The Testaments -- 

Margaret Atwood's long awaited sequel

Atwood’s long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale (34 years ago) answers the questions of what happened to Offred/June and how Gilead falls.  The Hulu series’s first season was based on the earlier book, but with its success, seasons 2 and 3 extrapolated out.  Atwood’s sequel leaps ahead of the show, fifteen years after the first book ends, focusing on three characters:  June’s two daughters and Aunt Lydia. As with the first book, what’s happening for the reader is distant past in the world of the novel.  The alternating narratives of the three characters turn out to be documents found many years after the fact and are, at the end, puzzled over by researchers and historians.

I love the series and I feel like it was an easy leap into the book, but  if you haven’t watched it, it would make sense to re-read Handmaid, to better re-situate yourself in the world of Gilead.  As with the show, June has smuggled her child, Nicole, out of Gilead and into Canada; in the television version, June stays behind, committed to getting other children born of handmaids out and she is determined to reunite with her older child, Hannah.  In The Testaments, we find that the older daughter, named Agnes Jemima in the book, has grown up in the home of a commander and his wife, cognizant of the fact that she was not their blood child.  When her adoptive mother dies, the commander takes a new wife who fits the stereotype of the evil stepmother, anxious to marry off the young woman and get her out of her home.  Agnes, repelled by the older man they want her to marry, manages to get herself accepted into the Aunts, a group of women closely resembling nuns but with a cruel streak; they train handmaids and reinforce the strict roles of women in Gilead.  

Nicole, raised in Canada by adoptive parents, is unaware that she is the poster child of both Gilead and Canada, a symbol of all those who got away or were stolen, depending on your perspective.  When her parents are killed in a bombing by Gilead operatives, she is persuaded by an underground group to go into Gilead and meet with someone only referred to as “the source,” who has been sending them information about the corruption in Gilead.  It’s not really giving anything away to say that Aunt Lydia, the Queen Bee of the Aunts, is the source.  A former judge, Lydia is wily and knows politics. In the vein of "if you can’t beat them, join them", she’s created a powerful and influential role for herself in order to survive and thrive, but she’s always harbored a resentment against the men who do not see her as an equal and ultimately expect her to do their bidding.  Privvy to much of the inside scoop in the world of the commanders, she’s keeping careful records.  

Can Aunt Lydia be trusted by the Canadians to aid them in bringing down Gilead?  The Ann Dowd t.v. character was so much in my head as I read, that I had trouble thinking she would actually do the right thing.  We know from the ending of the first book, that Gilead does fall; the how and the why are uncertain and what ultimately keeps the reader going.  It was interesting to be reading this while the current headlines are all about the whistleblower who may possibly, finally bring down the corrupt administration of Donald Trump.  Wouldn’t it be great if it was a woman?

Notes from the National Book Festival

It’s become a running joke in my house over the years – my expressed desire to attend the National Book Festival and the impediments to doing so that seem to occur every year. . .for decades.  But this year, I finally made it!  My husband and I headed via Metro down to the Convention Center, a behemoth set of buildings both large enough to house the various presentations and activities and to be problematic in terms of getting from one space to another in time.  The number of attendees was astounding and it was heart-warming to know there were so many people interested in books.  Parents with small children congregated on the basement level where there were children’s book authors and activities specifically designed for the young and restless.  Otherwise, my husband joked it looked like an English teachers’ in-service: 2/3 middle-aged, plump white women. As a man, he definitely had company but was certainly in the minority.

Prior to going, I had carefully studied the menu and created my own schedule beginning at noon and ending at 8 p.m.  Most sessions began on the hour and ran 45-50 minutes with minimal time to run to the next venue in between.  We soon learned that the ambitious schedule wasn’t going to work. My husband had hoped to get in to hear Ruth Bader Ginsburg at 11:30.  Checking the festival updates at 10:15 on the train, we learned the session was already full.  The Washington Postreported the next day that people began lining up as early as 3 a.m.  We located the room for the 12:00 presentation by Sigrid Nunez, the author of the 2018 National Book Award-winningThe Friendand an upcoming selection by my book club. Event volunteers encouraged us to go in during the previous session to insure a seat for the one we wanted. We caught the last 15 minutes of a discussion about fiction based on historical people and events.  One writer, Roxana Robinson claimed she made nothing up in Dawson’s Fall, her novel based on the story of her great grandparents, but she did include dialogue. . .hmmm.  Louis Bayard, author of Courting Mr. Lincoln, readily conceded that he made up scenes in order to tell a story.  

Sigrid Nunez began by discussing her writing process in response to a question by the interviewer.  She doesn’t write from outlines but rather starts from an image, an idea, or a character. The Friendbegan when she was asked to prepare 10 minutes for a reading at Boston University where she teaches, so she penned what was the first five pages of this novel.  The idea arose because she was thinking about a number of people she knew who had thought about suicide.  Not long afterwards, the University of Maryland invited her to do a 25-minute reading, so she added on to what she had written earlier and then realized that she was on her way to a novel.  Her main character who tells the story researches suicide after a friend kills himself.  One of the known indicators of suicide is writing in first person, Nunez shares and the audience laughs.  The character who commits suicide is “a very recognizable type – the womanizing professor who is completely oblivious to changing paradigms”.  When several of his female students start a petition to get him to stop calling them “dear,” he doesn’t understand how or why that makes students uncomfortable.  The narrator, a former student and mentee of his and now a friend, sides with his students and he accuses her of hypocrisy, reminding her that she liked it when he did it to her (decades earlier).  Nunez says, “Things have changed.  Thank goodness!”  She decided her book is, at least in part, about what happens to someone when they don’t understand change.  

