Meredith Sue Willis's
Books for Readers # 222
July 11, 2022
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Issue # 222
If not otherwise noted, reviews are by MSW
.
Reviews
Announcements
Read/Watch/Listen Online
Especially for Writers
Fantasy, Crime, and Science Fiction
Irene Weinberger Books
REVIEWS
This list is alphabetical by author
Dawn by Octavia Butler
Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly
The Night Fire by Michael Connelly
Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell
Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell
The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin
The Killing Moon by N.K. Jemisin
Eleanor and Franklin by Joseph Lash
The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers
Family Furnishings by Alice Munro
Jane and Prudence by Barbara Pym
Normal People by Sally Rooney
Summer 2022
I'm getting a lot of pleasure out of my reading this summer--books of my own choosing rather than student work. I also enjoy and certainly learn a lot from work-in-progress, but when I read it, I'm working. When I'm reading my own choices, I am climbing on a raft and floating downstream. Sometimes I encounter the thrill of rapids, sometimes it's a drifty dream, but I'm always in some other place in the universe.
This issue I'm sharing a several months project of reading Joseph Lash's carefully researched and affectionate portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt, mostly, but of Franklin too. The vicious politics of those days is instructive today, but also depressing because back then, there really did seem to be some agreement about the dignity of people (at least white men in tailored suits). There was also lip-service to public service (sometimes too much in the line of noblesse oblige). But read my full report below.
I have also been reading over time, and finally finishing, a large collection of Alice Munro stories, Family Furnishings. Many of them are great works of art. I enjoyed new science fiction too, N.K. Jemisin The Killing Moon, and old science fiction--the brilliant first volume of Octavia Butler's science fiction trilogy Lilith's Children. I also read my first Barbara Pym novels, quite a lot of fun in limited quantities, and for Victorian lit, two Elizabeth Gaskell novels. My happiest discovery was a book I had overlooked, Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding, If you missed it, do put it on your list!
I'd love to hear from readers of this newsletter about what you're reading, and how you choose. A list, a paragraph, an essay? I'd welcome having it. We can't assume everyone will love what we love, but how can we know if we don't share our suggestions?
The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers
I'm awed by The Member of the Wedding, especially the powerful scenes with Frankie, Berenice, and John Henry. It's all super southern summer heat, sensuality, smells, race, gender, and yearning. Twelve year old Frankie walks all over town looking for adventure, observing everything, searching for who she is.
The voice is compelling, and scene by scene there is great momentum, but it is all so intense I kept wanting to step back and catch my breath.
One structurally brilliant element is how Frankie's older brother's wedding, which is Frankie's own emblem for what the story is about, is told in memory and small flashbacks. Frankie is determined t be a part of the wedding and then believes she will be swept up and taken along on the honeymoon. We all know this is painful fantasy, but after long, slow almost natural-time scenes, and instead of dramatizing the crash, we are suddenly on the bus back from the wedding getting brief snippets of what happened, then Frankie's despair, followed by a summary of time passing: the shocking loss of an important character, the breaking up of the house and the world of the first three quarters of the book.
It's as if the great green belly of storm has gathered, but we somehow missed the rain, and we're left with the aftermath of puddles and broken branches. Bernice finally decides to get married, a minor character goes to jail, Frankie gets a superficial friend and is suddenly almost normal, at least for a while. McCullers uses summary with admirable skill, and one is left with the sadness and humor and unbearable pain of growing up human.
It's a brilliant book and I wonder why it doesn't come up on recommended lists so often anymore?
Eleanor and Franklin by Joseph Lash
This is one of those books that take me months to get through because I keep taking breaks for science fiction and Victorian novels. I have to take my time with these big nonfiction projects partly because there are so many facts. This one is a huge and well-written study by a great admirer and personal friend of Eleanor Roosevelt.
Actually, Joseph Lash is a pretty interesting individual himself (see him with ER below)–the child of Jewish immigrants, a socialist and student anti-war activist during the nineteen thirties and forties. He was one of the many "youth" ER befriended, and they became real friends, and he wrote this Pulitzer prize winning book about her and Franklin (but Eleanor is definitely the protagonist). There's another volume about ER alone.
Eleanor and Franklin is a solid book that opened me up to issues and events and people from a few decades before my birth. I have always been a little bored, to be honest, with World War II and Saint Eleanor Roosevelt. What was happening on the ground-- the Holocaust, the killing fields of eastern Europe, the bombing of Britain--all of that certainly was of deep interest to me, but the flag waving American side of it seemed old-fashioned and probably largely propaganda.
This book opens all that up in wonderful ways. It has more than 700 large pages plus extensive notes and other end material. I expect to go back to it as a reference (I bought an inexpensive hardcover via Bookfinder .) I loved the eye-opening survey of ER's upper class upbringing--FDR's too--in the early 1900's and teens. The First World War is prominent in the early part of the book with its shocking carnage for that generation.. It had a huge influence on the people who were in charge during the Second World War. ER came out of her repressed and often unhappy girlhood to work for, and believe in the possibility of, World Peace. Seeing the development of this great American of the twentieth century is at the very least inspiring. FDR was bred to be a leader, but ER taught herself.
She wrote lots of letters, and later journalism, so her internal life or at least her voices, are somewhat available. Even in private correspondence, though, she is always outward-oriented. FDR is seen from more of a
distance (yes, he was a public man, but also he was not Joseph Lash's personal friend). He's the quintessential extrovert, the lover of ships and sailing, the under secretary of the navy, the only son of a powerful socialite mother who was also the frequent oppressor of daughter-in-law ER. FDR's charm, his instincts for how to make change from within, for how to find people to do the work he needed done, are all on display, as is the great challenge of his paralysis after an adult bout with polio.
Finally, I loved learning some of the vast amounts I didn't know--that there was extensive civil rights organizing during and before the second world war; the political organizing of leftist young people; how long it took ER to gather the sophistication to accept the equality of people unlike her–black, Jewish, etc. I regret how much interesting history I ignored when I was a young adult as old fashioned, not radical enough.
Then of, course, there's the marriage. There are some old black and white snapshots of ER taken by FDR in which she is lovely and unselfconscious, and you feel for just a moment what attracted him, aside from her closeness to her Uncle Teddy. Lash is circumspect, but it is clear that it wasn't an easy marriage. FDR in his charming way used ER to take left wing positions and save him the flak. He philandered and flirted.
Lash treats it as a love story (that ER never stopped loving FDR in spite of everything). It gives a nice trajectory to this double biography, but I'm more interested in ER's self-discovery and expansion into one of the great forces of the twentieth century.
Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell
It's been a while since I read or reread Gaskell, who is one of the great Victorian realists. She represents the best of the conventional but generous-minded in Victorian writers. This was her last book, unfinished– she seems to have died suddenly as it was coming out in the Cornhill Magazine. There really are only one or two chapters she didn't get to, and you can see clearly that the right young people are going to be married to each other. But you know that from about page 5. It isn't a mystery, it's
a Victorian novel.
The big thing with Gaskell as opposed to, say, Trollope, is that she sees with a calm bright sunlight all the characters and with very few exceptions forgives everyone. She has one almost- villain, Preston, and even he acts, she suggests, not out of viciousness, but out of twisted love. I was, at any rate, happy to be in her world, which strikes me as closer to the real world than what many of the Old Vics gave us,. Not closer than George Eliot, but certainly closer than Dickens. I'm not trying to say she's better than Dickens, but only to say the arena where she was so successful.
I am struck again by how hard it must must have been to be a woman in the 1800's, including physically. My joints ache from merely reading how long they sat and how they stayed indoors at the sight of a cloud, how they are trammeled by their clothes and their rules. Even a small cold leads to days if not weeks of lying on couches out of the draft.
The main character is Molly Gibson. Her widowed father is the local doctor, much loved and handsome, but also a domestic tyrant (and a casual racist who really doesn't care much for women except for Molly). I can't quite tell if Gaskell herself recognizes he's a tyrant: he's a caring doctor and determined in all cases to do the right thing, but in the Old Vic masculine way of doing it by making all the decisions himself.
Molly is eighteen and nineteen and maybe 20 in this novel and supposed to take absolutely no actions not approved by papa and mama, mama being the comic, irritating, and quintessentially shallow Mrs.. Kirkpatrick now Mrs. Gibson.
The best character is probably Mrs. Kirkpatrick-Gibson's blood daughter Cynthia, who has a great deal of self knowledge and admits her selfishness. She jilts two and marries one over the months of this story. And yet she and Molly genuinely love each other. Female friendship is one of Gaskell's particularly good subjects, and she shows it with its ups and downs and loyalty through loss of faith.
There is in fact a whole town full of delightful characters who always rise above their type (Miss Browning and Miss Phoebe Browning; young Lady Harriet and her mama.) The older men are good– Lady Harriet's dad, who's a peer who most of all loves hospitality. Then there's Squire Hamley whose bad temper, family pride (Anglo Saxon, none of these merely two hundred year old peerages!), his prejudices and unbridled tongue cause harm to everyone who loves him.
Softer and lighter than, say, George Eliot, Gaskell patterned herself on Jane Austen, but her stories have a lot of social breadth too. They also have a lot of death–realistically in their time– and she takes on, especially in books like Mary Barton, North and South and Ruth a lot of social ills which were considered coarse for a lady.
Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell
I read Ruth next, the Gaskell novel that seems to have had the least staying power, and I'm pretty sure when I read it years and years ago I didn't like it a lot--and also totally didn't remember it.
This time, I was prepared for didactic and sentimental, and for the fact that Mrs. Gaskell pretends that women don't have sexual feelings. I also read it this time just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, when the liberation of women has suddenly seemed much more fragile.
So this time I liked Ruth. You have to accept that it was published in 1853, and that it intends to demonstrate the development and redemption (religiously and socially) of a "fallen" woman. The woman in question, of course, is a homeless, friendless, sixteen year old orphan. Ultimately, Ruth not only turns away from her unfortunate worship of the man who seduced her, she ends as a hero, a nurse who saves many during a time of cholera. This social redemption, along with the so-called coarseness of the subject matter is what made many pan the book when it was published. Friends of Mrs. G. were said to have destroyed the book after reading it.
For today, probably the hardest things to accept are the endemic Victorian sentimentalism and worship of purity and innocence--plus how it ignores female sexuality. In fact, no one is very sexual except the irredeemably selfish seducer himself. Ruth is loving and devoted to him, but it seems to be about having any kind of affection, certainly not physical love. Later, she is determined to understand her transgression, after having discovered the passionate cult of motherhood. Thus a lot of what makes up this novel is things twenty-first century people tend to make fun of, underrate, denigrate.
On the other hand, like other of Gaskell's women, Ruth has a full, rich interior life that confronts her own ethical and spiritual dilemmas. A lot of her contemporaries didn't like reading about a fallen woman's interior life, even a conventional one of Christian redemption, and to make her actions heroic. George Eliot, however, respected it.
The other thing I always enjoy about Gaskell's novels is how complex she makes all the secondary characters, women and men alike, of all social classes. Sally the servant to the Dissident family that takes in Ruth is a comic character (constantly reminding the world that she is not a low church dissident, but "churchwoman" of the Church of England). Her speech patterns are presented as amusing, but she is also a power in the household and quite intelligent in her financial arrangements as well as her human interactions.
Ruth's friend Jemima, daughter of the insufferable businessman and congregant Mr. Bradshaw, has moral battles in herself too: she pushes away the man she loves, then is jealous when he is attracted to Ruth. Then she discovers Ruth's secret and hates Ruth, but also watches her for signs of sin rather than reporting her (or just fainting away for a while). In the end, she is convinced against all her training of Ruth's essential goodness.
Mr. Benson the hunchback minister who is almost painfully too kind and forbearing, yet lives a lie (Ruth's real status) and suffers for it. A lot of these ethical dilemmas are perhaps small and old-fashioned, so I doubt the book will ever be popular now, but Gaskell's characters change and grow so much and so believably. Dissatisfying to me (but you knew it was coming!) is that Ruth's heroic nursing ends as it does.
Even Mrs. Gaskell's version of Christianity (her husband was a Unitarian minister) has more than a few redeeming characteristics!
Normal People by Sally Rooney
Highly and widely praised (see a review from NPR ), this is a book that I definitely get at some level, certainly wanted to keep reading. I was disturbed by the self-destructive main character, and I felt jerked around. Yes, I believe bullied but cool Marianne could become a sexual masochist, but I felt it as a literary decision, as the author making a move, if that
makes sense. I found myself not trusting Rooney to find her natural ending.
What we have here is essentially a coming of age love story covering four years in the lives of two young people from northwestern Ireland, one deeply neurotic and abused but affluent and capable of standing aside from the usual teenage school machinations; one the child of a single working poor mother (she works for Marianne's family).
Marianne and Connell have a complex on and off relationship, and most of it is interesting and complex. They switch positions. They both end up in Dublin, and he becomes the one who is awkward and lonely without friends, and then they switch off, and break off, and come together again, as lovers do. Novels about the intensity of a twosome has never been my cup of tea: I tend to like worlds that open up, social relations, big casts of characters. My favorite parts of this one are the social parts: their secondary school, the college world and insights into and discussions about class.. Love stories that stay focused on the relationship get claustrophobic for me in the end--again, this is probably my limitation, or taste.
Oh, and the ending is not as I feared, a double suicide, but that Connell gets invited to an MFA program in New York City--he's going to be a writer! Oh dear. Is this really Sally Rooney's emblem of a successful life? It seems so naively optimistic, and, frankly, as arbitrary as a double-suicide would have been.
Rooney is far too sophisticated and smart to let this happen without caveats and irony, but still, it's where the novel ends: Marianne unselfishly encouraging Connell to accept the invitation even though she thinks she's giving him up by doing it. This could be just one more swing of their pendulum, of course, and I'm sure Rooney intends multiple possibilities, but maybe she just ran out of ideas or got tired of the characters.
Endings have been tough ever since the end of the Victorian period. Weddings don't do as finales anymore.
Jane and Prudence by Barbara Pym
And more from the British Isles!
I have really odd reactions to Pym's work: It is fun in small does, but I liked this one I liked less than my first Pym, A Glass of Blessings. Jane and Prudence is all Jane the
vicar's wife and her "strange" quoting of poetry and almost entirely aesthetic reaction to religion. She's likable, barely capable of boiling water, pretty sure she's be bad at being a vicar's wife. There are a lot of conscious reminders of Trollope's Barchester and a lot of other familiar Old Vics.
Prudence is Jane's slightly younger friend who lives in London and collects lovers or loves. So the plot, such as it is, is about a widower in Jane's country village named Fabian with beautiful hair (yes, I remember the fifties American singer and Fabio the model for novel covers--does Pym?) and whether he is suitable for Prudence.
Meanwhile, Prudence gets asked out by her boss, is also dating a co-worker, and has some interest shown in her by the local MP.
It's fun by the end, once you know everyone, but meanwhile there is a lot of tea poured and busy bodies reporting what they observe and surmise (likable Jane is one of them) plus a lot of conversation about what men want, and how women waste their time catering to them. I'd like to think the main point is all the female energy wasted on pleasing and manipulating men, but I'm not sure that's true.
Family Furnishings by Alice Munro
Alice Munro doesn't need my praise–she won the freaking Nobel Prize!– but her stories are stunning, and for writers they are an ongoing education in how to do it.
I had read several of the stories in this collection before, but a couple I have to mention, both of them a sort of realistic horror story, were "Runaway" about the dysfunctional if not emotional abusive marriage of a young couple with a horse riding business and the amazing, terrifying "Dimension."
A surprising number of Munro's stories are available free online if you haven't become a fan yet. See Lit hub's list here.
FANTASY, CRIME, & SCIENCE FICTION
The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin
I was disappointed with this. I really like N.K. Jemisin's science fiction, and I know she's setting up a series here, but it took me half the book to be genuinely involved.
Jemi
sin is such a superior writer of science fiction that I gave her book a long trial, and I don't know if it was really worthwhile, but it did get better. I suppose an urban fantasy of this type needs an illusion of current technology, youth fads, slang etc., but these things all felt to me a little strained.
At the same time, it is consistently witty, and I liked a lot of the aspects of the characters, especially sassy Bronca the Bronx and Brooklyn. The Enemy is nicely imagined with this burgeoning of nasty white towers and fronds and tentacles spreading over everything.
