New Century Reading

Kudos

Kudos is the final part of a trilogy by Rachel Cusk, and in the end, I wish I'd stopped after the first book, Outline. But no, after reading and liking the first (so who could blame me?), I went on to Transit, which I didn't like quite as well. Still, that didn't deter me.

Like the other books, this one has Faye, the first-person narrator, encountering various and sundry people who all seem to feel compelled to tell her all kinds of things about her life. Unfortunately, in this book she's en route to a literary conference, and perhaps it's no surprise that the people she meets are insufferable navel-gazers. 

Worse, nearly every voice in this book sounds exactly the same. I struggled to keep track of who was telling Faye a story, or care. It's entirely possible that part of my dislike of the book is the times we live in now. I write this a week after our president took sides with Putin over the US and its intelligence agencies, and a day after said president sent an all-caps tweet threatening Iran with dire consequences. Somehow reading long, monotonous monologues about various self-epiphanies that aren't of much consequence to anyone but the person having them just seems petty.

So, possibly wrong time/wrong book syndrome. 

Killers of the Flower Moon

There is just so much American history that I'm ignorant of, and sadly, a lot of that is the history of marginalized communities in this country. I had no idea that many members of the Osage were, early in the last century, wealthy because the US government had re-homed them to what appeared to be unattractive Oklahoma land, but which turned out to be an area full of oil. 

So for a time, the Osage were quite wealthy. But because the US government didn't consider them to be fully human (!), the government appointed non-Native guardians to help them manage their money. Yeah, you can bet that went well.

In fact, it went so badly that after a while, Osage people began dying in higher numbers than would be normal for the time and place. And there seemed to be two ways they died: gunshot wounds to the head, or slow, lingering deaths, especially after drinking alcohol given to them by white people. 

Not surprisingly, the Osage suspected something else was going on. Unsurprisingly, their community was run (or rather, nearly terrorized) by a white man who pretended to be their friend, and who had problem coming up with false bills he said were owed to him by members of the Osage. Any time any complaint was so much as alleged against this man, he promptly bought off either the complainant himself, or the judge, jury, and law enforcement. 

This is the story of how the FBI came to be, and it's a good reminder in these turbulent days that the FBI does have a role to fill, but that it's also filled with people good and bad, now and back then. In the case of the Osage, they got one of the best, a man determined to bring the murderers to justice, against all the odds within that community.

But that doesn't mean that the case had a tidy ending, or that all the bad guys got what was due to them--or even that the killing stopped.

I found this book slow to get going, and there are an awful lot of people involved so that it was sometimes hard to keep people straight, but overall, it's a very worthwhile read. David Grann has done American history a great service in uncovering this travesty, now mostly forgotten except for the Osage descendants, for whom it's still a burning, horrible issue. 

Sometimes I weep for my country, past and present.

 

The Last Cruise

I wanted so very much to like this book. It's about one of those great, classic old cruise ships, like the Queen Mary, that is about to be taken out of service. But before she is, she's taken on one last great voyage from LA to Hawaii. The story focuses on a handful of people who are taking that last cruise: Christina, a 37-year-old farmer from Maine who's trying to decide if she should give her husband what he wants (children); Mick, a Hungarian chef who has been given his highest assignment yet on this final cruise; and Miriam, an elderly member of an Israeli string quartet, brought on board by the ship's owners, who want them to premiere a new piece one of the owners composed. 

This is a good setup, and at first I was drawn in by the characters and the situation. Christensen is a particularly strong food writer, and the scenes taking place in the ship's kitchens are especially fun. But there's also the tension of the "Upstairs Downstairs" nature of cruise ships, where those doing the serving are living in markedly less luxury than those they serve. There's also an exploration of what it's like to be an elderly Jew who served Israel in the Six-Day War, but is now not as enamored of the actions of the current Israeli government. 

