The Internet is My Religion by Jim Gilliam

Paperback, 194 pgs, Pub by NationBuilder (first published January 1st 2015), ISBN13: 9780996110402

You’re probably going to think a free memoir isn’t much—not interesting, not well-written, not worth bothering with. I picked it up at a conference not knowing it was a memoir. It sat around my house cluttering things until I decided to throw it out—but not until I glanced through it first.

Much later the same day it is all revolving in my head, leaving me feeling wonder, awe, thunderstruck surprise, joy, awe again. This is one helluva story, a creation story. a bildungsroman, an odyssey. And our hero—yes, emphatically, hero—emerges an adult, a moral adult caring about his fellow humans. His fellow humans care about him as well.

He is not bitter, or cynical, or any one of the things that lesser people may experience along the dark and scary road that can be our lives. His life surely trumps that of most of us, simply in terms of size: he is 6’9” and was down to 145 pounds at the height of his death-defying illness.

Since he tell us of his illness in the first pages, I am not giving away the story. No. That honor is still reserved for him because the bad things that happen are not really, ever, the story. It is what we did after that. And what Jim Gilliam did was to grab every bit of life he had left and use it.

By then he had discovered that God was not to be found in some cold pile of cathedral rocks somewhere or in the thundering denunciations of false prophets on TV. For him, God showed when we gathered together, in person or connected online, caring about and for one another, working towards a better, more perfect future. He calls that finding of connection a holy experience, and he is not wrong.

Gilliam is a technologist, and as such, one would expect his skills would not lie in writing. But this book, even if he had help, is beautifully done, full of moment, real insight, propulsion, and discovery. In a way, it is the tale of every man, though not every man has gotten there yet.

He will describe the moment he discovers falseness in the lessons taught him by his religious teachers, the moment the world begins to unravel around his family, the moment he discovers he must, no matter what, follow his own path to understanding.

What is so appealing about this journey is that Gilliam is guileless. He is not trying to teach us anything. He is explaining his journey, what he saw, and tells us what he thinks about what he saw. It is utterly fascinating because he has so much understanding of the events in his life.

Gilliam’s father and mother both were math majors and computer scientists of sorts in the computer field's early days. For business reasons his father lost an opportunity to develop one of the first software programs for personal computers at IBM and consequently turned to fundamentalist religion.

Gilliam grew up steeped in the language and an understanding of what computers could do, but was restricted from taking full advantage by the religiosity of his parents. He himself was very good at thinking like a scientist and took advanced classes while in high school so that he could enter college as a sophomore.

The hill separating him from his intellectual development became steeper just as he was finishing high school. I am not going to spoil the story arc. At no point did this 180-page small format paperback ever become weighted down with intent or causation. We just have the clean progression of one boy into man into—that word again—hero.

His understanding that there is something godly in human connection, in striving together for good, is exactly what people discover in moments of human happiness and fulfillment. While he rejected the morality in which he was raised, as I did, I wonder if somehow it wasn’t good preparation for recognizing morality when he saw it, finally.

Personally, I can’t think of a more absorbing, unputdownable story. Get it if you can. It is a wonderful, thought-provoking personal history.



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On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Hardcover, 256 pgs, Expected publication: June 4th 2019 by Penguin Press, ISBN13: 9780525562023

This work is called a novel but it is a ball of flame tossed into a dark night, blinding, brilliant, searing. Who knows if it is poetry or novel or memoir; the language fills the mouth and is saturated with truth. We recognize it. We’ve tasted it. We are pained by it. It still hurts.

Something here is reminiscent of the epic poetry of Homer. Life's brutality, man’s frailty, the odyssey, the clash of civilizations, the incomparable language undeniably capturing human experience, these things make Vuong someone who heightens our awareness, deepens our experience, shocks us into acknowledgement of our shared experiences. What have we in common with a Greek of ancient times singing of a war and the personal trials of man? What have we in common with a gay immigrant boy writing of war and the personal trials of man?

The story is clear enough but fragmentary. In a Nov 2017 LitHub interview, Vuong tells us

”I’m writing a novel composed of woven inter-genre fragments. To me, a book made entirely out of unbridged fractures feels most faithful to the physical and psychological displacement I experience as a human being. I’m interested in a novel that consciously rejects the notion that something has to be whole in order to tell a complete story. I also want to interrogate the arbitrary measurements of a “successful” literary work, particularly as it relates to canonical Western values. For example, we traditionally privilege congruency and balance in fiction, we want our themes linked, our conflicts “resolved,” and our plots “ironed out.” But when one arrives at the page through colonized, plundered, and erased histories and diasporas, to write a smooth and cohesive novel is to ultimately write a lie. In a way, I’m curious about a work that rejects its patriarchal predecessors as a way of accepting its fissured self. I think, perennially, of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée. This resistance to dominant convention is not only the isolated concern of marginalized writers—but all writers—and perhaps especially white writers, who can gain so much by questioning how the ways we value art can replicate the very oppressive legacies we strive to end.”

The novel he speaks of is this one. I did not understand that paragraph when I first read it as well as I do now. I am more aware, too, having looked closely for the Western world’s acknowledged historical tendency to erase or ignore pieces of experience not congruent with their own worldview.

The language Vuong brings is exquisite and extraordinary: “The fluorescent hums steady above them, as if the scene is a dream the light is having.” “…the thing about beauty is that it’s only beautiful outside of itself.” “The carpet under his bare feet is shiny as spilled oil from years of wear.” “…repeating piles of rotted firewood, the oily mounds gone mushy…” “He had a thick face and pomaded hair, even at this hour, like Elvis on on his last day on earth.”

Vuong repeats motifs to tie the experiences of one person to the rest of his life, to tie one person’s experiences to those of others: “I’m at war.” “We cracked up. We cracked open.” “…you never see yourself if you’re the sun. You don’t even know where you are in the sky.” “…my cheek bone stinging from the first blow.” “I was yellow.”

A teen, immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam with his mother, grandmother, and aunt finds himself fleeing his “shitty high school to spend [his] days in New York lost in library stacks,” from whence he, first in this family to go to college, squanders his opportunity on an English degree.

The teen discovers his gayness and does not flee it, though his white lover agonizes and denies all his life. We watch that boy fall, wither, die under the scourge of fentanyl and opioid addiction and Vuong places the scourge in the wider context of an awry world.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the fragmented, shattered nature of the tale, there is a real momentum to this novel, Vuong telling us things not articulated in this way before: a familiar war from a new angle, the friction burn of the immigrant experience, the roughness of gay sex, the madness of living untethered in the world. The language is so precise, so surprising, so wide-awake and fresh, that we read to see.

Last year, in September of 2018, I reviewed Vuong’s first book of poetry, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. The poems had many of the same tendencies toward epic poetry—they were big, and meaningful. Below I have attached a short video of Vuong reading from that collection to give you some idea of his power.



Among his honors, he is a recipient of the 2014 Ruth Lilly/Sargent Rosenberg fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a 2016 Whiting Award, and the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize. He is an Assistant Professor in the MFA Program for Writers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is thirty years old.



