This is your mind on Plants

This is Your Mind on Plants

Michael Pollan (Penguin Books, 2021)

       “The drug war’s simplistic account of what drugs do and are, as well as its insistence on lumping them all together under a single meaningless rubric, has for too long prevented us from thinking clearly about the meaning and potential of these very different substances. The legal status of this or that molecule is one of the least interesting thing about it.” Michael Pollan gives us a book in three essays about psychoactive substances, and our biological, social, historical, and legal relationships with them.

 

        The first essay is about opium. I clearly remember reading the original in Harper’s Magazine, more than 25 years ago. I’m glad to see it again, in a more complete form; in the1997 publication, Pollan censored his account of actually trying a tea made from the pods. The essay is partly about the determination of the US Drug Enforcement Agency to prevent citizens from discovering how easy it would be to obtain household supplies of opioids; in fact, the flowering plants found in our gardens are not botanically different from the dreaded opium poppies of Afghanistan and Turkey. 

 

         It’s also about Pollan’s awareness of the DEA, and the potentially serious consequences that could have befallen him. Those hinged on some constitutionally and philosophically knotty questions. How would the DEA determine that he had ‘knowingly’ or ‘intentionally’ planted the flowers to use them as drugs? Of course, confessing in a nationally published magazine might be considered something of a dead giveaway; but by now, the statute has run. As it turns out, of course, the opiates that were really destroying American lives were the pharmaceutically enhanced plagues of OxyContin and its ilk.

 

          The third essay concerns other mind-altering substances: those derived from cactus plants, such as peyote and mescaline. Pollan’s quest for information and experience was seriously disrupted by the start of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. It’s not impossible to use psychedelics alone, but the story he was after had more to do with the way indigenous people use them, at the intersection of religion and psychology. There’s politics, too; should the use of peyote be restricted to religious observances, and hence to indigenous people? Can white people use it without wrecking it, ecologically or socially?

 

           The middle essay is not about use of a drug, but about abstention: caffeine is one of the most widely used psychoactive materials, though one of the latest to come along. Coffee and tea reached London in the 1650s. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the arrival of caffeine in Europe changed...everything.” However hyperbolic that sounds, Pollan makes his case: “Coffee and tea ushered in a shift in the mental weather, sharpening minds that had been fogged by alcohol, freeing people from the natural rhythms of the body and the sun, thus making possible whole new kinds of work and, arguably, new kinds of thought, too.” 

 

          This was the chapter in which I took the most interest, since I’m as implicated as the 90% of adults who use at least some caffeine; we always know when the next dose is due, and where we’re going to get it. How much of my brain power is owed to the magic stuff, and what would happen if the sleep deficit ever came due?

 

         Be that as it may, it’s always a pleasure to linger with Michael Pollan over a cup of tea, both for the sharp writing and for the wide-ranging view. 

 

 

Any Good Books, November 2024

 

A Stranger in the Kingdom

 

A Stranger in the Kingdom

Howard Frank Mosher (1989, Mariner edition 2002)

The late Howard Frank Mosher had a fine long career as chronicler of a fictionalized Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. You may think of downstate Vermont as rural and remote already, but the upper corner tucked between the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Green Mountains of Vermont is significantly more so. Mosher populates his background history with indigenous people, escaped survivors of the Underground Railroad, the occasional Gypsy, and six or so generations of the Kinneson family. 

 

Kingdom County would be renowned, if anyone had ever heard of it, for deer hunting and fly fishing. In spring, when the mayflies hatch, the county judge “had been observed wearing waders in court under his judicial robes in order not to waste precious seconds getting onto his beloved river.” Mosher has a tender appreciation for such seasonal details; his meadows bloom with the flowers in their turn.

 

For this book, our narrator is thirteen-year-old James Kinneson. His father, Charles, is owner and editor of the local weekly paper; his brother, Charlie, is a feisty young lawyer in town. The Charleses are hard-headed and prone to argument “...over history and literature, politics and religion, current events and what they were pleased to call ‘the King’s English...” It’s their habit to put young Jimmy in the middle, yelling their points at him for the other’s benefit. Since Jimmy adores them both, it’s vexing, but it’s an amusing narrative device.

