I Thought You Were Dead

I Thought You Were Dead: A Love Story
Pete Nelson (2010, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)

    It’s 1998. Paul Gustavson is a divorced writer living in Northampton, Massachusetts, quietly drinking his life away. His girlfriend, who lives a couple of hours away in Rhode Island, is deciding between him and another man; his devoted dog, Stella, is fifteen years old and failing; and his father, back in Minnesota, has just had a major stroke.

    Pete Nelson’s I Thought You Were Dead is about what all this pushes Paul to do. Spurred to thoughts of mortality, he cuts back on doughnuts and takes up jogging. He tries yoga: “He liked the mindful breathing part. The poses hurt like hell, but that seemed to be the idea, learning how to get bent out of shape without getting bent out of shape.”

    Because he can’t visit the way his brother and sister can, he takes long-distance care of his father by chatting over the computer; this dates the story, in an agreeable way, because people are still figuring out how to do it. It’s also an effective way of making Paul talk about himself, because his father is not up to much in the way of responses beyond YES and NO.

    He takes care of Stella when it thunders, and carries her into the house when her back legs start failing. Stella has, as it happens a gift for conversation and a fundamentally sweet soul. She’s a little dumb about some things, hence the novel’s title–she lives in the moment. But she observes Paul acutely; she tells him the truth; and she makes the call about when it’s time for him to end her suffering.   

    She’s stoic about it, but Paul’s a mess. “He withdrew, holed up with a bottle of vodka to slow his thoughts. He wasn’t sure when he would be ready to resume his responsibilities in the universe.” He still loves Tamsen, his girlfriend, but he breaks up with her out of depressive inertia.

    At last, he puts down the bottle. “He’d expected to have some sort of unbearable craving for a drink, but he didn’t feel any thirstier than usual, and indeed he felt measurably better, more clearheaded. He slept better, and his skull didn’t hurt when he woke up in the morning.” Another visit to Minnesota rearranges his family constellation for Paul, opening lines of communication that had long atrophied.

    I Thought You Were Dead is a very fine book about people being able to hear each other. I appreciated the way it maintained a comic view of some complicated lives. The electronic chatting is an interesting touch; I think Nelson gets its strengths and drawbacks right. I also enjoyed the epigraphs, excerpts from the book Paul is working on, Nature for Morons. I’m always up for tidbits about evolution and psychology, anyhow, but of course, these are meant as commentary on Paul’s discoveries, things he learns as research before he knows them as life.

    It’s a long time till Spring--treat yourself to a novel.








Any Good Books,  March 2013

Left Neglected

Left Neglected: a novel
Lisa Genova (Gallery Books, 2011)

    How does Sarah Nickerson do it? The heroine and narrator of Lisa Genova’s Left Neglected is a modern-day Superwoman. She combines a home in a nice Boston West suburb, a husband, and three small children, with an overwhelmingly demanding job in human resource management at a global consulting company. Her cell phone, her laptop, a nanny (who worked 55-hour weeks till the older children started school) and a giant mountain of debt are all necessary parts of the answer.

    It’s a normal life for an ambitious Harvard Business School graduate, and it’s more than a little insane. “I go to Europe once every eight weeks, China once a quarter, and New York for one or two overnights a month, but this kind of travel is all predictable, finite, and manageable.” Manageable. Right. But add to that a broken garage door opener, and a meeting with seven-year-old Charlie’s teacher, strongly hinting that he be tested for an attention deficit problem, and it’s All a Bit Much.
   
    Then Sarah makes the way her life is spinning out of control unexpectedly concrete, by flipping her car in the median of the Mass Pike, and sustaining a traumatic injury to the right side of her brain. She can still talk, because that’s a left-brain function, but she loses all awareness of the left side of anything, including herself. The way the book handles her discovery of this strangeness is marvelously subtle, as is the way that she comes to terms with the fact that her life as an HR VP is not going to be recoverable.

