recorded in this novel, there are two that don’t fit easily the genealogies revealed here. One is a woman artist and part-time mail carrier who marries a reformed alcoholic and auto mechanic. The two live well together, deeply in love. Her heritage is mixed race including Croatan, black, and white and her maiden name is Bride. He appears to be white, his surname Rivers, perhaps descended from Sheriff Patrick Rivers, a “wholly unremarkable” and dull man who appears in this history after the war in Virginia near Beauvais Plantation.

There, it happened. This fiction has become a kind of history, or this history has become a fiction. We’re not exactly sure except that the time is not that long ago—only a generation or two—and we should be able to grasp motivation if we had a few more connections. What we do know is that plenty people died before their time for reasons their children and their children’s children no longer recognize. When does memory become fiction and does what happens now matter more than what happened then?

This is a deeply involving read; the author spans one hundred years but he left out the boring bits. The work is a kind of model for how to keep the reader understanding complicated knots in intertwined personal histories that last more than one lifetime. The language is peerless, and the capture of human nature cannot be denied. It feels a long time since I have been as enraptured by a fiction. Beautiful work.
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Postscript There is an Australian author who has Powers' similarly expansive sense of literature and the writing chops to pull it off. Rohan Wilson places his fiction in earlier-century histories of Tasmania and manages to make the work as big and heroic as those he implicitly references. My reviews here cannot capture his overwhelming talent and the skill he demonstrates in The Roving Party and To Name Those Lost.
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Links to my reviews for Powers' earlier work:
The Yellow Birds
Letter Composed During A Lull in the Fighting


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Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure & The Importance of Imagination by J.K. Rowling

Hardcover, 74 pgs, Pub Apr 14th 2015 by Little, Brown & Co, ISBN13: 9780316369152

This commencement speech was originally given in 2008 at Harvard, and it was not lost on Rowling that the people she spoke to had lives that were perceived by the outside world as every bit as magical as Harry Potter’s.

That may be why she focused on failure, a thing Harvard graduates may not be expected to know enough about, and imagination, which she credits with making the world a better place. Utter abject romantic and financial failure after her graduation with a Classics degree taught her what resources she had inside that failure could not destroy, but paradoxically could set free. And Rowling tells us that imagination has to do with empathy—imagining worlds we have not lived—and how critical that is for a world in which we want to live.

Rowling was eloquent on the subject of her first paying job at Amnesty International in London where she learned that terrific and terrible evil can exist, and how empathy can allow our indignation and refusal to submit to surface. Those who refuse to see the burdens under which others struggle can collude with evil through apathy, without ever committing an evil act themselves.

University-educated young people will have some idea of the world outside their doors and will be able to conceive of solutions for the very difficult problems that plague us. In a way, Rowling’s speech would be best widely read outside of Harvard’s yard, among those folks who are fearful of what is to come and who are not sure they have the mental strength and intellectual resources to meet future challenges they cannot even imagine.

One of the things that those attending Harvard are expected to understand and to internalize is competition. And yet, our success in the world—the success OF the world—may depend on cooperation. What worries me more than a few Harvard graduates escaping those hallowed walls thinking they just want to claw their way to the top of the heap are the people who have begun to disparage education, learning, empathy, compassion, and self-knowledge. This is the far greater danger, the looking backward, the denial of science, of imagination. Rowling says

“We do not need magic to transform our world; we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.”

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You Don't Have To Say You Love Me by Sherman Alexie

Hardcover, 457 pages, Pub June 13th 2017 by Little, Brown and Company ISBN13: 9780316270755 Awards: Andrew Carnegie Medal Nominee for Nonfiction (2018)

I'd never read Sherman Alexie's first great breakout book, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, I'm not sure why. I was interested; perhaps I was saving it. Instead I chose to read at this time his new memoir which could also be read as a eulogy for his mother.

His upbringing sounds like it was a rough time all round. His parents were alcoholics. Sherman didn't come out unscathed, but he has been reaching out--he is fearless in revealing himself and his family. Perhaps he has found this makes him more likable, relatable.

The end papers of this hardcover memoir are printed with a quilt pattern. Alexie tells us his mother quilted all the time, even through the night. He himself has at least ten quilts of hers and he uses all of them. But when his mother died, he wanted to collect all the quilts she'd left behind and burn them all. I didn't get the impression he did so. For whatever reason.

Lillian, that was her name. Lillian was one of the last speakers of his ancestor's native language. In a chapter entitled "Eulogy," Alexie repeats the phrase My mother was a dictionary over and over, every couple lines, but she never taught me the tribal language. The poem ends,

She always said to me, 'English will be your best weapon.'
She was right, she was right, she was right.