 

Into this bucolic backcountry comes the church’s new minister for the United Protestant Church of Kingdom Common, “one Walter Andrews from Montreal, Canada, a former chaplain in the Royal Canadian Air Force.” The Rev. Mr. Andrews is the first minister the church has contrived to call in two years, since the previous incumbent’s unfortunate experience at the local cock fights. Mr. Andrews is extremely well educated and well spoken; he’s also black, which is a subject of considerable interest around Kingdom Common. He brings his son, Nathan, who’s a few years ahead of Jimmy in school. They form a friendship of sorts, but Jimmy knows that Nathan would rather be back in Montreal, even if it meant moving back in with his grandmother. He’s not destined to fall in love with trout fishing.

 

The other new face in town that summer is Claire LaRiviere, a young woman who left Montreal after answering an ad for a housekeeper, placed by the senior Charles Kinneson’s disreputable cousins. Such a position is not a workable plan in any way, and Claire doesn’t have the money to get to Hollywood, which is her dream, so she winds up taking refuge in the minister’s house. That’s a touchy situation, and meat and drink for every gossip in town (none of whom, naturally, offer to take Claire in.)

 

She comes to a tragic end, and Walter Andrews is accused of killing her. Charles, Jr., puts on his best Perry Mason defense, including a large dash of good luck in his witnesses. Walter and Nathan leave town, leaving young James with a story for the ages. He will grow up to take over the newspaper, but he’s a novelist at heart.

 

This is a magnificently old-fashioned book, which tells of a time we can never otherwise come back to. The people are the ordinary run of scoundrels and saints, in interesting ways. I’m glad I’ll have a few more chances to visit Kingdom Common, if Thriftbooks doesn’t let me down.

Any Good Books, October 2024 by email

Tabula Rasa

 

Any Good Books, September 2024

Tabula Rasa

John McPhee (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023)

        If you (somehow) don't already know John McPhee's work, this is perhaps not the book to start with. If you do, consider it a tasty lagniappe to his very substantial career. Some of his thirty-odd books are on single subjects (Oranges!) that outgrew their origins as New Yorker pieces; others are collections of such pieces. Tabula Rasa could be thought of as a collection of bits and bobs swept up from the cutting room floor, but if a man who was born in 1931 wants an ‘old people project’ to help him live a while longer, I say he's entitled. The stories about why certain stories didn’t pan out are pretty interesting in themselves. And lest it sound too valedictory, a friend advised him, "just call it 'Volume One.'"

 

        One thing McPhee is well known for is writing about science, making the intersection of geography and geology more interesting than I’d ever have thought possible. There’s method in it: “In writing about science, one is always aware that the reader may know a good deal more about the science than the writer does, or a good deal less, and that both categories of reader are always going to be there, in some ratio or other. So, as I’m suggesting, you look for ways to put things that would inform the unknowledgeable while not irritating the knowledgeable.”

 

         Another favorite subject is Princeton, the University and the town. He spent a cheerful childhood there; his father was a staff doctor, so he and his friends made the whole college their playhouse. Looking back even farther, he revisits the history of a squabble between Woodrow Wilson, in his role as President of the University, and one Andrew Fleming West, Dean of the Graduate School. “The basic issue had to do with the construction of residential quarters for graduate students...People took sides, thought became anger, and bitterness developed that went much deeper than the question that began it.” In the 1950s, when McPhee was an undergraduate, there were still people who could give him a first-hand account, though it sounds like he never found an unbiased one. In 1910, Wilson lost the battle to a timely bequest that favored West’s position; he resigned his office and went into politics, and the rest is history. 

          McPhee has now taught writing at Princeton since 1975, two spring semesters out of three. “In the teaching semesters, I wrote nothing of my own. It was like crop rotation. I was fallow.” He teaches a small group, including a good deal of individual instruction: “We sit side by side looking down at printouts, which are covered with notes, marginalia, transpositions, nouveau commas, purged commas, structural revolutions, and low hanging redundancies that I, pretending to be an editor, am offering in the spirit of suggestion.” He forebears, in general, to write about his students and their work, but he makes an exception for the spring of 2020, when the university closed, on the third Wednesday of March. He had to figure out Zoom and .pdfs, which not every eighty-nine-year-old would have attempted. But since the sophomore students suddenly had nothing but time, the results are dazzling.