I was also a little disgruntled over the obviousness of the Borough of Staten Island, who was this whiney little whitegirl with a wildly stereotyped cop-father (I mean, the Staten Islander I know best personally is a feisty Irish-Italian intensive care nurse who was the oldest of seven kids in a working class family, and she's politically liberal and big sister-bossy in all the best ways) - but Jemisin was looking for stereotypes for her avatars, I guess.
Anyhow, I suspect "Aislyn" will get another chance to rejoin the City. I hope. I mean, if you really want diversity, shouldn't you include cisgender whitegirls too??
There's a lot of fun, eventually, but in the end, I went and ordered a more traditional Jemisin Science fiction series--and also went back to reread one of Octavia Butler's really good ones....
Dawn by Octavia Butler
Dawn (1987) is the first of the Lilith's Brood trilogy (the series was originally called Xenogenesis). The others are Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989). It's a reread for me, but still so excellent: everything I want in science fiction: a brilliant idea (what if our human DNA could be mixed with an alien species' DNA?); a strong main character, Lilith; and sympathetic but flawed aliens with a complicated sex life and reproductive strategy. If any faults, and I'm not sure it does, it is the slight speed up in the second half. I was ready to meet tons of new human characters to be brought out of suspended animation, but Butler gets on with the story. This may be in the end what makes it genre rather than literary? That character development and even world building are subsidiary to story? Thus probably the fatal flaw in my science fiction novels The City Built of Starships and Soledad in the Desert?
The Killing Moon by N.K. Jemisin
And back to Jemisin, and, whee! I still love her work!
This two book series, the "Dreamblood" novels, is so much better to my taste than the urban diversity apocalypse with the snappy repartee. The Killing Moon is a vaguely ancient Egypt-inspired fantasy that centers on a a religion that worships a sleeping moon goddess (and there is apparently, rather subtly slipped in, a second moon, the "Waking Moon.") The priests of the religion work with dreams, take them in from dying people, then help the dying in their passage (or just sometimes just assassinate them, even though they'd rather not). The harvested dreams are shared with other priests who use them for healing. The fantasy is mostly centered around this, but there's a lot of politics and secrets and nicely slipped in mythology.
What I love here is Jemisin's subtlety and her super splendid world building.
I'm eager to go back.
Dark Sacred Night and The Night Fire by Michael Connelly
We're getting close to the present time now in our reread of the Harry Bosch books. Connelly has always used current events and technologies very well: Bosch's slow adoption of computers and his honoring
of old school police detection are believable and charming.
Dark Sacred Night splits the point of view between Bosch and Renee Ballard, an LAPD detective in trouble for calling out a superior officer for sexual harassment. She is a loner, often sleeping after her night shift in a tent on the beach guarded by her dog. She then gets up and surfs, always with the memory of her single-father who once left her on a beach and never came back. It's a decent thumbnail backstory, not as good as Bosch's, and, of course, she's not as good as Bosch either, although a book with the two of them works well enough. The plot has a couple of good cold cases going at once--another predator serial killer, some gangbangers with a hit out on Bosch, etc.
Finally, The Night Fire also scratched my itch for Los Angeles noir, cold cases, a good villain, and Bosch. Renee Ballard is still splitting point of view with Harry, but in a book like this that has Harry too, it's okay. Ballard does the LAPD stuff, he works with her and continues to investigate for his half brother, the Lincoln Lawyer.
THINGS TO READ ONLINE
Nikolas Kosoff's story about a boy with a unique world view is available online at "Evolution." The boy's world view--and his world-- are very interesting. It's a gripping story of school life, New York City, making friends--and seeing, if not solving, a mystery.
Two lovely poems by Dreama Frisk are online at bourgeononline. She says " I do love one of the poems, 'My Orange Bathing Suit' which I edited and it finally said what I had in mind all the time. I had no idea about editing poems. I thought they were just born."
Diane Simmons' "The Big Time" in Hippocampus Magazine.
Check out Harvey Robins on how New York City could return to putting the needs of the public over the needs of corporations (for-profit and non-profit both ) in public spending.
Kelly Watt has a flash fiction online at Microlit Almanac. Also take a look a her book blog.
New issue of The Maryland Review is up!
The Jewish Literary Journal had published a new issue for over 9 years~ See the latest issue here.
Nancy Solomon, who covers New Jersey for NPR, has a new podcast about the deaths of a New Jersey power couple: Dead End: A New Jersey Political Murder Mystery.
Suzanne McConnell reads a short short about Arkansas and much more.
What to read instead of J.D. Vance's book Hillbilly Elegy.
A piece by Ed Davis at Journal of Practical Writing on publishing a story after ten years and forty submissions.
Latest issue of Authors Publish with places to submit and a lot more.
A substack blog with lots of information, out of Pittsburgh: Littsburgh.
Everyone needs to edit their work. Here are some specific examples of editing from Danny Williams: "Real Life Adventures in Editing."
ESPECIALLY FOR WRITERS
Check out the NY Times on the growing importance of TikTok to book publishing. Note that the writer they feature is the excellent novelist of ancient history and myth, Madeline Miller, whose Circe we reviewed in this newsletter.
Danny Williams on how to choose, edit, and when to use proper names in your fiction. And, FYI, Danny's editing store is open--write Danny Williams at editorwv@hotmail.com .
Philip Klay on how to write about war.
Jordan Kisner inThe Atlantic on failing to cross cultural divides in fiction (review of Geraldine Brooks's Horse).
Alice Munro's stories are a how-to-write course, and a surprising number are available free online. See the Lit Hub list here.
Digitalize your work! I don't usually recommend commercial ventures, but I and others have been using Golden Images for at least fifteen years. They do various kinds of conversions to digital (a printed book to, say,Word files for editing). I recommend these folks, and I also recommend that anyone who doesn't have their work in digital form somewhere to have it done as soon as possible!
See their website at Pdfdocument; email them; call 666-375-9999.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Coming in November 2022 from WVU Press: Rachel King's "Bratwurst Heaven!"
Molly Gilman is officially an audiobook narrator! She did A Blueberry Moon for Corah, published and availablefor purchase on Audible. It will be on Amazon and iTunes soon. All links are on mollygilman.
Pamela Erens has a new book--and lots of chances to see her speak about it: Middlemarch and IThe Imperfect Life. It's part of Ig Publishing's Bookmarked series, in which authors write about a favorite work of literature. Each volume is an idiosyncratic mixture of personal essay, literary appreciation, and craft talk. An excerpt of the book will be published on Literary Hub.
Leora Skolkin-Smith's new novel Stealing Faith is due out in August, 2022!
Valerie Nieman's In the Lonely Backwater
Meredith Sue Willis's
Books for Readers # 223
September 17, 2022
This Newsletter Looks Best. and its links work better, in its Permanent Location.
Back Issues MSW Home About Meredith Sue Willis Contact
Announcements
Lists
Reviews
Read/Watch/Listen Online
Notes on What We Read (George Lies & Donna Meredith)
Especially for Writers
Fantasy, Crime, and Science Fiction
Irene Weinberger Books
Irene Weinberger Books has just published a New Edition of
Meredith Sue Willis's novel Love Palace!
Buy it from Bookshop.org or any of the usual online hardcopy suspects.
Also available as a Kindle book on Amazon, and for most e-reader formats at Smashwords.com.
If you buy the e-book from Smashwords, use code VF64S at checkout to buy for only $1.00!
REVIEWS
This list is alphabetical by author (not reviewer)
Fascism: a Warning by Madeleine Albright Reviewed by Joe Chuman
Children of Dust by Marlin Barton reviewed by Rhonda Browning White
The Long Good Bye and The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke
and Auguste Rodin by Rachel CorbettThe Boston Girl by Anita Diamant
The Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran
The Shadowed Sun by N.K. Jemisin
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
The Lola Quartet by Emily St. John Mandel
African History: A Very Short Introduction by John Parker and Richard Rathbone
Election by Tom Perrotta
Auguste Rodin by Rainer Maria Rilke
Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
Butcher's Crossing by John Williams
Some Thoughts About Updating a Novel
Summer reading for me generally means meandering down roads with authors I missed the first time round. I have found I am pretty much ready to read anything by Emily St. John Mandel; ditto N.K. Jemisin. I Also this summer read a couple of books inspired by a visit to the Rodin exhibit at the Clark Museum in Williamstown, MA, and I also picked up one of the Oxford "Very Short Introductions," this one on the continent of Africa. Also in this issue are reviews by Joe Chuman and Rhonda Browning White, plus some remarks about personal reading habits by George Lies and Donna Meredith.
I also want to announce that I have just prepared and updated my novel Love Palace both in hard copy and as an e-book. I was inspired to do this after some discussions in my novel writing class about how to write a
contemporary novel. It is obvious that some novels (and of course movies) speak to certain age cohorts and capture the essence of a moment in time. When it happens naturally--when someone seems to speak for a generation or a group-- there is often a confluence of art and financial success. Such books occasionally are equally meaningful to later generations, but equally often they lose their allure. Mainly, I don't think anyone can set out to write them--I think they just come.
Almost all other novels are, In my opinion, either created world novels or historical novels. That is, writers have to do world building whether we are carefully constructing a post-apocalyptic landscape or a sword and sorcery fantasy, or if we are writing about 2022. It's one of the things that I love most about novels: that they take me to other times and places. Either in the foreground or the background are always certain technologies and styles of clothing and manners and commonly accepted beliefs. Badly written novels assume we already know most of this and agree about it rather than creating specific experiences and worlds.
I remember a "contemporary" novel from fifteen years or so ago in which the protagonist makes a living writing a blog. He travels around having adventures and occasionally filing stories electronically. It's the fantasy of an exciting reporter's life that just happens to be digital. But in the real world, making a living as a journalist has been deeply disrupted by digital technology. There has been no simple substitution of digital content for printed news. The world of social media has opened up, destroying and creating, more than we can even imagine at this moment. The writer of that blogger story had no idea of the coming of TikTok. My point here is not that a novelist shouldn't use blogs or TikTok or Youtube, but that they need to present those things as of their time. One solution is to offer a frankly alternative world, in which, say, personal computers never happened. Generally, though a story set in 1960 or 1949 or 2022 needs to be grounded in its time. The novel that assumed blogs were just the same as snail mailed or called in stories just felt dated and mistaken.
Likewise, a dear and now departed friend in my writers group, who was born around 1920, found one of her old stories that took place in showrooms of the garment industry in New York City in the early nineteen-fifties. The company in the story specialized in young girls' "frocks," and the main characters were two exquisitely dressed aging female sales representatives who try to sell the clothes to buyers who come to the show room. The women in the story are wonderful characters, and the place beautifully embodies a particular culture at a particular moment in time. My friend wanted to polish up her rediscovered story and publish it, and we in her writing group supported her fully, but insisted that she keep it in the nineteen fifties. No, she insisted, she didn't want it to have a date; she wanted it to be "timeless" and "universal." She refused to admit that the strength of the story was indeed in its universal qualities, but that its universality grew from its specificity.
This kind of specificity is what I was attempting with my update of Love Palace. In the first few pages, the narrator is in a bar circling possible job opportunities in the classified ads section of a newspaper. A newspaper made out of paper. I wanted her doing this in public so that another character could see her doing it. I knew pretty much exactly when this was happening (in 2005 or 6). When I wrote it, not all that long ago, I never imagined how few people would be circling ads in a paper newspaper today. I wanted simply to make it clear what she was doing, and that it was normal at that moment in time.
I also had a little idea I liked in which the narrator and her mother are in the youngest and oldest cohorts of the Baby Boomers. Neither the Baby Boomers nor the newspaper classified ads were essential to my story, but I liked both things. I could have cut them, but decided instead to adjust and clarify some dates to clarify that the story was taking place in 2006.
That year was just before Barack Obama's successful run for president. It was the year the iPhone was introduced but had not by any means replace flip phones. I added a few more details and made minor corrections to my time sequence. I looked for assumptions that people made then but not now, and thought about things such as how were community organizers regarded in public consciousness? Obama had been one--was it cool to do community organizing in 2006 and 2007? Maybe not so much for a reader in the 2020's? My changes to this novel were really very small, just a kind of cleaning up after the party.
In the end, Love Palace hasn't changed very much except, I hope, to be a little more aware of itself as historical.
P.S. For writers: more on whether and how to write contemporary novels.
Lincoln Highway by Amor TowlesThis highly praised and popular magical realism novel begins delightful and twisty, all nineteen fifties local color. Emmet Watson is just out of a youth prison/work camp, a true blue straight arrow who killed someone inadvertently in a fight, with big plans for himself and his little brother Billy, a brilliant seven year old who reads and rereads a fictional book called Dr. Abacus Abernathy's Book of Hero Stories.
Billy also turns out to be what I call a Hollywood Innocent, one of the children the movie business sentimentalizes and romanticizes.
The most fun in the book comes from Emmet Watson's co-inmates Duchess and Wooly, who are quirky and dangerous in really interesting ways. The novel has a lot of things that are terrific, especially in the first three quarters. After that, as Towles comes upon his ending, there are probably just too many random ways to finish. The book is largely upbeat, and the good people (Emmet & Billy and their Nebraska mother/wife figure Sally) seem likely to get what they want, as do Dr. Abernathy and a hobo named Ulysses, who is on a quest to regain his wife and son like the "Great Ulysses."
However (plot spoiler coming), the more difficult and complex characters, namely Wooly and Duchess, respectively commit suicide and drown out of greed. These are perfectly legitimate endings for the characters, perhaps especially Wooly, but while Duchess's exit will make a really nice movie scene (underwater, seeing all the people of his life as he sinks), it is a nicely written cop out that disposes of the complex characters and rewards the conventionally innocent and heroic.
It's a lot of fun though: wonderful scenes of riding the rails, in the halls of the Empire State building, at a hobo camp in Harlem, and in a rich folks' camp in the Adirondack as well as an orphanage run by a very clever nun.
For other opinions, see the NPR Review, the New York Times and, for those who might possibly care, Bill Gates.
The Lola Quartet by Emily St. John MandelThe tone here is mildly depressed as various people from South Florida in their mid-thirties live their lives. Their lives include a lot of waking with hangovers, fighting addictions, and being chased by murderous drug dealers.
The characters center around a musical group from high school, and all have had early-mid life crash-and-burns: theft, drugs, a gambling addiction, a newspaper reporter who starts making up quotations for his stories. They all speak with the same rhythms and use interchangeable imagery. Whatever the background or race or personality, they all sound the same. It reminds me of the young people in the private boarding school novels I've read. A lot is being assumed that I don't subscribe to, and that puts me off.
And yet– I think I would read anything Emily St. John Mandel wrote. I can't always say I like all her work, but she is consistently interesting.
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
The Glass Hotel is one I'm very happy I came across. If you want a good summary, this piece in The Atlantic by Ruth Franklin would be a good place to start. What I want to say instead and again is that Mandel knows what she's doing and is always, always interesting, whether she' writing post-apocalyptic fiction like Station Eleven or this multi-plotted multi-charactered novel about a remote hotel and a Bernie Madoff style Ponzi scheme.
The novel has ghosts. The Atlantic writer thinks they are the embodiment of guilty consciences, but it seems to me they are just the lingering presences we see if we have unfinished business. The head of the Ponzi scheme, who spends a good chunk of the novel in prison, sees a lot of the ghosts, many of them victims of his crimes. One major character dies and gives us a tour of what it's like to be a ghost. All of these things are done beautifully.
If I have any complaints, they would be that some of the tying up of plot points seems a little too neat and arbitrary, and also what I said in the review of above of The Lola Quarter, that the characters have a sameness of diction. They are pretty much all likable, or at least understandable, but there is a certain lack of family and ethnic texture. I miss the long past, the ethnic past, that makes a lot of what we are.
But, as I indicated, I've read three of her novels, and I have a hold on the Kindle library version of her latest.
Children of Dust by Marlin Barton Reviewed by Rhonda Browning White
(From Regal House Publishing September 2021 ISBN-13: 978-1-64603-079-8)
Can a white male from Alabama honestly and honorably write about racial injustice, infanticide, and wife abuse and infidelity? Yes—and he can do it incredibly well—if he is Marlin Barton. Southern author Marlin Barton’s most recent novel Children of Dust tells two juxtaposing stories of generations of the same family set over two hundred years apart as they navigate the emotional wounds caused by their forefather.