Perhaps my favorite poem is one of his shortest, called "Communion" in which sentiment pairs with form:

we worship
the salmon

because we
eat salmon

The chapter entitled "Missionary Position" will stay with me a very long time. While in high school, one of Alexie's friends said something deeply racist in his company, having momentarily forgotten he was Indian. He ended up dating her for a few years, and once gave her a pawnshop ring that was worth $20. When they broke up, she gave the ring back. He sold it back to the pawnshop for $10.

In the beginning of the book, in a chapter called "Scatalogical," Alexie explains there is something called a grief poop. After everyone had left the funeral home, two days after the death of his mother, Alexie stayed behind to use the restroom. A sign hung on the wall behind the toilet: Please be gentle with our toilet. The pipes are old. Be judicious in your use of toilet paper. He tells us "I took the largest shit of my life. I expelled everything." He ended up breaking up the poop into pieces and had to hold the pieces in his hand so he could flush them in four tries. "Thing was as big as a walrus." I'd never known about grief poops, but it makes sense.

Alexie's work has become indispensable for the well-read American. One cannot claim any credibility as a reader without having dipped a foot into his world and walked awhile in his boots. Reading Alexie is a kind of responsibility.



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"They Can't Kill Us All" by Wesley Lowery

In his Acknowledgments, Wesley Lowery calls the victims of racial violence “Rorschach tests in a divided nation’s debate of race and justice.” That seems a particularly appropriate choice of metaphor in light of the criticisms from some portion of our populace about the movements that have sprung up to protest police violence against black citizens. What do you see when you are shown an unarmed black man splayed and bloody on a city street, in a park, in a car, shot by police fire?

With all the incidents of racial violence in the past two three years now—can it really be so many for so long?—it is hard to keep straight when the outrage began and when it began to blossom into fury. Lowery began his reporting on police shootings with Ferguson in 2014. He was writing for the Washington Post. He first saw Instagram photos uploaded by his friend Brittany Noble with CBS affiliate KMOV in St. Louis, who had a list of local officer-involved shootings in her reporting history. “I just felt different. Something wasn’t right. This wasn’t the typical police shooting scene,” Noble told Lowery.

When did “police shooting scene” become paired with “typical”? Lowery explains that it was during Ferguson that we realized there was no national data for police shootings. It needed to be collected, and was, later, by hand, by scouring newspaper reports from around the country. It turns out that the largest subcategory of people killed by police are armed white men, many mentally ill or explicitly suicidal. We don’t see the numbers here, but one wonders how many unarmed white men, as opposed to unarmed black men, become victims. There is no doubt that a close reading of the numbers would help us to understand the difficulties on both sides of the policing debate.

So Lowery begins with nearly three months in Ferguson: “There is this overwhelming feeling that they can shoot us, they can beat us—we can even have this stuff on video and the police officer still gets off” [Patricia Bynes]—and is drawn into a national crisis, ping-ponging around the country with each new shooting. The timeline and the incidents are laid out in order, along with the crescendo of voices in protest.

He notes the moment “black lives matter” goes viral for the first time, from a Facebook post by Alicia Garza, a 31-year-old activist in Oakland, reposted by fellow activist Patrisse Cullors. Black Lives Matter became “an ideological and political intervention” then, "in the face of deadly oppression." The name later became the name of an organization. “Its tenets have matured and expanded over time and not all of its adherents subscribe to them in exactly the same manner…” The division in what became the movement has been seen before between groups wishing to bring racial inequality to the nation’s attention. While some may not agree that "Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise," one has to admit it looks an awful lot like that.

Lowery introduces us to many young activists and spokespeople around the country who are anxious to be part of the dialog and the solution. That is the hopeful part of his narrative. Well-educated, articulate men and women around the country have poured their organizing and speaking skills into highlighting these issues for those who do not face profiling or harassment or intimidation in their everyday lives. Many may end up someday in political roles, if they can gain traction: ”No one is going to teach you. Power is never given, it’s taken,” one young aspirant was told by a prominent official. So be it, then.

The discussion of political leadership led directly to an eye-widening moment for me: “…the percentage of black registered voters in the South more than doubled—skyrocketing from 31% to 73%—between 1965 and 2005” (a result of the Voting Rights Act of 1965). Not coincidentally, this is just the time the conservative Koch brothers began to systematically fund groups who would move far-right politicians into down-ballot races, beginning the process of changing the face of southern electoral politics so that new districts could be drawn without contention and restrictions on voting rights could be enacted.