    The lightly fictionalized Baldwin Rehabilitation Hospital captivated me in particular, as I’ve done visitor time there--not just the jail on one side, and the beautiful bridge on the other, but the nightly sounds of confusion and suffering; and what the nurses say when you get out of bed and fall down because you don’t really understand that you can’t walk; and how rehab lasts only as long as insurance will pay for it, under criteria established by the kind of person Sarah used to be.
   
    Sarah gathers some of what she knows about her situation from the faces of those who come to see her. Her boss and her assistant come over to the hospital: “The incision scars, the bruising, the overall baldness. I’m a horror movie, and she desperately wants to bury her face in someone’s shoulder.” Why is this woman who looks like a train wreck claiming she could work from her hospital bed? Inevitably, mercifully, her boss’s phone rings, and the visit is cut short.

    Having her mother turn up to help is a bit of a shock for Sarah. How can someone who hasn’t driven off of Cape Cod in decades navigate into the darkest heart of Boston traffic, in her son-in-law’s car, after taking the kids to school? “I feel like I missed a meeting,” says Sarah, because she’s had no significant relationship with her mother, Helen, in thirty years. She needs one now, though, and one of Left Neglected’s sweet pleasures is seeing Sarah as both mother and daughter, especially as she has to negotiate both a new connection with her mother, and an new separation. Can Sarah stand her mother’s taste in clothers? Is it cheating if Helen pushes Sarah’s wheelchair down to the gym for therapy? Part of the work is figuring out when to accept help, and when to fight through without it.
   
    Where is fighting going to get her, anyway? The old, competitive straight-A Sarah can’t control how fast her recovery happens, if it happens at all. Her old wardrobe of professional clothing (“Armani, Donna Karan, Grettacole, Ann Taylor”) has buttons on all the blouses, which makes them highly impractical for someone with only one useable hand. “Accept. Adjust. Those words don’t sing to me at all. In fact, I have a hard time even considering those words without hearing Give up. Lose. Fail.”
   
    Well, by this point we know that Sarah is not going to give up, or fail, but her life and her family’s are irrevocably changed. In addition to a handful of very interesting neurological conundrums, Left Neglected brings us the kind of Easter story novels can be very good at. We all need to know what Sarah learns: “Maybe success can be something else, and maybe there’s another way to get there. Maybe there’s a different road for me with a more reasonable speed limit.”





Email edition, February 1 2013

Behind the Scenes at the Museum: A Novel

Behind the Scenes at the Museum: A Novel
Kate Atkinson (1995, Picador)

    To start at the very beginning: Ruby Lennox is conceived, she informs us in the first paragraph, by a drunken father, George, and his wife, Bunty, who is pretending to be asleep. She uses her time in utero to examine the nooks and crannies of Bunty’s unhappiness, which we’ll hear more about throughout the novel, and to establish her cheeky, knowledgeable voice.

    Ruby’s life story makes up the main narrative of Behind the Scenes at the Museum, but between those chapters, we get extensive historical footnotes: capsule histories of Bunty; her mother, Nell; and Nell’s mother and step-mother, Alice and Rachel, none of whom is particularly blessed with good cheer or good fortune. Generation after generation, these women find their children intolerably burdensome. The husbands in the picture are no prizes either: when they’re not swilling down beer with their mates, they’re having a go at some willing floozy, or gambling away the family estate.

    Besides their miserable childhoods, and their own terrible choices, these people are at the mercy of the Twentieth Century. Nell’s marital fortunes are upset by World War I, as Bunty’s are by the second great war. There’s also plenty of poverty and neglect to go around, to say nothing of abuse--people fling things at other people’s heads every fifty pages or so--and all kinds of death.

    Yet somehow it’s all very entertaining. Partly it’s the writing, of which I can’t give you a sample because the meaning of each sentence depends so much on its context. It’s fun to follow various motifs as they loop through the family’s tangled history. Old photographs, a locket, a head of blond curls, a gesture, all turning up in new places, with new meanings that don’t erase the old ones: the china Nell’s suitors drink from turns up, two generations later, as a saucer to feed the dog from.