 

         Some subjects seem to come out of nowhere. McPhee couldn’t pull together an article about Meredith Willson, the Music Man man, but the residue is this gorgeous sentence: “As a composer, Willson was so prestidigitational that the trombone march and one of the love songs (“Goodnight My Someone”) were so different in texture and tempo that you blinked once or twice before realizing that they were the same tune.” Nice! And I bet it has you humming.

The Color of Law

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

Richard Rothstein (2017, Liveright)

       I can recommend this book as a deeply comprehensive history; as a reading experience, however, it’s not for the faint of heart. It’s the history of de jure segregation in the United States, which extended for a solid hundred years after the end of the Civil War. Black people were denied equal access to both public and privately built housing; this occurred all across the country, in cities and (especially) suburbs. Sometimes the mechanisms were local, such as private covenants and local ordinances; at least as often, the Federal government put its giant thumb on the scale.

     Richard Rothstein argues that this was both illegal and unconstitutional, the entire time it was happening. The Thirteenth Amendment, when it abolished slavery, empowered Congress to enforce abolition. “In 1866, Congress enforced the abolition of slavery by passing a Civil Rights Act, prohibiting actions that it deemed perpetuated the characteristics of slavery. Actions that made African Americans second-class citizens, such as racial discrimination in housing, were included in the ban.” One hundred and two years would go by before the Supreme Court would uphold a claim based on that law.

      What could make more of a statement of second-class citizenship than a declaration that having you in a neighborhood made the whole area less ‘desirable’? The idea that racially integrated neighborhoods were less ‘harmonious’ actually had a deeply perverse effect: the more people lived in segregated enclaves, the less likely they were to feel neighborly toward one another, guaranteeing an inharmonious cast to many future interactions. The idea that Black people entering a neighborhood would lower property values was not a mere superstition, but a self-reinforcing mechanism: if mortgages were available at all, they came at higher rates. Worse yet, Federal lending insurance wasn’t available in Black neighborhoods, so people bought property on contracts that gave them no equity at all till they made the last payment.

       Just as Social Security was rigged to omit people whose occupations were domestic or agricultural, so the G.I. Bill made offers to returning servicemen that only white men could take advantage of. The suburban building boom was accompanied by propaganda about how much your family would benefit from your own little acreage, but everybody knew that only some people could enjoy it. When governments built housing directly, sometimes demolishing mixed neighborhoods for the land, the projects were nearly always designated for one race or the other; you get one guess about which ones came with parks, playgrounds, and swimming pools.

       Rothstein’s writing is clear and comprehensive; he makes a dry, airtight case. The result is a book I wanted to throw across the room many times per chapter. The cycle of poverty begins right here, with the inability to build generational wealth in home equity, in contrast to every Levittown family whose investment provided college tuition and home down payments for their children, and their children’s children. The mortgage interest deduction is an entitlement, pouring billions of dollars into the pockets of suburbanites. School investments followed property values, with predictable results. And if a neighborhood was already undesirable, why not site waste dumps and dirty industry there too? You can’t wonder why the children who grow up there have asthma and lead poisoning far out of proportion to their numbers.

      It didn’t need to be that way. 

 

 

 

Any Good Books, August 2024

 

Chances Are

Chances Are

Richard Russo (2019, Vintage Contemporaries)

      Three old friends meet for a fall weekend at Chilmark, on Martha’s Vineyard, where one of them has a house his mother used to own. It’s 2015; they are sixty-six years old, and have led very different lives. Lincoln, whose house it is, deals in commercial real estate, out in Arizona; Teddy runs a boutique academic publishing house; and Mickey is an old rock and roller.