Rafe Anderson, a Confederate veteran of the Civil War, is the patriarch of this family’s twisted lineage. Rafe fathered fourteen children by three different women: his wife Melinda, a Caucasian woman; his confidant and lover Virginia, a Black woman; and his mistress Betsy, a mix-raced woman who is the daughter of Annie Mae, the Anderson family’s half-Black-half-Choctaw midwife and housekeeper. When Melinda’s tenth child is born healthy yet dies only hours after birth under suspiciously gruesome circumstances, Melinda, Rafe, and Annie Mae point fingers as mistrust irreparably shatters this already fractured family. Rafe’s love affairs and children with two women of color is hypocritically compounded, because following the war he led the slaughter of dozens of black slaves.
Centuries later, two of Rafe’s descendants, one Black, one White, meet on uncomfortable terms to compare their ancestry, their vastly different upbringings, and what their present and future hold as children of Rafe’s troubled and violent bloodline. As the two men Seth and Charles cautiously reveal and contrast what they know of their family history, they discover Rafe’s war-damaged psyche and how his violent actions and the memories thereof carried that harm to and into those who he tried to love, finally realizing they have more in common than shared blood.
Children of Dust is not a diatribe or primer on learning from past mistakes; rather, it’s a fictional account of historical truths laid bare, without moral commentary. Barton simply relates to us here is what these people did, how they felt, and what happened to them: What do you think?
This is not a comfortable read. Yet, for all its psychological and physical violence, the story is infused with tenderness and, ultimately, understanding, and that is the lesson we might learn from this novel.
African History: A Very Short Introduction by John Parker and Richard Rathbone.
This is one of the Oxford "Very Short Introductions," of which I especially enjoyed the ones on the Big Religions. This one was less gripping, but helpful in clarifying a few things for me. The authors spend a lot of time on the challenges of historiography, especially because of the lack of a written record from ancient times in Sub Saharan Africa. In Africa too, much of the history was written by citizens of the the colonial powers, and the authors are themselves white and British. I wonder how the book would have been different written by someone black, and if black, whether someone of the black diaspora versus an African.
Parker and Rathbone are old fashioned in a lot of ways, but seem to try pretty hard to be even-handled with what little they have space for. One thing that was very striking was the fact that (why didn't this ever occur to me?) the colonial period in Africa lasted less than a hundred years: from the 1880-90s through World War I. After World War II was a period of nationalism and rejection of the imperial powers. So in spite of all its importance, colonialism was a blip in African history.
Another interesting section talked about the "kings" in the 1500's through 1807 who profited hugely from slave trade. Generally, European slavers were kept out of interior Africa and dealt with by black representatives of the kings.
Also of special interest was a comparison of Muslim invaders and influence in north and east Africa to Christian invaders in West and South Africa. I'm glad to have read it, and I'll go back to the little volume.
Auguste Rodin by Rainer Maria Rilke
This is a tiny book with 1903 photos of some of Rodin's work.
It is Rilke's famous monograph on Rodin that tries to capture the sculpture in words. It is stirring and convincing as one person's tour of the sculpture of someone he considers a great artist from whom poets can learn as well as visual artist. It has an interesting prologue that discusses Jessica Lemont, the young woman who translated it and gave lectures on Rilke for Americans.
One cast of Rodin's "The Thinker" was the first piece of serious in-the-round art I ever saw. It was at the Cleveland Museum of Art around 1960. I also have a post card on my desk of the lovers' feet from "The Kiss," and I never go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City without going by the "Burghers of Calais" (detail below).
So I'm a fan, and it was a shock to me some years back when I learned how many casts of how many sizes were done of Rodin's most famous pieces. And, of course, his clay and plaster was cast in bronze or carved in marbles by others.
So Rodin was, finally, both a great artist and a great entrepreneur. My Cleveland Museum of Art Thinker was huge, whereas the original sculpture had been smaller, meant to be the capstone of his "Gates of Hell"--possibly meant to be a portrait of Dante himself.
So if Genius isn't quite what I imagined all those years ago, I'm still moved by Rodin's bodies and faces and feet.
You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin by Rachel Corbett
I wanted more Rilke and Rodin, and found this book. In a 2017 commentary in the Harvard Review , Erik Hage says, "...this critical biography is very much about the creative expansion of the Prague-born Rilke, who was still a struggling poet in his twenties when he came under the spell of French sculptor Auguste Rodin, then a lionized master in his sixties." It's a good review that gives an excellent sense of themes and structure of the book.
I'm going to write here a collection of things that pleased me in it. First there is the wide-ranging view of a moment in time in Europe, mostly Paris–art, the delights of debauchery, the rise of psychoanalysis, and the run up to World War I. It was a time of social life, of artists fertilizing (and sleeping with!) each other. Young Rilke gets a commission to write a monograph (see above) on Rodin and goes to Paris to immerse himself in Rodin's work, to write the piece, and to learn from Rodin how to be an artist. Famously, Rodin rose to the young poet's challenge by saying you have to work all the time: "Travailler, toujours travailler." Eventually, Rilke goes away, comes back to be Rodin's secretary, which starts well and ends disastrously, and finally Rilke's career as a poet and writer takes off.
Rilke has conflicted feelings toward Rodin, but also toward Paris itself, where he eventually gets a cheap apartment in an old mansion in Paris (the Hotêl Biron) that becomes a sort of WestBeth or Chelsea Hotel with Cocteau throwing parties and Isadora Duncan dancing in the garden. Eventually Rodin himself takes rooms, and the building becomes the present Rodin museum.
And the parties. The historically wild parties.
Meanwhile, the end of the book is very sad as Rodin ages. He has a lack of sympathy for new art and artists like Matisse and the Picasso. Rodin rejects the new and visits Gothic cathedrals.
Something else Corbett does very well is the women artists: Clara Westhoff who studied with Rodin, then married and had a child with Rilke. Her friend was Paula Becker, whose sad early death cut off one of the great artists of the period. Then there was the apparently ever fascinating Lou Andreas-Salomé who is a lover and/or mother figure to half of Europe's intelligentsia--and becomes a Freudian analyst.
If you are interested in any of the artists and writers or simply the period, Rachel Corbett lays it all out and guides you through.
The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant
This was a best seller a few years ago, and I enjoyed it. It's not a difficult novel-- not that it isn't serious, but it is direct, told in the voice of a grandmother telling her life to her granddaughter, sharing, encouraging, always in the end upbeat. The narrator Addie Baum is the only member of her immediate family born in the United States: a little brother died shortly after arriving, and her parents and older sisters are all in various ways lifelong greenhorns. Her father lives to go to shul and study; her mother hates even the cabbages in the new world. One of Addie's older sisters is withdrawn and shy; one leaves home to live on her own and work as a shop
girl. Both sisters marry, in sequence, the same man, a good hearted entrepreneur. Addie goes to school and to a settlement house and does well in all her studies. She gets jobs, has unpleasant relationships with men; eventually meets the right one. There is the first world war. There is the deadly Spanish Flu.
Interestingly, Addie, for all her intelligence and ambition only finishes her schooling and finds a calling after she has married and had children of her own.
Without softening any of the evils of urban immigrant life, Diamant draws us into what human happiness can be, maybe the most it can be. She isn’t a subtle writer, but she's a very convincing one. She writes in a major key, perhaps even without the black keys--all of which sounds a little critical, but I read it practically straight through, cheering for Addie and her family all the way.
The Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran
This exquisitely sad 1979 novel has hit the sweet spot for a multitude of readers. It is possibly the classic depiction of the decade and a half between Stonewall and AIDS–a defiant over-the-top testosterone-soaked
world in which gay men attempted to have it all at once. It is the gay world of Manhattan's dance clubs and Fire Island, centered on two characters who embrace and define and go beyond the stereotypes they embrace: Malone is a gentlemanly idol for everyone who knows him with a beautiful body, social graciousness and sheer kindness. He embodies the beauty and desire, and mystery, and spends much of the latter part of the book as a prostitute until his mysterious exit.
Sutherland is a self-identified queen, usually in costume like a founding member of the Village People, but much more exquisitely dressed. He's a party giver, a mentor and a guide through the world he is helping to define. He also provides drugs for every occasion.
The novel itself has what seems to me a totally unnecessary epistolary frame of letters between two friends, the "writer" of the novel and someone who fled the milieu that the novel creates. What is the point? There is also a certain lack of control of the story line, and maybe too much repetition, but this aspect may be what makes it feel so authentic– was that world ever in control? Is my far more conventional world?
For further reading try these online pieces about The Dancer from the Dance: The Guardian; a"deep dive" into the book ; the New York Times in 1979 review
Butcher's Crossing by John Williams
The New York Review of Books classics edition I was reading had an introduction by Michelle Latiolais that included both personal notes on Williams as a teacher and an overview of his books, which were written in various genres. She rates this ostensible Western on a level with the brilliant Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian.
Butcher's Crossing is also brilliant and beautiful, although for reasons I haven't fully analyzed, I think I'll always admire John Williams' work more than love it. This is a kind of coming of age story with lots of men contemplating the great natural West and then slaughtering thousands of buffalo strictly for their skins. Then they face the real challenge, which is surviving six months of winter in the Rocky mountains when they get snowed in (the trick is--buffalo hides).
The end is bitter or disastrous for the older men. The young protagonist's outcome is less clear, except that he is sure he'll never go home to the comforts of Boston. There's a good hearted whore, also young, who is heading off to better hunting grounds, probably St. Louis. It's bleak and lonely and beautiful and gripping, and it is very clear that Williams sees the subduing of the West as ambiguous at best.
At once super-realistic, and dreamy, but for me at least, the opposite of a cuddly book.
Election by Tom Perrotta
They started shooting the Reese Witherspoon movie of this book before the book was officially published in early 1998. That's a real vote of confidence. I liked the movie pretty well, but the book is far sharper and funnier
and poor Tracy Flick is at least as sad as she is obnoxious. She just tries so hard.
I read this because a friend recommended Perrotta's latest book, Tracy Flick Can't Win, but said I had to read Election first, even if I had seen the movie. So I did.
Election has at least six narrators each speaking in anything from half a page to several pages. The jumping around works quite well as a narrative device as well as character exploration. Each voice tells the next part of the story, and the choice of narrator is always in the service of who's going to have the funniest perspective. I hooted occasionally and snorted often. What a bunch of sad sack losers, from the teacher who loves teaching but has to give it up due to his own foolishness to the popular football player who doesn't really want to run for school president but is so agreeable to everyone that he gets on board plus his little sister who has just discovered she loves girls not boys and wants to transfer to a Catholic school and starts wearing the pleated skirt and knee socks to the public school.
It is light and very funny without being over-the-top or nasty. Wikipedia categorizes it as "black comedy," but it's more sad than dark: a small, multi-voiced novel with a lot of attitude about the human condition.
Especially the destructive power of sex.
Fascism: a Warning by Madeleine Albright Reviewed by Joe Chuman
As an avid obituary reader, I perused with interest the article in the New York Times on the life of former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, who died on March 23rd at the age of 84.
I came away from the review of Albright's life and accomplishments with the impression that she was a person of prodigious substance and ability. Madeleine Albright was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937, a place and time rich in history. In addition to English, she spoke Czech, Polish, French, and Russian. Madeleine Albright held a doctorate in international affairs from Columbia University, having studied under Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security adviser. She taught at Georgetown and was a director of the Council of Foreign Relations.
Albright was arguably born into a career on the international scene. Her father, Josef Korbel, was a high-ranking Czech diplomat and, having emigrated to the United States, became a professor of international
politics at the University of Denver, where he served as a mentor to Condoleezza Rice. Born just before World War II, Albright fled with her family to England, returned to Czechoslovakia, and fled again when their homeland fell to Communism, before coming to America.
One surveys Albright's life story with the impression that she was not only keenly intelligent, but also highly educated in academia, as well as by personal experience drenched in historical events. Albright was a model of independence and accomplishment and did not have to expound feminist ideology to admirably exemplify a strong, self-confident, and independent woman.
Albright authored five books. Fascism: A Warning, published in 2018, is the last. Clearly, the election of Donald Trump was an inspiration for writing the book. But while strongly supporting Hillary Clinton's presidential bid, she asserted that she would have written the book anyway had Donald Trump not become president, wanting to lend momentum to democracy during the first term of a Clinton presidency. Yet she states, nevertheless, that Trump's victory gave her a sense of urgency.
In my view, the most striking aspect of the former secretary of state writing a book warning of the dangers of Fascism is the fact that she chose to write it. As such, it takes its place among a long list of volumes sounding the alarm about the emergence of Fascism, the demise of democracy, and the rise of authoritarianism in the current moment.
While citing urgency as a motive for writing the book, I scanned the pages with the sense that her warning is not urgent enough. The text suffers from a lack of tight organization and the voice of the author often sounds desultory and diffuse. Fascism is part history, weak on theory, while sprinkled with interesting tidbits from Albright's biography. But the urgency is lost in a tone of academic distance, and to a great extent is lacking in academic or theoretical rigor.
For example, even Albright's definition of Fascism seems overly broad and somewhat vague. It is an extreme form of authoritarianism to be sure, but it is not clear what conceptually defines it. Noting that there can be Fascism emanating from the political left as well as the right, the closest she comes is as follows:
“...Fascism should be viewed less as a political ideology than as a means for seizing and holding power.”
“Fascism...is an extreme form of authoritarian rule. Citizens are required to do exactly what leaders say they must do, nothing more, nothing less. The doctrine is linked to rabid nationalism. It also turns the traditional social contract upside down. Instead of citizens giving power to the state in exchange for protection of their rights, power begins with the leader, and the people have no rights. Under Fascism, the mission of citizens is to serve; the government's job is to rule.”
Or, “I am drawn again to my conclusion that a Fascist is someone who claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is utterly unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use violence and whatever other means are necessary to achieve the goals he or she might have.”
True enough. Fascism is a species of authoritarianism, but it is not clear from Albright's rendition what makes Fascism distinctive as a manifestation of authoritarianism.
This wide interpretation opens the door to a survey of history's bad actors, but how they are ideologically similar beyond a yen for power and dismissal of democratic norms is not clear. Within her study, she places in the same tent Mussolini and Hitler, but also Joseph McCarthy and such contemporary figures as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Roberto Duterte of the Philippines as well as Kim Jong-il, and the contemporary Korean ruler Kim Jong-On. While Mussolini and Hitler are the prototypical Fascists, and we can readily place the Kims with them, is it theoretically coherent to locate Joseph McCarthy in the same camp as Chavez and Duterte? They are all tyrannical and power-hungry. But Fascism relates to a political system that goes beyond personalities.
Albright's thesis would most helpful if she could clarify the common political, social, and economic conditions that enable Fascist leaders to assume the helms of state. Assuredly in reviewing the historical accession to power of each of her protagonists, she discusses the context of their emergence. But systemic similarities are not sufficiently clear by which to draw confident lessons that can pertain to the current moment.
What seems broadly true is that Fascist leadership fills a vacuum created by political and economic instability. So it was with Benito Mussolini, the archetypal Fascist, who organized his own squads of armed men to wrest power from a Socialist parliament with the help of Italy's powerless king, Viktor Emmanuel. Hitler and Nazism arose out of the losses and humiliation following the German defeat in the First World War. As Albright notes:
“...the silencing of guns had been accompanied by the dishonor of surrender and so, also, the victors' demand for blood money, the loss of territory, and the dissolution of the territorial regime. To Hitler and many other soldiers, this startling and humiliating outcome was not something they could accept. The war had reduced the ranks of German men between the ages of nineteen and twenty-two by a number of 35 percent. The fighting and economic deprivation had pulverized the nation. In the minds of enraged survivors, the cause of their disgrace had nothing to do with events on the battlefield: Germany had been betrayed, they told themselves, by a treasonous cabal of greedy bureaucrats, Bolsheviks, bankers and Jews.”
"After a series of elections in which the Nazis failed to win a majority, but fearing the communists, the aging president, Paul von Hindenburg gave the keys of power to Hitler, as Viktor Emmanuel did with Mussolini a decade earlier. As Albright notes, Hitler and the Nazis went on to amass power via a political blitzkrieg, destroying what remained of German democracy. This he did by sending out thugs to brutalize opponents and sending them off to newly formed concentration camps, taking over the unions, banning Jews from the professions, barring unsympathetic journalists, and consolidating police functions under a new organization, the Gestapo.”