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Shortest Way Home by Pete Buttigieg

Hardcover, 352 pgs, Pub February 12th 2019 by Liveright, ISBN13: 9781631494369

Since beginning Buttigieg's book, I have travelled across the country and spoken with lots of folks outside of my usual cabal. Nearly everyone I spoke with had heard of Buttigieg, current Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, running for President as a Democratic candidate. Only one of the people I spoke with mentioned his homosexuality as a reason for his possible failure to connect, and the same person was also skeptical about his age.

Buttigieg himself would remind voters that his age has been the thing that conversely has energized people, particularly older voters, who recognize that their generation left his generation with a big problem when it comes to climate change. Older people who have no stake in what will come are unlikely to move the needle as far and as fast as it needs to move. Time to step aside and hope for fresh ideas. At least that is what Buttigieg is peddling.

When I listen to him talk, I agree. I just want all the old men and women who have left both parties in a shambles with attempts to hold onto power (What power do they exhibit, may I ask? It’s positively derisive.) to leave the stage asap.

This book is easy enough to read, though does not rank with Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father which broke the mold on literary presidential memoirs. Truthfully, I picked up the book in the midst of an infatuation with Buttigieg’s calm sense and blunt assessments, and before I finished, I felt the bloom had left the rose. I still admire him and definitely consider him a frontrunner but I am not infatuated anymore. This is a good thing. I go into my support of his candidacy with a clear head.

Buttigieg is genuinely talented in languages, and it makes one wish we learned what he did from his linguist mother. One of my favorite of his stories is when he told Navy recruiters that he’d studied Arabic in hopes of landing an intelligence job at a desk somewhere and they wrote down that he’d studied “aerobics.” That is classic SNAFU.

Buttigieg describes the feeling at rallies for presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. The two rallies had the ambiance of a party, but while Bernie’s parties seem joyous and goofy—Bernie with the finch, Bernie riding a unicorn, buttons featuring glasses and hair—Donald Trump’s parties have a edge, like a party where “you’re not sure if a fight will break out.” This is good storytelling. We know exactly what he is saying and can feel the roil.

What kills me about Buttigieg is that he is so quiet about some of his biggest accomplishments, e.g., he applied for a Rhodes scholarship and got it, he decided to run for president and he is a frontrunner. He doesn't thrash about explaining his calculations: a nobody mayor of a small city calmly and quietly declares an exploratory committee and begins criss-crossing the country before anyone else has even thought to get into the race and captures a lot of press because of his youth and his self-possession.

He could see the Democratic party had lost its way, punctuated by the loss in 2016, to say nothing of the turmoil in what used to be a Republican party. He could see that sitting back and watching ‘the clash of the white hairs’ was not going to advance us because these folks appear bewildered by where we have landed. He thought he could be useful, pointing out the obvious and taking steps to address some of our most urgent issues. Gosh darn it if he isn’t.

One of the more startling and interesting things Buttigieg said about government is that

“some of the most important policy dynamics of our time have to do with the relationships, and the tension, between state and local government.”

I pulled that quote out for you to see because I think this is something national pundits and talking heads miss completely.

Way back in the 1970’s and 80’s Lee Atwater, a Republican strategist, figured this out and moved to capturing the heartland. That strategy has brought us gerrymandering and court-packing and other state-level indications of one-party dominance. But local governments are finding that counties walking in lock-step to the state does not always work for their particular conditions. There is great inequality as a result of GOP leadership at the state level. What is government about anyway?

A Koch Brothers-funded think tank called the American Legislative Exchange Council is pointed to as generating model legislation for adoption in state legislatures and finds sympathetic state actors to carry the bills.

“Legislation is often nearly identical from state to state—so much so that journalists sometimes find copy-paste errors where the wrong state is mentioned in the text of a bill. Tellingly, by 2014, ALEC had decided to expand its model beyond the state level—not by going federal, but instead targeting local policy through a new offshoot called the American City County Exchange.”

Democrats must be willing to compete in red zones—many times it is only because they are not competing that they have less support.

Buttigieg makes the point that many folks got involved in local and county government as a matter of course in their lives, as one aspect of community participation, and they chose the most organized party to help them on their way. That would be the Republican party. They are pretty inculcated with the party line after a few years, but they may not agree with everything the party posts. That is why Indianans could vote for both Mike Pence and Pete Buttigieg. Voters really can read, think, make up their own minds.

We have to be in it to win it. I am more and more reluctant to declare myself Democrat after seeing some of the shenanigans local, state, and national leaders get up to. But I’ll be damned if I’ll sit by and watch the plotters and weavers poison the well. If ever there was a time to stand up and participate with your voices, now is that time. Choose your issues, decide at which level you can intervene, look to see where you might have some degree of influence, and get engaged. No more cheering from the sidelines.




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Closer Than You Know by Brad Parks

Hardcover, 402 pgs, Pub March 6th 2018 by Dutton Books, ISBN13: 9781101985625

Brad Parks’ compulsively readable standalone crime thriller is nearly flawless. The author takes risks by making his protagonist a woman, a young white mother married to a black man. While he might make a misstep or two in how a woman might react to rape or a first-time mother might react to being wrongly accused of several crimes and then having her child taken by social services, he has a strong enough case that we keep reading to see how he will explain it all.

Technically, the book moves smoothly between points of view, from accused, to police, to perp, to innocent victim. Our own opinions are in flux as we get pushed and pulled with every new development in the case against the mother. She is a victim several times over, and we can explain her reticence to spill her guts and tell all she knows to her attorney by first considering her foster-care background.

The whole builds up to a situation in which good people can get hurt by other well-meaning people because everyone is being manipulated by normal human perceptions and reactions. Preet Bharara, former Chief Prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, recently wrote in his memoir that one thing he learned in his time at one of the most visible courts in the land that “[a]nyone is capable of anything.”

I read this book at first because the author is the son of one of my brother’s best friends, but I am pleased to be able to report that the skill, talent, and sheer dare-devil chutzpah of the author is on full display. Brad Parks takes risks but is able to pull off the heist. Congratulations, Brad Parks!



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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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Becoming by Michelle Obama

Hardcover, 426 pgs, Pub Nov 13th 2018 by Crown, ISBN13: 978152476313, Lit Awards: Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Memoir & Autobiography (2018)

Who would have guessed there would be two such popular and talented writers in one family as there are in the Obamas? I guess we will have to wait to see if their kids, Malia and Sasha, have inherited the gene. Michelle’s book is ravishingly interesting and so smoothly written I was happy sitting there and reading it at the neglect of less pleasurable duties.

The fairy-tale aspect of growing up “with a disabled dad in a too-small house with not much money in a starting-to-fail neighborhood” and ascending to the most admired and coveted house in the land is not emphasized until the last pages. Michelle looks back at Barack’s eight years in office, and how he was followed by a con man with a filthy mouth. The contrast between the two men is not subtle, and neither is Michelle’s distress.

Before the disappointing turnover at the end of Barack’s time in office, the story is filled with hope—hope that Americans will see change for the better in their opportunities, schooling, wages, and leadership. Michelle’s emphasis mostly stays squarely on her own hopes rather than those of her husband, and focuses on her plans to institute mentoring for teens of color, and the building of a system for providing good food for kids in schools.

Michelle made no bones about the fact that she was more a homebody than her cerebral husband who, in one anecdote, laid in bed late one night gazing at the ceiling. When asked what he was thinking about, he sheepishly answered, “income inequality.”