After a while, though, it seemed like an awful lot was going on. Besides the principal characters, there are a host of secondary characters, many of whom seemed to exist only as mechanisms for moving the plot forward. There is not just one, but two implausible romances. Things happen much too quickly.

And too much happens. I won't give spoilers, but Christensen threw every crisis she could think of at this poor old ship. And that ended up diluting many of the story lines and weakening the whole book.

Finally, the ending--OMG. Again, I won't spoil it, but it felt entirely like the author got tired of writing the book and said, There, it's done. I don't need everything single thing tied up in a neat bow when I read a novel, but this ending was way too far on the other side of the spectrum.

So, not a hit for me. 

The Friend

I hardly know how to describe this book. This is one of those spare, understated novels that appears straightforward, and yet in the silences and blank spaces between what action there is, there's a lot going on for the reader to interpret. In that way, I felt it was similar to My Name is Lucy Barton.

The characters in this book are mostly nameless, other than the dogs and several famous people (although even here, not everyone is given a name--early on there's a description of a poet teaching at a university in 1974 who announces to her class that she might not be there the next week, then goes home and puts on her mother's old fur coat and commits suicide in her garage: That's very much Anne Sexton). The unnamed narrator is a woman, a writer, who's been friends with a man who's also served as her literary mentor for many years. But now he's killed himself. What's more, he's asked his third wife to give the narrator the man's dog, an enormous great Dane named Apollo. The woman doesn't want the dog--her apartment is minuscule, rent-controlled in NYC, and doesn't allow pets. But she can't refuse, and to her dismay, she discovers the dog himself appears to be grieving the loss of the man. 

So begins a carefully controlled narrative about dogs and humans, writers, the writing process, the grieving process, and suicide itself. It almost reads as if it's a journal the woman kept to record her thoughts and emotions around these topics. It's not that a great deal happens, but there are a lot of thoughtful ideas examined and explored, not always fully, but enough to make the reader think about them.

And there's a dog. A sweet dog, very sweet dog, is Apollo. Unfortunately, Apollo is already old for his breed when the woman inherits him. But she will not give him up.

I've seen a lot of complaints about this book online, where people think it's too random, or doesn't have a coherent storyline, or that it's emotionally chilly. I found none of these things to be the case. That said, I should note that I'm still thinking about and grieving Anthony Bourdain (as I was when I read Lauren Groff's Florida), and I have a border collie who just turned 17--pretty much the upper end of a border collie's life expectancy, and her age is showing. And I write. So all the things author Sigrid Nunez covers here are more than relevant to me at the moment. And if you liked Lucy Barton, this might be a good fit for you too, although quite a different story. 

The Great Believers

It's 1985, and Yale Tishman is a development director for an art gallery in Chicago. He's just found himself in the best position someone in an art gallery could ever be: He's learned of a hidden stash of previously undiscovered pieces of art by such luminaries as Modigliani. If he can get the artworks authenticated, his little gallery will immediately become a big player in the art world.

It's 2015, and Fiona is in Paris, desperately searching for her adult daughter who's been missing for three years, but who recently appeared on a video Fiona found online. While searching, she's staying with her old friend Richard, a photographer who has become highly regarded in art circles over the years. 

In The Great Believers, these disparate place and time settings are connected. Yale was good friends with Fiona's brother, Nico, whose memorial service opens the book. Nico was gay and died of that disease that was so misunderstood and terrifying in 1985. Yale too is gay, but in a monogamous relationship. As the disease spreads and more and more people die, his circle of gay friends both tightens together in solidarity, but faces a growing number of deaths. In her grief over her brother's death, Fiona becomes a sort of personal caretaker for many in his group, a role that takes an enormous toll her on later in life.

Meanwhile, the delicate dance of getting the potential art treasures out of elderly Nora's family continues, with Nora's children and grandchildren outraged that she wants to donate these possibly invaluable pieces to a small art gallery rather than sell them for a huge amount of money--money that would, of course, benefit said children and grandchildren. Yale has to walk a precariously thin line in appeasing both Nora and her extended family while working to get the art authenticated--and also while watching his community die off in ravaging ways. 