One night in early 2016 I happened to catch the Colbert Report when DeRay Mckesson was guest speaker. That night he was trying to explain the Black Lives Matter to Stephen Colbert, who came off looking foolish and even a little resistant against the smooth, cool rationality of Mckesson. I learn from Lowery that Mckesson has become a huge figure in racial identity politics since 2015 when he involved himself with the Black Lives Matter movement. I have added the clip below for those who haven’t seen it.

I understand also that Mckesson has been involved in discussions President Obama convened with his advisors and other activists Lowery mentions, e.g., Brittany Packnett, (Campaign Zero), and Mica Grimm, (Black Lives Matter). It is thrilling for me to hear these voices, though I wish there were less contention among the groups about motives and means. The ends are pretty much the same, it would seem. The means…I guess we will have to see the response of the police and government, but not everyone wants the activists to fail in their pursuits.

The Stephen Colbert Report with DeRay Mckesson:



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The Book of Human Emotions by Tiffany Watt Smith

Emotions are funny things…some flit through us at the speed of light, barely registering on our face or consciousness, while others linger, hovering over us, coloring our perceptions of each new day. Descartes thought here were six basic emotions: wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness, but most of us can name several more of which we have intimate knowledge.

There are emotions that we experience only once or twice in a lifetime and yet someone somewhere has probably identified and named that particular feeling. It is reassuring and something joyous, I think, to discover that some strong emotion is shared. Tiffany Watt Smith does not attempt a comprehensive catalog, but she makes the excellent point that we need more words for our feelings rather than trying to narrow the breadth and width of human experience into discrete and limited categories. It is a marvelous, revelatory read.

Watt Smith worked in theatre before beginning an academic career. Somehow that seems entirely appropriate to emotion-spotting. An actor with a range of experiences may need some prompting on how they should feel about a certain scene, and the words help to give them context. Or perhaps actors are teaching us as audience an emotion we instinctively recognize but have never been able to put into words.

The book is filled with a sense of good humor. Even in definitions of those feelings we would be happy to do without, like disappointment and despair, Watt Smith does not leave us feeling bereft. She always puts in a little upswing at the end which shows us the way out, or makes us smile in relief and pleasure that we are not in that space now.

I particularly liked her discussion of compassion in which she recognizes that

”For Tibetan Buddhists, the wish to free a person from suffering is ideally experienced in equanimity, with a quiet confidence. For many of us, however, compassion is considerably more anxious territory…requiring a person to discover very vulnerable parts of themselves…Only the wisest can bend themselves to another’s pain without being rendered numb and helpless themselves: the “compassion fatigue” we hear about in the caring professions today.”

Her discussion of contempt puts me in mind of Donald Trump, as do many things these days. Contempt is a performative emotion in that it turns a spectator into a participant, inviting a conversation. One can watch a spectacle, but once one acts or speaks in contempt, one is provoking a response.

Disgust is a prime candidate for a “universal” emotion as it is instantaneous and involuntary, though Watt Smith points out that often “something out of place” is often the culprit to feelings of involuntary disgust: a hair in one’s soup, soup on one’s beard or clothing, or simply a disagreeable smell where we don’t expect to find it.

There is a word which has no equivalent in English, though I have seen the emotion described in a novel by a woman of Bangladeshi descent, called maya-lage. Watt Smith calls it fago in this book, which is a type of love and pity felt for those in need, mixed with sadness, sorrow, and compassion. It is the feeling one gets contemplating the fate of those who experience an earthquake, or other natural disaster.

I can’t recommend this book more highly for all of us, but especially for those in the creative professions. It is filled with irresistible descriptions of feelings we may have experienced but for which we had no words, and may inspire attempts to capture those emotions as they cross the mind-body divide. The author goes around the world seeking words that express a human state. It is completely absorbing. One doesn’t have to read the entries in order—one is encouraged to skip around.

You will not want to miss emotions for which definitions appear in a country we just visit—that a nationality has created a word for a sensation may mean it is a characteristic feeling in a certain culture, like han, a feeling of sadness and hope at the same time…a yearning for things to be different (Korea), or torschlusspanik, a German word for the agitated, fretful feeling that time is running out, or “gate-closing panic.” I am quite sure the Chinese must have similar expression somewhere, knowing what I do about their culture. I must also mention the extraordinary capture of characteristic feeling in the term greng jai, “the feeling of being reluctant to accept another’s offer of help because of the bother it would cause them.” Greng jai is a Thai phrase.

Buy this one. Watt Smith is a delightful companion, and many of the words you will want to find again. Below, Tiffany Watt Smith gives a short TED-like talk on her work.

