PBS Best-loved Novels -- Some thoughts

In an article in today’s Washington Post( https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/whats-the-best-american-novel-a-pbs-vote-is-a-revealing-look-at-our-limited-taste/2018/10/29/039f8532-db80-11e8-b732-3c72cbf131f2_story.html?utm_term=.602914107d94) Mark Athitakis criticizes America’s taste in fiction while concluding that the reason so many of the titles made the recent PBS list of 100 best is a nostalgia for childhood and adolescence and the stories that first taught us about family and friendship. Athitakis believes that the problem with this is that, “if we treat books mainly as mementos of our own experiences, like yearbook photos, we diminish our capacity to see them as ways to understand that of others.”  

 I see his point about the presence of adolescent literature on the list – the Harry Potter series, Charlotte’s Web, Little Women, e.g. -- but as to his criticism, I think he forgets that the list is not “The best books of all time” but rather “the best lovedbooks.”  There’s a difference.  “Best” implies a literary quality that reflects strong command of language, creative but controlled narrative structure and well-developed characters. “Best” books are often the first to play with a particular idea in a unique way and they always leave the reader with moral or philosophical questions as in the case of the list-topper, To Kill a Mockingbird.  We may love books for these reasons but sometimes a book that lacks some or all of these qualities still resonates for a very personal reason and that, I think, is where the readers who voted are coming from. 

Less concerning to me than the titles that appear in the list is, as Athitakis points out, America isn’t reading. Research tells us, he says, that ¼ of Americans never read fiction and only ½ of Americans read a book for pleasure last year.  As a bibliophile and former English teacher, this breaks my heart.  I have relatives and close friends who almost never read novels and to me that’s like watching a black and white television. Don’t they want to update to color?  

Athitakis also expresses dismay that you have to go pretty far down the final tally to find a work in translation — “The Little Prince,” No. 36 — and further still to find one by a non-North American or European author — “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” No. 54.”  This may reflect the age of the PBS readers (He says it’s the over-50 crowd.) I spent most of my 36-year career working with colleagues to put into the hands of our students works that reflect the diversity of the world in which we live.  My former students know who the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche is (and could spell her name), and can compare and contrast her work with that of white South African writer Nadine Gordimer.  They have read Chekhov and Orwell but also Toni Morrison, August Wilson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Bao Ninh and Michael Ondaatje.  I was in a classroom recently where students had just finished Diary of a Part-time Indian.  It is my hope that these young people in 30-40 years will be a) still reading, b) watching PBS and c) offering up a list of best loved titles that demonstrates a wider and more diverse selection.  

That said, I will smugly conclude with the fact that I have read 65 of the titles on the list, a few of which would be included in my personal selections for “best loved” and a few that would also just be “best.”  How about you?

Here’s the link to the PBS list:

https://www.pbs.org/the-great-american-read/results/

An Evening With Elizabeth Strout

Last Friday night, Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kittridge, My Name is Lucy Barton and Anything is Possible, spoke to a crowd of about 200 people at George Mason University.  Dressed smartly, but somewhat casually with her shoulder-length white blond hair thrown up in a messy ponytail, she opened with an anecdote about her first interview 20 years ago.  “I thought I looked nice.  The reporter said, ‘You don’t look remotely like what I thought you would.’”  She went on to say she hoped she was what we were expecting.  “Thanks,” she said, “for taking the risk.”

In contrast to Tayari Jones, who spoke two nights earlier and who focused on her newest book, Strout spoke from a prepared talk on why fiction matters.  “We don’t have a clue what goes on inside of our neighbor’s house.  We will only see things through our eyes.  There are always things we keep secret.  That space between ourselves and the world, that in-between is literature and poetry.”  Novels, she says, allow us glimpses into another person’s life. Reading a novel helps you know what is feels like to be another person; novels give one the ability to empathize.  An audience member asks about a related concept - point of view.  “Point of view,” she explains, “is like a camera.  It goes into a head and then pulls away, then zooms into another character’s head.”  

Although Strout never took a creative writing class, she says that, at her mother’s urging, she wrote everything down, becoming a keen observer.  She’s also a listener, noting the importance of language and the difference between what is said and what is experienced.  Her goal, she explains, is accuracy of language and emotional honesty. “Where else,” she asks, “do we learn about life but through fiction?”