      The three men are also indulging, individually and severally, in a bit of time travel. Specifically, they are thinking about the weekend they spent there in 1971, shortly after graduation. They’d been roommates since freshman year, and had worked together as scholarship boys at Minerva College; much of their social lives revolved around the sorority house where Lincoln and Teddy waited tables, and Mickey washed pots. That weekend, before going their separate ways, they had another friend along, a girl from the sorority house.

      Jacy was from nearby Greenwich, which set her a few rungs above the ‘hashers’ on the social ladder. All three were a little in love with her, but she was engaged to a law student from back home. The plan, as her fiancé would have it, was that they’d settle down in their home town and raise another generation in easy privilege. In the event, though, she left the island at the end of the weekend and went completely off the grid–which, if you had sufficient ready cash, was much easier to do in 1971 than it would be now.

       The sixty-six-year-old Lincoln is back on the Vineyard to see about the house, and make a decision about whether to keep it or sell it. (There’s a minor narrative hitch here: you don’t keep a house in a place like that without checking on it in person at least occasionally, which neither Lincoln nor his mother seem to have been doing. But no matter.) He’s also still curious about what happened to Jacy after she left the house that early morning forty-four years before.

      I’ll spoil the story this far: Richard Russo is not the kind of writer who would turn an alumni weekend into a police procedural. If there were a body to be found on the island, it would have turned up long since. Lincoln does have some substantial chats with the retired police chief, which, of course, he wouldn’t be doing if he had anything to do with Jacy’s disappearance. Teddy and Mickey have memories and stories of their own, and they all end the weekend with new possibilities in their lives.

      There’s an underlying theme here about determinism, which Russo handles masterfully. In what ways are we always who we were born to be, and where does chance intervene? Some things are honestly random, like the 1970 draft lottery. Other aspects of our lives may come directly from the egg, like Teddy’s pacifism, which would only be magnified when he got injured at high school basketball practice; a coach encouraged rough contact because he thought Teddy was too timid. Or perhaps it was because he actually was too timid to deck the bully the first time he got tripped. “Squinted at in this fashion...human destiny was both complex (it had a lot of moving parts) and simple (in the end, you were who you were.)”

      Lincoln is who he is; like his mother, he’s never actually won an argument with his father, simply because the old man never, ever admits that he has lost. But his mother stealthily had her influence; sending Lincoln East to Minerva was her idea, as was keeping the Chilmark property. “When his mother died, he thought maybe that would put an end to the struggle, but no. Though she might be dead and buried, she continued at odd moments to plead her posthumous case, especially here on the island, the place she’d loved most.”

      You’re always in good hands with Richard Russo. This strikes me as a fine book to take to the island, wherever yours is. Here’s wishing you a comfortable chair and a cool drink.

Bowlaway: a novel

 Bowlaway: a novel

Elizabeth McCracken (2019, Harper Collins)

“They found a body in the Salford Cemetery, but aboveground and alive.” How’s that for an opener! “A body,” because Bertha Truitt was unconscious, lying in the frozen-over early spring grass, with no footsteps to show how she got there. The year is 1900, or thereabouts. Bertha’s of an indeterminate, middling age, and has nothing whatever to say about her past. The bag she has with her adds to the oddity, containing as it does a small wooden ball and a narrow wooden object, which turn out to be a candlepin: she’s going to bring the town a new sport. In short order, she builds a bowling alley, with a cellar below and an apartment above.

Truitt’s Alleys welcomes all comers, and Bertha attracts a claque of women bowlers. It would be scandalous not to at least conceal them with some kind of curtain, except that Bertha Truitt won’t think of such a thing. Let them ogle, let them gawk, if they will–her sublime unconcern sets them at naught. Joe Wear, the cemetery watchman who discovered her, becomes the manager of the lanes; Dr. Leviticus Sprague, the doctor who was there when she came to, becomes her husband. He’s a black man–Bertha’s unconcerned about that, too–with relatives on a farm Down East who are waiting for him to come to his senses and come home.