It is important to know, as Albright reminds us, that Nazism had its allies in the United States. Fritz Kuhn, a chemical engineer and German immigrant,organized the German American Bund in 1936, which championed a Nazi victory in Europe. Its high water mark was a rally at Madison Square Garden in February 1939. Twenty thousand attended to shouts of “Seig Heil” while Kuhn mocked FDR as President Frank D. “Rosenfeld” and his “Jew Deal.”
Albright includes a chapter on Stalin. While Fascism and Communism viewed the other as enemies, and each augmented its legitimacy through calumniating the other, Albright's definition of Fascism is sufficiently broad to include Communism within its fold. While delineating their marked differences – Nazism was obsessed with race and nationality and Communism with class – both consolidated power in the state, sought to shape the minds of citizens through relentless propaganda, and employed violence and murder at monumental scales. Both were utopian schemes that sought to create “a new man.” This is sufficient to identify Communism as a species of Fascism. Despite discussing Stalin at length, for reasons unexplained, Albright does not include a word about Mao, who one might conclude fits into the same broad political parameters as other major purveyors of violent tyranny.
Nothing here is new and one can ask whether an understanding of history is best served by so closely bringing Nazism and Communism together under the rubric of Fascism.
Albright's treatise is most valuable when discussing more recent figures who are shaping our contemporary political landscape. There is a chapter devoted to Putin, but I found the sections on Recep Erdogan of Turkey and Viktor Orban of Hungry to be most instructive. Erdogan's assault on Ataturk's secular legacy, his increasing Islamicization of Turkish society, which has resulted in the condemning of the LGBT community, and sending women back to traditional roles as mothers and into the home, holds out little promise of a democratic future for Turkey.
Viktor Orban's Hungary represents the autocratic state of greatest consequence to the United States in that Orban's “illiberal democracy” is a projected bellwether for the type of government that the Trumpist camp would like to see America become. Orban has hollowed out the Hungarian parliament. He has made the judiciary subservient to the executive and he has roped in journalists who are critical of the regime. He is also championing Hungary as a Christian society while barring immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. He attacks the European Union, a common trope of right-wing nationalists. And he is not beyond conspiracy-mongering, using George Soros as a scapegoat, and making moves toward anti-Semitism. One finds a direct line to Trump's proto-Fascism, and, as mentioned, Orban has become a darling of ultra-conservatives and Trump's acolytes in the United States.
Trump bookends Albright's thesis. In many ways, Albright gets it right. She is on target in asserting that Trump is a demagogue. She points to his mendacity, his undermining of democratic institutions, his railing at “fake news,” his attacks on the FBI, and his claims of rigged elections.
It is no surprise that Albright extends much of her critique to Trump's foreign relations. She critically notes the renunciation of the Paris climate agreement, his badmouthing of the Iranian nuclear deal, squandering resources on the Mexico wall, and other destructive acts of folly.
But she is most concerned with the diminution of America's standing in the world, especially in the eyes of our allies. She notes:
“... the presidency has been painful to watch. I find it shocking to cross the Atlantic and hear America described as a threat to democratic institutions and values. A month after Trump's inauguration, the head of the European Council listed four dangers to the EU: Russia, terrorism, China, and the United States. In the wake of one Trump visit, an exasperated Angela Merkel said, 'The times in which we can fully count on others are somewhat over.' Since early 2017, surveys show a marked decline in respect for the United States.”
She rightly points to Trump's “America First” foreign policy, noting how this recapitulates the 1940 America First Committee that brought together Nazi sympathizers to try to halt the nation's entry into World War II. Albright states that the America First Committee claimed 800,000 members and had the active support of Charles Lindbergh, who made anti-Semitic allegations of Jewish influence pushing the United States into conflict.
Albright appropriately concludes that Donald Trump is setting the stage for Fascism, and she is rightly worried. She ends her book by saying,
“Some may view this book and its title as alarmist. Good. We should be awake to the assault on democratic values. That has gathered strength in many countries abroad and that is dividing America at home. The temptation is powerful to close our eyes and wait for the worst to pass, but history tells us that for freedom to survive it must be defended, and if lies are to stop, they must be exposed.”
This is assuredly true, and Madeleine Albright's admonitions are essential. Yet I leave her text having wanted more. Her tone is reminiscent of mainline news reporting early in Trump's term. Then Trump was seen through the lens of a political actor whose policies were worthy of rational critique. Missing then, and missing in Albright's treatise, is a strident and militant assertion of how Trump is not merely a political actor with an extreme agenda. He is a malignant narcissist and sociopath, whose policies are outside the domain of rational or normative assessment. Lacking also in her critique is an appreciation of Trump's penchant for violence: his fomenting conflict at rallies, his support for white supremacists and haters, and most significantly his egging on armed insurrectionists to attack the capitol, even failing to protect his vice-president when threatened with murder.
Had Madeleine Albright survived a few months longer to have witnessed the select committee's hearing on the January 6th insurrection, she might have tightened her critique of Trump, the man and his madness. I read Fascism: A Warning, wanting to avail myself of the insights of a learned insider whose career has been devoted to formulating and executing policy at the highest levels. Yet being an insider may not be the most advantageous perspective to hold, as war may be too important to be left to the generals.
See Joe Chuman's Substack blog here.
The Shadowed Sun by N.K. Jemisin
This is a very good two-book series. I read The Killing Moon and reviewed it last issue , this sequel has the exiled young king (whose father was prominent in The Killing Moon) returning. He wants his throne back after spending ten years with a "barbarian" warrior society where men wear veils and women pick their lovers and hold all the wealth, including children. I love Jemisin's explorations of cultural possibilities.
The plot here is pretty direct at first glance: how, when, and will he get his throne back?
The fantasy aspect continues to be the power of dreaming that Jemisin set up in the first book. The other main character is the first woman every taken into the "Hetawa" of priest dreamers. Her speciality is healing--the most powerful priests are the "gatherers" who collect dreams from people who offer them and also gather the dreams and souls of those who are ready to pass on. They also rather often do the office of assassins, The young healer is from a class of farmers. When her family was struggling, she offered herself to be sold to help her family. She's shy and stutters and of course becomes increasingly powerful as the book goes on.
The horror this time is not a twisted monster as in the first book, but a "wild dreamer," a tortured child whose dreams fatally infect whoever is nearby.
When Jemisin is really on, as she is in these two novels, the inventive details, the controlled magic, the very human dilemmas of those with talent and power, the mix of magic with politics--can't be beat.
The Long Good Bye and The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
I decided to try the Progenitor instead of rereading a Michael Connelly Bosch novel. I read Chandler's last book first, and I adored the first forty pages--such fun, the familiar trope of the hard boiled PI stating his habits, getting his case. About about five eighths of the book was pretty darn fun--but it was a long book, and some of it was somewhere between a hoot and appalling. There was one scene of seduction and then the aftermath of the sex that was just ridiculous. The woman doesn't want to be an alleged nymphomaniac like her sister (who is a rich girl whose hobby is taking lovers). Every time a woman shows up in the book, actually, it's hard to take. I certainly stayed with it, and enjoyed a lot of it, but you get nauseated by the silly women not to mention the racism ("That was white of you....." is the least of it.)
I was eventually so annoyed with the book that I came up with a bit of snark that I'm quite sure someone else must have thought of first: "Raymond Chandler is the master of Raymond Chandler parody."
Then, just to be fair, I read his first novel, The Big Sleep, which has more conviction about what he was doing. The Big Sleep has all the usual--rich people to hire Marlowe and let him observe their lifestyles. Absolutely awful women. I mean the embodiments of the nasty names: bimbos and bitches and dumb blondes.
As far as I can tell there are three people Chandler actually likes in this novel (leaving aside whether or not he likes Marlowe). One is a very frail elderly rich man; one is an emphatically short grifter who doesn't live long, but stands up for his friend. The third one is a recurring cop/DA's investigator character who is old school law enforcement and pretty honest.
All the driving around vintage LA and environs is fun, as id guessing what race, ethnic group, or sexual persuasion he's going to dump on next. The Big Sleep never bored me, but I just can't take this stuff seriously.
Did Chandler or did he not know what a jerk Phillip Marlowe was?
Here are a few perhaps more balanced reviews of Chandler's work: something from Ploughshares; another from Kirkus Reviews ; and The New York Times from 1997.
NOTES ON HOW WE READ AND MORE
George Lies writes, "I've been reading more, a variety. Hummingbird by Patricia Henley, who's coming... for West Virginia University WV workshops, July 21-24 hosted by Mark Brazaitis. [Also] detective genre like old Robert Parker (Spenser series), and scanning Mary Karr's Art of Memoir. Aim to get Val Nieman novel (In the Lonely Backwater) too."
Donna Meredith on her approach to choosing and reading books, plus thoughts on books reviewed in Issue 222 : " I enjoyed [Issue # 222] of your newsletter. I like the variety of books you include. I used to teach The Member of the Wedding to high school sophomores and loved it for all the reasons you mentioned in your review. What a great job McCullers does in capturing the hot sticky summers of the South and the angst of growing up! How sweetly innocent Frankie is!
" Like you, I am a fan of Alice Munro's short stories. A favorite one that I taught was 'Boys and Girls.' Munro nails the way sex stereotypes are pushed onto children, how girls are told they must sit and behave in certain ways—and so are boys. It broke my heart at the end when the competent narrator accepts that her family's view that she is 'just a girl.' I think my students enjoyed discussing how much of our sexual identity is nurture and how much is nature.
"Your sci-fi choices are also ones I admire. Octavia Butler and N. K. Jemisin are outstanding writers, and it is probably unfair to attach a genre label to them as though that makes them inferior—or to your own novels, which have no 'fatal flaws,' quoting you in the newsletter. Modern literature wouldn't be the same without Aldous Huxley, Robert A. Heinlein, Ursula Le Guin, Arthur Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Frank Herbert, Anne McCaffery, and Isaac Asimov—and I could go on. These writers open our minds to new possibilities and help us accept the inevitable changes that will shape our future world. It doesn't matter if the writer nails exactly what will happen. What's important is that their vision awakens our own imagination. Your sci-fi novels succeed in doing this, so keep on writing them.
"My reading style is usually to tackle one book with literary value to review for Southern Literary Review, followed by a mystery or any book that qualifies as pure escapism. For example, I just read A Literary Life of Sutton E. Griggs by John Cullen Gruesser for SLR. I had to do a lot of thinking and highlighting of important material for a review of this biography of an important Black writer in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Then, needing something lighter, I plowed through the pages of Michael Robotham and Edna Buchannan mysteries that I'd seen recommended in newspapers. Next, I reread a book chosen by my book club for July, The Committee, by Sterling Watson. This novel is based on the historical actions of the Johns Committee at the University of Florida. The committee was similar to the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s, with government attacking those suspected of being homosexuals or Communists. Watson's book is so relevant today as some conservative legislators are once again trying to dictate what sorts of things can be taught in school here in Florida. Basically, I alternate serious reading with something lighter."
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Our occasional reviewer, Joe Chuman writes: "Since I retired as the professional leader of the Ethical Culture Society of Bergen Country New Jersey in January 2021, I have been fulfilling my aspiration to write more extensively. My primary outlet has been the Substack platform. My objective has been to share my views on contemporary issues and enter into conversation with others who hold common interests. Since last October, I have produced more than 40 essays of considerable length, amounting to approximately an essay each week. Happily, my circle of "followers" continues to expand. Just this week my essays caught the eye of an editor of LOGOS, a quarterly, progressive, online journal on society, culture, and politics. Founded in 2002, LOGOS claimed more than a quarter of a million readers worldwide at its high water mark. LOGOS is planning to embellish its format. In addition to its quarterly magazine, it is planning to publish a weekly edition of briefer pieces, written by a select group of opinion writers. I was invited to be one of those writers. Contributors to LOGOS have included Francis Fox Piven, Daniel Ellsberg, Jurgen Habermas, Cornel West, and other notables. I am honored to be asked to join them. The rollout of the new format should appear by the end of this year. It will extend my thought to tens of thousands of readers across the globe. It is a wonderful opportunity!"
Also, Joe Chuman's Substack blog is solid, important reading-- consider subscribing to it.
Coming in November 2022 from WVU Press: Rachel King's "Bratwurst Heaven!" Rachel King's new linked short story collection Bratwurst Haven is available for order from: Annie Bloom's Books, Bookshop ,Amazon -- and wherever else you buy your books! Rajia Hassib calls the collection "an intriguing and tenderly rendered study of this flawed world we call home." There is a virtual launch through Annie Bloom's on November 1, 2022, and then in-person readings in Baltimore, Washington, DC, and more.
Nikolas Kosoff's story about a boy with a unique world view is available online at "Evolution." The boy's world view--and his world-- are very interesting. It's a gripping story of school life, New York City, making friends--and seeing, if not solving, a mystery.
Check out Harvey Robins on how New York City could return to putting the needs of the public over the needs of corporations (for-profit and non-profit both ) in public spending.
Kelly Watt has a flash fiction online at Microlit Almanac. Also take a look a her book blog.
THINGS TO READ ONLINE
Terrific flash fiction by Shelley Ettinger: "Banana Chair Season!"
For those of you interested in issues of racial equity, here are links to an ongoing podcast series about a New Jersey Integration organization I have been associated with for several decades, The South Orange/Maplewood Community Coalition on Race. The first two podcasts can be found here.
The series, hosted by Rev. Liz Testa, is about one community's commitment to racial equity and integration, where people of different backgrounds are welcome and active in all aspects of civic life. Each interview is a candid conversation that dives deep into personal experiences and shines a light on the relentless work of the South Orange-Maplewood Community Coalition on Race over the last quarter-century. One of the podcasts features Maplewood, NJ native, singer Sza, and her mother Audrey Rowe.
Emunah Zakowski has a podcast for teens about possible career choices and paths. Here, she interviews a security specialist at Snap, Inc. (who happens to be my son Joel Weinberger).
A new podcast titled "Wildflowers: Three Women Discuss Fresh Picked Topics." They say, "We don't claim to be tech-savvy, and it's obvious, but we are having fun, especially since each podcast we discuss a specific wine we are tasting, a book we are reading, and then a topic we want to discuss. On our three latest podcasts, we discussed mastering fear, mindfulness, and our idea of a perfect day. In our next couple of podcasts we will be discussing what is on our bucket lists and the importance of getting out of our comfort zone. If this podcast sounds intriguing to you, here's a link to our latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YEIrp7ti6o "
Jane Lazarre has an excellent piece on the Duke University blog about the new Spanish edition of her 40 year old book about mothering, The Mother Knot. She also talks about the book in light of the Supreme Court decision nullifying the constitutional right to abortion.
Some interesting information on Short Short and Flash fiction, including collections to read. From Lit Hub.
"The Building Blocks of Scene" by Sharon Oard Warner on Jane Friedman's blog.
ESPECIALLY FOR WRITERS
Interesting? Yes? Depressing? Probably. AI generated e-book genre fiction--and nonfiction. How an e-book paranormal cozy mystery writer started using Sudowrite to help her write lots of novels fast. (Josh Dzieza in The Verge). Thanks to Nikolas Kozloff for pointing us to this piece.
Check out the NY Times on the growing importance of TikTok to book publishing. Note that the writer they feature is the excellent novelist of ancient history and myth, Madeline Miller, whose Circe we reviewed in this newsletter.
Danny Williams on how to choose, edit, and when to use proper names in your fiction. And, FYI, Danny's editing store is open--write Danny Williams at editorwv@hotmail.com .
Philip Klay on how to write about war.
Jordan Kisner inThe Atlantic on failing to cross cultural divides in fiction (review of Geraldine Brooks's Horse).
Alice Munro's stories are a how-to-write course, and a surprising number are available free online. See the Lit Hub list here.
Digitalize your work! I don't usually recommend commercial ventures, but I and others have been using Golden Images for at least fifteen years. They do various kinds of conversions to digital (a printed book to, say,Word files for editing). I recommend these folks, and I also recommend that anyone who doesn't have their work in digital form somewhere to have it done as soon as possible!
See their website at https://www.pdfdocument.com; email them at stan@pdfdocument.com; call 666-375-9999.