Tiffany Watt Smith @ 5x15 from 5x15 on Vimeo.

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Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, edited by Larry Siems

Hardcover, 379 pages Published January 20th 2015 by Little, Brown and Company (first published January 1st 2015)

Mohamedou Ould Slahi wrote this diary in 2005 while in detention in Guantánamo. For years he was considered America’s highest ranking terror suspect; I don’t know when that designation changed, or if it ever did. In 2008 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Guantánamo detainees could challenge their detention through habeas corpus. In 2009 U.S. District Court Judge James Robertson heard Mohamedou’s petition and in 2010 ordered his release. Within weeks, Obama’s administration filed a notice of appeal, sending the judge's decision back for review. The case is still pending. Mohamedou remains in U.S. custody in Guantánamo.

An NYRB review by Steve Coll introduced me to this title. It is, as Coll maintains, a “remarkable” document. Mohamedou was targeted by U.S. intelligence after the Millenium Bombing Plot in 1999, when Ahmed Ressam attempted to drive explosives from Montreal to Los Angeles. Mohamedou claims not to have known Ressam, but he was living in Montreal at the time also. After talking with his parents in Mauritania, he decided to return home rather than be surveilled by American intelligence agents. As soon as he arrived in Senegal to be picked up by his family, he was detained for questioning by his own government and subsequently released. After 9/11, he was called in by Mauritanian intelligence to answer questions. He drove himself to the police station, beginning a long and harrowing tale of capture, rendition, torture, and imprisonment.

I have been unable to understand why the Obama administration challenged Judge Robertson’s ruling on Mohamedou's habeas corpus, though the footnotes on Mohamedou’s wiki might prove instructive if one is trained in legalese. Mohamedou’s own personal diary of his time in detention from 2001-2005, from Mauritania, to Jordan, to Afghanistan, and finally to Guantánamo, though written in 2005, was not released for publication until 2013. Heavily redacted, it still allows a reader to get a sense of the man. He addresses a question directly to readers:

“So has American democracy passed the test it was subjected to with the 2001 terrorist attacks? I leave this judgment to the reader. As I am writing this, though, the United States and its people are still facing the dilemma of the Cuban detainees.”

Taking into account all we know of the successes, failures, intents, bureaucratic execution and distortions that are a part of our “intelligence” history, I think we have to conclude that keeping Slahi in Guantánamo for some 15 years is far from our finest hour, if he forgives the understatement. Moreover, it has not made us safer, that oft-recycled excuse for exceeding the letter of the law.

Slahi’s reminiscences are unexpectedly keen, propulsive, visceral, and colloquial, using American expressions to describe circumstances and characters we are sure to recognize. I say “unexpectedly” not because he is a Muslim, but because he is an engineer. It may be profiling to say that in my experience with engineers spoken or written language is not usually their forte. Mohamedou used English to write, though his stronger languages are Arabic, German, and French. He went to school in Germany, and understands western habits. He graduated from the University of Duisburg with a degree in engineering. When his visa was expiring in Germany, he traveled to Montreal to find work. Using English allows Mohamedou to address us, the American electorate, directly, and to gently remonstrate using our own language habits, and peculiar phraseology. We wish we knew this man, could send him books, could argue with him late into the night, only to realize with sadness, bitterness, and distaste after putting the book down that such things will never happen. Too much water under the bridge, we can almost hear him say.

Absolutely Mohamedou Ould Slahi should be released immediately: one only hopes that he is able to reconstruct some kind of life for himself after his ordeals. As he so eloquently puts it, there are stages to a prisoner’s emotions while under incarceration:

”I have been through several stages during my captivity. The first phase was the worst: I almost lost my mind fighting to get back to my family and the life I was used to…It was several weeks before I realized that I’m in jail and not going home anytime soon...

Phase two is when you realize that you’re in jail and you possess nothing in the world but all the time in the world to think about your life—although in GTMO detainees also have to worry about daily interrogations…you have control over nothing…you have no privacy…In the beginning it is a horrible thing to lose all those privileges in the blink of an eye, but believe me, people get used to it. I personally did.

Phase three is discovering your new home and family. Your family comprises the guards and your interrogators. True, you didn’t choose this family, nor did you grow up with it, but it’s a family all the same, whether you like it or not, with all the advantages and disadvantages…

[In a footnote the book’s editor, Larry Siems, adds: MOS adds a note here in the margins of the handwritten original: “Phase four: getting used to the prison, and being afraid of the outside world.”]

One has to conclude it may have been a crime to keep him locked up. Highly recommended.