Elizabeth McCracken gives us the whole of the twentieth century in the history of this modest bowling alley. It survives Bertha’s death in one true-but-unlikely misadventure, and Dr. Sprague’s death in another; it survives the Depression, by being the cheapest entertainment in town. Nahum Truitt, her son (can it be so?) comes down out of Maine to take over; he marries, and raises two sons to carry on a while longer. A neon sign goes up; pinball machines are installed; the human pinsetters are replaced by automation; the seasons turn.

McCracken has a distinctive gift for strangeness, both in language and in narrative. The story of Truitt’s lanes, or of candlepin bowling itself, is a story of genealogy, and of love. “Maybe somebody else had invented the game first. That doesn’t matter. We have all of us invented things that others have beat us to: walking upright, a certain sort of sandwich involving avocado and an onion roll, a minty sweet cocktail, ourselves, romantic love, human life.” That crescendo from sandwich to human life is comic, in its way; it’s also profoundly true, if you’re in the mood to let fiction can get past your defenses.

For dessert: I listened to WBUR’s Only a Game religiously for the entire 27-year run of the show, and still miss it, of a Saturday morning. In 1994, in the shadow of the Ken Burns Baseball documentary series, Only a Game had a crack at New England’s own candlepin bowling, in about as many minutes as Burns needed hours. Enjoy– 

https://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2018/07/27/candlepin-bowling-ken-burns

A Gentleman in Moscow

A Gentleman in Moscow

Amor Towles (Viking Penguin, 2016)

“It is not the business of gentlemen to have occupations.” Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Hunt, must surely be considered a gentleman. But in 1922, in Moscow, all such honorifics are definitely considered surplus to requirements. A committee of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs has sentenced the count to the most internal of all possible exiles, the Metropol Hotel just a few city blocks from the Kremlin itself. He’s been living there for four years, since his return from Paris. What brought him back? “I missed the climate,” he quips to the committee, which is not amused.

If you have to be confined to one building for the rest of your life, you could do worse than the Metropol, a legendarily cosmopolitan hotel in the center of Moscow, cheek by jowl with the Bolshoi Theater and the Kremlin. There’s a barbershop on the premises, as well as a coffee shop, a bar, and two restaurants, one of them extremely fine. At the outset, though, the Count feels the walls closing in on him. The prospect of endless days reading the paper in the lobby, where the revolving door taunts him with the unattainable out-of-doors, looks like soul-crushing ennui.

All the more so since he’s left his long-term lodging, a suite on the third floor. His status as a non-person affords him only an attic room once used by valets who accompanied well-to-do guests. Happily, though, he makes the acquaintance of Nina Kulikova, age nine. He’s not a man with much use for children, as a rule, but the two become fast friends, and she shows him backstage and below-stairs dimensions of the Metropol that it had never occurred to him to be curious about. “In the time that Nina had been in the hotel, the walls had not grown inward, they had grown outward, expanding in scope and intricacy. In her first weeks, the building had grown to encompass half of Moscow.” Under Nina’s tutelage, Count Alexander is capable of the kind of attentiveness that will let him experience the same thing.

His gift for friendship will be an abiding asset over time, as will his acute social sense: he’s just the man you’d want to place the diners at a party for forty, having consulted for his grandmother as a youth. It’s a talent he brings to the Boyarski, the five-star restaurant on the second floor of the hotel, where he joins the staff assisting his friends, Andrey, the maitre d’; and Emile, the redoubtable chef. He’ll have need of all his friends when Nina reappears as a young woman, only to hand off her little girl and disappear again.

As time passes, we see Russia and the Soviet Union mostly at an ironic distance: “Let us concede that the early thirties in Russia were unkind.” Various congresses and committee meetings are held in the hotel, and there’s one terribly dislikeable employee who rises through the ranks by virtue of his utility as a government stooge. But if the hotel is a prison, it’s also a refuge, where good conversation can be had over good food and drink.

I hear that a miniseries of this book is airing on Showtime this spring. I’m leaning toward giving it a miss, though. As with Towles’s other books, which I recently reviewed, the writing itself is a great part of the pleasure. In my mind’s eye, Count Alexander Ilyich should have been a role for Claude Raines, complete with a quiet courtesy, a certain twinkle in the eye, and a great capacity for watchfully awaiting developments. Maybe I’ll just read it again.