The interviewer asked Nunez if she had memorable mentors at Bard and Columbia. Nunez laughs as she describes Elizabeth Hardwick (a novelist and literary critic who was married to Robert Lowell), with whom she took two workshops.  She remembers Hardwick saying to a student, “I tried to read your story, I really did, but it was so boring,” and to Nunez, “I see the mark of an amateur on every page.” The audience howls at this.  

The only character in The Friend with a name is the Great Dane, Apollo, whom the narrator adopts after the professor dies.  As a high school teacher, when we studied books in which characters went unnamed, I always suggested that there was an intentionality to it, that the writer was trying to communicate something perhaps metaphoric.  Jose Saramago’s Blindnessis a perfect example of this.  I was, therefore, surprised when Nunez said that she originally wrote the book with character names but came to feel like something wasn’t working, that the names made it less fluid, so she took them out.  When she took the names out, the book was better.  Huh.

Nunez credits her desire to become a writer with being an avid reader.  She loved being read to as a child.  “It’s a terrific escape, borrowing somebody else’s consciousness for a while.”  She mentioned that recently she and her colleagues are seeing more students who want to be writers but who have no interest in reading.  “It’s a huge mystery to me.”  Me too, but when my husband and I discussed it afterwards, he suggested that perhaps they are more interested in writing for television, film or the Internet.   As a reader, her tastes, her “favorites”, have changed over time.  She says she no longer has favorites, that her tastes are broad, but she did recommend two titles that she recently read:  The Grammariansby Cathleen Schine and Trust Exercise by Susan Choi.

                                                                       

                                                                   Julia Alvarez

After stepping out for lunch, we realized that we were never going to make the 2:00 presentation by Ann Beattie and then the 3:00 interview with Julia Alvarez, so we opted, once again, to sit through part of a presentation on poetry and place prior to hearing Alvarez – a good thing since the room was very full.  I remember Alvarez’s first book, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent.  Published in 1991, it tells the story of four sisters who, along with their parents, flee the Dominican Republic in the 1960’s after their father has taken part in an unsuccessful coup attempt.  The book, told in reverse chronological order, somewhat mirrors Alvarez’s own experience when her father dared to speak up against the brutal dictator, Trujillo, and her family likewise fled.  Alvarez has been asked here today on the 25^thanniversary of her second novel, In theTime of the Butterflies, a work of historical fiction that tells the story of the four Mirabel sisters who took part in a successful underground revolution to unseat Trujillo after 31 years of power.  The Mirabels were known as “the Mariposa,” Spanish for butterflies, hence the title.  The book is taught in classrooms around the country and is frequently chosen as the “one read” by cities, colleges and festivals.  

Alvarez was interviewed by Marie Arana, another Latina author and frequent book reviewer for The Washington Post.  Arana began by asking why Alvarez thinks the book is still relevant.  Alvarez, thoughtful and measured in her response, points out the refugee crisis in our country, a situation she says that was created by politics.  “I understand that sense of desperation that drives people from their homelands.  It is a continuing saga.”  She references and recommends several times a book called Hope in the Dark:  Untold Histories, Wild Possibilitiesby Rebecca Solnit, which talks about “the indirectness of direct action,”  the difference that people can make even when they think something has been unsuccessful. Alvarez connects this to Butterfliesby saying she is interested in “what politicizes people, what causes people to stand up, what’s the last straw?”  She laughs wryly.  “These are very important questions right now.”  

Alvarez cites Chekhov who, she says, stated that “the task of the writer is not to solve the problem but rather to state it correctly.”  She feels like writing the story of the Mirabels as a novel provides the nuances.  Each of the sisters stands up for a different reason.  

Like Nunez, Alvarez credits her passion for reading as the inspiration for becoming a writer.  A memorable book?  Arana asks. The first book to garb her was The Arabian Nights.  “It gave me the idea that stories have power.  They can change you.”  She laughingly says she dreams of a Scheherazade who goes to the White House and tells DJT, whom she refers to as “the sultan,” stories every night that will both distract from his idiocy and eventually win him over to reason.  As an adult writer, Alvarez talks about the impact of reading Maxine Hong Kinston’s The Woman Warrior.  “That was about myfamily,” she says. “Every Latina could start her book with the first line from that book:  ‘You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I am about to tell you.’”  The audience laughs appreciatively.  “From this book,” Alvarez said she learned, “you can speak in terms of history and mythology and the immigrant experience.”  She credits it with changing mainstream American literature.

Alvarez has a new novel coming out next year, The Afterlife.  She says that her publisher didn’t like her working title because it implied religion and death, but one of the perks of becoming successful, is that you can choose your own titles.  No hint as to what the book is about other that it is “a short, lyrical novel,” influenced by her love of poetic language.  

Our schedule had included Barbara Kingsolver at 6 and a panel on “The Enduring Appeal of the Odyssey” at 7, but, honestly, we were on overload by 4 and decided to – as our good friend Ed says, leave the party while we were still having fun.  I’m glad we went; listening to writers always makes me want to write and, of course, read even more.

What I read on my summer vacation --- great titles to take to the beach or read on your screened porch

Anthony Horowitz clearly has a lot of fun with the reader in this second outing in which he is featured as a character.  In his previous The Word is Murder, Tony Horowitz, the writer, becomes involved with Daniel Hawthorne, a Scotland Yard detective turned private investigator who taps Horowitz to play Watson to his Sherlock with the idea that Horowitz will write a true crime book about him.  They pair up again in The Sentence is Death to discover who murdered a lawyer by breaking a £2,000 bottle of wine over his head and then cutting him with the shards.  Horowitz writes as if he is penning a nonfiction book, providing locations and names of people, all convincingly real.  You assume, however that this is all a conceit, yet he creates doubt with first, an afterward in which he thanks people who appear as characters in the book and then, rather brilliantly, including an interview of himself supposedly written by a writer sent by Barnes and Noble to do a feature on him.  The journalist tells you in her article about her efforts to track down various people from the book who always seem to be out or too busy to see her when she calls, and she includes a face-to-face meeting with Hawthorne who shows up at Horowitz’s flat while they are talking. You can imagine Horowitz chuckling as readers shut the cover and immediately Google characters and even the journalist’s name.  The mystery itself is good but it is the interplay between the two main characters and the character Tony’s own second guessing and self-doubt that propel the narrative forward.