When Strout gets specific about her work, it is usually in reference to Olive Kittridge, the episodic novel about a cantankerous Maine school teacher, the book for which she won the big prize.  Audience members ask a variety of questions about the book, including ones that touch on Olive’s unlikeability.  “I am not interested in whether my characters are likeable or unlikeable.  I am more concerned with whether they are honest,”  she replies. I am surprised that the discussion is so focused on this older book and want her to talk about her most recent two works, the second of which is a sort of sequel to the first, so when the floor is opened to questions, I jump up to the mike.  My Name is Lucy Barton, if you haven’t read it, is a slim little novel told in first person by Lucy, a young mother and wife who has an extended stay in a hospital for a seemingly undiagnosable illness. Her mother comes to visit and they talk about people from Lucy’s home town, a place from which she flees some years earlier.  The reader is left with many gaps in Lucy’s story, many of which are filled in the subsequent novel, Anything is Possible, which takes place in that home town with each chapter told from the point of view of a different person, including Lucy’s siblings.  I want to know about her decision to write two connected books. Strout says that she actually wrote the two books at the same time, writing scenes and moving them around on her table.  For example, when Lucy and her mother mention Kathy Nicely, Strout says she wondered whatever happened to Kathy and then moved around the table to write her story. 

I think people would have gladly engaged her in dialogue for another hour, but the hosts called time and the line for the book signing is already 25 deep by the time we get out of the auditorium.  Strout is both a gifted writer and an entertaining speaker.  It was a good way to spend a Friday night.

An evening with writer Tayari Jones

Tayari Jones, an African American author now teaching at Emory University, has recently published her fourth novel, An American Marriage,about a young black man wrongly incarcerated and the wife who is left behind when he is sent to jail.  I have long been a fan of Jones’ beginning with her compelling first novel in 2002, Leaving Atlanta, about three fifth graders set against the backdrop of the 1979-80 serial murders of black children.  At the high school where I taught, I passed the novel around and soon my colleagues and I were enthusiastically offering it to students.  It’s taken Jones 16 years and three more books to hit the big time. She joked that earlier author tours would involve cozy conversations with the 8 or 10 people who showed up for the book signing, but now that Oprah has chosen An American Marriageand the film rights have been sold, Jones is finally enjoying a wider audience.  About 150 people sat in the small auditorium with me last Wednesday night at George Mason University as she read excerpts from her book, talked about the inspiration for the story and answered questions from enthusiastic readers.

Jones explained that she wanted to explore larger issues and 6 years ago went to Harvard for a year to study mass incarceration, a plague on the African American community in this country, in particular.  One out of 4 men in Washington, D.C., she pointed out, will end up in jail or prison. She emerged from her year of study, armed with statistics and horrifying knowledge, particularly in regard to wrongful incarcerations, but she just couldn’t find a story.  She says she realized that she needs to write about people and their problems and not vice-versa.  The germ for the story presented itself when she was visiting her mother in Atlanta and she overheard a well-dressed couple arguing in the food court at the mall.  “Roy, you know you wouldn’t have waited for me for seven years,” the woman said.  The man responded, “This wouldn’t have happened to you in the first place.” Jones says she knew she had her story. The first draft of the novel was entirely from the wife, Celestial’s, point of view.  But Jones wasn’t satisfied because she thought Roy, the husband, had a valid perspective that needed to be heard, and so she rewrote the whole book from his point of view.  Then, she says, she realized that story had already been told, likening it to The Odyssey, in which Odysseus returns after a long absence expecting a wife who has been waiting loyally for him. The third incarnation of the book toggled between the two points of view and added a third one, that of Andre, Celestial’s lover.  

An audience member asked her about the title and Jones shared that she did not initially like it.  “It sounded,” she said, “like a story about rich white people in Connecticut with feelings.”  Her editor kept insisting, but Jones said, “I’ve never been called ‘American’ without another word.  African-American.  Black American.” She conferred with her mentor, playwright Pearl Clegg, who told her it was indeed an appropriate title. “Your story could only happen in America.” 

A phrase that Jones returned to several times as she fielded questions is “the tyranny of genre expectations,” something against which she rebels.  For example, she explained, people see the set-up in her book and expect that everything will work out well in the end; the woman will stand by her man, wrongs will be righted.  Celestial, she explains upsets our expectations because she’s not a sacrificial person.  “It’s important to think about what we ask of women.”  Several audience members expressed that they were both irritated for and by Celestial.  “Look,” Jones counters, “Roy has this incredible moral high ground.  How can you ever ask this man to take out the trash? “If stories are going to move us forward, we have to be unsettled.”  