Michelle had come from a family that was large and loud and lived close by one another in Chicago. After claiming an undergraduate degree at Princeton, Michelle moved on to Harvard Law, taking advantage of the momentum. the opportunity, and the expectation that she would achieve what her parents did not. She may not have been timid, but she wasn’t exactly expansive in her view of herself or her life. She acknowledges Barack introduced her to a larger world with different but equally important personal and societal goals and expectations that are shared by millions.

I have seen in comments about this book that Michelle dodged important questions about Barack’s time in office that involved decisions the two of them would have made together, e.g., Reverend Wright, etc. and while her opinion may have added something to the narrative, I tend to agree with “write your own darn story” pushback. Michelle’s considered take on what it meant to her and her family when some people seemed to lay in wait to broadcast misinterpretations of her campaign stump speeches makes it clear we are lucky to get anything more. It is easy for us to forget Michelle was an actual surrogate for Barack. She had a heavy speechmaking schedule and drew such crowds that she finally scored a plane and a team of her own.

Probably the thing I am most impressed with—and what Michelle herself is most proud of—is her raising two consequential young girls in the fishbowl that is the White House. The girls survived, even thrived, in that place, and hopefully will have absorbed some of the grace and resilience of their parents. What we don’t know is what Michelle’s next act will be, for she is still a relatively young and IVy- trained lawyer. We know she doesn’t like politics, never has, but would still like to make a contribution.

Just having withstood the pressures of the White House without cracking and having taken the time to write a book that encourages others to see themselves as aspirants to national office is something to be thankful for. I am also grateful she provided the home life and support Barack needed in such a difficult job with such a difficult Congress. It wasn’t easy for either of them and in many ways it did not turn out as they had envisioned.

The Obamas could have had a more placid life without trying to handle affairs of state, so their attempt to share their strong family values was a kind of blessing. The book is a wonderfully smooth read (or audio!), and is hard-to-put-down. The audio is read by Michelle herself and therefore places the emphases where she wanted. Published by Crown and Random House Audio in North America, this book sold more copies in the U.S. than any other book in 2018 and will be published in 24 languages.

A section of color photographs is reason enough to choose the book over the audio, but the audio is interesting because Michelle herself reads it. She has chosen to discuss things we are intrinsically interested in, like choosing a college, a major, a job, and a husband, and while many of us have had similar decisions to make we would not have had Michelle’s set of choices. The book is absolutely worthwhile.



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Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong

Paperback, 89 pgs, Pub April 5th 2016 by Copper Canyon Press, ISBN 155659495X, Lit Awards: T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry (2018), Forward Prize for Best First Collection (2017), Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry (2017), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Poetry (2016)

Published in 2016, this is Ocean Vuong’s first full collection. We will never know how a boy emerges, so young, with a talent so great. A poem chosen at random lights deep, protected nodes in our brain and attaches to our viscera. We recognize his work as surely as we appreciate a painting, or a piece of music. He appears a conduit, not a creator.

One of the poems in this collection has a title referencing a Mark Rothko painting. Glancing at it, we know immediately why he pairs it with these words.

Untitled (Blue, Green, and Brown, 1952)

The TV said the planes have hit the buildings.
& I said Yes because you asked me
to stay. Maybe we pray on our knees because god
only listens when we're this close
to the devil. There is so much I want to tell you.
How my greatest accolade was to walk
across the Brooklyn Bridge
& not think of flight. How we live like water: wetting
a new tongue with no telling
what we've been through. They say the sky is blue
but I know it's black seen through too much distance.
You will always remember what you were doing
when it hurts the most. There is so much
I need to tell you--but I only earned
one life & I took nothing. Nothing. Like a pair of teeth
at the end. The TV kept saying The planes...
The planes... & I stood waiting in the room
made of broken mockingbirds. Their wings throbbing
into four blurred walls. & you were there.
You were the window.

Rothko's Blue, Green, and Brown, 1952

It was the phrase How we live like water: wetting a new tongue with no telling what we've been through. That phrase stopped me.

In an interview with The Guardian, Vuong says “life is always more complicated than the headlines allow; poetry comes in when the news is not enough.” Vuong won awards for this collection, and gained recognition. He now is an associate professor in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and writing a novel.

In an interview with Lit Hub Vuong explains

“I’m writing a novel composed of woven inter-genre fragments. To me, a book made entirely out of unbridged fractures feels most faithful to the physical and psychological displacement I experience as a human being. I’m interested in a novel that consciously rejects the notion that something has to be whole in order to tell a complete story. I also want to interrogate the arbitrary measurements of a “successful” literary work, particularly as it relates to canonical Western values. For example, we traditionally privilege congruency and balance in fiction, we want our themes linked, our conflicts “resolved,” and our plots “ironed out.” But when one arrives at the page through colonized, plundered, and erased histories and diasporas, to write a smooth and cohesive novel is to ultimately write a lie.”

 Vuong brings with him the possibility of a vision that is articulate enough to share, brave enough to bolster. It's a kind of blessing, a grace note we don't really deserve, his voice.

Vuong’s poetry is available as an ebook from many libraries. He is what we call a ‘literary light.’



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The Politics of Resentment by Katherine J. Cramer

Paperback, 225 pgs, Pub Mar 23rd 2016 by University of Chicago Press, ISBN13: 9780226349114, Series: Chicago Studies in American Politics

The subtitle of this academic study is “Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin & the Rise of Scott Walker.” Professor Katherine Cramer visited rural groups in extra-urban parts of Wisconsin for five years to see how people perceived the government in Madison and if it was serving their needs.

What she uncovered is a vast resentment of country folk towards their urban counterparts: rural dwellers believed their tax dollars were siphoned off to pay for government employees in the cities who in turn created regulations which strangled enjoyment of country life, e.g., fishing and hunting, among other things.

Cramer warns those of us whose opinions differ not to consider rural inhabitants ignorant, but to consider they have perceptions upon which their opinions are formed and these perceptions are formed as a result of their rural residency. I am tempted to apply the very strictures several of her interviewees use throughout her period of study: if I believe it, true or not, doesn’t that make it valid?

I thought country people were to be admired for their down-home values and common sense. If you could only get a copy of this book to read one of the final sets of reactions to the recall vote of Walker in 2012 which Cramer painfully transcribed, starting about page 196, it is the short course to understanding the rest of the book.

This was a difficult book for me to read because it was so infuriating. The country folk she spoke with met in small groups, one of which was a group of businessmen who met every day in the middle of the morning for a game of dice--'just for an hour or so,' they defended it.

I’m sorry, but anyone who then tells me that they do not consider other people know the meaning of hard work sounds positively ludicrous. I’m not here to judge them, and couldn’t care less what they do with the most productive hours of the day, but they really shouldn’t be pointing any fingers.

It turns out from my reading of these “meetings” is that people sit around and voluably winge for an hour or so, complaining about this and that, what they don’t have and what they wish they did have. Taxes come in for a large percentage of the discussion points and since I come from a state known for high taxes, Taxachusetts, I am wondering what on earth their property taxes could be that they so cramp their style, what with all that “hard work” they keep on about.