In Long Gone by Alafair Burke, Alice Humphrey is the 37-year old daughter of a famous Hollywood director and a one-time Oscar-winning actress.  Intent on escaping her father’s fame – both as a director and as a philanderer – and his money, Alice, out of work for 8 months after being fired from the Metropolitan Museum, takes a job as a small gallery manager in the meatpacking district of NYC.  The job seems too good to be true, but despite her reservations about the dubious talent of the feature artist and mystery gallery owner, the money is good and Alice feels happy to be working again.  Two days after the gallery opens, an out-of-town religious group protests the gallery art and the man who has hired Alice proves difficult to reach until he finally answers her calls and asks her to meet him at the gallery. When she arrives, she finds the place cleaned out – artwork, counters, even pens, and her employer dead, apparently shot.  Meanwhile, a young girl who looks remarkably like Alice has disappears from a small town in Connecticut and her prints show up at the gallery crime scene.  The story moves back and forth between the perspectives of Alice and the various detectives trying to solve the cases.  

In Miracle Creek by Angie Kim, I was introduced to a therapy I’ve never heard of before:  HBOT - apressurized oxygen chamber that patients enter for therapeutic “dives” with the hopes of curing issues like autism or infertility. People don helmets, similar to what an astronaut or deep-sea diver would wear and breathe in higher contents of oxygen.  In rural Virginia, Young and Pak Yoo run one of these experimental medical treatment devices and have built a steady business for The Miracle Submarine.  As the book starts, a fire destroys their business, killing a mother and child who are in the chamber at the time and disfiguring several others, including their teenage daughter.  Much of the book is the trial of one of the other mothers who is charged with the crime, but as various characters give testimony and the narrative flips back and forth in time, the reader and others begin to doubt her guilt and realize that the day of the accident was much more complicated than it appeared.  

After reading Conviction by Denise Mina, I had to ask myself, why haven’t I read anything by her before?  Motivated by a stellar review to add this one to my Kindle, I realize that the Scottish mystery writer has authored numerous others that have met with acclaim.  In Conviction, Mina sets the main character, Anna McDonald, and the reader on a wild ride.  The day begins ordinarily enough; Anna is preparing breakfast for her two children while her husband busies himself getting ready for work.  She listens to a true crime pod case, a pastime to which she is addicted.  The day becomes decidedly unusual when her best friend, whom she is supposed to meet later, shows up in traveling clothes and with a suitcase.  It seems Anna’s husband is leaving her for the friend and taking the two children with him.  In shock, Anna returns to the pod cast and realizes that the story featuring a sunken yacht and a murdered family involves someone she once knew when she herself was someone else.  The friend’s husband shows up on the doorstep and, to escape the wreckage of their own lives, the two begin a wild adventure to clear her former friend and discover the truth behind the mystery.  Fast paced, at times humorous, it has all the makings of a summer movie.

I am reminded that a Kate Atkinson mystery is not like any other detective story I have read. In Big Sky, her hero, Jackson Brodie, is back in his fifth outing.  He’s now living in a small town on the coast of Scotland to be near his son and former lover, Julia.  Jackson’s story is as much about the travails of being the parent of a teenager and longing for Julia is it is about solving a mystery.  The narrative switches back and forth between a cast of seemingly unrelated characters in and around this town and at times, Jackson disappears from the story entirely.  Unlike most detective books, the story does not stay focused on his sleuthing.  Eventually however, all of the story lines converge and Jackson, a minor character in several of them, becomes more prominent.  It’s an easy and enjoyable read and you don’t have to have read the others in the series to pick this one up.

Two books challenge our notions of the way time works.  In Time After Time by Lisa Grunwald, it is December 1937, and Joe Reynolds, a young railroad lineman, reports to work at Grand Central Station in NYC.  A beautiful young woman dressed like she’s come from a party in the 1920’s catches his eye.  He looks for her every day but doesn’t see her again until a year later when he summons up the courage to approach her and buy her a coffee.  He is confused by her talk of the Roaring Twenties and her seeming ignorance of world events, and after spending the day with her, he is dismayed when he walks her home and she vanishes into thin air along the way.  Another year goes by before he sees her in the terminal again, wearing the same clothes.  

Nora Lansing is an aspiring artist, just off the boat after a year in Paris.  She and a friend are taking the subway when a huge accident occurs and many people die.  When she wakes up after the crash, she finds herself lying on the floor of Grand Central.  Eventually, it becomes apparent to both Nora and Joe that she died in the accident but she never left the train station.  As long as she stays within a certain distance of the station, she is alive. If she goes too far away, she vanishes, only to reappear on a particular day in December.

Grunwald makes use of “Manhattanhedge”, (a very real solar phenomenon when, on certain days of the year, the sun is perfectly aligned with the line of the streets, shining through the windows of Grand Central), to provide an explanation of sorts for Nora’s comings and goings.  She also uses world events, particularly WWII, to show both the passage of time, Joe’s aging and the impact of outside events on both his world and Nora’s very limited one.   The reader, like the characters, is challenged to consider the circumstances of Nora’s comings and goings, and to contemplate the situation in which one lover ages and one does not.