Larry Siems is a human rights activist and directed the Freedom to Write program at PEN American Center. He worked with Slahi's legal counsel to get this document released. It has been translated into 24 languages.


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To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris

Ferris, as you might be able to tell from the title, is all about religion in this novel. His main character, Paul C. O’Rourke, is a dentist—a dentist with a taste for the absurd. He is funny, especially when he is trying not to be. His practice in New York City keeps him crazy busy, so he allows himself only a few indulgences. He is a Red Sox fan in New York, which means he must watch every game (except the 6th inning), taping them to watch later if he has something else on his schedule. The ritual is one which gives structure, and a kind of meaning to his life. He wants something. He still has desire of a sort.

O’Rourke tries to be normal, just so that he can get along with other folks, but he is like a space bot acting human: it’s all wrong. O’Rourke is having a crisis. He doesn’t get the point “of it all,” and he especially doesn’t see God acting in the world. So when a patient tells him he is part of a long-lost race of non-believers in God (any god), O’Rourke wonders if perhaps it isn’t just possible: To be genetically indisposed to believe in God.

O’Rourke wants something to be everything: absorbing, challenging, meaningful. His girlfriends had close family ties, and O’Rourke found that to be meaningful for awhile: he wanted to be a part of their families as much as he was interested in the women themselves. But their religious affiliations always proved a barrier. O’Rourke didn’t believe in God.

One night O’Rourke wakes in the middle of the night and the city outside his window is completely quiet. Not a person could be seen, though earlier the streets were filled with people.

"I felt so forgotten, so passed over, so left behind, so lost out. I was sure not only that everything worth doing had already been done while I was asleep but also that, now that I was awake, there was no longer anything worth doing. My first instinct was to reach for my me-machine. It put me in instant touch, it gave me instant purpose…No one had called or emailed or texted. I would do practically anything, I thought, to have them back—I mean the strollers and lovers of a few hours earlier, so that I might have another chance to stroll alongside them…and, after awhile, to leave the Promenade, off to bed for a good night’s sleep—or to that one vital thing among the city’s offerings that night, that one unmissable thing that makes staying up all night a treasure and not a terror—and then to rise again at a decent hour—to walk the Promenade in the light of a new morning…oh, come back you people lost to darkness! Come back, you ghosts, the day is hard enough. Don’t leave me alone with the night…There was the hum of the river, and the last desultory traffic of the night washing by on the expressway below. I can only suggest the effect it had one me, that is the feeling that my life, and the city’s, and the world’s every carefree, winsome hour, were perfectly without meaning."

In the final pages of the novel, O’Rourke finds himself understanding a little of how others manage to get through their days. If it doesn’t hurt, there is no reason to worry about it. "What’s the point of dwelling on all the shit and the misery?" He’d like to do as others do, but one senses his melancholy. He is lonely and there is no God.

Finally, O’Rourke concludes that there is no certainty, no freedom from doubt, “there is only will.” We may retain the doubt, but we must still act, and in the acting, we may have enough to sustain us spiritually. It makes sense to me what Ferris says about religions: that they are less concerned about God than they are about the religion itself. And all religions have this problem. They can sometimes even lose sight of morality itself, a failing no involved God should permit.

O’Rourke was free to change his affiliation from the Red Sox to the Chicago Cubs, and take a swing with a cricket bat at a ball that came in fast and low one day in Kathmandu because while he still had doubt, he also had hope. The pitcher was his patient, a patient with perfect teeth.

I had to work hard on this book for many days before I caught glimmers of Ferris' meaning. I don’t think it is because I listened to it rather than read it. The listening helped because the reader, Campbell Scott, was drier and funnier than the voice I had in my head as I read, but it is true I couldn’t mark the sections that wove the religious quest together. They got buried under the avalanche of extraneous associations the story of the dentist practice provoked.

There is nothing wrong with a little existential angst, especially if it makes one doubt and not be an arrogant prick. But Ferris is right. It doesn’t get one anywhere and itself has no meaning. One can only do what needs to be done and go on with it. Unless, of course, you don’t. Go on with it, I mean. That's the other option.


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A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

Atkinson returns to her theme of “What If” in this companion volume to Life After Life in which we met Ursula Todd and many possible iterations of her life. Ursula’s brother Teddy and his family take center stage in this novel and the generation gap is caught beautifully as Atkinson articulates the view from Ted and that of his only daughter, Viola. Viola’s son and daughter, Sunny and Bertie, exhibit an equal distance from understanding their own mother’s life choices and personality.