The groups internally trade inaccuracies and then promulgate them around town. It is terribly frustrating to hear them talk about how the government (Fish & Game) might come in and look in their freezers for all the fish they stocked there, proof of their illegal overfishing. No, I don’t understand, even after reading these five years of interviews, what these people want. They want less regulation they say, even saying they’d prefer drunk driving and pollution controls be rolled back.

I give Professor Cramer credit for being able to stick it out. She was prepared when the state went belly-up for old Scott Walker, enemy No. 1 of public employee unions. Some of the comments about how there were people being paid excessive overtime sounds much like what I read in the Boston Globe this week, with some public employees making hundreds of thousands of dollars in excessive overtime charges.

It happens. It doesn’t happen everywhere and it doesn’t happen all the time. (It happens, I might add, with people who think they are smart when they are not.) The crime has been exposed, the people will pay it back and then go to jail. That doesn’t mean we have to throw out the system we set up to ensure fairness. Cramer concludes her study with these ideas that sound remarkably familiar in today’s political commentary:

“One can view as misinformation or ignorance the perceptions among rural folks that they are victims of distributive injustice, but the conclusion that people vote the way they do because they are stupid is itself pretty shallow. It overlooks that much of political understanding is not about facts; it is about how we see those facts.”

Indeed. Well, these folks may not be stupid, but they are sure acting like it. Rural consciousness indeed. If you don’t go looking for the truth, you may not stumble upon it.

Cramer's research wasn't wasted, though it made me plenty steamed. Clearly these folks had opinions, but those opinions, I believe, could be changed if someone actually engaged them with a few factoids. The mere fact they did not run Cramer out of town on a rail means they just want to be listened to...at some point, there is no reason to presume they wouldn't listen to someone else with a good argument.

Also, the fact they were meeting at all and were, to however small a degree, interested in local goings on, e.g., regulations, taxes, etc. means they are fertile ground for new ideas. They can at least conceive of public policy. Give them the kit & caboodle of figuring out fairness & I think we would be surprised if those old progressive notions don't come floating to the surface.

What politicians and educators have to do is get out more--go to the hinterland and bring a few good ideas, some failed policies, and a few debunked lies to show side-by-side. I think there is possibility that these folks will rise to the challenge, now that we know they have nothing but perceptions to back up their feelings of resentment. They obviously like getting together to talk things out. Give 'em the numbers--and, by the way, give us their numbers!

Cramer did not give us the actual facts re taxes, etc. That would have helped us to figure out if these folks just can't do math or if they actually have grievance. She did mention something about the cost of sewer (which in my town is calculated as twice the price of water). There, for a family of two, the bill was something in the vicinity of $53/month. The majority of folks have incomes of $11K/yr. This is income, mind you, not including savings or property. If those country folk had a look at what city folk with that kind of income had to deal with, they might not be so full of anger.

Here is an excerpt of Coleen Marlo reading the audiobook:




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The Country Life by Rachel Cusk

Audiobook, Pub Oct 1st 2014 by Recorded Books, Inc.; Hardcover, 341 pgs, Pub Jan 1st 1999 by Picador USA (first published June 20th 1997) ISBN13: 9780312198480, Lit Awards: Somerset Maugham Award (1998)

This novel is a fantastically successful parody of a Eighteenth Century novel in which a young woman encounters all sorts of terrors in her first solo foray into the wilds of the country in Sussex. I had the advantage of listening to this novel, brilliantly read by Jenny Sterlin, produced by Recorded Books, but I like to think I would have picked up on the melodrama even if I’d read it.

As an undergraduate reading 18thC literature, I was tasked in one demanding class to “write an paper in the style” of one of the authors we studied that term. This novel by Cusk would be a brilliant fulfillment of that requirement. One would swear one were reading a modern Gothic romance in the style of our very earliest novels like Weiland; or The Transformation by Charles Brockton Brown, written in 1798 or Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein.

All the intrigue, drama, and fear of a young woman’s fancy are amply on display: creaking floorboards, the dangers of walking in the country on public footpaths, leering oversexed male acquaintances, dwarfish figures whose intent, whether good or bad, is undetermined. Stella is simply overtaken with every possible obstacle to living well in Sussex at Franchise Farm, a large, ancient, impressive farming estate owned in perpetuity by the Maddens. Stella has been engaged to be a companion to the Matthew Madden, a teenaged handicapped scion of the family.

Cusk works over our sympathies in this novel so that every couple pages we are changing allegiances with the characters. The story has a darker heart than we’re prepared for by all the ridiculous drama of Stella’s first days at Franchise Farm, but this is meant to be discovered after several hours with the characters, so i won’t reveal it here. Suffice it to say that the overblown prose and extraordinary dilemmas faced by our narrator contrast in a comic way with the utter ordinariness of the rest of the characters, all of whom find themselves watching Stella with some degree of alarm and surprise as she settles in.

I can’t remember when I’ve enjoyed a novel as much, it being so completely unexpected, truly hilarious and absurd, with our heroine, through no intent of her own, ending up several days completely blotto on stolen vodka. The teenaged charge Matthew bears some responsibility for taking advantage of his much-older companion, never having seen someone with as little control or suitability for her position as the lovely Stella. As his mother says volubly, “He’s not retarded, Stella, he’s just disabled.” And very clever and interested he is, too, in all that goes on around him. For once he sees someone nearly as helpless as he is, and he rises to the challenge.

The finish is heartfelt and warm, and we discover that Stella is indeed suited to her position, and in fact we want more of her stumbling ways since she manages to bring out the best in everyone. We have been aghast at the blunt language and contentious attitudes of many of the folks we meet. But they can recognize vulnerability when they see it and do not crush those suffering from it.

I am particularly thrilled to read a novel that describes—and asks us to imagine—what life might actually be like for someone disabled. The group meetings Matthew must attend outside of his school hours are truly horrifying—all authoritarian control and insistence on talking about one’s feelings. Matthew is often overlooked and not appreciated for what he can do well.

Every novel I have read by Cusk is very different from its predecessors but equally funny. Her work is not losing its charm, no matter that I have read nearly all her oeuvre at once. I am even more convinced of my earlier assessment—certainly that Cusk is my favorite living author, but also that she is one of the greats working today. She is especially relevant in a world in which sexual relations have entered the stage of “let’s put it all on the table, dear.”

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My 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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Elmet by Fiona Mozley

Paperback, 311 pgs, Pub Aug 10th 2017 by JM Originals, ISBN13: 9781473660540, Lit Awards: Man Booker Prize Shortlist (2017), Dylan Thomas Prize Nominee for Longlist (2018), Women's Prize for Fiction Nominee for Longlist (2018), RSL Ondaatje Prize Nominee for Shortlist (2018)

In hindsight, the resonance of this dark and fierce debut on the stage of world literature should have been the warning bell that #MeToo movement was about to extract its penalty. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2017, this novel’s strengths are in describing a natural world that seems almost untouched in its primitiveness, a world that one would swear were long gone.

A family of father, daughter, and son build their own dwelling on land passed on by a long-dead wife and mother. A wealthy landowner nearby likewise claims the land but recognizes the family from when the mother lived there. A convoluted agreement is worked out whereby the wealthy man deeds the land to the family in return for fealty.