Meredith Sue Willis's
Books for Readers # 224
November 21, 2022
This Newsletter Looks Best. and its links work better, in its Permanent Location.
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Especially for Writers
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How to Help Your Favorite Authors
REVIEWS
This list is alphabetical by author (not reviewer)
The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones
Howard's End by E.M. Forster
Sacred by Dennis Lehane
Hombre by Elmore Leonard
Mr. Majestyk by Elmore Leonard
Pledging Season by Erika Erickson Malinoski
The Sea of Tranquillity by Emily St. John Mandel
In the Lonely Backwater by Valerie Nieman reviewed by Ed Davis
BUtterfieldd 8 by John O'Hara
Tracy Flick Can't Win by Tom Perrotta
The Hustler by Walter Tevis
The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis
The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis
Twilight of the Self: The Decline of Individual in Late Capitalism
by Michael Thompson reviewed by Joe ChumanThe Paying Guests by Sarah Waters
The books most on my mind this fall have been 1619, an amazing collection of essays, historical moments, and poetry; also my first Walter Tevis and John O'Hara books; the ever-wonderful Sarah Waters' The Paying Guests; and a reread of Howard's End. In the macho genre, I also read some Elmore Leonard, and the beginning of a new Science Fiction trilogy called Pledging Season. Down in the "Read Online" sections are a number of brand new and excellent short stories by Jane Ainslee, Norman Danzig, Troy Hill, Ed Davis, Kelly Watt and others. And a new issue of our Hamilton Stone Review!
I also wanted to say a few sentences about something I've been thinking about--and talking about--for a long time. This is my increasing appreciation of story and those who do it well, which often in fiction means genre fiction The simplest way I can figure out to distinguish literary fiction from genre fiction is that if story comes first, it's genre. If other elements--language, character development, ideas, etc.--come first, it's probably literary. This, of course, grossly oversimplifies, and I am also assuming that the book in question has good writing And by good, I mean at the very least clean and careful, and deeply excavated. I don't care if it's all dialogue, or full of meticulous descriptions of mountain landscapes or cityscapes (either fantasy or realistic). I don't care if the pace is crisp or leisurely. I do care that someone wrote it carefully--and probably went back and dug deeper, found the right words, whether they are gorgeous set pieces or simple reports of the facts in a police procedural.
I have an article on the differences between the process of writing genre and literary fiction in my occasional online publication, A Journal of Practical Writing.
Someone challenged me in regard to this newsletter: If it's a good novel, why was I segregating "real" books from genre?
Well, I've decided to stop doing that.
REVIEWS
The 1619 Project (created by Nikole Hannah-Jones)This collection was a hard read, not because of style or too many facts– it works beautifully with its combination of reporting, historical narrative, chronologies, poems, and very short stories. Hannah-Jones's first and final sections (called "Democracy" and "Justice") were excellent, as was her preface. In her dedication, she offers the the book "to the more than thirty million descendants of American slavery."
Informative, moving, and entertaining, it is also depressing and scathingly horrible. The murders of enslaved people, the rapes, the hundred years of lynchings and forced labor-- are the jumping off point. But for me, also horrifying, were the centuries of elaborate rationalizations by white people for why all this was okay. These rationalizations included that black people didn't feel pain; that they were less intelligent than people of other races; that slavery was better than living in their native African "jungles." Obviously you would have had to rationalize. We are still rationalizing about race but also about climate change and other big issues. The problem is that it is easy to go around saying Tsk tsk, oh slavery was so bad and also the Holocaust, people will always do evil things, tsk tsk.
But this book, a "project" supported by The New York Times, goes into what people nowadays call the granular. They tell individual stories and facts you didn't know. It is almost too much to face up to. Sample facts that were new to me: about 20 per cent of all American adults today are descended from the homesteaders who were granted free land under the Homestead Act This was a wealth- building gift from the government to white people, not to black and formerly enslaved (skipping over entirely who the land belonged to before the government took it). This is one small part of the evidence of how white Americans, even those of very modest means, have more depth of resources than black Americans.
Note to families who don't want their white children made to feel guilty about slavery and more: You don't have to feel guilty for what you didn't personally do. But you should know the facts, and consider if those facts suggest any actions you or your government might take.
Other eye-openers, new to me, were about relations in the early eighteenth century between African Americans, free and enslaved, and Native Americans. That was not a simple history--sometimes the groups made common cause, as in the Florida swamps, sometimes wealthy Native Americans became enslavers. But in a history like this one, ambivalence and complexity are the rule. The book also makes clear that Reconstruction, while it was brutally terminated, has never been forgotten, left memories and inspiration.. It was a moment when black men were elected to state and national office, and when government created public schools and roads and libraries in the South to benefit all of the poor and working classes.
Those years immediately after the Civil War are an important part of the book, particularly the extreme efforts of the defeated Southern white ruling class to get back control over the black labor force. One way they did this was with vagrancy laws that threw multitudes of ex-enslaved into prisons which then leased out the prisoners for plantation labor. Terrorists like the Klan were sent off to destroy property and murder the financially and educationally successful free blacks. Also appalling is the withdrawal by the U.S. Army and other institutions that had been set up to help the transitions to freedom. The southern ruling class called it the "Redemption," and the rest of the world, if it noticed, called it terrorism and Jim Crow.
1619 introduced me to individuals I'd never heard of, who got no monuments in Washington, D.C., but whose lives are inspiring and remind us of how change really happens– Rebecca Lee Crumpler, for example, the first Black female doctor who was not only a trailblazer, but also went to work in the South for the Freedmen's Bureau and wrote one of the first treatises on the burden of disease in the Black communities. But the book offers many more, people who deserve not to be forgotten.
All of this is in service not of some strange theory called CRT, but rather as an effort to teach the details of what happened and to examine the centrality of slavery to the economy of the Unite States, and the importance of race in our entire political and social history.
We are right now facing a moment when large numbers of white people in the U.S. want to return to a mythologized past when white people were in the driver's seat. It's a frightening time, but I'd submit that is hardly a worse time than the period between the end of the Civil War and 1950 when there were an average of three lynchings every two weeks in the United States. It's also not a a worse moment than Poland in 1940 or Ireland during the potato famines. This is not to compare, just to insist that we and our children need to know the facts. They give us perspective and background for making our individual voting decisions and decisions about which neighborhoods to live in, where to share our financial resources.
Read 1619 , even if it takes you a year. Or two. We need the details.
Howard's End by E.M. Forster
Always wonderful. A perfect book to reread as you age and learn about yourself and your changing reactions to it. When I first read it, I was in my twenties, and I was just blown away. I felt it as great thought, great art, great everything. And it is great art, but
it's a much smaller story than I first thought. It is precise in the limitations of the world it gives us, which I have come to see as giving a book much more chance of universal value.
Forster takes on issues of class and gender and does nicely with them within his limits. Like so much Victorian literature, it never gives up its deep faith that the liberal Christian English middle classes, that their way really is superior to all other ways of being. He respects other ways of being, values people unlike his own class, but in the end could never put down the cup of tea and walk out of the party.
This is not a denigration of Forster or his book, which I continue to adore. He knows this about himself. He knows it about his protagonist Margaret Schlegel. But both Forster and Margaret, as hard as they try, really do find Leonard Bast and his outreach for culture to be pathetic. And Forster, with Margaret, can't help finding their ruddy representative of Empire, Henry Wilcox, very attractive.
Forster handles beautifully how mistaken Margaret is to think she can change anything deep about Henry Wilcox. The Wilcoxes are brilliantly pinned to the felt and labelled. So philistine! So dishonest! So superficial! And yet Margaret and Forster have such affection for them (the ones who built the empire!). How Margaret "handles" her condescending husband is disturbing to me: the pretending to submissiveness.
So I am more critical than I used to be, but I am still moved by the tightness of the novel,by his brilliantly seen landscapes, the strange un-intellectrual brilliance of the first Mrs. Wilcox's vision. "Only Connect." All those years I thought it came from Passage to India!
I'll also quote a little from what I said about it in 2007. Then I was taken by how much funnier it was than I remembered: "Aunt Juley and the Wilcoxes at the beginning is such a wild scene. The only weak part for me is poor Leonard Bast who is such a total patsy– I wonder, was Forster so hard on him because he loved him? Or was it too painful to imagine being him? Without the learning and the cushion of wealth that permits and sustains learning? The thrilling conclusion....[how] Henry ends up leaning on Margaret (a la Jane Eyre...with Mr. Rochester ... blinded and wounded, and widowed too, of course)– that was a bit much with the coincidences, but so satisfying you don't really care. No question that genteel poverty then was more of an abyss– now, you could get a lower class job and not go totally over the edge– also women can get jobs now. More choices. Certainly a less elite culture, too. In the end, there is a quality of magic in the novel, the influence of Mrs. Wilcox. Mr. Wilcox's repeated brutalities really make you wonder how Margaret could keep loving him– on the other hand, there is truly a case to be made for his assumption that the Lower Orders have their own lives and he doesn't have to feel sorry for them."
Painting of Forster by Roger Frye.
The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters
The Paying Guests is set ten years or less after Howard's End, just after World War I, while Howard's End is just before. Waters, of course, is writing from the 2000's, and she seems to be in some small conversation with Forster's book. The male lodger in The Paying Guests is named Leonard, for example, like the striving clerk Leonard in Howard's End, although the post-war Leonard is much less interested in culture and more confident of his own worth than sad Leonard Bast.
Waters's
characters have almost all lost family members to it. Low level gentry like Frances and her mother are in reduced financial circumstances and are forced to rent out some rooms in their house. Frances and the new lodger wife Lillian fall in love, and the first half of the novel is a strong love story with lots of fascinating economic and social information about life in 1920's London. There is class conflict and changes in women's status. The second half turns into a kind of reverse mystery of police and court procedures working on how Lillian's husband died. Frances and Lillian know,and we readers know, and there are wrenching challenges to Frances and Lillian's relationship and indeed their ethics.
There is a lot to enjoy here: the gripping story, Lillian's big, warm, vulgar shop keeping family. Lillian's husband Leonard, too, is an odd mix of energy and kindness and annoying vulgar false intimacy. I also liked how Frances does housework because she and her mother can't afford a maid, She works off a lot of her frustration and worry. The fact she is hands and knees scrubbing is genteelly ignored by her mother--Frances does big cleaning jobs when her mother is out at church or meetings f charitable organizations.
Sarah Waters is always a wonderful read, and the split in this novel between love and class drama to crime and guilt is successfully accomplished.
CHECKING OUT WALTER TEVIS
It started with The Queen's Gambit on Netflix and led on to Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason as "Minnesota Fats...."
The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis
I read Tevis's science fiction novel first, while finishing the Netflix series of The Queen's Gambit. It is so sad, all about the self-destruction of a humanoid of another species. It takes place in a future without personal computers and smart phones, so you have to imagine it, reading today, as a kind of alternative future happening simultaneously with our ow present.. All the people seem to be alcoholics or want to be. Newton, the man who fell, is wonderfully vulnerable and touching.
The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis
I've almost never done this before: seen a movie and THEN read the book. We watched the Netflix show, and then I looked up Tevis, read The Man Who Fell to Earth, saw that he had written several other novels that were turned into movies I was familiar with (notably The Hustler with Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason). So I decided to read The Queen's Gambit too.
This book and The Hustler are clean and simple, solid books, and The Queen's Gambit is more interesting in a lot of ways than the movie. One review of the movie took the show runners to task for having a beautiful Beth Harmon when the book makes it clear that she's not. Her older friend Jolene calls her ugly, but she's just plain, and apparently, once she gains poise and good clothes, is not bad looking at all. That's in the book. On Netflix, her beauty becomes, I guess, a stand in for her fascinating mind.
The strength of the novel is that mind. The novel is told at a very close third person. Unlike the movie, the book has everything subservient to chess: clothes, sex, relationships. The review made the excellent point about how the actor's beauty makes her take a room whenever she enters. Beth in the book is internal, and in it Beth is far less obsessed with her parents.
Two big differences from the novel: first, Tevis manages quite magically to make the short descriptions of chess games interesting to read. I know the moves and the pieces in chess, and have some vague idea of what it means to castle, but I don't really play. You might have to know at least that much to enjoy the chess descriptions, but they are usually brief and emphasize the drama and the player's internal tension or triumph– but it really is chess. Whereas the movie, incapable of internalizing the game, has to find visual equivalents, and creates a huge upside down imagined chessboard of pieces hanging from the ceiling like stalactites. It's cool--those queens and rooks like pale folded bats. But when Beth in the book thinks about chess, it's not gorgeous magical swooshing but chess pieces on a board playing a game you can follow at least in part.
The other big difference is that the character of Jolene, her companion in the orphanage and maybe four years older, crawls into bed with Beth and feels her up, makes Beth feel her. This is distressing, but it doesn't stop them from becoming friends. I don't get this, frankly, because it is is told and then dropped, and I wanted more. It isn't that I don't believe you can move on with someone, especially a kid, who abuses you, but I want to know how it works. And also re: Jolene-- in later years she doesn't just appear at Beth's door, Beth reaches out to her first.
Anyhow, I liked the movie, but I liked the book more, which isn't unusual with me, but this made it very clear, some things that novels do better than movies.
The Hustler by Walter Tevis
This was Tevis's first novel, 1959. He was a graduate of Iowa Writers, an alcoholic, and as a child had been addicted to (I think) phenobarbital, under circumstances not terribly dissimilar to his character Beth Harmon. He died of lung cancer at 56.
I liked the novel but had trouble not seeing Paul Newman as Fast Eddie Felson. I saw the movie many years ago, but even so remembered some of what was coming: Minnesota Fats washing up in the waning hours of their pool match (although I think Jackie Gleason in the movie changed shirts)
Fast Eddie's shattered hands.
He changes over the course of the novel from a hustler with more charm than sense and with the heart of a loser to a winner. I think I was glad: it's satisfying to see fufillment. On the other hand, I'm not mad about "the girl," who stays a loser. She's a drunk, a clinger, and Tevis also gives her a limp. She is, however, working on a masters degree, and she's a kind of writer and certainly a reader.
It's a solid, small, tight novel that is well worth reading.
Pledging Season by Erika Erickson Malinoski
First of a science fiction series about a world where women are the privileged gender, and men get to help
out. Men as everyone knows are naturally better at child care and vie for the privilege of offering their seed to make new babies.
Ya'shul is a young man who wants to be recognized for his scientific discoveries, but his long time beloved takes the credit rather than sharing it with him. He spends most of the novel hurt and yearning to be noticed and accepted.
Meanwhile, the planet is facing imminent sun storms, and the people will have to move into caves to survive. A different ethnic group, with different gender practices, the Wanderers, are joining Ya'shul's group for survival, and the alternate point of view is that of Andeshe. Andeshe's group needs Ya'shul's help to save the enormous flying natives who they use for travel and keeping lines of communication open.
The Wanderers appear to be able to change genders. The novel raises all kinds of interesting issues and would be terrific for starting conversations. Their system allows for certain activities to be gendered–the big flying creatures, pteradons, prefer to be handled by women, for example. It doesn't stop Andeshe from handling pteradons, he/she just has to do it in woman form.
Perhaps my favorite thing about the story is how little physical violence there is. Human beings still manage pretty serious oppression of each other, but there isn't any sword play or throat slitting. Indeed, Andeshe's concerns about how the Uplanders don't seem able to resolve conflicts is one of the most interesting ongoing threads. Malinoski takes conflict resolution very seriously and experiments with how it can/might play out.
The novel is frank in its emphasis on working through situations and problems, but always through the lives of its characters. It's a promising series–I look forward to reading more!
For a free sample, go to the review at Queer Sci Fi.
The Sea of Tranquillity by Emily St. John Mandel
This was a shorter book that the others of hers I've read, and it re-uses a few moments and people from The Glass Hotel. This one is pretty straight science fiction, though, with much of the action on three domed (not doomed) moon colonies. A time machine bounces the action around from 1912 through 2020 and on into the 2100's, maybe later.
Much of it is remarkably "normal," or at least familiar. Kids go to school, neighborhoods decline, some people have boring jobs in hotel security. There's a mild love story, pandemics, passion for one's children. Oh, and book tours! One important character is a novelist, Olive Llewellyn, who gives the same lecture about post apocalyptic literature over and over. There are shaky silvery holograms instead of Zoom for virtual meetings. I liked it, but it feels a bit like an introduction to more.