The publication of this novel and Jones’ book tour has coincided, for me, with several other works that bring different perspectives on the issues of incarceration in this country.  I’m listening to season 3 of the podcast “Serial” researched and narrated by Sarah Koenig of NPR’s “This American Life.”  Koenig spent a year at the Cleveland courthouse and each episode features a different aspect of the judicial system.  It may sound dry but in actuality, it’s pretty compelling listening.  I also listened to a NY Timesbook review podcast with a journalist for Mother Jonesnamed Shane Bauer who had been wrongly incarcerated himself – in Iran – for two years.  He has a new book out, American Prison, that chronicles the four months he spent as a Louisiana prison guard and reveals what he discovered about the privatization of American prisons. It’s not a book I would have ordinarily considered reading, but his interview was so interesting, coupled with these other stories, I decided to buy it.  

A word about the people who made my evening with Tayari Jones possible - Based at George Mason University, Fall for the Book is an independent, non-profit literary arts organization that promotes reading by sponsoring a variety of year-round events and activities, the flagship of which is the Fall for the Book festival held each October (fallforthebook.org). This year’s festival featured several headline speakers including Jones and Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout.  Next time, I’ll write about her.  

The Destroyers,Christopher Bollen

A complex story set against the beautiful backdrop of a Greek island

 I took this book along with me on my recent trip to Greece because it is set on one of the Greek islands, Patmos, and because I anticipated a compelling read. Although we did not visit that particular island, we saw Santorini, which provided ample visuals for the large cruise ships docked off shore and the crowded warren of pedestrian streets through the village cut into the side of the hill that are portrayed in the novel. Located in the Aegean nearer to Turkey than Greece, Patmos is a small island most famous for being the site of the vision given to John in the New Testament Book of Revelation.  As such, Patmos has become a destination for Christian pilgrims who come to tour the cave and several monasteries.  

It is against this backdrop that the story begins.  Ian Bledsoe arrives on the island in a move of desperation; he’s lost his job, been disinherited and is unsettled by the recent death of his father.  His childhood friend, Charlie Konstantinou, now lives on Patmos and is running a rental yacht business, and it is to Charlie that Ian flees in search of financial support for a new business venture and friendly emotional support. The story flashes back periodically to the boys’ adolescence in Manhattan.  The sons of rich men, they live on the upper east side and attend chichi private schools, but both itch to become self-made men rather than glide on the coattails of their family wealth.  Ian, in particular, is more interested in philanthropic causes and gets himself in trouble when he becomes involved with employees of his family’s baby food company who expose the horrific working conditions and less than sanitary products of the company’s Panamanian factory.  

Significant to these flashbacks is Ian’s recall of an imaginary game that he and Charlie played endlessly, the titular “Destroyers.”  One of them begins the game:  “You’re in the Buckland cafeteria when six gunmen enter.” The other responds, “I dive below the table.”  The first one says, Gunmen spray bullets under the table.”  (14)  The game continues with them taking turns, improvising “weapons and shields and intricate booby traps constructed out of Old Masters paintings or jugs of crab salad” (15).  In Ian’s recall of the game, he comments, “It was Charlie’s tendency to make bad decisions, as if attracted to the deadest of ends and yet still expecting to escape without a scratch” (15).  This sentiment proves to be significant foreshadowing.

Bollen creates a memorable cast of characters on Patmos among whom there are various tensions.  There’s Charlie and his live-in girlfriend, Sonny, a gorgeous former actress, who wants to marry Charlie and bring her 7 year old daughter to live with them, something Charlie is hesitant to do.  Charlie’s cousin, Rasym, and his boyfriend, Adrian, are visiting as is Louise, a college fling of Ian’s who is, strangely, seemingly interested in rekindling their romance.  Rasym wants Charlie to bring him into his business, a move Charlie is resisting.  Miles, another friend from adolescence who knows Charlie more because of his family’s vacation home on Patmos, hangs around the periphery, expressing an obvious interest in Sonny that also riles Charlie.  And then there is the Greek family that has worked for the Konstantinous for several generations; the parents are loyal to the family while the younger generation yearns to escape the provincial life on the island.  Secondary characters include the spiritual hippies who live on the beach, enjoying drink, drugs and sex.  As in reality, there are refugees washing up in rubber rafts, some dead and some alive, fleeing their war-torn countries but generally unwelcome in Greece.  

The present day plot takes off when Charlie tells Ian that he is going to be away for a few days on a business trip in Turkey and he doesn’t want others to know he is gone; he enlists Ian to cover for him so that others, particularly Sonny, think he is spending alone time on his yacht.  When Charlie doesn’t return, Ian becomes alarmed both by his absence as well as by the lies Ian has told various people regarding Charlie’s whereabouts.  The situation grows darker as other events unfold and no one knows whether Charlie is a victim or a perpetrator.  

Bollen explores the lure of wealth and the conflicts that arise around money – both having more than enough and the opposite, not having enough.  He also asks readers to consider the intersection of morality, self-interest and loyalty to others.  How much are you willing to sacrifice in order to do what is right?