From the author of the Wayward Pines series, Blake Crouch, Recursion is a thought-provoking story that engages the reader in a thought experiment – what if Einstein’s theory that time is not linear is true?  What if the past, present and future all exist simultaneously?  And, what if you could not only recall the past through memory but actually return to an earlier moment in time?  People begin reporting what becomes known as “false memory syndrome.”  They vividly recall relationships, experiences, years of their lives that do not seem to have happened.  NYC cop Barry Sutton is called to the scene of a woman attempting suicide from the 41^stfloor of a building.  As he tries to talk her back, she tells him about herself but also about a marriage and son that she remembers in an alternate reality.  She has found the man, a widower whose first wife jumped from this very ledge, and not only does he claim that he doesn’t know her, but his wife is very much alive.  Too conflicted and devastated over the loss of this phantom child, she plunges to her death.  Barry begins to investigate and gets the man to confess to him that they were married – in another time line.  The narrative switches to Helena Smith, a neuroscientist who is working to develop the technology to capture memories.  Her mother has developed Alzheimer’s and she wants to be able to help her re-experience her past.  Helena’s work succeeds in ways she could not have foreseen and soon she is burdened with trying to stop what she has started.  The book is fast paced and fun.  As Barry ponders, so too the reader – if I could go back and change the outcome of an experience, would I?

Recommended for your summer beach bag 

A couple of weeks ago I had knee surgery which left me with limited mobility and a lot of time to curl up with my ice machine and a book.  My reading choices were comfort food in the form of page-turner, quick reads, just the right titles for convalescing or for sitting under an umbrella with the sound of breaking waves nearby.  Here are some recommendations for your summer beach bag:

By far, the most inventive is The 7-1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastleby Stuart Turton.  The narrator wakes up at night in a forest.  He has no idea who he is or where he is or why he utters the name, “Anna” and feels a sense of alarm that she is in danger.  A woman’s cry and a gunshot occur in short order and soon a disheveled man appears, thrusting a compass in the narrator’s pocket and murmuring, “Go east,” before disappearing into the woods.  The bewildered narrator follows this direction, emerging finally in front of a large mansion where he is recognized and ushered in by the man answering the door.  Over the next hours, he learns that he’s at a house party with 50-some odd guests on the 19^thanniversary of the death of the owners’ young son on the property. Their daughter, Evelyn, returned from France where she has spent nearly two decades, is murdered on this evening. A man disguised as a plague doctor tells the narrator, who has had strange sensations of being more than one person, that he is, in fact, one Aidan Bishop, who will be provided with 8 different hosts, each time reliving this same day.  He must figure out who kills Evelyn by the end of his last host’s day or his memory will be wiped and he will start all over.  He can only escape by solving the mystery.  

The game is afoot as Aidan inhabits different characters, viewing scenes from various perspectives, adding together their assorted bits of knowledge, but he soon realizes that his sleuthing is not without peril.  It seems there are others also inhabiting hosts, competing with him to leave, and a strange footman who keeps trying to kill him.   Then there’s the elusive Anna, who is seemingly a friend, who works with Aidan to outwit the others and escape together.  The book is creatively inventive; there’s a lot of fun to be had in trying to solve the mystery as the day repeats through new eyes, but eventually the reader also wonders exactly what this world is and why Aidan is there. Who is the plague doctor?  His periodic appearances and warnings seem to suggest that he is on Aidan’s side, but is he? 

The Girl Before by J. P. Delaneyis a deliciously compelling mystery. Delaney’s narrative structure is part of what propels the story forward, alternating between the voices of Emma (in the past) and Jane (in the present).  Although they don’t know each other, they have several significant things in common:  they physically favor each other and both are residents of 1 Folgate Street, a beautiful house of minimalist architecture whose lease stipulates over 200 rules. They each end up renting the house after a traumatic event (a burglary and an assault in the case of Emma and the loss of a full-term baby for Jane), both desiring a change of environment.  And, most significantly, they each become romantically involved with the house’s owner and architect, Edward, a strangely compulsive man.  When Jane learns that Edward’s wife and child died in a freak accident and are buried under the house and that something also happened to Emma, she begins to investigate Emma and Edward.  As both narratives move forward in time, the reader watches as the mysterious architect and his strange house gradually cast spells over both women, and there’s an increasing sense of danger.  It turns out that Delaney is not only playing with time but also narrator reliability. A number of twists and turns surprise the reader.  This novel won’t win any big literary prizes, but it was a page-turner, equal to the best of Ruth Ware and Sophie Hannah.  

After I finished this one, I read Delaney’s second book, Believe Me,which reads more like a first book rather than a second one and indeed, the author acknowledges in the afterword that after the success of The Girl Before, he pulled out an old draft and reworked it. There are similar devices at play here:  an unreliable narrator, jumps in time, and dodgy characters who are not what they appear to be.  The premise is a good one:  an actress is hired by the police to play a role that will lure a serial killer into the open.  She spends time telling you about her method of immersing herself in the role and, after a while, the line between her and the role begins to blur.  She apparently keeps track of it but as the reader you are not privy to this.  The killer has a fascination with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire which – and I never knew this – is very erotic and concerned with ways to kill a lover.  The killer likes to base his death scenes on lines of verse.  

The second in Ann Cleeves’ Shetland series, White Nightsreturns to the tiny islands 80 miles off the northern coast of Scotland where a small, tight-knit community is shaken by the murder of a stranger.  Policeman Jimmy Perez is attending an art exhibition that features work by his new love interest when the reception is interrupted by a stranger who falls to the ground crying out and then suggests that he has no idea of who he is or what he is doing there.  The same stranger is found hanging from the rafters of a community boathouse the following morning.  When the pathologist confirms that the death is murder rather than suicide, Perez begins to investigate.  Who is the man?  Why was he found wearing a mask – the same mask that a costumed performer was wearing the day before as he handed out flyers indicating (falsely) that the art exhibition had been cancelled?  As with the first book in the series, Raven Nights, there’s more than one murder before it’s all over and the answers lie in the past.  Cleeves creates a highly believable setting in which the land itself is a character. 