    Kate Atkinson’s authorial finesse, and courtesy, permits her to embed these things without drawing too much attention to them. She leaves us a few riddles, too; none of the characters, not even our Ruby, knows all that’s going on. (One of these riddles is what, precisely, the title alludes to, but maybe I’m overthinking it.)

    I enjoyed the ground-level tour of York, and the countryside of northern England, and the trenches at Ypres, rats and all. One of the reasons I prefer non-fiction to fiction is that the world it describes continues after I put the book down, and this book contrives to feel like history in that sense. It also feels like capital-L Literature, yet without being precious, or trying too hard to dazzle. Perhaps I just mean to say that you could read it again, the next day or a decade later, and get something rich out of it.

Any Good Books, email edition, January 2013

Drop Dead Healthy

Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection
A. J. Jacobs (2012, Simon & Schuster)
   
     A. J. Jacobs’s specialty is finding things that most people do a little of, and doing them to wild, mad excess. In The Know-It-All, he read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica; in The Year of  Living Biblically, he grew a beard, kept a slave (well, an intern) and shunned poly-cotton blends. In Drop Dead Healthy, he does both journalistic and experiential research on the range of nostrums and practices modern Americans employ to stay healthy.

    Jacobs dives in, as always, head first. When he sketches out the things he needs to try, “[i]t’s an intimidatingly long list. Fifty-three pages.” For all his single-minded elan, he presents the information with a healthy dose of respect for the complexity involved. One study seems to disprove another every day, partly because there are so many of them, and partly because it’s categorically impossible to control for all the factors that may be in play, when it comes to matters like nutrition and exercise.

   But as a one-man experiment, Jacobs doesn’t necessarily have to control for anything but his experience. He buys a treadmill, finds out that he is annoying everybody who lives on the floor below, and parks it. He reads that sitting too much is bad for you, and he converts the treadmill into a desk “...after about a half-dozen collapsed versions involving dictionaries, filing cabinets, and masking tape. But it works.”

    And so on through acupuncture and yoga, meditation and triathlons, raw foods and low-carb diets. When Jacobs tells us what something is like, he includes how foolish he feels doing it, and how hard it is for his wife, Julie, to live with. (Julie remains the voice of reason; heaven knows where he’d be without her.) This improves his credibility, as does his admission that he is in danger of becoming overly focused on the health effects of everything. You could drive yourself to an early grave, or a padded room, worrying about all the potential toxins and hazards you meet every day; the current state of medical science is not as much help as you’d hope.

    At any rate, of course, Drop Dead Healthy is not intended as medical advice. Some of what Jacobs has tried would work for anybody; as for the rest, it’s just as well that he can tell us what it was like. He’s charming company, his characters are interesting, and he tells a good story--that’s really all I ask.   

Be well!

Email, December 2012

Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America
Tanner Colby (2012, Viking)

    At the time of Barack Obama’s 2008 election, Tanner Colby was as excited as anybody, but he was also prompted to notice something: that his excitement was happening in a totally white social milieu. Among his progressive, left-leaning friends, he couldn’t find anybody who had more than one or two black friends. If, as he suspected, this was the default state for white Americans, why was this the case, and what did it say about the past fifty years of social, economic, and cultural life in this country?

    Some of My Best Friends Are Black is a personal book, though it's not a memoir. Colby touches on political and legal history where he needs to, but anecdotes are really the right way to tell this story. He visits places, mostly from his own past, where significant parts of America’s racial history have played out. He introduces us to people who have lived this history in all its perverse complexity: racist aggression plays its part, to be sure, but so do inertia dressed up as custom; the sometimes freakish consequences of good intentions; and the rational calculation of some black people that integration, for them, may not be all it’s cracked up to be.