The story is old as Moses but were for modern day appliances and tools, we’d not know the exploitation continues so blatantly today. Mozley brilliantly describes the bump and thrum of life on a working woodlot which yields most of the family’s needs for game and heat. The father, a very large man, earned a living early on by bare-knuckle fighting for cash. He was cool-minded and strong; he always won.

The daughter and son were seen as strange among the townspeople who knew of them. They were self-sufficient and proud, and did not attend any local school, though they were of an age to do so. The boy was slight in frame and lovely in countenance; the girl became a tall and strapping and arresting-looking woman. It is said the son took after the mother. We learn that the daughter takes after the father.

This was a very good choice for the international fiction prize, evoking as it does the history of the Celtic Britons, the earliest known settlers of the region in 4th Century B.C. The epigraph itself, a quote by Ted Hughes, speaks of Elmet as "the last independent Celtic kingdom in England...a sanctuary for refugees from the law." The story itself is rich and complete, the bullying nature of wealthy landowners charted throughout the ages. Insular and suspicious townsfolk make an appearance, as does a singular woman who lives alone in the hills.

A fight scene near the end of the book registers viscerally. The momentum and brutality derived from that moment electrifies our experience through the end, the final scenes almost changing the nature of the novel despite the foreshadowing given earlier. This may be why Mozley added the italicized chapters earlier on--to warn us of great changes to come. Perhaps ideally these wouldn't be necessary, but then the sense of time and distance and distress of the narration wouldn't be as clear.

There are so many intriguing aspects of this novel one is tempted to cut Mozley some slack if some fulsome descriptions might be considered extraneous to the thrust of the action. The character of Vivien, for instance, may have been developed somewhat beyond her remit. Considering the vast talent arrayed for the award last year, it is difficult to expect a debut would have prevailed against such talented entries as Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, which did end up taking home the prize. But this was, without a doubt, a very strong debut indeed.



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A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother by Rachel Cusk

Paperback, 224 pgs, Pub Mar 1st 2003 by St. Martins Press-3pl (first published 2002), ISBN13: 9780312311308

This work was initially published in 2002, and fifteen years later we learn that it had a rocky reception. Womenkind may indeed be split into two irreconcilable halves because I have no idea what could incense people about this book: I laughed through it, and when I wasn’t laughing, I was marking her passages to relate later, so clearly did they capture the ambiguity we feel between love and distress at being so loved and/or needed ourselves.

This memoir of the circumstance surrounding the conception, birth, and first years of a child’s life is really a tight series of essays. Cusk manages to capture moments that illuminate the despair mothers can feel when they discover the true disorientation that comes with bringing the baby home—feelings like cotton wool has supplanted one’s brain and that one cannot find the wherewithal to make a plan—the whole exhaustion of it.

No one really prepared her for the sense of having one’s life hijacked—she admits she’d jumped right over references to children or infants in the writing of those she’d enjoyed before. The children part wasn’t relevant and didn’t matter—a little like me when as a teen I skipped the foreign names in any book I read. I would note the first letter of the name and gauge the length of the word by blurring my eyes. I could distinguish individuals by something distinctive the author had shared about them, so why even bother to learn to pronounce their names?

Cusk’s own story is different than everyone else’s: her daughter “sucks well,” sucking for hours at a time, giving her a short break before starting up again. The nurses she consulted all considered this to be good news, generously praising mother and child for being able to move onto the next phase, bottle-feeding, whenever she had spare hours to sterilize the equipment and make up the formula—or pump and freeze her own milk to put in sterilized bottles.

With motherhood, Cusk has discovered her presence “has accrued a material value, as if I had been fitted with a taxi meter.” There was never any slack, no “lubricant empty hours” in which nothing is planned or paid for. When interviewing babysitters, sometimes she might find herself giving overly-detailed instructions about every aspect of her daughter’s care, as though the caregiver could in some way understand “what it was like to be me.”

A very funny but telling paragraph or two is given over to describing a scene she happened upon one night on a television documentary in which a pampered American housewife admits she would prefer her child get less attention from her South American nanny rather than have the nanny care for the American children as though they were her own: “I’m like, you know, put her down, she knows how to sit in the hot tub!” A hot tub. A baby.

Towards the end of this memoir is a chapter entitled “Don’t Forget to Scream!” about the family’s move to a university town. Mother appears to miss her London life in the way she had missed it when she had the baby. The baby is a toddler now, and when invited to the local play group housed in a church hall, she is manhandled by the other children. Mother could see that successful mothering ventures contained a measure of military organization:

“…conscription to the world of orthodox parenthood demands all the self-abnegation, the surrender to conformity, the relish for the institutional, that the term implies…Here the restaurants had high chairs and changing facilities, the buses wide doors and recesses for prams.”

The chaos of living among those outside the …hood cannot be found here in the privileged, patriarchal enclave of the university town where everyone asks, “What does your husband do?”

Cusk is out of step, gloriously, and can tell us what we look like, those of us who haven’t stepped back long enough to think about it. The mothers in the university town are older than she is—far older, some grey-haired and pregnant-bellied. This societal change she notes casually but is an observation that should make us sit up and think. Practically everything she says makes me think, which is why I think any one of these chapters would work well as essays—a short sharp strike across the noggin.

The language she employs to describe a year of sleeplessness recalls young men on the front lines in war.

“The muddled nights began to attain an insomniac clarity. My insides grew gritty, my nerves sharp…I no longer slept in the intervals, but merely rested silently like some legendary figure, itinerant, doughty and far from home. The reservoir of sleep I had accumulated through my life had run dry. I was living off air and adrenalin. Mercury ran through my veins."

What can I say? She makes me laugh, she makes me think. Her writing electrifies me. Reading Cusk novels and memoirs back to back is pure indulgence. Below please find reviews of Cusk's other work in order:

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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The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy by Rachel Cusk

Hardcover, 256 pgs, Pub May 26th 2009 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN13: 9780374184032

One has to ask oneself why we read memoirs of travels. Wouldn’t it be better to just take off on our own, not knowing of other people’s troubles or joys in case we are fearful or disappointed? But Rachel Cusk reminds us why we read other people’s tales: she is observant, and terribly funny. Tales of her trips make ours resonant with laughter, too. How did we first manage when confronted with grocery stores without anything we would consider food in them?

Oh yes, training one’s palate until we recognize what is so special about food, in this case, in Italy. The simplicity of it. We meet the brusque-seeming, loud and insistent butcher, the tennis-playing hotelier who smokes incessantly, and the “four Englishwomen [on the train] their own laps full of purchases from Florence boutiques…returning to their rental villa in the hills….They seem to have outlived the world of men, of marriage and motherhood and children. They laugh hilariously at anything any one of them says. They are a third sex, these happy materialists.”

One of the best afternoon’s amusements is listening to Cusk detail the paintings she comes upon in her travels; endless pictures of Madonna and any number of versions of the Child. She gives the backstory of Raphael, his adoration of the work of Michelangelo, and his death at the early age of thirty-seven. The observations she makes about the “congested alleyway toward the Piazza della Signoria, where a riot of of café terraces and horse-drawn tourist carriages and pavement hawkers selling African jewelry is underway.” How much has this scene changed in millennia of Italian history? Or has it always been just like this, where people

“push and shove rudely, trying to get what they want…I have seen a fifteenth-century painting of the Piazza della Signoria, where children play and the burghers of Florence stroll and chat in its spacious spaces, while the monk Savonarola is burned at the stake in the background outside the Palazzo Vecchio. Here and there peasants carry bundles of twigs, to put on the fire.”