Fitting right in with contemporary mysteries such as those by Delaney, in The Better Sisterby Alafair Burke, we are confronted with a female protagonist who is not the most reliable narrator.  For the first half of the book, the reader is firmly in the corner of Chloe Taylor, a highly successful magazine editor married to Adam Macintosh, a prosecutor turned criminal attorney.  Their marriage is a bit unusual – Adam is Chloe’s sister Nicky’s ex-husband and Adam and Chloe are raising Ethan, Adam’s son by his first marriage. Living on the Upper West Side, they are largely estranged from Nicky, a drug and alcohol abuser whom they have left behind in Cleveland.  Adam and Chloe appear to be happy; Nicky appears to be a family embarrassment and danger best forgotten; Ethan appears to be a normal teenager, reveling in his privileged upbringing.  The key word there is “appears,” as, it turns out, nothing is quite as it seems.  When Chloe returns to their East Hampton get-away home after attending a party, she finds her husband dead on the living room floor, murdered.  With the arrest of a suspect and the aftermath of a trial, appearances are stripped away to reveal a more complicated set of relationships. The writer’s decision to withhold information, only parsing it out gradually, is the key to the novel’s success. 

My Ex-Life by Stephen McCauley is an enjoyable read about regular people bravely making significant life changes as they reach middle-age.  David is a college prep coach living in San Francisco and the demands of the rich kids’ parents are wearing thin.  His younger boyfriend has thrown him over for another man and together they want to buy the cute carriage house where David lives, and evict him.  When his ex-wife, Julie, calls him out of the blue to solicit David’s help with her teenage daughter’s college applications, the circumstances seem right to flee to the East Coast for a few days.  Days turn into weeks as David and Julie rekindle their friendship and David becomes concerned for Julie’s daughter who is not making very good choices.  In an attempt to keep her house, Julie has turned it into an Air BNB, but it’s rather shabby and in need work.  Julie’s second ex-husband is trying to force the sale of the house for his half of the profits, a battle Julie seems to be losing.  Despite some of the serious issues that arise, the book is light enough to be turned into a Hallmark movie – maybe.  There’s some nice humor in the character of the next door neighbor whom I pictured as Melania Trump.

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Nigerian writer Oyinkan Braithwaite  begins with Korede, a 30ish nurse, getting a call from her younger sister Ayoola telling her that Ayoola’s latest boyfriend is dead and can Korede please come help clean up the mess.  Korede is prepared with bleach, rubber gloves and a strong stomach because this will be the third time she has gotten one of these calls about killing a boyfriend in self-defense.  The reader immediately wonders why Korede doesn’t go to the police rather than complicitly helping to cover up the murder, and this remains a mystery for most of the book.  How can she be so matter of fact about this, particularly when it’s the third time? Ayoola, for her part, always claims self-defense, but she never bears any physical signs of injury and exhibits no remorse or concern for what she has done.  As Korede wryly notes, three murders qualifies her sister as a serial killer.  

Korede, meanwhile, is up for a promotion at the hospital where she works and she is more than a little in love with one of the young staff doctors, Tade.  She’s also found a strange sense of peace with a comatose patient whom she sits with daily, spilling out the details of her life to the only person who will keep the secrets.  

Things begin to unravel when Ayoola, who is physically quite stunning, shows up at the medical office one day and Tade becomes smitten.  Korede’s attempts to dissuade his interests only serve to create friction in their friendship and she becomes increasingly concerned that he will meet the same eventual fate as Ayoola’s previous boyfriends.  Another interesting development is that the comatose patient wakes up after 5 months and remembers all of Korede’s secrets.  

There’s a huge aha moment towards the end that  puts the murders and the cover-ups into an understandable though hardly justified context. The novel is pitched as dark humor and there are some laughable moments and situations as credulity is sometimes stretched.  There’s a fair amount of suspense as the reader dreads the inevitable and wonders whether Korede will finally cease to protect Ayoola.

My Book Club Queue for 2019-2020

July 2019                    There, There, Tommy Orange  (paperback $12.80)

August 2019              Educated:  A Memoir,Tara Westover (Hardcover $15.18; PB $20.40)

September 2019        The Secrets Between Us, Thrity Umbrigar (paperback $11.59 released June 25)         

October 2019            Washington Black, Esi Edugyan  (paperback $11.56)

November 2019        Virgil Wander, Leif Enger  (hardback $17.37; paperback $17 released August 20)

December 2019         The Friend, Sigrid Nunez  (paperback $11.00)

January 2020             A Manual for Cleaning Women:  Selected Short Stories, Lucia Berlin (paperback $10.87)

February 2020           Unsheltered,Barbara Kingsolver (paperback $9.41)

March 2020                The Alice Network,Kate Quinn (paperback $11.24)

April 2020                  A Woman is No Man, Etaf Rum

May 2020                   The Atlas of Reds and Blues,Devi Laskar

                                    

An Interesting Read for Our Times:  

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

After finishing my latest book club title, immediate comparisons between Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West and Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad  came to mind. Whitehead reimagines the system for moving slaves to freedom as a real train moving through underground tunnels. Entrances to the “stations” are well hidden and those who board the trains don’t know exactly where they will end up but are willing to risk the ride to attain freedom.  Hamid uses a similar device in that doors to rooms turn into portals that transport refugees from their homelands to somewhere in the West. Characters don’t know where the doorways will lead, but they are desperate enough to walk into the darkness. 