 

 

 

published by email, May 2024

Silent Cavalry

Silent Cavalry: How Union Soldiers from Alabama helped Sherman burn Atlanta–and then got written out of history.

Howell Raines (2023, Crown Publishing)

        This one’s for the folks back home in Alabama. Many of my friends there are, like Howell Raines, descended from the settlers of Winston, Walker, and surrounding counties. Birmingham’s industrial base attracted thousands of men whose Scots-Irish ancestors had scratched out a living in the last mountains of the Appalachian chain. The residents of Winston County, in particular, have long enjoyed a reputation as combative and stubbornly independent people. They went so far, during the Civil War, as to secede from Alabama, declaring themselves the Free State of Winston. While this was more a slogan than a reality, the county sent more people than any other, to cross Union lines and form up as the First Alabama Cavalry, USA.

         That so many Alabamians took up arms for the Union is one of those stories that falls between the cracks of the standard histories. Howell Raines went looking for the history, and for the reasons it has tended to be lost. He’s actually been thinking about this for most of his life, in the background of his long career as a journalist. (I’ve been familiar with his name since the late 1960’s, when he worked at the Birmingham News with my father.)

        The First Alabama came into being after General Ormsby M. Mitchel pressed down from Nashville to seize Huntsville and Decatur in the spring of 1862, shortly after the battle of Shiloh. Controlling the Tennessee River was an essential step to splitting the Confederate State into two parts. It also made Northern lines a relatively short walk from all over north Alabama, and an attractive destination compared with conscription into the rebel army at the point of a gun.

       Contemporary reports from Union officers praise the unit’s toughness; it saw valorous action at the battles of Chickamauga, Lookout Mountain, and Missionary Ridge; Sherman used a couple of its companies in the vanguard of his march to Atlanta and beyond. Raines says, “Hill country partisan that I am, I take the First Alabama’s lack of legendary status as proof of the suppressive power of Lost Cause historiography.” The Lost Cause is a manufactured myth, in which “the war was not a heroic crusade to abolish slavery; instead it became a tragic story of undeserved suffering inflicted on a noble, if misguided, class of southern aristocrats….”

       The myth’s manufacture is quite an interesting story in its own right. An editor of the Richmond Examiner brought out a book called The Lost Cause in June 1866, which ascribed ‘aristocracy and chivalry’ to the slave-holding way of life: “The civilization of the North was coarse and materialistic. That of the South was scant of shows, but highly refined and sentimental.” The late-nineteenth-century historian William Archibald Dunning, of Columbia University, sent Lost Cause acolytes into leading universities all across the South, ensuring that the academy would tell a harmonious story for most of the twentieth century.

      In that context, the mystery of the First Alabama’s disappearance from history is not so hard to parse. Neither the University of Alabama nor the Alabama Department of Archives and History had any interest in memorializing Alabama’s poorest and least Confederate county. Lost Cause historians regarded men from the hills with scorn; by definition, they couldn’t have done anything noble or meritorious. In their loyalty to the Union, they were, by definition, traitors. Howell Raines begs to differ.

      This is a dense, chewy book. If you don’t already know a Bankhead from a Debardeleben, it might be a bit rich, but I found it delicious.

Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician: a novel

 

Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician: a novel

Daniel Wallace (Doubleday, 2007)

     “Every night Henry remained open to the possibility that this was the night his powers would return.” It’s hard to imagine a more down-on-his-luck man than Henry Walker, Negro Magician, in 1954. He’s been with Jeremiah Mosgrove’s Chinese Circus for four years, and his magical powers are long in the past. He was hired because, if a crowd comes to see a Negro doing magic, and he can’t do any, they’ll at least get some comedy out of it. 

 

      “How low he had fallen. The memory of all he had once been taunted him.” This is a story about memory and storytelling. We’re going to hear his story as he has told it to his friends from the traveling show: JJ the Barker; Rudy, the Strongest Man in the World; Jenny, the Ossified Girl; and Jeremiah Mosgrove himself. 