Kate Atkinson adds an Author’s Note at the end of this story which tells us much of what she was communicating in this novel. “It is about fiction,” she tells us. “We must imagine what we cannot know.” Atkinson chose to look at the Second World War, and makes her central character an RAF airman. Teddy, we wonder at the end, does he even exist? That’s the thing about fiction. All that attention, care, and love lavished, and in the end, they are only characters on paper. But Atkinson caught enough truth in her writing that we know these characters, Ted, Viola, Sunny, are real enough within each of us.

What I like best about Atkinson’s work is her sense of humor about the tragedies of human life. She is a wonderful storyteller on the order of a Bruegel painting: large canvas, detailed figures not all doing the good and great thing. She gives us history, and we see the now, but we also get potential for the future. She does not leave us feeling that the thoughtful or erudite must be gloomy or humorless. With this two-book fiction, she gives us enough distance to see possible outcomes of decisions made now, and we always have the sense that we can change the outcomes if we don’t like where we’re headed. Her characters are complex enough to exhibit the petty and the grand. Once again, we always have a sense of possibility: character is malleable! We can change.

Atkinson tells us that this novel is “about fiction…and the Fall of Man from grace.” She indicates many references in the novel to Utopia, the Garden, the Way and then the falling, rising pattern of the characters, birds, planes correspond to what she is trying to convey. War is a fall from grace. And no matter how we frame the argument, innocents become victims. Atkinson reiterates that she is not a polemicist so wants her characters instead to express doubt and insecurity about the notion of the efficacy of war.

The thing about Atkinson’s fiction is that it is capacious enough to include the traditions of the past with the irresistible freshness and piquancy and social criticism of now. She does a marvelous job of telling a rip-snorting story at the same time she is urging caution. She was always a wonderful writer of fiction. She is in the process of becoming a great one.

A word about the audio production of this title: Hachette Audio did a brilliant job of producing this audio, read with terrific understanding by Alex Jennings. It is highly recommended. However, if one is familiar with Kate Atkinson's work, one will note that Atkinson has a tendency to move easily and quickly forward and back in time and between outlooks of various characters. One shift that was particularly difficult for me to catch in the audio was the story of Augustus. At the end, when I realized the importance of Augustus, I had to admit I didn't understand where he fit in. One glance at the paper copy set things straight for me since Augustus' story is set in different type in paper.

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I recently listened to the NYTimes podcast of reviewer Tom Perrotta and Ruth Franklin talking about this book and I was struck by their insight that this book, in contrast to Life After Life, is about people who don't change very much at all: Viola, especially. Even though we know now that we can rewrite our lives, even our history, Viola holds on to old resentments and punishes herself and her family. Sunny seems to have taken the lessons of the earlier possibilities to heart, however.


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Isa Does it by Isa Chandra Moskowitz

Isa does it again, the title should read. This is simply delicious, filling vegan fare and Isa’s intent was to make the recipes quick enough to make on a weeknight. I have some favorites from this book that will go in my long-term memory.

The ingredients of the Puréed Split Pea Rutabaga Soup are unusual enough that one is glad Isa told us to add star anise. This is memorable, and hearty, and smells so good cooking. Everybody passes up their noses at those big, waxy rutabagas at the grocery, but when they come to my house, they invariably ask what the “secret ingredient” is in my vegetable soups. Sweet potato? Squash? No. That would be the fragrant and sweet rutabaga, slightly orange-fleshed when cooked.

The Briny Caesar Dressing needs to be tasted to be believed. It is laugh-out-loud and talk-loudly-at-a-high-register garlicky goodness. I insisted on salad for days, turning into a minor Caesar myself.

Regarding the Everyday Pad Thai, I’m kind of mad Isa told us about this. She admits she would make it for every meal if she could. That is a little like passing on an addiction, what? It’s is so good, I hid the leftovers and ate them myself after making something fishy or meaty for the others. Even the leftovers are great.

The Sticky Orange Chicky Stir Fry made with her very own Chickpea Cutlets I made with a small can of pineapple juice rather than oranges. It was lovely looking, and the Steamed Chicky Seitan need to be tasted to be believed. This is the creative mind at work, and Isa does it like no one else.

When I first saw this book, I will admit I was underwhelmed. I thought, okay, this looks like homemade family-style vegan creativity. But Isa has something special in her make-up and her food always is surprising, delicious, inventive, assertive, and somehow new. The splendid 2007 Veganomicon by Isa and Terri Hope Romero had been my go-to book for years, until overtaken by Terri Hope Romero's Vegan Eats World (2012). But Isa is an wunderkind in the kitchen and this new offering adds diversity, simplicity, and depth to one's repertoire. I am finding I need this book as well, to keep me healthy, wealthy, and wise.