Early on, the narrator comments, “Location, location, location, the realtors say.  Geography is destiny, respond the historians” (11).  And, geography, both real and virtual, is not only what in part defines the lives of the characters but also provides or denies access to knowledge, relationships and the larger world. Saeed and Nadia, the main characters, live in some unnamed Middle Eastern country where, because of war, it becomes increasingly an untenable place to be.  As gunmen encroach further and further into the city, they become physically cut off from each other and must rely on texting and calling.  The writer addresses the power of the technology saying, “In their phones were antennas and these antennas sniffed out an invisible world, as if by magic, a world that was all around them, and also nowhere, transporting them to places distant and near, and to places that had never been and never would be” (39). By communicating through the phone, Saeed “became present without presence, and she did much the same to him” (40).  Yet, the virtual world can only go so far.  “The city’s freewheeling virtual world stood in stark contrast to the day-to-day lives of most people. . .who went to sleep unfed but could see on some small screen people in foreign lands preparing and consuming and even conducting food fights with feasts of such opulence that the very fact of their existence boggled the mind” (42).  Hamid slowly builds both a feeling of desperation in Saeed and Nadia as well as a sense that no one is coming to their rescue.  

Eventually, the two contract with an agent to help them gain passage out of the country, a short but unsettling trip through a doorway in an abandoned dentist’s office.  “It was said in those days that the passage was both like dying and like being born, and indeed Nadia experienced a kind of extinguishing as she entered the blackness and a gasping struggle as she fought to exit it, and she felt cold and bruised and damp”  (104).  They emerge in Mykonos and live for awhile in a large refugee camp, but while life there is safer, its quality leaves a lot to be desired.  After Saeed and Nadia go through another door and end up in London, they squat in an elegant, unoccupied (by the owners) home and are soon joined by other refugees.  After weeks of living in dirty conditions, Nadia luxuriates in a hot shower.  When Saeed tells her, “It’s been forever. This isn’t our house” (125), she insists that she needs a few more minutes to wash her clothes.  “What she was doing, what she had just done, was for her not about frivolity, it was about the essential, about being human, living as a human being, reminding oneself of what one was” (126). This scene suggests to the reader that something we take for granted – being able to be clean, to wear clean clothes – is not a given for Nadia or tens of thousands of others who flee horrible living situations.  

After they have been in the London house for awhile, Saeed discovers another house filled with refugees from his country and he tries to get Nadia to agree to move into that house. Nadia, meanwhile, has bonded with the inhabitants of her house and attends their council meetings where she is welcomed and accepted.  Here, Hamid begins to pose several of his central questions:  What is the source of belonging?  Where is one’s allegiance?  Do humans always eventually sink into tribalism when they feel threatened? Nadia asks Saeed why they would want to move.  “’To be among our own kind,’” he replies.  She questions what makes them “our kind,” and he tells her that they are from their country. “’From the country we used to be from,’” she counters. She argues that they have left that place and implies that in doing so they have also left behind that identity. London gradually becomes more like the country they left, with fighter aircraft streaking through the sky and tanks and armored vehicles on the streets.  It’s not clear if this is the British gov’t. dealing with the refugees squatters or a response to the militants who have apparently been using the doors to spread their violence to other parts of the world. This idea reflects the likes of Al Qaeda and the Taliban who both occupy physical geography but also export their terrorism around the world.  

Nadia and Saeed move a third time to San Francisco where they encounter an entire hillside of refugees. Saeed is “drawn to people from their country, both in the labor camp and online.  It seemed to Nadia that the farther they moved from the city of their birth, through space and time, the more he sought to strengthen his connection to it, tying ropes to the air of an era that for her was unambiguously gone” (187). This difference in their responses is part of their increasing separation from each other.  They must ultimately decide to assimilate or remain a separate group – a situation that faces all immigrants.

Initially, the author comments that “In Marin there were almost no natives” (197) referring to the Native Americans who first populated North America.  However, he goes on to say, “And yet it was not quite true to say there were almost no natives, nativeness being a relative matter, and many others considered themselves native to this country, by which they meant that they or their grandparents or the grandparents of their grandparents had been born on the strip of land that stretched from the mid-northern-Pacific to the mid-northern-Atlantic, that their existence did not owe anything to a physical migration that had occurred in their lifetimes” (197-198).  Saeed wryly observes that the people who have this attitude tend to be light-skinned “and stunned by what was happening to their homeland, what had already happened in so brief a period, and some seemed angry as well” (198).  A jab at Trump’s nationalism and the racism of his followers?  This brings to mind the fact that Nadia wears a full body, traditional Muslim robe.  Saeed assumes she is devout but quickly learns that she does so only as a means of protection, that men are more likely to leave her alone.  She smokes pot and takes hallucinogenic mushrooms, has pre-marital sex and is fairly secular in her outlook.  “Nadia frequently explored the terrain of social media, though she left little trace of her passing, not posting much herself, and employing opaque usernames and avatars, the online equivalent of her black robes” (41). Thus, this sense of anonymity, both physical and virtual, is also juxtaposed with the ideas of belonging and connection.  

Towards the end of the book, there is a brief anecdote about a wealthy, old woman in Palo Alto who has lived all her life there and had, at one time, “known the names of almost everyone on her street, and most had been there a long time. . .Now she knew none of them, and saw no reason to make the effort. . .every year someone was moving out and someone was moving in. . .and all sorts of strange people were around, people who looked more at home than she was. . .and when she went out it seemed to her that she too had migrated, that everyone migrates, even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives, because we can’t help it.  We are all migrants through time” (209).  Thus, Hamid seems to be, by juxtaposing “nativeness” and “migration” making the case that where we are nowand how we currently see ourselves defines who we are, and that the separation created by geopolitical lines, skin color and cultural identity is a tenuous one at best.  Like Whitehead, Hamid offers us a different lens through which to view our world.

Scottish Author Ian Rankin 

comes to Washington DC

Local writer Neely Tucker interviews Ian Rankin at Politics and Prose at the Wharf.