    The book begins in Vestavia Hills, Alabama, where Colby went to high school in the early 1990s. The Vestavia schools had been under a court-ordered integration order since they broke off from the county school system in 1970. What was it like to ride the bus from Oxmoor, a poor black community on the outskirts of Birmingham, to Vestavia Hills, home of the Rebels, whose emblem was the Confederate Stars and Bars? It wasn’t a bad thing for the kids from middle class homes--one of Vestavia’s black teachers sent four very successful kids through the system--but the Oxmoor imports were largely an educational afterthought. Going back into the sixties, and up to the present, Colby tells an interesting story, full of promise for Vestavia, whose schools are now significantly diverse, but far less hopeful for Birmingham, whose schools are still in dire shape.

    His reporting from Kansas City, Missouri, focuses on housing: redlining, blockbusting, and predatory mortgage lending on one side of the city; on the other, suburban developments like the Country Club District, where sale covenants forbade houses from being sold to or occupied by black people. In 1911, the developer J. C. Nichols began making such covenants self-renewing, and effectively perpetual, a model that was to be the norm for suburban developments across the nation for the next fifty years, whether or not Jim Crow held sway legally. The FHA, in its turn, gave the vast majority of its loans to white buyers in white suburbs, having written into its rules that black neighborhoods were undesirable.

    It’s a largely untold story, as Colby notes: “Slavery and segregation can’t be kept out of the history books; they’re too big. But the story of real estate is buried in the ground, so it’s easier to pretend it never happened. We get to act like all that money out in the suburbs came from nothing but honest, American hard work, and not a big, fat, racist handout from Uncle Sam.” And of course, where there are ‘desirable’, ‘exclusive’ neighborhoods, there are other areas, where the composition of schools goes from 80% white to 99% black in a single year.

    Colby found a neighborhood association that pushed back against the slumlords and blockbusters, maintaining a mix of races and incomes; they have upgraded housing, addressed crime, and kept their pleasant urban neighborhood open to all comers. “Within that,” Colby says, “it’s up to the people who live there. They can either form a community or not form a community.” But if they do, it will be the real thing, not something a realtor invented and sold them.

    I’ve read other books about racial issues in education and housing, but I haven’t come across one about the advertising industry. As the FHA flooded the suburbs with baby boom families, advertising experienced a boom, teaching the new homeowners what to want. “And therein lay the root of the industry’s problem with race, both in the office and on the airwaves. If advertising is aspirational, who in the 1950s aspired to be black? No one, as far as major corporations were concerned.”

    In the 1960s, Madison Avenue faced some pressure to open its doors to black talent, only to find that the college educated candidates had gone into other fields. There was a brief surge of minority recruitment and internships, but the 1973 recession lopped off most of the people who’d been added under those programs. The black ad men Colby talks to have had a variety of careers, both in the 1960s and more recently, and in both mainstream and black agencies. The black agencies, it turns out, operate in a wholly different sphere, a sort of Negro League for the business; they provide work within the alumni networks of historically black colleges and universities, but they control a tiny proportion of the overall advertising business, and working there is almost never a stepping stone to Madison Avenue proper. Which brings up the question, is there one American audience, or are there two?

    Colby’s final question is related: is there one Catholic church, or are there two? In Lafayette, Louisiana, the labor of making the black church and the white church one parish extended from 1963 to beyond the turn of this century. The process began in violence and continued in contention, misunderstanding, and the defense of turf on both sides, through a dozen or so priestly tenures, until at last, the reasons not to worship together wore themselves out.

    Some of My Best Friends Are Black is rich in nuance and detail, but Colby’s ultimate point is this: economically and socially, people are tribal. It seems particularly hard for white people to admit black people to their tribe, and consider them worthy of the hand up we are naturally inclined to give Our Own. So few of us have lived in comfortably integrated circumstances, we don’t even really know what a good outcome looks like. Certainly, the struggle to dismantle legal barriers is important, but there’s a place for this book, too: as Colby says, “...if we’re not talking about why black people and white people don’t hang out and play Scrabble together, we’re not talking about the problem.”



Email edition, November 1, 2012