So few are the antiquities that people from the world over wait in long, snaking lines, “an overgrown humanity trying to fit into the narrow, beautiful past, like a person in corpulent middle age trying to squeeze in to a slender garment from their youth.” It takes one’s breath away, the clarity with which Cusk writes, reminding us of what we may have once observed but could not convey.

The Catholics have a large presence in Italy, the Basilica di San Francesco lending credence to “the giantism of Catholic architecture…which harmonize unexpectedly with the iconography of late capitalism…the airport terminal…and the shopping mall.” Cusk takes the stuffing out of adults who use “Christianity as a tool, a moralizing weapon they had fashioned in their own subconscious…the strange, dark chasm of repression and subjectivity…judgment lay down there…flowing like a black river.” Do I need to say Catholic school growing up in England was a less than satisfactory experience?

This is the book I would give a friend to explain why I love the work of Cusk so. How can one not appreciate the quiet way she inserts her family into an unfamiliar world and does not spare herself nor anyone else the sharpness of her observations. The family moves over a period of months, down the Italian coast, just south of Naples.

The last day of their southern journey, the ‘bottom’ of their vacation, they are denied a trip to Capri by boatman strike. Instead they boat to Positano where father, mother, and two children paid fifteen Euros each to lie on the beach. Beside them were young American newlyweds in white bathers, ‘groomed as gods” but timid and self-conscious. Cusk wishes she had a Raphael to paint them for her, and I do, too.

Cusk has a warmth in her writing for the magnificent, the ‘theatrical and sincere,’ the elaborate, the splendid Italians, and she tells us her children will always remember Italy as a place they want to live. Her husband gets no notice, and if we did not know she travelled in a family of four, we would not know he was there at all. This book was published in 2009, and three short years later her marriage lay in ruins. We see the beginning of that split here, methinks.

One feels quite as though one had done this journey, too, traveling along with sunburnt girls in the back of a car with the windows wide. The final week in a faded blue tent strike us as real as real can be—even with the call from the publisher saying the rights to publish her last book in South Korea allowed them the possibility of a glorious, comfortable night in a seaside resort with gold bathroom fixtures but an unused swimming pool and a beautifully-appointed restaurant in which no one ate.

‘Rewarding’ hardly seems adequate praise. I savor her work like Peruginas. Her writing is for me like one of those moments she describes whose effects will last forever…visually stunning, thought-provoking, delicious to remember. The summer feels lived.

Below please find reviews of Cusk's other works, in order:
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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The Bradshaw Variations: A Novel by Rachel Cusk

Hardcover, 240 pgs, Pub March 30th 2010 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (first published 2009), ISBN13: 9780374100810

Moving backward through Cusk’s oeuvre I come to this novel featuring flawed suburbanites—couples whom Cusk, in the end, treats gingerly. There is no need to be cruel since we all suffer from some sort of imaginative lapse, whether or not be can recognize our own among those described here. One character is a woman often silent and dressed in black, standing watching, judging, and sometimes relating the action to readers. But she can wear blinkers in her own household, not recognizing how untethered and unsure her husband has become in his role, until he abandons part of it.

This is another of Cusk’s book that begins with a challenge, in this case, the question What is art? Readers will look forward to how this book relates to that question, repeated time and again throughout the narrative, just about the time the reader feels far removed from that promising interrogative start. And the final scene is another of Cusk’s remarkable, unforgettable bloodbaths which recall theatrical roots that seem to underpin much of Cusk’s work.

Three couples, the husbands all brothers, hold special delights for those tracing the effects a father might have on children and grandchildren, though the father, now an old man, is mostly just a memory.

“[Leo] has never heard his father raise his voice. There has been no need to raise it: it is in the leveling persistence that the violence is accomplished…it goes over everything and mechanically levels it, like a tank. It is benign, ruthless, unvarying…His voice has talked in Leo’s head about the world and its ways since he can remember.”

The father barely shows in person until that fateful last scene. We realize then that any failures or successes of the now-grown sons probably have little to do with the father after all this time. The range of the boys’ personalities prompt sniggers of recognition among those who have grown up with siblings, so used are we to the way the confident, the envious, and the spoilt interact.

We also get three different views of marriage, four, if you count the parents, still married after all these years. Howard and Claudia seem so unlikely until near the end when we see what holds them together. Leo and Susie limp along together, Leo relying on Susie to interface the world for him, despite her frequent tipping over into barely managing. Tonie has her own job, dresses in black, and generally stands aloof while her husband Thomas struggles with his own identity and sense of self-worth. Each brother is a little jealous of the others, except perhaps Howard, the entrepreneur. He sees the world for what it is and works with it.

This is a wonderful novel filled to overflowing with characterizations of people, of events, of passions, of depressions. We are not necessarily led anywhere—that is, it is essentially plotless, like a life is plotless. But it makes us recognize actions which will lead to an unhappy outcome, barring any intervention. It can be a mirror or a map, depending on where the reader finds him- or herself. It is beautifully deft and concise, the prose that brings us the struggles, joys, failures, and ambitions of the Bradshaws. And it features a dog and a piano and an adagio that tick-tocks like a clock. Time is relevant.

Below please find reviews of Cusk's other works, in order:
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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Medea (Oberon Classics) by Rachel Cusk, Euripides

Kindle Edition, 96 pages, Pub Sept 30th 2015 by Oberon Books, ASIN: B015ZT58N4

Rachel Cusk was invited by London’s Almeida Theatre to write a new version of Euripides’s Medea. The new play is both thoroughly modern and bears the stamp of personality of this talented novelist and memoirist. That she fiercely loves her children, two boys, is apparent. She followed Euripides’s formula, creating a storyline which places the blame differently.

If you remember the story, Medea kills her sons when her unfaithful husband marries the young & well-tended daughter of Creon. Considering how difficult it would be for anyone to contemplate such an act, and considering Cusk was severely castigated by readers for her memoir about motherhood, A Life’s Work, Cusk manages to make her work, like Euripides's work, many things at the same time: strong, agonized, righteous, and tragic.

Commentaries on the original Greek play had different interpretations of Medea herself. One made her out to be a young lover who changed her view of her husband when she’d had children. The things that she liked about her husband when he was a young man annoy her when she’s older. When she learned he was unfaithful and was looking for something new, she poisoned his new wife and killed the husband and sons out of pique and revenge.

A more nuanced interpretation, suggests Medea pursued her ambitious middle-aged husband Jason hotly, helping him to secure the fleece of the Golden Ram and thus develop a reputation as one of the most daring heroes of Hellas. But Medea was an foreigner and when she returned to Jason's home with him, her combative and fiery alien nature grated on the conservative natives . She grew tiresome for Jason and he sought another, younger, wealthier alliance that would increase his standing. Then Medea sought revenge.