Before my husband joined me in retirement, I would look wistfully at the Post literary calendar for the week, noting author readings and talks that we might like to attend but would not due to their time (weeknight around rush hour) and location (often downtown).  Now, however we are freer to indulge!  Recently, we ventured down to the newly developed Wharf waterfront area in southeast Washington where a branch of the independent book store, Politics and Prose, hosted Scottish detective novelist Ian Rankin.  It was a terrific way to spend the evening (dinner first at Hank’s Oyster Bar) as Rankin is an interesting and convivial author.  He was interviewed for about 45 minutes by Post contributor and novelist Neely Tucker and then he took questions from the audience of about 50 for another 15 before signing copies of his newest work, In a House of Lies.  

First, a word about Rankin’s work.  He has penned numerous novels in his detective series as well as several plays and a graphic novel.  Several of his books were made (unsuccessfully, he says) into television, but he thinks a new series may be out next year that gives the stories the time they need to develop.  Rankin’s first John Rebus novel was not intended as the start of a series but because Knots and Crossesdid so well, his publisher urged more and soon readers were treated to more novels with the crusty Edinburgh detective.  As the series developed, Rankin brought in several other recurring characters: detectives, Siobhan Clarke, Rebus’s younger partner, and Malcolm Fox, an internal affairs cop initially out to get Rebus.  The crime bus in Edinburgh, “Big Ger” Rafferty is frequently Rebus’s nemesis. Rankin says he painted himself into a box with Rebus, who is 58 when the series starts.  A friend wrote to him and reminded him that the compulsory retirement age is 60.  After a few books, Rebus is forced into retirement but later comes back to work cold cases.  Inevitably, they connect with current cases and Rebus again joins his old colleagues. 

Rankin admits that he has no idea what the ending will be when he starts writing and claims that this is true with many writers that he knows.  He completes a first draft (which he lets no one else read) in which he works out the plot, usually deciding on a plausible ending about 2/3 of the way through, and then goes back and does several more drafts, fine-tuning the language and fixing things that don’t makes sense – like the dog.  A couple of books ago, Rebus ends up adopting a dog that he names Brillo.  Rankin says he was through his second draft of the next book before his wife asked what he’d done with Brillo; he’d forgotten about him.  In the most recent book, she pointed out that Rebus is gone from home too long to leave Brillo and that Rankin needed to work dog feeding, walking and care into the story.  The Brillo stories brought a laugh from the crowd as did Rankin’s example of a translation problem.  When his books are translated into French, they include footnotes to clarify Anglo clichés and cultural references.  In one book, he makes an analogy to Kansas and Toto, referring to what he assumed is a well known book and film.  The footnote indicates that he is referring to two 1980’s American bands.

Mysteries are often dismissed as lighter weight, a genre that is enjoyable but which does not have the gravitas of better literature. Rankin suggests that mysteries are a way to explore why people do things, specifically commit evil acts.  A detective as the protagonist has the ability to move through all of the rungs of society, from street criminals and homeless people to the wealthy who live privileged lives in gated communities.  Rankin’s novels, like most detective stories, feature murders, although unlike American mysteries in which people are likely to be victims of gunshot, his victims die in many other ways.  He points out that few people in Scotland have guns, aside from hunting rifles.  Even the police don’t carry guns.  Scotland is also a small country, about 5 million, with an annual murder rate of about 60.  Rankin mentions a fellow Scots mystery writer, Ann Cleeves, who has a series set on the Shetland Islands.  She’s going to have to set her stories somewhere else, he says, as there is actually no crime there and, he asks, where’s the criminal going to go?  With this, he mimes swimming.  

We stood in line to get our books signed which gave me the opportunity to tell him we are contemplating a trip to Scotland and ask him where he thinks we should visit besides Edinburgh.  He seems puzzled that anyone would make his homeland their vacation destination – “It’s not very big, you know” – but mentions that this is a 500 miles drive up through the northern part of the country. “Beautiful, but not much up there.” But, he adds, that if we come to Edinburgh, we should let him know (ha!) and definitely hit his and Rebus’s favorite drinking establishment, The Oxford Bar.

A trio of good reads about choices and power

Improvement, Joan Silber 

Reminiscent of Elizabeth Strout’s Anything is Possible, Improvementis a series of short stories that take place in the same fictional universe, linked by the relationships of the characters. The reader would do well to construct a chart to see how the characters and the events of one story connect to others.  Reyna is a single mother living in NYC who, in the first story, talks about going to visit her boyfriend Boyd at Rikers Island and about Kiki, her aunt who, as young woman in her mid-twenties, went to Istanbul with friends, stayed, married a rug salesman and mysteriously returned 8 years later to the States. Kiki also lives in the city and takes care of Oliver, Reyna’s child, when she goes on her monthly visits to the prison.  In a later story, the recently released Boyd immediately gets involved in a scheme to buy cigarettes in Virginia in bulk and then drive them to New York to sell them.  When on the morning of one such run, their driver is unavailable, Boyd asks Reyna to do it.  Reluctantly she agrees but then has a last-minute change of heart, fearful of the consequences for Oliver if she is caught.  Instead, one of Boyd’s cronies, Silas, who has no driver’s license, drives and is subsequently involved in a fatal accident, for which his sister blames Reyna. A later story focuses on Darisse, a waitress in Richmond that Silas met during earlier runs and for whom he fell hard.  Darisse is left wondering when Silas doesn’t show up, and questions what she understands about love.   About two thirds of the way through the novel, the story floats back around to Kiki and the reader learns about her years in Turkey.  When political unrest causes Usman’s rug shop to close, they move to Cappadocia, his home town, an historic but provincial outback that finally proves too third-world for Kiki.  During her last weeks there, they play host to three young Germans who are travelling through the country, collecting and then re-selling historic artifacts.  The Germans become the center of several later chapters, with the daughter of one of them befriending Reyna.  