Not everyday can be a big tangle in the kitchen. This food is simple(r), but fine enough to serve anyone and have everyone go to bed full and happy. My Island Black Bean Burgers with Jamaican Curry looked positively Photoshopped, so beautiful it was. And the Jamaican Jerk Sloppy Joes were divine. This collection is another great success for Isa. I admit to fantasizing about going to an Isa restaurant. Rumor has it she is opening a restaurant in Omaha this spring. A pilgrimage would have been necessary without this book.

P.S. I rarely follow recipes anymore for things like cookies. I note that she riffs, like I do, on the basic formats. When I am in the mood, I add oatmeal and peanuts and chocolate bits…and she has a recipe Kitchen Sink Chocolate Cookies. Try it. I guarantee it will be a favorite. And if you have never added rosemary to chocolate chip cookies, trust her. Her Rosemary Chocolate Chip Cookies have to be tasted. Or substitute raisins. I did that with bread recently and thought I’d died and gone to heaven.


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This is Water by David Foster Wallace

It is mid-April and traditionally this is the time we look forward to graduations, weddings, taking a new step in our lives. David Foster Wallace gave only one commencement address in his foreshortened life. I say only one, but I was surprised to learn he gave one at all. It was to Kenyon University, a small private liberal arts college in Ohio, in 2005. He died in 2008.

Who among us believes we become adults or fully-realized humans the day we receive our diploma? So the commencement speech given by DFW is entirely appropriate to point us toward the new goals we have in our future. Not just how to think, but what to think about.

DFW tells us tiny parables that highlight his message. The first one, about the fish in the water, I will ever associate with him. Two fish swimming together one day encounter an older fish swimming in the opposite direction. “How’s the water?” the older fish asks. DFW suggests we do not become unconscious to what is all around us. One needs to keep one’s awareness close and one’s judgments at a distance. So simple, so thought-provoking.

It’s a short book, probably the shortest ever with his name on the cover. But it gives us a sense of the man and his prescription for living a fulfilling life. One only wishes he could have been able to do that, too.

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The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

Hardcover, 226 pgs, Pub Sep 6th 2012 by Little, Brown and Company (first published 2012), ISBN13: 9780316219365, Lit Awards: New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award Nominee (2013), Guardian First Book Award (2012), PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award (2013), Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction (2013), Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction (2013) Dayton Literary Peace Prize Nominee for Fiction (2013), The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize Nominee (2012), Prix littéraire étranger Le Monde (2013), National Book Award Finalist for Fiction (2012)

One knows one has a classic when time starts to slow and nothing is more important than reading this book at this time. Powers set himself apart with this debut. From whence did such a reserve of talent spring? One cannot credit the "shitty little war": "I don’t want to be tight with anyone because of this. Being here can’t be the reason we’re tight. I won’t let it be." Murph says this in the turning point of the book. All hinges on Bartle’s response: "Naw, man," I said. "You and me, we’re tight just ‘cause. We’d be tight anywhere. It isn’t about this."

Powers’ talent is something that the experience of war distilled to poetry, forcing the mind into remaking an observation finer, smaller, clearer until it fit into one line, one paragraph. "…ducking under the netting stretched from bunker to bunker…I used my hands to keep the sagging fabric from falling over me like a shroud. Thin light rippled down through the voids and fell onto my hands and my body…" I can see those zebra-lines of bright light strobing as Bartle walked.

"half of memory is imagination anyway."

We think sometimes that sending boys to war will make men of them, but instead it makes them a wreck more often than not. Those that survive the experience often just want a peaceful, simple life that they have "maybe not control over, but some agency in. [A veteran] wants to have a life that’s manageable, that he doesn’t feel overwhelmed by." That quote, from a Parade Magazine interview, continues

"…the entirety of the experience is overwhelming, the fighting, the coming home, the readjusting. So, I think, in [Bartle’s] case, he has a desire to live simply, to just be ordinary."
And
"I think a lot of the guys I know and a lot of people I’ve talked to, what they want is very often what most people want, a kind of simple life, a livelihood, a family, people who care about them, people they can care about."

At first it seemed Powers had created a series of linked stories, each chapter complete enough to stand on its own. But then I got into the rhythm of his tale and could see his underlying structure. I loved the way he handled us. We were told how but not why, and gradually we came to understand. The C.I.D. investigator changed “incident” to “accident” in the course of their conversation, did you notice? I knew then that Bartle was going to survive the war.

“Then it was spring again in all the spoiled cities of America.”

What a shock it must be to return home where one does not feel responsible for saving anything.