Cusk’s Medea has less backstory, though from the voices of the chorus (a group of mothers meeting while their kids playdate, and who cross paths picking up their children at the school gates), we learn that Medea is not liked. She’s smart, but no one really likes her writing, if they read it at all. She’s opinionated, which doesn’t work if one wants a marriage to run smoothly ("she asked for it"). She’s a “snooty cow” because she doesn’t always recognize the women in different settings, her mind on other things. Cusk slips in a Holocaust joke: “She gone very Belsen,” referring to how Medea has stopped eating. “It’s called the divorce diet.”

Meanwhile, Medea turns to the audience and makes her case:

“A bad thing has happened to me
You’re scared that if I name it, it might happen to you, too.
…Sleep, woman, sleep.
You won’t even feel it when he creeps to your side
and slits your throat.
What’s that you say? What about love?
Yes, you’re loving souls aren’t you?
You love the whole world,
You love your little hearts out.
It’s all right, you can hate me.
Go ahead, feel free.
It’s so much easier than hating yourselves.

Medea has other voices speaking with her, ones more intimate: the Tutor and the Nurse and the Cleaner. The Cleaner is clear-eyed and clear-spoken and shares what she learned from her mother: the best revenge is to be happy. Pretend if you don’t feel it. Women are good at pretending.

The eventual playing out of the story is unique yet retains the pain of the original. We hear Creon slyly telling Medea “You know, you look completely different when you smile” while she is in the midst of her life’s most curdling trial. “There’s the sourness again. The problem with you is you don’t know how to love…an unloving woman is a freak.”

The audience undoubtedly feels stress levels rising as the characters have interleaved speaking parts—talking over one another. If you’ve ever been witness to a disagreement, this is one…after another…after another. Any uncomfortableness we feel when Jason and Medea are speaking is relieved by Nurse, Tutor, and Cleaner pointing to the absurdities of male expectations. But the best joke goes to Aegeus, who will become Medea’s second husband.

Aegeus, speaking to a Medea distraught about the money Jason expects from the marriage says he understands Jason is about to get his needs “assuaged” by a wealthy heiress. This word comes as a surprise in the midst of conversation and surely would elicit a burst of laughter in any theatre. The word joke may only work in English, but its excessive formality and sound-similarity to “massage” is a perfect bomb.

Cusk’s originality in portraying the oldest stories of all—love and infidelity—continues to entrance. I am even more impressed now with her fictional trilogy Outline than I was before I read whatever I could of her work. This author is special. In a book talk at Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C., Cusk says a criterion to use when creating is that a work should be “useful.” Exactly. That’s why her work, her honesty, her humor, her willingness ‘to go there’ is so exciting. What she does keeps us alive.

Below please find reviews of Cusk's other works, in order:
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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Sabrina by Nick Drnaso

Hardcover, 204 pgs, Pub May 22nd 2018 by Drawn and Quarterly, ISBN13: 9781770463165, URL: https://www.drawnandquarterly.com/sabrina, Lit Awards: Man Booker Prize Nominee for Longlist (2018)

This is the first graphic novel in the history of the Man Booker to be considered for an award. To say it is worthwhile doesn’t capture the real slap these big-bodied, small-headed figures levy. Lives of quiet desperation indeed. There may be some features missing in the frames…don’t all our lives have features missing? This feels terribly urgent, and painful, as though we cannot go another day without talking about it.

Sabrina lives in Chicago and has a life that includes a live-in lover, a cat, a sister, and a mother. One day she doesn’t come back from a walk. Drnaso shares the aftermath, picturing what life was like for those who remained, particularly for her boyfriend Teddy.

What is this story about, besides the central mystery? It is about what we do when our lives are upended, how we act, how we carry on. There are people we will remember as kind, and helpful, and others we will remember as clueless, and poisonous. We have to live in the world despite the horror it can hold. We obviously can decide not to do that as well.

The drawings have a real momentum that ratchet up our stress and fear levels. We are not completely clear on exactly what has happened until some distant midway point. We are as in the dark as the characters. When we finally get the news, we are disinclined to believe it, given all the peripheral noise. And finally, the darn conversations with Florida, and the workmates ostensibly helping with job prospects…they are so real they do not seem fictional at all.

What about the creepy guy in the white pickup looking for the cat? Why was he there, and what did he want? Was he meant to be an ambiguous figure meant to toy with us when we were so suspicious of everything? Was it the suspicion in our own minds that made the experience of meeting him and accepting his help so uncomfortable? If the frames were lighter and the background noise of a woman’s disappearance not concurrent, would we feel such strain upon seeing him in the street?

The ennui we feel upon hearing of a preventable tragedy like a mass shooting by a disaffected youth is not inevitable. Whether or not this is Drnaso’s message, I think those who pick up this book will see that we must not succumb to despair, and that sometimes we have to rely on ourselves, so inner resources are critical. We need to store up those inner resources for rainy days, while working to be kinder, and changing the way we treat one another.

The drawings and captions are extremely effective in conveying mood, attitude, situation. For some reason when characters looked through the closed blinds, I always had a frisson of energy. This sense of one hiding away and being afraid to look at reality stays with me. Maybe we’re all a little like that: too wrapped in our insular worlds an not paying enough attention to people and things around us.

Wake up, Drnaso might be saying.

Regarding the conspiracy theorist Albert Douglas, his resemblance to Alex Jones cannot be overlooked. It occurs to me now that the real Alex Jones may have been trying to see what it would take for some rights to begin to be abridged. I find it difficult to imagine the man is as mad as he pretends: Has anyone camped outside his house to videotape his interactions with family and friends neighbors to see if he is a lunatic off-screen? (I assume he has no friends. Is this wrong?) He may indeed be so conservative he wishes to hoist liberals on their own petard. For many of us who don't listen to Jones, it can be useful to actually hear what he has been saying and how close he strays to the edge...of sanity, or legality.

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Aftermath: On Marriage & Separation by Rachel Cusk

Hardcover, 147 pgs, Pub Aug 7th 2012 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (first published 2012), ISBN13: 9780374102135, Lit Awards: J.R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography Nominee (2013)

It used to be rare for me to read through a writer’s oeuvre at once. I was afraid I would show an author I admired to disadvantage. With Rachel Cusk, each book is another, deeper aspect of the same theme so one may move from one to another, gorging intemperately on the ideas there and stagger out like a bee drunk on honey.

Honesty, she says, is critical. If one is going to pay any attention to an author, honesty about the human experience, however coruscating, is key. Men write about war which tears the heart from the body. Women write about domestic issues which tear the soul from the heart. One day this may change. To date, thousands of years since the Greeks, it hasn’t yet.

Clytemnestra took over her husband’s work while he was away fighting the wars in Troy. Cusk calls her unisex, that she seeks equality, now that she’s seen men’s work and can handle it herself. But the ‘pure peace of equality’ does not engender children, or border expansion, or empires.

“It is all aftermath, predicated on the death of what was before…Clytemnestra wants no more begetting. She wants the peace of equality but to get it she will have to use violence. To reach the aftermath, first there has to be the event itself.”

Reading backwards through Cusk’s work, I realize this book is the third piece of a memoir in acts. It begs to read through in a sitting, her writing is so clear, so inescapable, so sharp, so quivering and naked. Her husband barely appears and yet we hear her silent wail, like reverberations impacting eardrums. The children are her Iphegenia, “the sacrifice that lies at the heart of all marriages.”