 

     From Rudy, we get the story of Henry’s family coming down in the world, when he was ten. His mother died of TB, the house was lost to the bank, and his father took a job as janitor at a resort hotel. Henry and his nine-year-old sister, Hannah, had the somewhat illicit run of the place, and Henry has a fairy-tale encounter with a magician. Mr. Sebastian begins by teaching him tricks, proceeding to invest him, apparently, with magic, so powerful that he makes his sister disappear. It’s the kind of disaster a boy might never recover from. 

 

      Mr. Sebastian disappears too, as you might imagine; a desultory police search finds nothing. Henry and his father get on with their Depression lives, and find a manager for Henry’s career as a magician. Tom Hailey spots the pair as desperate enough to go for his suggestion that Henry pass as a Negro, with the aid of a sunlamp and some pills Hailey can provide. When Henry suggests that this might be telling a lie, Hailey says “Lying? Hardly. Do you think I could be in business for as long as I have if I were a liar? Absolutely not. It’s an illusion, Henry. It’s part of the act.”

 

      It’s an illusion that couldn’t be sustained if the black teenager had a white father, and so Henry faces another loss, another disappearance. “It’s not the number of losses but their size that counts….a boy whose mother dies before his ninth birthday, whose luminous sister is stolen from him before his eleventh, and whose father falls into the hopeless arms of death and lies there dying a little bit every day in plain sight of his son and the world–these are the real losses, the ones that tear into the body and bleed the soul.”

 

      This all sounds pretty bleak, but I found it compelling, too. The Chinese Circus is a perfect distillation of sacrifice and loneliness, but Henry has true friends there. The story of his life and losses gets told enough different ways, from enough different angles, to introduce doubt about which is the true story. The magic, for one thing–do you want to believe that Henry could saw a woman in half, and put her back together? Where did it come from, if it’s real, and where did it go? Was Mr. Sebastian the Devil, or was Henry just dazzled?

 

      And of course, a story can be true even when it isn’t quite factual. A story that’s all loss can still be beautiful. We go through life accepting hearsay evidence as the best we can get; we live first, and understand later, if we ever do.

March 1, 2024 by email.

Tom Lake

Tom Lake: A Novel

Ann Patchett (2023, Harper Collins)

    Sixteen-year-old Laura showed up at auditions for Our Town just to help out at the registration table. But you never know: watching the first people trying out gave her a strong sense that she could do a better job, so she filled out a form (casually dropping the ‘u’ from her name), stood still for a Polaroid headshot, and won the role of Emily for the first time.

    That’s chapter one of the story the now fifty-something Lara is telling her three daughters in the summer of 2020. They have a good deal of time for stories, because they are all home in Michigan, on the family cherry farm, working long days to get the sweet fruit in. There aren’t as many migrant fruit pickers as usual, but the daughters have been in these orchards all their lives. It’s familiar work, in beautiful circumstances.

    The story they want is how their mother knew Peter Duke, before he went on to become a dream-boat movie star. A decade before, when they were emerging teenagers, their father had dropped a bombshell: “You know your mother used to date him.” Since they’re now nearly as old as Lara was then, they want the real story. And she’ll give it to them, though not exactly all of it.

    Peter and Lara were thrown together in a season of summer stock at Tom Lake, a pretty little Michigan town whose theater provides work for up-and-coming actors; it’s also a refuge for third-rate television stars whose names will sell tickets. Lara is tapped to play Emily because she knows the part; she’s actually been to Hollywood and made a movie already, but this role is really her wheelhouse.

     Peter is to play her father, Editor Webb. He’s not yet famous, but he’s easily the most charismatic and athletic man in the company, the sort of fellow who can do a handstand on the back of a chair, in the middle of a conversation. Such casual physicality is part and parcel of the intensity of the compressed summer season. The actors indulge in lunchtime swimming and evening tennis, drinking and late nights, romances and betrayals, as though they’ll be twenty-four forever. It’s in the nature of such bubbles, however, to pop and be gone.