"I know there are exceptions, but in my experience, to a man, every person that I served with wanted to contribute to our country, felt that it was something that they could do on behalf of their fellow citizens."
And
"It’s more a realization that life is precious and fragile, and taking it for granted just seems kind of baffling." [Parade interview]

"I was the curator of a small unvisited museum."

One walks away from the story, the language, wondering about the man. Powers began with poetry, with "Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting," in fact. This poem, in his Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting: Poems debut collection of poetry by the same name, names Private Bartle:

"I tell her I love her like not killing
or ten minutes of sleep
beneath the low rooftop wall
on which my rifle rests.

I tell her in a letter that will stink,
when she opens it,
of bolt oil and burned powder
and the things it says.

I tell her how Private Bartle says, offhand,
that war is just us
making little pieces of metal
pass through each other."

This novel exposes the great emotions to which we are subject. It has economy, focus, lyricism, and a unique style. It looks very much to me as though Powers has a great gift, and we have been given one, too.


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Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting by Kevin Powers

Hardcover, 96 pgs, Pub Apr 1st 2014 by Little, Brown and Company, ISBN13: 9780316401081, Lit Awards: T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry Nominee (2014), Forward Prize Nominee for Best First Collection (2014), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Poetry (2014)

What strikes a newcomer to Powers is his restraint. He is the matte black of soundless, reflection-less pitch in which a cry does not resonate. His screams are visual things, and we readers have had our eardrums burst.

"The truth has no spare mercy, see."
-–from "Death, Mother and Child"

I read Powers’ debut book of poetry first and then by Section Three, read his poetry concurrently with The Yellow Birds, Powers’ classic story of wartime Iraq. I found that although up to now I do not commonly read poetry, Letter… nods to prose in a way that seems reassuringly familiar. And when I began his National Book Award winning novel The Yellow Birds, I saw a poetic sensibility in his prose. Perhaps the best writers of war fiction have poetry in their literary makeup, like Remarque, and Graves. (Some argue that sections of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is like a list poem.)

Poems are a sort of shorthand: an efficient economy of words. Much can be said but whatever is meant must be pared to its essence, carved close. It suits war…as a subject and as a propellant. Sometimes shorthand is all you can manage. Poetry can act as a grounding tool, rolling the words in the mind and the mouth until they come out making some kind of sense. It helps one to see, to really notice, and to organize one’s thoughts coherently.

In an interview with the magazine of the same name, Powers tells us:

"Poetry was the beginning of my thinking, a way of asking, Is this even an answerable question? How do I approach it? I wanted to be honest about both the experience and the difficulty of talking about it."

He wrote the title poem before the novel and many of the ones in this book were begun during his writing The Yellow Birds. Poetry, the process of writing it, concentrates the mind, and forces one to choose words, and to picture the literary landscape.

"This idea of this particular soldier [Bartle] with these particular concerns had occurred to me before I realized I wanted to write a novel. In fact it was seeing that these same thematic elements, these same questions kept appearing – essentially I was writing different versions of the same poem over and over again. I just needed a larger canvas." From June 2013 Guardian interview

Letter…, then, is one kind of art in the service of another. Powers mentions the work of printmaker and sculptor Käthe Kollwitz in "Death, Mother and Child", whose art is also used in the service of another: "Kollwitz was right. Death is an etching." Art doesn’t change the truth, but only gives it voice.

"You came home
with nothing, and you still
have most of it left."
--from "Leaving McGuire Veteran’s Hospital for the Last Time"

In this collection I felt a building of understanding. Whether that was Powers' skill or my own development, I cannot say, but somewhere shortly after halfway I was hammered by the experience of reading these deceptively simple poems. The accretion of awareness made me reach for his earlier novel, which I hadn't yet read, to see what I missed.

NPR’s Abigail Deutsch, in her review of Letters…, says that the collection is good, but uneven. She names one poem, “Improvised Explosive Device,” as having corny effects. I happened to like that one, which begins:

If this poem had wires
coming out of it,
you would not read it.
…If this poem had wires coming out of it,
you would call the words devices…

In the recent award ceremony for the PEN Hemingway Awards at the JFK Library in Boston, the author Geraldine Brooks mentioned that Ernest Hemingway once said that “War is the only subject there is, and those who don’t agree haven’t had a chance to experience it.” I guess perhaps that’s so, but war comes in many forms and Powers seems to understand that. “I wonder how do we justify the things that we do, because it always seems like we are doing terrible things.” [Powers in the Guardian interview]

Powers is writing a new novel, about the murder of a former plantation owner just after the American civil war has ended. The story involves the consequences of this murder and how it affects the community he lorded over.


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