There's a reason Nora chose Yale as the person she wants to oversee the art, and I won't spoil it for anyone, but when the reason comes out, it's one of the most satisfying, yet heartbreaking parts of a book that has considerable heartbreak (and satisfaction) in it. Author Rebecca Makkai does an excellent job of spinning these two stories and drawing them closer and closer. She's not coy about it; we meet Fiona in the first chapter, which is set in 1985, so we know she knows Yale and Richard. But how their stories play out is wonderful to behold. 

Make no mistake, this book has a lot of sadness in it. Makkai is unflinching in showing what life was like for the gay community in 1985, with the discrimination, violence against them, and the rise of AIDS. She takes us into hospital wards to show us what death by AIDS looked like then, and she takes us to community protests to see how the gay community fought back. 

But she never loses sight of the fact that as a novel, we need to have characters we believe in and are interested in. They can be--and are--flawed. But I was so deeply invested in following their stories that I didn't even care that there were some plot points I saw coming a mile away. It felt less like an authorial misstep, and more like that feeling you have when you learn something gossipy about someone and find you're not at all surprised, that that seems fitting for that person.

My only quibble was that the Paris chapters took a while to build steam and tension. The Chicago chapters had steam and tension from the get-go. Paris did catch up, and the ending had me in tears. Makkai's writing is spot on, and I'd marked some places to quote, but realize the quotes would give spoilers, so no.

Makkai also addresses the issue of allyship versus appropriation in the acknowledgements, which is welcome. After all, she's clearly not a gay male who lived through the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. But she's done her homework, and she details her sources in the acknowledgements and urges readers to read some of those as well. I don't know how this novel is being received in the LGBTQ community, particularly by those who survived those years, and I'd be curious to know. If she's misrepresented, it should be called out. From where I'm sitting, though, she presented the gay community as extremely unfairly treated and dying horrible deaths that led to further ostracizing from many segments of society.

Wade in the Water

There's a good reason Tracy K. Smith is the Poet Laureate of the United States. Damn, the woman can write.

This slim volume, her latest collection, is not meant to be read quickly, and will certainly bear many rereads. Sometimes she deliberately uses very simple, plain language, almost understated, which can trick the reader into not expecting the emotional gut punch or insights she provides.

Several of these poems are political. She uses, to great effect, a poetic form known as erasure. It sounds like a simple thing, but look how effective it can be when a gifted poet who's also African-American takes on the Declaration of Independence. That poem is one of the best in the book, right along with a lengthy poem called I Will Tell You the Truth about This, I Will Tell You All about It, which is composed entirely of phrases from letters and statements of African-Americans enlisted in the Civil War, along with the family members. It is, not surprisingly, a brutally emotional read.

But Smith also writes about the personal in deeply affecting ways. Just look at this excerpt from a poem called 4 1/2:

Morning finds her curled like a prawn

Around a stuffed blue Pegasus, or the smallest

Prawn-pink lion. Or else she's barging

Into my room, and leaning in close so

It's her hair I wake to--that coarse, dark

Heaven of knots and purple fluff.

_____________________________

She's like an island 

Made of rock, with one lone tree at the top

Of the only mountain. She's like the sole

Incongruous goat tethered to the tree,

Smiling almost as you approach, scraping

The ground with its horns, and then--

Lickety split--lurching hard, daring

The rope to snap. She's hungry.

 

Read the entire poem for a lovely meditation on mothers and children.

So, yes, I loved this and will return to it. 