The individual stories are compelling and the characters are well drawn.  The motif of the Turkish carpets and tapestries runs through the book mimicking the weaving together of these various people and the way their lives touch each other.  The book raises questions about the degree of responsibility we have for the choices others make as a consequence of our own choices.  Silber also invites the characters and the reader to consider what loving another means and how far one is willing to go for love.  This would make a great book club selection. There’s so much to figure out, including the significance of the title.  

The Female Persuasion, Meg Wolitzer

A bit like Improvement, this novel periodically refocuses the spotlight and perspective on a different character. The story begins with college freshman Greer Kadetsky, a lonely misfit of a girl who is stuck in a third-tier school even though she was admitted to Yale, because her careless parents forgot to fill out the financial aid forms. Encouraged to go out and do the party circuit one night by Zee Eisenstat, a feminist fellow freshman who soon becomes Greer’s best friend, Greer becomes the victim of unwanted pawing by a suave fraternity boy and it is with this incident that the novel’s central topic takes off:  the relationship between men and women and how women can get power to assert themselves as equals.  Zee and Greer’s attempts to bring the boy’s inappropriate behavior to justice are unsuccessful as the university gives him the proverbial slap on the wrist, but soon after, Zee takes Greer to hear a campus talk by famous feminist Faith Frank (think Gloria Steinhem) and Greer suddenly sees that attaining equity for women can be accomplished on a much larger playing field.  Greer becomes enamored with all things Faith and after college manages to land a job with Faith’s new foundation which is committed to hosting conferences and funding projects designed to help women all over the world.  The foundation is bank-rolled by Emmett Schrader, a venture capitalist who has the hots for Faith and whose funding power eventually becomes at odds with Faith’s aspirations.  

Greer’s chapters focus on her search for significance – the possibility of making a difference for other women, a goal which competes against her love for and need to support her hometown boyfriend, Cory, and eventually against the political hypocrisy of Faith, her hero.  Faith’s chapters show the reader her growth from a young idealist to a more seasoned older woman who doesn’t quite realize what she has lost along the way.  Zee gets chapters as well.  The one who introduces Greer to Faith and more of a radical feminist than Greer, Zee wants to get in on the foundation’s work too, but is thwarted in a decision that fractures a friendship.  She goes on to be a very effective therapist and finds a life partner in Nicole, a school administrator.  She is, perhaps, an example of advocating for women on a smaller, more personal scale.  Cory, Greer’s longtime boyfriend, appears to initially have it all:  four years at Yale and then a lucrative management job in Manilla.  For a time, it seems the challenges to his and Greer’s relationship are ones of geography and career success.  Then, a terrible family tragedy brings Cory home and his world and stereotypical male role are rocked.  Cory’s acceptance of traditional female roles as caregiver and house cleaner reflect the possibility that men can exist outside of the patriarchal hierarchy, although he isn’t exactly thriving.  

With each character, Wolitzer poses the questions:  What does it mean to be powerful?  What does it mean to make a difference?  How do gender roles impact each of these?  Greer’s teenage babysitter is interested in her employer’s advocacy and we see the mantle of feminism both handed down and reinterpreted by the next generation. The novel ends in 2019 against the backdrop of the presidency of the biggest misogynist around.  Clearly, there’s still a whole lot of work to be done.

The Shakespeare Requirement, Julie Schumacher

Much less serious than the previously discussed novels, but spot on with its portrayal of bureaucratic power plays, the comical sequel to Dear Committee, The Shakespeare Requirement returns the reader to the world of Payne University (an appropriate pun for the distress it engenders) and picks up with Schumacher’s skewering of university politics.  The Economics Department’s march to not only take over the physical space of the English Department but to in fact eliminate it all together as a useless subject is led by its chair, Roland Gladwell. Jay Fitger, the protagonist of the earlier book, is the newly appointed English Department chair, and seems ill-equipped to fight off his nemesis.  As the book opens, Fitger is moving into his new wasp-infested office that has no working telephone or computer, no air-conditioning and a shortage of electrical outlets.  “He had recently returned from a visit to Econ’s portion of the building, where he had been mistaken by one of the clerical staff for a vagrant or tourist – another gawker come to admire the hot-and-cold-water fountains and Orwellian flat-screens, the espresso bar, and the sunshine filtering gracefully through the skylights and casting itself in subtle patterns on the tile floor. Descending the stairs again to English, he left behind a silent, air-conditioned Erewhon and reentered the grim and steamy underworld that served as heart and soul, at Payne, of the liberal arts” (2).  Fitger ends up missing the first week of the semester due to an allergic reaction to wasp stings, while his “electronic calendar, PCal,[which Fitger refuses to use] which indicated that he was free every day, all semester, was filling up” (34).

It is with great reluctance that Fitger assumes the responsibility of his department’s survival which, he quickly learns, begins with obtaining unanimous consensus on a Statement of Vision, a necessary step in order to secure funding. The various eccentric characters in his department are loathe to agree to the importance of anyone else’s niche area over their own and the suggestion that perhaps it is time to eliminate Shakespeare as a required course for English majors creates an uproar. Gladwell seizes upon this conflict by surreptitiously enlisting a student to start an SOS (Save Shakespeare) campaign complete with buttons, flyers, rallies and editorials in the school newspaper.  Fitger attempts to gain the support of his former wife, Janet, an administrator and now paramour of the dean, in order to bolster his department.  He’s also still in love with her, a point that does not interest her.  Fitger’s administrative assistant, Fran, adds a fair amount of comedy to the situation as well.  Like most people in that position, she knows far more about what is going on than anyone else and she does her best to keep Fitger afloat, which is not easy considering his own eccentricities that include his phobia to technology.  

The chapters alternate points of view between a variety of characters, including those already mentioned as well as several students, providing a broader context for Fitger’s woes against the backdrop of the larger university.  Everyone is vying for power whether it be personal or professional.  Schumacher has created a genuinely funny satire of this insular world, one to which anyone in pretty much any large organization can relate.