Passion, Roses, Love and Fire: In the Lonely Backwater by Valerie Nieman Reviewed by Ed Davis
I don’t believe I’ve seen a teenaged protagonist as troubled and true as Maggie Warshauer since Huck Finn. This 17-year-old sailor-scientist inhabits deep water both literally and figuratively in Valerie Nieman’s new novel, In the Lonely Backwater (Fitzroy Books, 2022). The author sets her tale at a backwoods North Carolina lake marina which
Maggie’s alcoholic father manages (barely, with her considerable help). Physically plain and stout rather than svelte and sexy like her cousin Charisse, Maggie is a loner who charts her own course, whether on or off her sailboat Bellatrix, salvaged with her dad from the boat “boneyard.” Brilliantly, Nieman guides us through one of the most honest, truthful and profound meditations I’ve yet read on identity, including candid discussions of sex and gender, to discover the very roots of character.
Abandoned by her girly-girl Mom, Maggie knows she could benefit from a little “civilizing” and even tries wearing makeup once. But like Huck, she can’t stand all the compromises she’d have to make to excel in that artificial world, so she imagines her own. She invents an imaginary boyfriend she can brag about to Charisse and her friends on social media. Just as Huck had Tom Sawyer, for a while Maggie has the two male members of the Three Musketeers: Hulky, the Black wrestler, and Nat, whose extreme sexual confusion and alienation both parallel and contrast with her own. Maggie’s unfortunate trajectory is to be left more and more isolated, with no escaped slave Jim with whom to share either her dinghy or the houseboat she lives in with Dad, whose negligence may not be as cruelly violent as Pap Finn’s but is ultimately, along with Mom’s abandonment, just as damaging.
Maggie, lost and alone inside her mind, is the classic unreliable narrator, and Nieman employs that device to stunning effect. Trapped as we are in Maggie’s head, we experience first-hand her escalating stress, culminating in real terror as the plot works its way to its exciting showdown. But, to her great credit, Nieman, like Twain, is much more concerned with her protagonist’s character rather than plot. She allows the story to meander more like a river than the lake Maggie navigates when the wind’s up for sailing.
The plot does, however, have a hissing fuse, which is lit right away by Charisse’s tragic death. Missing after prom, Maggie’s cousin and rival turns up choked to death on an abandoned houseboat, with her dress cut off, panties in her mouth. And Detective Drexel Vann, with his relentless questioning over the next several months, never quite gives up on Maggie as a suspect, since the two girls had been rivals with recent bad blood between them. And it doesn’t help that Charisse, drunk and reeling from attempted rape by her prom date, joined the Musketeers on her last night alive at their hangout, the cemetery at Old Trinity church, making Maggie the last to see her, other than, presumably, her murderer. Who, as weeks pass, may be stalking Maggie, leaving strange symbolic objects increasingly creepy—and, worse, personal.
Like Twain’s masterpiece, Nieman’s includes so much more than an exciting plot: for example, Maggie’s obsession with her hero Carl Linnaeus, whose Lachesus Laponica, or A Tour in Lapland, written in 1811, becomes her bible, teaching her how to learn science by observation. Linnaeus’s quoted entries, entertaining in themselves, simultaneously make comments on Maggie’s life. She applies her scientific attitude to everything, becoming a great classifier, for example, comparing people to boats. Detective Drexel Vann is “a great bass boat, but not a flashy one, not metal flake or anything.” Vann is, fascinatingly, both father figure and worthy opponent to Maggie in their cat and mouse game.
The book is less a mystery than a classic coming of age novel. As in Twain’s masterpiece, we endure with Maggie the ravages of alcoholism in the father Maggie both loves and resents, forcing her to grow up way too soon. We’re also exposed to poignant scenes such as a stormy visit to West Virginia relatives, the day her mom gives her a home permanent to girlify her (doesn’t work!), and instances of Maggie sailing off alone to hang out on Bora Bora Island, just like Huck hiding out on Jackson’s Island. Nieman takes her time to penetrate Maggie’s many layers. Wisely, she leaves one layer unmined until the very end, when plot and character merge to reveal one of life’s greatest mysteries: the lies we tell, especially when young and vulnerable, to protect ourselves from an unbearable truth.
Nieman’s novel has been compared to the mega-bestseller Where the Crawdad Sings. And while I know millions have enjoyed Delia Owens’ book and more millions are now enjoying the film based on it, I found In the Lonely Backwater clearly superior. While Owens, a zoologist, knows nature, as a first-time novelist, her writing leaves much to be desired. Nieman—former journalist, poet, writing professor and author of four novels— deserves just as large an audience. Structurally, thematically as well as stylistically, she’s at the top of her game. I’ll leave you with one example of her many gorgeous sentences, as this female Huck says heartbreakingly of her estranged mother: “I loved to read the names on the bottom of her lipstick tubes, all passion and roses, love and fire.” That describes you, too, Maggie, I’d reply,
BUtterfield 8 by John O'HaraIt's the early nineteen thirties, and Gloria Wandrous is everywhere in New York City, sleeping with men, drinking all day everyday, supported by her mom and uncle. She was debauched by a friend of her uncle at 12 or 14, and how this is handled is odd: it is clearly presented as seminal in her behavior, but not as a criminal act–was it in the nineteen-twenties when it would have happened to her? It's almost as if, "Goblin Market" style, tasting it once made her want it for herself.
She seems to like sex, maybe for pleasure, maybe to shut someone up, to get something she wants. Honestly, it's a strange book,disgusting casual racism and anti-Semitism and classism–not to mention sexism. Awful lifestyles, sex the only serious pleasure distraction, hangovers a good enough excuse for not going to work.
Gloria is still a teenager, still beautiful and men trail her with their tongues out.
The ending is peculiar, as well as gory. Was it tacked on for neatness? To punish the bad girl? The earlier lighter parts are more convincing, as when Gloria wakes up in a lover's apartment, alone, and "borrows" the man's wife's fur coat since her dress is torn.
I can't say I'm going to be reading a lot of John O'Hara, even if he did publish more stories in the New Yorker than anyone else.
Right: Liz Taylor as Gloria in the movie. They moved it up to the 1950's and made Gloria into a professional call girl. Ah Liz! Look at that waist, elbow, right hip line!
Tracy Flick Can't Win by Tom Perrotta
Once again Perrotta is wittily looking at what success means in America. Tracy Flick from Electionis again doing everything right and not being rewarded for her competence, and again the world of high school is seething with political intrigue and sex. Tracy is an assistant principal now, though, not the scheming student.
There are a lot of laughs, but as Ron Charles writes in The Washington Post, "Perrotta often is billed as a comic novelist, but he has become our patron saint of suburban melancholy."
Definitely a pleasure to read, with an all-American bang-up ending. But, as my friend who turned me on to these books told me, it's better if you read Election first. (Here's what I had to say about Election)
Review from The Washington Post
Review from The New York Times
Hombre by Elmore Leonard
One
more mid-twentieth century macho book! But Elmore Leonard is pretty dependable to have a jaundiced eye on the right things. This is one of his westerns, published in 1961, turned into a movie, as usual (yes, that's Paul "Apache Boy" Newman to the left).
There is a sad ending and an interesting extremely quiet main character. . As a child we watched a lot of cowboys on TV, and a few movies, but I didn't read much western fiction. So to me, this is mostly interesting as early Elmore experimenting with a slightly prissy young man narrator, an intentionally slightly awkward voice.
It's an accurate but unreliable narration that gives us a lot about prejudice against native Americans and Mexicans too. Leonard also manages to have two count 'em two women, one of whom has been captured for a while by Apaches and is pretty tough and angry but not traumatized.
Leonard does the action with one hand tied behind his back, and just the right amount of scenery. But it's all about character. For the centrality of character to Elmore Leonard, take a look at this appreciation of how Leonard works with character by Dennis Lehane.
(Image of Paul Newman in the 1967 movie)
Mr. Majestyk by Elmore LeonardMore Elmore Leonard: this time, Charles Bronson got the lead in the movie.
This seemed very short–the e-book ended at about 70% with filler and a teaser for another book to finish it out.
It is a little Keystone Coppish with a mean but increasingly incompetent hit man determined to kill, personally, our hero, the melon farmer who is nice to his workers, Mr. Majestyk. There are also some Chicano organizers, and the female leader falls for Mr. M. and helps him out in all the ways she can.
The bad guy, who seems maybe more interesting to Leonard, is falling apart as he breaks his own rules for his work out of a desire for vengeance. He and some henchmen, chase Mr. M. all over, mayhem ensues.
The first two-thirds is amusing, witty Elmore Leonard. The rest is chases and shooting.
Sacred by Dennis Lehane
In 1997 Kirkus reviews was calling Dennis Lehane a gifted newcomer. Sacred is one of his early ones about the Boston private detective team Kenzie and Gennaro, and this one is mostly fun: sharply written, good repartee especially between the partners, enough in the way of murders and betrayals and beatings and torture to satisfy fans of that stuff. I'm willing to skim it for the parts I like, which are the settings and the main characters. There are some good minor characters too, and a blatantly sociopathic villain.
More recently, in a 2015 review at Star Crossed Book blog said, "Lehane not only survives the dreaded third-book curse, he beats it to death with a stick." I would, in the right mood, read almost any Lehane, although my favorite is his dark, mostly-Boston cop trilogy. Those still have all the crime you could ask, but in a more literary form.
But above all, I like Lehane best when he does Boston. A large part of Sacred is set in Florida. And don't get me wrong, he writes Tampa very well, especially as viewed by his Boston P.I.'s.
Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
Fire and Ice again! I reread Game of Thrones, probably because House of the Dragon ended on HBO. This was the first doorstopper of the series that I read, back @ 2010 when I was apparently half embarrassed to be reading it (see my manifesto above about literary versus genre).
Martin is so solid in this, and so skillful in how he writes just enough in each point-of-view chapter to bring one person's experience and character to life, but skips any parts he doesn't want to bother with. And he really doesn't want to bother much with quotidian life--although he is never anything but concrete. That is, if a zombie hand is crawling up someone's leg you feel it as well as see it, and if there is a feast, you get the details on courses of quail and venison and duck and "aurochs" appear, with notes on herbs and sweeteners. All concrete, all in the service of creating slivers and scenes of a world, a universe, where everyone is in danger, lives are under constant threat, bodies broken, people die--by execution, by zombie, in battle.
Several of the main characters are children, which ups the ante and makes us care a lot, and also lightens the heaviness of this world at war. And then there is major point of view character Tyrion Lannister, witty and strategizing, basically kind, and able to see the big picture. He was brilliantly played on the HBO series by Peter Dinklage. My son said Dinklage's only fault was that he is far better looking than Tyrion in the novel.
For my first take on the book, look here.
Twilight of the Self: The Decline of the Individual in Late Capitalism by Michael Thompson reviewed by Joe Chuman
(also see on substack)
The Twilight of the Self, recently published by political scientist, Michael Thompson, was written after Donald Trump came to office. But Trump, nor Trumpism is explicitly cited in the text. What Thompson has done is more comprehensive than an exposition of our current political condition. His thesis is devoted to explicating the foundations and structures – economic, cognitive and psychological – which have caused the decaying of democracy and the emergence of authoritarianism at this stage of capitalist development.
At the focus of the democratic crisis is the withering of the individual and individual autonomy. Thompson's definition of autonomy is the one forged in the Enlightenment. It partakes of the understanding of autonomy as commensurate with the freedom of the individual as a rational being capable of positing her own purposes and ends. But most salient, he notes, is the power of the individual to stand in critical relation to the realities that frame the society of which he or she is a member.
It need be mentioned that Thompson does not embrace the status of the individual proffered by classic liberalism which places the individual as standing apart from society. He is clearly no libertarian. Nor does he embrace communitarianism. Rather, Thompson sees the person as embedded in society, a legatee of its values, norms and logics, yet capable of peering beyond given horizons to enrich his own life and society more broadly. His concept of the individual and autonomy is relational.
It is this now atrophied and lost capacity that has desiccated the authentic self and led to the demise of democracy, predicated as it is, on the active engagement of individual persons with the life of the community. Though he doesn't invoke the American sage, it is my conclusion that Thompson's views on the self and democracy are close those of John Dewey. For Dewey, democracy is not so much invested in the processes and institutions of electoral politics as it is the lifestyle of a free people. For Dewey, the emergence of the self is a dialectical process in which the individual becomes himself or herself though directing life outward, and grows through active engagement with others and the world. Its tenor and mores are pervasively humanistic. It is this reality that has become flattened by acceptance of supervening and domineering forces of which people are barely aware.
The Twilight of the Self is an erudite and probing analysis written in a high-minded academic idiom and rigorously researched and creatively argued. Thompson makes use of such foundational thinkers as Marx, Max Weber, Erich Fromm, Georg Lukacs and other luminaries from the realms of political, economic and sociological thought. His thesis takes from these thinkers while extending their applicability to the realities of the early twenty-first century.
These realities are vested in the hegemony of what Thompson defines as the cybernetic society. In Thompson's description:
“Cybernetic society is a phase of capitalism saturated by the logic of instrumental extraction and commodification – that is, where every of society, polity, culture, and psyche are extruded through a uniform deep logic efficiency and profit maximization, as well as the attendant logics of control and organizational management that secure it, leading to a corrosion of psyche and culture. This is a society where these technical logics of organizational management and control have been able to socialize the self, making it the simultaneous object and subject of control and surplus extraction.”
In short, the lives and consciousness of individuals selves is embedded in and molded by larger economic structures so that these realities have become unquestioned givens. They are internalized and felt to be natural, and persons so shaped are denuded of the capacities to critique and the capacity to think beyond them. As a result, autonomy fades, and individuals are reduced to cogs in a larger system of control. But Thompson makes clear that the current reality of domination differs from earlier eras of capitalist domination in that individuals willingly comply with supervening and controlling forces which they assume to be normative and just as things are and need to be. Again, autonomy and the capacity to critique one's condition, are lost.
He notes,
“Social power now becomes a function of compliance- and this compliance is more expansive and more introjected into the individual that previous modes of submitting to power. Now in the cybernetic world, compliance is a kind of coded means by which an individual component of a system performed the requisite task allotted to it. It entails a kind of rationalized submission to the broader purposes of the totality, of the system as a whole.”
A consequence is the alienation of the self, which Thompson describes as “...the shift from being a causal agent over one's own life and social world to being a mere plaything of others. It means surrendering the most potent power we have as individual agents: that of the capacity of dissent, to disobey, to refuse to build something better, something more humane, more rational.”
Situated at the upper tier of the cybernetic society are economic elites, and the values that govern it are those of the market: the commanding drive toward profit, accumulation and mass consumption. Society and relations become commodified, evacuating all other spheres of value and meaning.
These supervening forces, work to shape the personal inner lives of individual persons. As Thompson notes,
“To properly understand this aspect of the decline of the individual in modern society, I again need to highlight the transformed structure of economic life under the cybernetic society. The shift from a production-based economy in the nineteenth century to a mass-consumption society in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has now morphed into an economy increasingly dominated by rent extraction, expanded working hours, decreasing wages, and highly secured internalized values for consumption as proxies for person success and feelings of self worth.”
As a trained psychoanalyst, Michael Thompson is concerned with how these larger economic and structural forces become internalized in the lives of adults and children.
“Pathologies of the self now take preoedipal form in term of narcissism, relational issues, the withered ego, and a one-dimensionality resulting from efforts to imbricate the self into the seamless operations of the commodity form and the forms of life that have been erected to service it.”
As they pertain to the socialization of children, he notes what has become commonplace:
“The proliferation of television shows, portable internet devices, and videos, games, and other distractions, that saturate even the youngest child's environment, let alone the increasing over scheduling of children's time by parents, shuttling them to and from school, after school activities, and other commitments – all this crowds out the autonomy of imagination and free time so essential to childhood. Whereas earlier forms of childhood would have been ripe with the possibility for an autonomous imagination, now the psychic imagery is colonized by the external world of iPhones, YouTube, and other innumerable heteronomous and commodified for of 'imagination.” The self's capacity for imagination gradually becomes subsumed by industrialized cultural patterns of feeling, thought, and perception; its autonomy weakened, and, in some instances, destroyed, rendering it essentially heteronomous. In adulthood, this lack of an autonomous imagination severs the individual's capacity for free thought, for criticism, for judgment. It whittles away the generative, creative capacities of the self, rendering it incapable of imagining alternative forms of life, values and norms. The self's capacity for spontaneity dries up as it becomes a cog in the machinery of the waves of conformity controlled by commodification logics.”
