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