A Place For Us

I was excited to read this book after reading Ron Charles' rave review of it. It's a sprawling story of an Iranian-American family growing up in California. The parents, Layla and Rafiq, have a stable marriage that was arranged for them in the traditional way, and they are deeply rooted in their Muslim faith. They have three children: Daughters Hadia and Huda, and youngest son Amar. As the book opens, Hadia is getting married to a man of her own choosing, breaking tradition, and there's considerable tension as Amar comes to the wedding after what appears to be a three-year rift with the family. The source of that rift, and how Hadia came to break her parents' traditional ways, is what spools out through the book.

It's not told chronologically, which is sometimes successful, sometimes not. As the book goes along, we hear from Layla, Hadia, and Amar, seeing stories told from every side, with the overall effect of seeing how people enmeshed in the same circumstances can have very different perceptions of what happened. As the book goes on, the tension grows over what will happen and how this family in a tightly knit community can hold its center.

I don't have quite the raves for it that Ron Charles does. As I have complained about before, I think this is a book written by a very young (for the first time that I can remember, the author lists her birth year in her bio, so the readers can be sure to know just how young she is) and photogenic woman that could have used a bit more time before being published. It could have used some tightening. There was also a structural decision that I can't detail without giving spoilers that I don't think was successful, and I spent a lot of time after finishing the book thinking about why the author made that choice. If you've read the book and want to chat in the comments, please do!

While I understand that the book was tightly focused on the family, I was surprised at the lack of context around being Muslim in America in the post-9/11 world. There are some touches of the anti-Muslim attitudes that increased after 9/11, but those are dropped pretty quickly, even though the anti-Muslim sentiments have done the opposite of disappearing in the real world.

In the end, though, I was never tempted to quit reading, and I think the author has the potential to become a really strong writer. I'll definitely read her next book.

Heart Berries

What a debut from Terese Marie Mailhot! I'm trying to think of something that's not totally a cliche in describing this brief memoir--riveting, incendiary, etc., etc. 

It's a memoir rooted in a breakdown and time in a psych ward (self committed). The staff gave her a notebook, and she began to write her way out. In so few pages (about 120), she covers her own personal, horrible history (her mother wasn't necessarily bad, but she brought home bad men; her father--oof); her larger family history, including the forcible removal of children from indigenous parents and rehoming them to Catholic schools (hmmm, sounds vaguely familiar); the way the Native community has suffered over the generations and still today; and her struggles to find her place in that world, when her own life is so rooted in abuse that she has many, many personal issues to deal with.

Mailhot has a unique approach to telling these stories; it's a stream-of-consciousness approach, dabbing here and there like a hummingbird, while gradually putting together the bigger picture, like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. She's unsparing and unflinching about every aspect of her life, talking about her failures as a parent (she lost custody of her first child to her ex-husband) and her insistent, repeated returns to an ex-boyfriend who is less than committed to the relationship. At times, her words are pure anguish.

And sometimes they're pure poetry. That said, if I had one wish for the book, I wish it was a little tighter, and some of the streams of consciousness didn't feel entirely coherent. But the ones that did made up for it. 

There There

This is a debut novel that's explosive, fierce, funny, and heartbreaking, and honestly, I think it's fair to say that Tommy Orange is poised to join the ranks of such Native American literary luminaries as Louise Erdrich and Sherman Alexie. He's got a voice all of his own, stories to tell, and a masterful way with narrative and drawing characters.

There There is the story of so-called urban Indians, in particular Natives of Oakland, CA. The title comes from the famous saying of Gertrude Stein regarding Oakland: "There is no there there." The saying has become a cliche that people use to describe things or people that don't have particular meaning or value. But if you dig deeper into Stein's context, that isn't really what she meant.

Author Tommy Orange uses that deeper meaning to great effect, looking at how Natives who were displaced from their righteous homes and ended up in places like Oakland can become part of that latter landscape, making it their home even when it's not their home; they can feel nostalgia for it as white hipsters start encroaching.