A psychological consequence are increased levels of anxiety which drives individuals to various forms of deleterious response. Among them is assuredly increased loneliness and isolation, of which our society tragically abounds. But another is the prevalence of group narcissism, which takes malignant forms, as the person seeks to reattain ego-strength and self-esteem. Borrowing from the thought of the social psychologist Erich Fromm, Thompson interprets malignant group narcissism as motivated by sadistic, destructive intent. “Members of the group want to vent their weakness by harming, subordinating, or applying violence (symbolic or physical) on others and groups that they see as weak and underserving. They achieve a sense of self-satisfaction and compensate for the insecurity brought on by their own ontological anxiety through this sadism.”
While, as noted, Thompson does not explicitly apply his thesis to the current extremism of our current political climate, it is apparent that he is framing the foundation that is manifested in the tribalism centered on shared political positions, the xenophobia stoked by Donald Trump and appropriated by his followers and the racist violence manifested by hate groups. While Thompson's analysis pertains to society as a whole, it is not wrong to see it most clearly manifested in right wing extremist who emerge from the white, working class sectors who have felt marginalized and oppressed by economic, political and intellectual elites who have left them feelings powerless and have transferred resources to others unlike themselves whom they feel are undeserving.
Though the primal causes of the loss of individual autonomy are vested in economic class structures and the pervasive power that issues from them, the solutions he suggests do not in the first instance call for revolutionary action as the starting point. Thompson is foremost a scholar and an educator. His mission is to elucidate and analyze and thereby awaken his readers to a variant of false consciousness that suffuses our understanding of society and our station in life. His mission is to awaken us from our slumbers. That mission starts with a proper understanding of the self in order for individuals to regain critical agency. This in turn results from an understanding of oneself as ensconced in social relations with others. As he states, “what I am is a function of what we are, and changing one can requires the transformation of the other. And with this understanding we can gain a clearer grasp of the larger realities that have diminished our individual autonomy and have worked to suppress the flourishing of all on whom our own freedom and enriched humanity depend.
Michael Thompson has written an illuminating and probing treatise in the tradition of grand theorizing.
For those dedicated to the belief that we should live in a world in which the flourishing of each and all is our highest end, and achieving such a world needs to direct our best efforts, The Twilight of the Self is essential reading.
COMMENTS ON BOOKS IN THE LAST ISSUE
Eddy Pendarvis writes: "I really liked your take on The Lincoln Highway. I'm with you on Billy's character as way too sentimental, and the ending way too unsatisfactory. I think the reason Towles couldn't end the novel in a very satisfying way is that it was basically picaresque—nothing very organically related, though there were themes that went through almost all the episodes."
ANNOUNCEMENTS
MSW reviews "Foote" A Mystery Novel," by Tom Bredehoft at Southern Literary Review, November 2, 2022.
Norman Danzig's story "The Angel of Death" has just been published at Blue Lake Review.
Erika Ericlson Malinoski has an interesting new book called Pledging Season--science fiction exploring gender identity. See her website.
Books recommended by Erika Erickson Malinoski: Fine: a Comic about Gender and Love and War: How Militarism Shapes Romance and Sexuality.
Rachel King's Bratwurst Haven is about to be published. You can order from Annie Bloom's and other places, and Rachel will be appearing as follows:
Saturday, November 26: Shop Girl (dress shop) in Gresham, OR
Thursday, February 9: Boulder Book Store in Boulder, CO
New Hamilton Stone editions book Their Own Society: Prose on Poetry gets praise from David Wojahn in a letter to author Roger MitchellL
"Your prose, in its quiet way, is a wonder, and your insights are always spot on. Even the shortest of the pieces are filled with observations that always seem fresh, and your taste is so refreshingly catholic. And the longer essays rock--I
don't think anyone has written better on McGrath, or made a more persuasive case for his centrality. Your various appraisals of modernism find a clear path through schools and movements of labyrinthine diversity. (No easy feat: over the dozen-odd times I've taught the Modern Poetry survey, I've never been able to come up with an adequate definition.) And the assessments or Bly's influence couldn't be more even-handed; you get at his genius, his myopia, and his Hucksterism. Reading the Bly stuff, I found myself thinking of of Stein's characterization of Pound: she called him A Village Explainer. You take him seriously, but not TOO seriously."
David Wojahn teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and at Vermont College of Fine Arts. His Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982-2004, was one of three named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. University of Michigan Press published his From the Valley of Making: Essays on the Craft of Poetry in 2015. He is currently an Editor-at-Large for Ron Slate's On the Seawall.
Roger Mitchell is the author of twelve books of poems. Their Own Society is his second book of prose, a selection of essays and reviews. Retired from Indiana University, he now lives in Jay, New York, with his wife, the fiction writer, Dorian Gossy.
Plan B: A Poet's Survivors Manual by Sandy McIntosh
In PLAN B: A POET’S SURVIVORS MANUAL, McIntosh offers the answer: you need a Plan B if you want to put food on the table, wear shoes without holes in the soles, and stop living with roommates before you turn sixty. Taking us on a witty, fascinating, no-holds barred romp through his own experiences in the world of commercial writing and publishing, McIntosh reassures us that it is possible to have a successful career as a poet while holding down day jobs that make us better writers.
"PLAN B: A POET’S SURVIVORS MANUALis a wonderful book, an important book, a book aspiring writers of fiction and poetry should read. On page 50: "The best day job for a poet involves writing. ; Writing anything. . .will make you a better writer." I have said these exact words to many students, many writers, and have lived my life by this credo... My entire career, which strikes even me as improbable, illustrates many of your "survival tips.""
–David Lehman, Editor, The Oxford Book of American Poetry. Series Editor, The Best American Poetry
From Marsh Hawk Press, Inc.
THINGS TO READ, SEE, & DO ONLINE
Newest Issue of The Hamilton Stone Review, # 47
Check out Ayun Halliday's web page: She makes cartoon-style hand lettered publication--doing things no one else is doing. And I lover her take on wealth, fame, and art. She says, "I’ve got this theory that 99.9% of all humans who toil creatively throughout history have not been and will never be rich as a result of their art. Nor will we be famous…at least not as famous as we deserve. Yet, we struggle on, undeterred that most of the world, if they consider us at all, think we’re SMALL POTATOES...I interviewed dozens of creative humans and share my own experiences in this rallying cry for the “small potato” who persists in making cool, meaningful work and living a creative life devoid of (gasp!) wealth or celebrity." This is from her Manifesto of Small Potatoes. And her hand lettered pages and art work are just delightful. And encouraging!
To read: an excellent short story by Jane Ainslee called "The Iceman." It's about the crushing of good little girls' souls, told in vivid sensual detail.
Kelly Watt's short piece "Next Exit" is up for an honor!
Also, see Ed Davis's "Artemis" at The Plentitudes.
Another powerful short story: Norman Danzig's "The Angel of Death" has just been published at Blue Lake Review.
Troy Hill has new stories online: The Write Launch published his long short story "Aquarium Life" and The Bangalore Review published his story "Ford Man."
Linda Schreiber suggests this short story about the future: "The Bookstore at the End of America."
Barbara Crooker's beautiful October poem-- A few lines from the middle: and bathe the dying. Blessed be
the single mother, working two jobs.
Blessed be the undocumented, who pick
the grapes and bathe the dying. Blessed be
the single mother, working two jobs.
Blessed be the rich, the powerful, the entitled.
Some day, their hearts will crack open,
and they will see there are no borders.
HOW TO HELP WRITERS IF YOU LIKE THEIR WORK
Do you have a favorite author? Are you a writer who wants to do a favor for other writers–andmaybe they'll do a favor for you? Here's how:
• Write an Amazon review. Go to Amazon.com and search the book you recently (or a long time ago!) read.Click through to its Amazon catalog page. Scroll down below the ads and the editorial reviews and product details to Customer Reviews, and then scroll a little farther to REVIEW THIS BOOK.
• You don't have to have bought the book from Amazon.
• They may ask you to set up a reviewer's account. You only have to do it once, and you can stay anonymous if you choose or make up a handle.
• Give the book as many stars as you reasonably can. I rarely review books I can't give five. Inflated grades? For sure, but this is about publicizing books we enjoyed and admired.
• Write a review. Short is fine. In fact, short is probably better than long on Amazon. You can reuse the review on GoodReads and Barnes & Noble and anywhere else.
• Don't use foul language. They won't publish a review if they don't like the words in it, and they can be heavy-handed. It's a 'bot "reading" the review, not a person.
You will be doing literature a favor, and all of us with books in print thank you in advance!
ESPECIALLY FOR WRITERS
Danny Williams on how to choose, edit, and when to use proper names in your fiction. And, FYI, Danny's editing store is open--write Danny Williams at editorwv@hotmail.com .
Alice Munro's stories are a how-to-write course, and a surprising number are available free online. See the Lit Hub list here.
Digitalize your work! I don't usually recommend commercial ventures, but I and others have been using Golden Images for at least fifteen years. They do various kinds of conversions to digital (a printed book to, say,Word files for editing). I recommend these folks, and I also recommend that anyone who doesn't have their work in digital form somewhere to have it done as soon as possible!
See their website at https://www.pdfdocument.com; email them at stan@pdfdocument.com; call 666-375-9999.
LISTS
(Note: some of these links take you to .pdf's to download or read in your computer. Smart phones and iPads may not open them.)
Ernie Brill's Lists to Expand the Canon:
African American Classics
International top-notch short novels less than 200 pages
International Woman 's Literature
Literature From Vietnam
The Literature of Protest
Phyllis Moore's Young Adult Appalachian List:
IRENE WEINBERGER 2021-22 BOOKS:
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BUYING BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS NEWSLETTER
If a book discussed in this newsletter has no source mentioned, don’t forget that you may be able to borrow it from your public library as either a hard copy or as an e-book. You may also buy or order from your local independent bookstore. (To find a bricks-and-mortar store, click the "shop indie" logo left).
A new not-for-profit alternative to Amazon.com is Bookshop.org which sends a percentage of every sale to a pool for brick-and-mortar bookstores. You may also direct the donation to a bookstore of your choice. Lots of individuals have storefronts there, too including me.I have a lot of friends and colleagues who despise Amazon. There is a discussion about some of the issues back in Issue # 184, as well as even older comments from Jonathan Greene and others here.
The largest unionized bookstore in America has a web store at Powells Books. Some people prefer shopping online there to shopping at Amazon.com. An alternative way to reach Powell's site and support the union is via http://www.powellsunion.com. Prices are the same but 10% of your purchase will go to support the union benefit fund.
Another way to buy books online, especially used books, is to use Bookfinder or Alibris. Bookfinder gives the price with shipping and handling, so you can see what you really have to pay.
Another source for used and out-of-print books is All Book Stores. Also consider Paperback Book Swap, a postage-only way to trade books with other readers.
Ingrid Hughes suggests "a great place for used books which sometimes turn out to be never-opened hard cover books is Biblio. She says, "I've bought many books from them, often for $4 including shipping."
If you are using an electronic reader (all kinds), don't forget free books at the Gutenberg Project—mostly classics (copyrights pre-1927), and free, free, free!
Kobobooks.com sells e-books for independent brick-and-mortar bookstores.
More and more public libraries are now offering electronic books for borrowing as well.
RESPONSES TO THIS NEWSLETTER
Please send responses to this newsletter directly to Meredith Sue Willis . Unless you say otherwise, your letter may be edited for length and published in this newsletter.
BACK ISSUES click here.
LICENSE
Books for Readers Newsletter by Meredith Sue Willis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from Meredith Sue Willis. Some individual contributors may have other licenses.
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Meredith Sue Willis, the producer of this occasional newsletter, is a writer and teacher and enthusiastic reader. Her books have been published by Charles Scribner's Sons, HarperCollins, Ohio University Press, Mercury House, West Virginia University Press, Monteymayor Press, Teachers & Writers Press, Mountain State Press, Hamilton Stone Editions, and others. She teaches at New York University's School of Professional Studies.
BACK ISSUES:
#224 1619, E.M. Forster. Elmore Leonard, Pledging Season by Erika Erickson Malinoski. Emily St. John Mandel, Val Nieman, John O'Hara, Tom Perrotta, Walter Tevis, Sarah Waters, and more.
#223 Amor Towles, Emily St. John Mandel, Raymond Chandler, N.K. Jemisin, Andrew Holleran, Anita Diamant, Rainer Maria Rilke, and more, plus notes and reviews by Joe Chuman, George Lies, Donna Meredith, and Rhonda Browning White.
#222 Octavia Butler, Elizabeth Gaskell, N.K. Jemisin, Joseph Lash, Alice Munro, Barbara Pym, Sally Rooney, and more.
#221 Victor Serge, Greg Sanders, Maggie O'Farrell, Ken Champion, Barbara Hambly, Walter Mosely, Anne Roiphe, Anna Reid, Randall Balmer, Louis Auchincloss. Reviews by Joe Chuman and Chris Connelly
#220 Margaret Atwood, Sister Souljah, Attica Locke, Jill Lepore, Belinda Anderson, Claire Oshetsky, Barbara Pym, and Reviews by Joe Chuman, Ed Davis, and Eli Asbury
#219 Carolina De Robertis, Charles Dickens, Thomas Fleming, Kendra James, Ashley Hope Perez, Terry Pratchett, Martha Wells. Reviews by Joe Chuman and Danny Williams.
#218 Ed Myers, Eyal Press, Barbara Kingsolver, Edwidge Danticat, William Trevor, Tim O'Brien. Reviews by Joe Chuman and Marc Harshman.
#217 Jill Lepore; Kathleen Rooney; Stendhal; Rajia Hassib again; Madeline Miller; Jean Rhys; and more. Reviews and recommendations by Joe Chuman, Ingrid Hughes, Peggy Backman, Phyllis Moore, and Dan Gover.
#216 Rajia Hassib; Joel Pechkam; Robin Hobb; Anne Hutchinson; James Shapiro; reviews by Joe Chuman and Marc Harshman; Fellowship of the Rings#215 Julia Alvarez, Karen Salyer McElmurray, Anne Brontë, James Welch, Veronica Roth, Madeline Martin, Barack Obama, Jason Trask, Katherine Anne Porter & more
#214 Brit Bennet, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Robin Hobb, Willliam Kennedy, John Le Carré, John Loonam on Elana Ferrante, Carole Rosenthal on Philip Roth, Peggy Backman on Russell Shorto, Helen Weinzweig, Marguerite Yourcenar, and more.
#213 Pauletta Hansen reviewed by Bonnie Proudfoot; A conversation about cultural appropriation in fiction; T.C. Boyle; Eric Foner; Attica Locke; Lillian Roth; The Snake Pit; Alice Walker; Lynda Schor; James Baldwin; True Grit--and more.
#212 Reviews of books by Madison Smaartt Bell, James Lee Burke, Mary Arnold Ward,Timothey Huguenin, Octavia Butler, Cobb & Seaton, Schama
#211 Reviews of books by Lillian Smith, Henry James, Deborah Clearman, J.K. Jemisin, Donna Meredith, Octavia Butler, Penelope Lively, Walter Mosley. Poems by Hilton Obenzinger.
#210 Lavie Tidhar, Amy Tan, Walter Mosley, Gore Vidal, Julie Otsuka, Rachel Ingalls, Rex Stout, John Updike, and more.
#209 Cassandra Clare, Lissa Evans, Suzan Colón, Damian Dressick, Madeline Ffitch, Dennis Lehane, William Maxwell, and more.
#208 Alexander Chee; Donna Meredith; Rita Quillen; Mrs. Humphy Ward; Roger Zelazny; Dennis LeHane; Eliot Parker; and more.
#207 Caroline Sutton, Colson Whitehead, Elaine Durbach, Marc Kaminsky, Attica Locke, William Makepeace Thackery, Charles Willeford & more.
#206 Timothy Snyder, Bonnie Proudfoot, David Weinberger, Pat Barker, Michelle Obama, Richard Powers, Anthony Powell, and more.
#205 George Eliot, Ernest Gaines, Kathy Manley, Rhonda White; reviews by Jane Kimmelman, Victoria Endres, Deborah Clearman.