“Grief is not love but it is like love. This is romance’s estranged cousin, a cruel character, all sleeplessness and adrenalin unsweetened by hope.”

“I blame Christianity,” she says, lashing out. “The holy family, that pious unit…has a lot to answer for….The day feeble Joseph agreed to marry pregnant Mary the old passionate template was destroyed.” Honesty. Where was it then? Where is it now?

She doesn’t eat. In the chapter entitled “Aren’t You Having Any?” her children essentially beg their mother not to disappear, but “it is impossible to eat and stay vigilant.” Her daughter is invited to the party of a close friend, but when the time comes to pick her up, the narrator realizes the friend invited other people for a sleep-over, but not her daughter. She immediately attributes this to her divorce and considers it a calculated cruelty, but someone less involved would certainly make a different assessment. The daughter, perhaps ten years old, is the more adult in this case, urging her mother to drop it:

“They probably didn’t even think about it. That’s just how people are.”

Indeed they are. The chapter called “The Razor’s Edge” reminds us of Antigone, where sacred law meets state law. Creon is Antigone’s uncle who has ordered her not to bury her slain brother because of his alleged crimes against the state, of which Creon is in charge. Creon eventually retracts his threats, but too late. When Teiresias, the blind soothsayer, tells Creon to relent and forgive Antigone lest he perpetuate perversity, Creon first insults Teiresias, and then admits that he is frightened. This, Cusk tells us, is

“aftermath, the second harvest: life with knowledge of what has gone before…true responsibility is an act of self-destruction.”

Am I wrong in suggesting the narrator is right? We will all go through these stages in our life. Cusk is so close to it here, and so invested in her own version of it, that she does not realize this is natural, normal, perhaps even healthy. None of us was ever perfect, so perhaps a little self-destruction (read: ego-destruction) is called for. It’s the rebuilding that makes true love, true generosity possible. It happens regularly in good marriages: the breaking and restitching. Doesn’t it?

This narrator has a larger capacity for love than she ordinarily shares. This is clear in her story about the witch’s house: how she and her daughters rented a set of rooms in an old house but were kicked out by the proprietor before the agreed-upon time was up. She felt the wrong keenly and when she complained, she was deserted in a distant location by the proprietor. Cusk told her friends how she bravely got her own back, but she admits to us that a greater achievement would have been to acknowledge the lack of love and attention the place and the people needed. She sought safety for herself and her children, but sometimes safety is best found by opening up and letting go, rather than by holding on.

This astonishing end to a trilogy of memoirs only makes Cusk's writing all the more precious, knowing it was first written in blood, by her fingernails. It always amazes me that voices of such extraordinary power are not immediately recognized, nourished, protected. We need writers with skills and sensibilities like this, without which we’d have no standard to set the bar. Many thanks to this brave woman willing to share her innermost agonies in exquisite prose for our improvement.

Below please find reviews of Cusk's other works, in order:
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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Transit by Rachel Cusk

Hardcover, 272 pgs, Pub Jan 17th 2017 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (first published January 1st 2016), ISBN13: 9780374278625, Series: Outline #2, Lit Awards: Scotiabank Giller Prize Nominee (2017), Goldsmiths Prize Nominee (2016)

It is strange, I suppose, for me to describe this trilogy of books as though they were thrillers, but they acted that way upon my consciousness. I read them out of order, 3-1-2, so I will discuss the totality of them in recognition of their separateness. There was a propulsiveness to the story as told by Faye, writer and teacher, former wife and current mother, and narrator of these three slim volumes. These easily contain some of the best writing I have enjoyed for many years.

The perspective in these novels is female, but Cusk gives us a wide range of male personalities to consider. She is not cruel, though it may be true she leaves out that ‘divine spark’ that gives the male its essence, its truest expression. Her observations are deep enough to border on psychoanalysis, giving us the material with which to draw the conclusions. It is fortunate she is so funny because we recognize then that this is fiction. Real life is never so funny. Is it?

The final scene in this novel recalls the title of a memoir of hers, The Last Supper, which is definitive, even conclusive, in some way. I have no idea whether the two are related in subject matter, but somehow I am tempted to believe they are. One leaves the dinner party shattered, with only shreds of one’s understanding of what makes a good spouse, a good parent intact. Everything we understood about marriage and parenting has been challenged and we are distraught to realize the only thing left of our understanding is that love must be in the equation somewhere. Scratch that. Everywhere. In great abundance.

As a set-piece, this scene has no parallel that I know of in modern literature. The utter compulsion with which we listen to each new voice, each new revelation, gives the book its thriller aspect. What new terror is around the turn in the conversation? Parenting is something about which everyone has opinions. Even when we think we don’t, as soon as someone else acts, we realize that oh yes, we do indeed have opinions.

During the dinner party, and several times in the course of this series of novels, Faye takes calls from her own sons, who for one reason or another are on their own while she is away. We see how she reacts, and sometimes, though not always, we learn what she says. We form opinions about her in these moments. Can anyone disapprove of how she handles these intimacies? We have to ask ourselves why she includes these moments in her novels. Is she modeling how love manifests? I think it may be so.

This narrator, I should remind everyone, is practically invisible in these novels. She had a few opinions in the first novel, delivered to a man she met on an airplane and about whose life she really shouldn’t have had much to say, since he was essentially a stranger to her. Opinions like these gradually peter out over the course of the novels and when she is asked directly for her opinion on some topic, she may instead offer a memory of something that happened to her that could be construed as an answer.

She uses this technique in her writing classes as well. She is challenged when she is teaching writing sometimes that she does not actually teach, and that her novels make no sense. What we learn is that her questions in class about classmates’ experiences are meant to expose those things worth writing about, and how to get to that kernel each time. I think we can assume the author Cusk interrogates herself and her experience in this way to uncover her own heart, though that can never account for the alchemy that makes these books literature.

Struggling through her days as a single mother of two boys, Faye manages to engender rage in the residents below her second-floor flat. She determines to hire someone to soundproof the floor while updating the cabinets and finds the most expressive, articulate, introspective builder who reveals he would prefer to live “somewhere completely blank…where there’s nothing, no colors, no features, maybe not even any light…” Similarly, she finds a hairdresser who casually makes the deepest cuts: “To stay free you have to reject change.”

Later, Faye will tell an old friend, “Freedom is a home you leave once and can never go back to.” Does she mean freedom, or innocence? Are they the same? Still later yet Faye wll say to that same friend that desire and self-control are not the whole story when we speak of ourselves in the world. There is also something that happens that some call fate but others might call powerlessness. This phenomenon may be especially observable in relationships when others exhibit will, but not, perhaps, exclusively. It is existential, a reason there are gods.

Faber published this book in New Zealand and put this cover on it.

Heidi Julavits interviews Rachel Cusk for The Cut after the publication of Transit in 2017. “Silence,” she said, “is going to become a very powerful thing.”

Completely convinced of the potency and success of this trilogy, I am surprised to see how many of my fellows in literature did not share my opinion. She tried something unique in these novels that began as an answer to critics of her autobiographies. It worked. I am eager to discover all I can of her writing, and believe she should be close to the top of the list of our best for what she delivers and how she delivers it. Kudos indeed.

Below please find reviews of Cusk's other works, in order:
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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