The book focuses on several characters, each given several of their own chapters. At first they appear disparate, but gradually Orange draws them together as Oakland prepares for its first big Powwow. Along the way we learn about people's histories, how they've become who they are now. It would have been easy for Orange to resort to "types," but he doesn't; these people are all human and breathing. And they have wide varieties of reasons for wanting to attend this Powwow, some of them dark.

My one quibble is that there are so many people that a few get short shrift, and by the end, it's somewhat hard to keep track of them all. I was fully invested in the story and ripped through the dramatic ending, and yet I think a deeper focus on fewer characters would have been even more involving. That said, this was a hell of a debut, and I can't wait to read Orange's next book.

I'm thankful too, as a pretty clueless white woman, that there are people like Orange writing these books that help me learn and understand things I don't know about the Native community. It's humbling.

 

Florida

Let's talk for a moment about the magic power of an excellent writer. In this case, Lauren Groff and her amazing collection of stories, Florida. I should have hated this book. It has two things that rouse significant ire in me: a complete lack of quotation marks around dialogue, and snakes. I hate snakes. Like, detest and abhor them, think they're proof of the infallibility of whatever source of Creation you believe in. This book is full of them.

But even as I was squirming uncomfortably in my chair or on the couch, I could not put this book down. The snakes are never there for shock value, but are a full part of the book, even--sigh--a necessary part. It's a dark book, for sure. There are plenty of unlikable people doing unlikable things. Many times the settings are deep in rural swampland. Not always; a couple of the stories are set in France, but many of the characters in those stories are from Florida. Not surprisingly, Florida itself comes across as a character, a complex, difficult character with ever-shifting attitudes and motives. Sort of like the relative you have that intrigues and scares you, and you don't really want to have them in your home, but you're always open to hearing about them because they're so peculiar and yet fascinating.

And there's heartbreak of all kinds. Just look at the opening sentence of the opening story: "I have somehow become a woman who yells, and because I do not want to be a woman who yells, whose little children walk around with frozen, watchful faces, I have taken to lacing on my running shoes after dinner and going out into the twilit streets for a walk, leaving the undressing and sluicing and reading and singing and tucking in of the boys to my husband, a man who does not yell."

Wow. There's a lot going on right there.

Betrayals are rife here, as are abandonments. In one chilling story, two little girls are left behind in a remote, swampy cabin when their mother disappears under strange circumstances. Spouses leave their partners, people leave their homes. One of those stories involves a young woman who becomes terrifyingly homeless after her boyfriend dumps her.

But here's the thing I love about Groff: She's a fantastic writer, she has a beautiful way with words, she creates full universes, and as unpleasant or downright awful as they can be sometimes, they're always gripping, I always care about the characters even if I don't like them, and I want to know what happens.

Sometimes timing is everything. After waking up to the shock last week of hearing about Anthony Bourdain's suicide (RIP, Tony, you will always have a place in my heart for your so-excellent work, and that heart still aches for the pain you were in), I read the final story (novella, really) called Yport. In this story, an unnamed mother takes her two sons to France for a few weeks in the summer, partly to escape the Florida heat, and ostensibly to continue research on an academic project regarding Guy de Maupassant. But the trip is unnerving on many levels. Things don't go as planned, and the mother is brought to face several unpleasant realities, not the least of which is she hates de Maupassant and will never finish her project. She focuses on the risks of climate change to the point where it's sending her into a deep depression:

"She can't stop the thought that children born now will be the last generation of humans. Her sons have known only luck so far, though suffering will surely come for them. She feels it nearing, the midnight of humanity. Their world is so full of beauty, the last terrible flash of beauty before the long darkness."

Of course I have no idea what was going on in Bourdain's mind. But he was also greatly in tune to the ills of the world, and it's not hard to imagine he might have been having similar thoughts.

It's a story full of despair, and yet doesn't leave the reader fully in despair at the end. It's a powerful piece to end a powerful book, and it left me drained and emotional--and ready to start over from page one. No wonder Groff is one of the few buy-on-the-day-of-release authors for me.