#204 Larissa Shmailo, Joan Didion, Judith Moffett, Heidi Julavits, Susan Carol Scott, Trollope, Walter Mosley, Dorothy B. Hughes, and more.
#203 Tana French, Burt Kimmelman, Ann Petry, Mario Puzo, Anna Egan Smucker, Virginia Woolf, Val Nieman, Idra Novey, Roger Wall.
#202 J .G. Ballard, Peter Carey, Arthur Dobrin, Lisa Haliday, Birgit Mazarath, Roger Mitchell, Natalie Sypolt, and others.
#201 Marc Kaminsky, Jessica Wilkerson, Jaqueline Woodson, Eliot Parker, Barbara Kingsolver. Philip Roth, George Eliot and more.
#200 Books by Zola, Andrea Fekete, Thomas McGonigle, Maggie Anderson, Sarah Dunant, J.G. Ballard, Sarah Blizzard Robinson, and more.
#199 Reviews by Ed Davis and Phyllis Moore. Books by Elizabeth Strout, Thomas Mann, Rachel Kushner, Craig Johnson, Richard Powers and more.
#198 Reviews by Belinda Anderson, Phyllis Moore, Donna Meredith, Eddy Pendarvis, and Dolly Withrow. Eliot, Lisa Ko, John Ehle, Hamid, etc.
#197 Joan Silber, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Alexander Hamilton, Eudora Welty, Middlemarch yet again, Greta Ehrlich, Edwina Pendarvis.
#196 Last Exit to Brooklyn; Joan Didion; George Brosi's reviews; Alberto Moravia; Muriel Rukeyser; Matthew de la Peña; Joyce Carol Oates
#195 Voices for Unity; Ramp Hollow, A Time to Stir, Patti Smith, Nancy Abrams, Conrad, N.K. Jemisin, Walter Mosely & more.
#194 Allan Appel, Jane Lazarre, Caroline Sutton, Belinda Anderson on children's picture books.
#193 Larry Brown, Phillip Roth, Ken Champion, Larissa Shmailo, Gillian Flynn, Jack Wheatcroft, Hilton Obenziner and more.
#192 Young Adult books from Appalachia; Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse; Michael Connelly; Middlemarch; historical murders in Appalachia.
#191 Oliver Sacks, N.K. Jemisin, Isabella and Ferdinand and their descendents, Depta, Highsmith, and more.
#190 Clearman, Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods, Doerr, Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, Miss Fourth of July, Goodbye and more.
#189 J.D. Vance; Mitch Levenberg; Phillip Lopate; Barchester Towers; Judith Hoover; ; Les Liaisons Dangereuses; short science fiction reviews.
#188 Carmen Ferreiro-Esteban; The Hemingses of Monticello; Marc Harshman; Jews in the Civil War; Ken Champion; Rebecca West; Colum McCann
#187 Randi Ward, Burt Kimmelman, Llewellyn McKernan, Sir Walter Scott, Jonathan Lethem, Bill Luvaas, Phyllis Moore, Sarah Cordingley & more
#186 Diane Simmons, Walter Dean Myers, Johnny Sundstrom, Octavia Butler & more
#185 Monique Raphel High; Elizabeth Jane Howard; Phil Klay; Crystal Wilkinson
#184 More on Amazon; Laura Tillman; Anthony Trollope; Marily Yalom and the women of the French Revolution; Ernest Becker
#183 Hilton Obenzinger, Donna Meredith, Howard Sturgis, Tom Rob Smith, Daniel José Older, Elizabethe Vigée-Lebrun, Veronica Sicoe
#182 Troy E. Hill, Mitchell Jackson, Rita Sims Quillen, Marie Houzelle, Frederick Busch, more Dickens
#181 Valerie Nieman, Yorker Keith, Eliot Parker, Ken Champion, F.R. Leavis, Charles Dickens
#180 Saul Bellow, Edwina Pendarvis, Matthew Neill Null, Judith Moffett, Theodore Dreiser, & more
#179 Larissa Shmailo, Eric Frizius, Jane Austen, Go Set a Watchman and more
#178 Ken Champion, Cat Pleska, William Demby's Beetlecreek, Ron Rash, Elizabeth Gaskell, and more.
#177 Jane Hicks, Daniel Levine, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Ken Chamption, Patricia Harman
#176 Robert Gipe, Justin Torres, Marilynne Robinson, Velma Wallis, Larry McMurty, Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, Fumiko Enchi, Shelley Ettinger
#175 Lists of what to read for the new year; MOUNTAIN MOTHER GOOSE: CHILD LORE OF WEST VIRGINIA; Peggy Backman
#174 Christian Sahner, John Michael Cummings, Denton Loving, Madame Bovary
#173 Stephanie Wellen Levine, S.C. Gwynne, Ed Davis's Psalms of Israel Jones, Quanah Parker, J.G. Farrell, Lubavitcher girls
#172 Pat Conroy, Donna Tartt, Alice Boatwright, Fumiko Enchi, Robin Hobb, Rex Stout
#171 Robert Graves, Marie Manilla, Johnny Sundstrom, Kirk Judd
#170 John Van Kirk, Carter Seaton,Neil Gaiman, Francine Prose, The Murder of Helen Jewett, Thaddeus Rutkowski
#169 Pearl Buck's The Exile and Fighting Angel; Larissa Shmailo; Liz Lewinson; Twelve Years a Slave, and more
#168 Catherine the Great, Alice Munro, Edith Poor, Mitch Levenberg, Vonnegut, Mellville, and more!
#167 Belinda Anderson; Anne Shelby; Sean O'Leary, Dragon tetralogy; Don Delillo's Underworld
#166 Eddy Pendarvis on Pearl S. Buck; Theresa Basile; Miguel A. Ortiz; Lynda Schor; poems by Janet Lewis; Sarah Fielding
#165 Janet Lewis, Melville, Tosltoy, Irwin Shaw!
#164 Ed Davis on Julie Moore's poems; Edith Wharton; Elaine Drennon Little's A Southern Place; Elmore Leonard
#163 Pamela Erens, Michael Harris, Marlen Bodden, Joydeep Roy-Battacharya, Lisa J. Parker, and more
#162 Lincoln, Joseph Kennedy, Etel Adnan, Laura Treacy Bentley, Ron Rash, Sophie's Choice, and more
#161 More Wilkie Collins; Duff Brenna's Murdering the Mom; Nora Olsen's Swans & Klons; Lady Audley's Secret
#160 Carolina De Robertis, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Ross King's The Judgment of Paris
#159 Tom Jones. William Luvaas, Marc Harshman, The Good Earth, Lara Santoro, American Psycho
#158 Chinua Achebe's Man of the People; The Red and the Black; McCarthy's C.; Farm City; Victor Depta;Myra Shapiro
#157 Alice Boatwright, Reamy Jansen, Herta Muller, Knut Hamsun, What Maisie Knew; Wanchee Wang, Dolly Withrow.
#156 The Glass Madonna; A Revelation
#155 Buzz Bissinger; reader suggestions; Satchmo at the Waldorf
#154 Hannah Brown, Brad Abruzzi, Thomas Merton
#153 J.Anthony Lukas, Talmage Stanley's The Poco Fields, Devil Anse
#152 Marc Harshman guest editor; John Burroughs; Carol Hoenig
#151 Deborah Clearman, Steve Schrader, Paul Harding, Ken Follet, Saramago-- and more!
#150 Mitch Levenberg, Johnny Sundstrom, and Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns.
#149 David Weinberger's Too Big to Know; The Shining; The Tiger's Wife.
#148 The Moonstone, Djibouti, Mark Perry on the Grimké family
#147 Jane Lazarre's new novel; Johnny Sundstrom; Emotional Medicine Rx; Walter Dean Myers, etc.
#146 Henry Adams AGAIN! Also,Fun Home: a Tragicomic
#145 Henry Adams, Darnell Arnoult, Jaimy Gordon, Charlotte Brontë
#144 Carter Seaton, NancyKay Shapiro, Lady Murasaki Shikibu
#143 Little America; Guns,Germs, and Steel; The Trial
#142 Blog Fiction, Leah by Seymour Epstein, Wolf Hall, etc.
#141 Dreama Frisk on Hilary Spurling's Pearl Buck in China; Anita Desai; Cormac McCarthy
#140 Valerie Nieman's Blood Clay, Dolly Withrow
#139 My Kindle, The Prime Minister, Blood Meridian
#138 Special on Publicity by Carter Seaton
#137 Michael Harris's The Chieu Hoi Saloon; Game of Thrones; James Alexander Thom's Follow the River
#136 James Boyle's The Creative Commons; Paola Corso, Joanne Greenberg, Monique Raphel High, Amos Oz
#135 Reviews by Carole Rosenthal, Jeffrey Sokolow, and Wanchee Wang.
#134 Daniel Deronda, books with material on black and white relations in West Virginia
#133 Susan Carpenter, Irene Nemirovsky, Jonathan Safran Foer, Kanafani, Joe Sacco
#132 Karen Armstrong's A History of God; JCO's The Falls; The Eustace Diamonds again.
#131 The Help; J. McHenry Jones, Reamy Jansen, Jamie O'Neill, Michael Chabon.
#130 Lynda Schor, Ed Myers, Charles Bukowski, Terry Bisson, The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism
#129 Baltasar and Blimunda; Underground Railroad; Navasky's Naming Names, small press and indie books.
#128 Jeffrey Sokolow on Histories and memoirs of the Civil Rights Movement
#127 Olive Kitteridge; Urban fiction; Shelley Ettinger on Joyce Carol Oates
#126 Jack Hussey's Ghosts of Walden, The Leopard , Roger's Version, The Reluctanct Fundamentalist
#125 Lee Maynard's The Pale Light of Sunset; Books on John Brown suggested by Jeffrey Sokolow
#124 Cloudsplitter, Founding Brothers, Obenzinger on Bradley's Harlem Vs. Columbia University
#123 MSW's summer reading round-up; Olive Schreiner; more The Book Thief; more on the state of editing
#122 Left-wing cowboy poetry; Jewish partisans during WW2; responses to "Hire a Book Doctor?"
#121 Jane Lazarre's latest; Irving Howe's Leon Trotsky; Gringolandia; "Hire a Book Doctor?"
#120 Dreama Frisk on The Book Thief; Mark Rudd; Thulani Davis's summer reading list
#119 Two Histories of the Jews; small press books for Summer
#118 Kasuo Ichiguro, Jeanette Winterson, The Carter Family!
#117 Cat Pleska on Ann Pancake; Phyllis Moore on Jayne Anne Phillips; and Dolly Withrow on publicity
#116 Ann Pancake, American Psycho, Marc Harshman on George Mackay Brown
#115 Adam Bede, Nietzsche, Johnny Sundstrom
#114 Judith Moffett, high fantasy, Jared Diamond, Lily Tuck
#113 Espionage--nonfiction and fiction: Orson Scott Card and homophobia
#112 Marc Kaminsky, Nel Noddings, Orson Scott Card, Ed Myers
#111 James Michener, Mary Lee Settle, Ardian Gill, BIll Higginson, Jeremy Osner, Carol Brodtick
#110 Nahid Rachlin, Marion Cuba on self-publishing; Thulani Davis, The Road, memoirs
#109 Books about the late nineteen-sixties: Busy Dying; Flying Close to the Sun; Looking Good; Trespassers
#108 The Animal Within; The Ground Under My Feet; King of Swords
#107 The Absentee; Gorky Park; Little Scarlet; Howl; Health Proxy
#106 Castle Rackrent; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; More on Drown; Blindness & more
#105 Everything is Miscellaneous, The Untouchable, Kettle Bottom by Diane Gilliam Fisher
#104 Responses to Shelley on Junot Diaz and more; More best books of 2007
#103 Guest Editor: Shelley Ettinger and her best books of 2007
#102 Saramago's BLINDNESS; more on NEVER LET ME GO; George Lies on Joe Gatski
#101 My Brilliant Career, The Scarlet Letter, John Banville, Never Let Me Go
#100 The Poisonwood Bible, Pamela Erens, More Harry P.
#99 Jonathan Greene on Amazon.com; Molly Gilman on Dogs of Babel
#98 Guest editor Pat Arnow; more on the Amazon.com debate
#97 Using Thomas Hardy; Why I Write; more
#96 Lucy Calkins, issue fiction for young adults
#95 Collapse, Harry Potter, Steve Geng
#94 Alice Robinson-Gilman, Maynard on Momaday
#93 Kristin Lavransdatter, House Made of Dawn, Leaving Atlanta
#92 Death of Ivan Ilych; Memoirs
#91 Richard Powers discussion
#90 William Zinsser, Memoir, Shakespeare
#89 William Styron, Ellen Willis, Dune, Germinal, and much more
#88 Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo
#87 Wings of the Dove, Forever After (9/11 Teachers)
#86 Leora Skolkin-Smith, American Pastoral, and more
#85 Wobblies, Winterson, West Virginia Encyclopedia
#84 Karen Armstrong, Geraldine Brooks, Peter Taylor
#83 3-Cornered World, Da Vinci Code
#82 The Eustace Diamonds, Strapless, Empire Falls
#81 Philip Roth's The Plot Against America , Paola Corso
#80 Joanne Greenberg, Ed Davis, more Murdoch; Special Discussion on Memoir--Frey and J.T. Leroy
#79 Adam Sexton, Iris Murdoch, Hemingway
#78 The Hills at Home; Tess of the D'Urbervilles; Jean Stafford
#77 On children's books--guest editor Carol Brodtrick
#76 Mary Lee Settle, Mary McCarthy
#75 The Makioka Sisters
#74 In Our Hearts We Were Giants
#73 Joyce Dyer
#72 Bill Robinson WWII story
#71 Eva Kollisch on G.W. Sebald
#70 On Reading
#69 Nella Larsen, Romola
#68 P.D. James
#67 The Medici
#66 Curious Incident,Temple Grandin
#65 Ingrid Hughes on Memoir
#64 Boyle, Worlds of Fiction
#63 The Namesame
#62 Honorary Consul; The Idiot
#61 Lauren's Line
#60 Prince of Providence
#59 The Mutual Friend, Red Water
#58 AkÉ, Season of Delight
#57 Screaming with Cannibals
#56 Benita Eisler's Byron
#55 Addie, Hottentot Venus, Ake
#54 Scott Oglesby, Jane Rule
#53 Nafisi,Chesnutt, LeGuin
#52 Keith Maillard, Lee Maynard
#51 Gregory Michie, Carter Seaton
#50 Atonement, Victoria Woodhull biography
#49 Caucasia
#48 Richard Price, Phillip Pullman
#47 Mid- East Islamic World Reader
#46 Invitation to a Beheading
#45 The Princess of Cleves
#44 Shelley Ettinger: A Few Not-so-Great Books
#43 Woolf, The Terrorist Next Door
#42 John Sanford
#41 Isabelle Allende
#40 Ed Myers on John Williams
#39 Faulkner
#38 Steven Bloom No New Jokes
#37 James Webb's Fields of Fire
#36 Middlemarch
#35 Conrad, Furbee, Silas House
#34 Emshwiller
#33 Pullman, Daughter of the Elm
#32 More Lesbian lit; Nostromo
#31 Lesbian fiction
#30 Carol Shields, Colson Whitehead
#29 More William Styron
#28 William Styron
#27 Daniel Gioseffi
#26 Phyllis Moore
#25 On Libraries....
#24 Tales of the City
#23 Nonfiction, poetry, and fiction
#22 More on Why This Newsletter
#21 Salinger, Sarah Waters, Next of Kin
#20 Jane Lazarre
#19 Artemisia Gentileschi
#18 Ozick, Coetzee, Joanna Torrey
#17 Arthur Kinoy
#16 Mrs. Gaskell and lots of other suggestions
#15 George Dennison, Pat Barker, George Eliot
#14 Small Presses
#13 Gap Creek, Crum
#12 Reading after 9-11
#11 Political Novels
#10 Summer Reading ideas
#9 Shelley Ettinger picks
#8 Harriette Arnow's Hunter's Horn
#7 About this newsletter
#6 Maria Edgeworth
#5 Tales of Good and Evil; Moon Tiger
#4 Homer Hickam and The Chosen
#3 J.T. LeRoy and Tale of Genji
#2 Chick Lit
#1 About this newsletter.
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