     Though her one movie was an artistic success, Lara is thoroughly content to have wound up as a wife and mother in northern Michigan. The setting is an intentional nod to Chekhov; as in The Cherry Orchard, developers “are the enemies of stone fruit. They would leave just enough trees in the ground to justify calling the place Cherry Hills or Cherry Lane, then pull the rest up and build pretty white summer houses with picture windows and wraparound porches, places we could never afford.”

     At best, growing fruit is a tough business: sometimes the crop fails. Other times, everyone grows so much that the price craters, and nobody makes any money. “The farm is either the very paradise of Eden or a crushing burden of disappointment and despair manifested in fruit, depending on the day. I would love to leave my child Eden. The other stuff, less so.” 

    As surely as anything, though, you can’t leave your child only one side of the coin. For every first-act Emily, the smartest girl in school, there’s a third-act Emily, dying in childbirth, leaving a young husband who doesn’t know what hit him. Like Our Town, this book is about growth, change, and memory. It’s about how lovely the ordinary is, and how fleeting; and also how mothers and daughters can never fully know each other’s stories.

Feb 1, 2024

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: a Memoir

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: a Memoir

Elizabeth McCracken (Little Brown, 2008)

I’m a long-time fan of Elizabeth McCracken’s writing, and I’ve had this on the to-read shelf for a while; now I see what may have held me back. The subject is perhaps the saddest subject possible, a pregnancy that goes to full term and ends without a live baby; on that ground alone, I can’t universally recommend it. On the other hand, perhaps there are people who should be required to read it, including anyone who wants to treat pregnant people, or make laws about them.

You can tell early on, however, that McCracken is going to present to us all kinds of emotions. “As for me, I believe that if there’s a God–and I am as neutral on the subject as is possible–then the most basic proof of His existence is black humor. What else explains it, that odd, reliable comfort that billows up at the worst moments, like a beautiful sunset woven out of the smoke over a bombed city.”

McCracken and her husband, Edward, are both writers. In their early marriage, which is to say, their mid-thirties, they lived between Europe and the US, as teaching jobs or whim might dictate. For economy’s sake, during her pregnancy, they moved to the countryside in Bordeaux. It was a preposterous house, enormous and cold, which had once housed unwed mothers and their offspring. “The house was surrounded by farmland and vineyards, cows out some windows and horses out others, and a vast patio off the summer kitchen…” But all that is lost now, put away with the grief. It’s as if, she says, time forked as in science fiction; on one track, she and Edward can remember this as a happy time, and share its memories with their little boy; “on the other track, the one I accidentally took, he died, and we left France.”

Edward and Elizabeth moved to England for the summer of 2006, then back to the US, and had a second child just fifty-three weeks after the first, complicating the bifurcated track all over again. He’s an eldest child, who had an elder brother once. She wrote this book while he was still a baby, while her memory was fresh, but after it had begun to gel into a comprehensible shape. It’s a writerly response to the nine months that are now missing from her life, because they were so happy when they happened, and then their meaning flipped. McCracken doesn’t want to turn the first child into an angel, nor to erase him completely, so we have this book.

“Perhaps it goes without saying that I believe in the geographic cure. Of course you can’t out-travel sadness. You will find it has smuggled itself along in your suitcase. It coats the camera lens, it flavors the local cuisine….I travel not to get away from my troubles but to see how they look in front of famous buildings or on deserted beaches. I take them for walks. Sometimes I get them drunk. Back at home we generally understand each other better.” That makes sense to me, though I tend to do my traveling in books.

She went to New Orleans eighteen months after Hurricane Katrina, when she was seven months into the new pregnancy, where her sorrow had a sort of family reunion. Not just the orange tattoos on the buildings, but a woman who says to her, “My first child was stillborn, too.” There’s a sort of kinship, mostly invisible, like a very large club you never asked to join.

Obviously, I’m sorry about the death of little Pudding, who acquired this rather Dickensian moniker in his first days as an embryo. I’m happy for the birth of his brother, who must be about to graduate from high school. I’m happy that all that is so far in the past, though, of course, we’ve all had new sorrows to be going on with, and new joys. 

 

Jan 1 2024