Vintage Contemporaries: a novel

Vintage Contemporaries: a novel

Dan Kois (Harper, 2023)

        Dan Kois’s lovely novel starts in 1991, with young Emily Thiel, newly in New York, getting her first job as assistant to a literary agent. Her first new friend is called Emily; in today’s terms, we might call them Lawful Emily and Chaotic Emily. Emily T. keeps jobs, even if they are terrible, and Other Emily is the employee of your nightmares, until she quits on a whim. “She was Beth and Emily was Jo; she was Melanie and Emily was Scarlett O’Hara; she was what’s-her-name, the wallflower, and Emily was Emma. She knew that she was the boring one. But she also knew that Emily depended on her, and that Emily was extraordinary.” (Kois throws us a bone by letting Genius Emily rename Emily Thiel ‘Em’, for the two sections of the book set in the Nineties. In the sections set after the turn of the millennium, Emily takes her name back. To which Emily says, “That’ll confuse the readers, but sure.”)

        Em also gets to know her mother’s friend Lucy, a divorced mom with a novel to sell. It’s less ‘literary’, that is, gloomy, than most of the well-received novels of the time, but Em warms to it. It’s about two young women in New York, friends with opposite temperaments… wait a minute, are we swallowing our own tail? Well, waving at it, certainly. Kois is not shy of the theme with variations: he will give us two pairs of sisters, two pairs of friends crying together after pregnancy scares, and plenty of subtle-but-not-secret foreshadowing.

      Kois has said in interviews that this book is, in part, an homage to Laurie Colwin, a novelist and food writer of the later twentieth century, who died too young. I’m taking that to mean that Lucy has some of her attributes, especially the ability to write well and seriously, without dwelling in realms of despair and gloom. Lucy’s philosophy is optimism: “I love writing about characters who are living the best they can, who are in love, whose circumstances may be complicated but whose days are full of joy. I love writing about the food they cook, the wine they drink, and the hangovers they don’t regret.” Unfortunately, the occasion for the essay in which she says this is an announcement that she has ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease – and her a Mets fan, with a Yankee disease! Colwin left us a couple of great memoirs with recipes, and Emily helps Lucy write one, as well.

       We leap ahead to 2005, and find Emily with a husband and a baby, and a much better job at a small publisher, though the babysitter costs nearly as much as she makes. They live in Manhattan, but just barely–they’re in Inwood, up at 207^th Street. She encounters Emily again, and they have lunch, but there’s a real question about on what terms they could become friends again. The next chapter, set in 1993, unpacks some of the difficulties that led their friendship to unravel.

        That chapter is also a deep dive into New York’s housing situation. Em lives in a dark, damp apartment on the Lower East Side, whose kitchen is “the site of a thriving mouse community, a civilization so advanced they had probably figured out the wheel by now.” Chaotic Emily lives a few blocks away in an actual squat: an illegally occupied building that is as squalid as it sounds, but is also communal and political in some ways we have forgotten about.

        We also get a day-to-day view of the publishing industry, and the terrible entry-level jobs it offers bright young English majors. We see Emily progressing through its ranks, beginning with the tedium of slush piles, the casual ogling and sexist comments, the lousy pay, the general sense that this hazing has been going on forever. Later in her career, when she has an assistant instead of being one, she is proud to have survived tough, demanding bosses; she also sees that some of the demanding conditions were genuinely out of line. The general lack of respect for assistants lies too deep in the culture to fix, but she can steer a few people away from outright sexual harassment, before leaving for another job, herself.

        Being a mother is a delight for Emily, as little Jane progresses from being a squashable baby to being a three-year-old who believes she can do cartwheels. She also makes time to work with Other Emily’s site-specific theatrical productions, which have somehow progressed from the pipe dreams of their youth to actual shows, with actors and sets and audiences. Emily’s editorial eye is actually just what is needed; her questions and suggestions make the work better, and it’s enough.

 

 

 

Any Good Books, March 1 2023

 

Lost and Found

Lost and Found: Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and Happiness

Kathryn Schulz (2022, Random House)

 

In the fall of 2016, Kathryn Schulz lost her father. He was seventy-four, so one of the things she lost was what might have been another couple of decades of delight in his company. The first section of Lost and Found is an extended consideration of what it means to lose things, from the smallest shirt button, through keys, and jobs, and friends, and so on up to glaciers and species. It’s a wonderfully personal look at a perennial and universal problem: “Like being mortal, being slightly scatterbrained is part of the human condition: we have been losing stuff so routinely for so long that the laws laid down in Leviticus include a stipulation against lying about finding someone else’s lost property.”

 

Her atheism, and her Jewish heritage, dispose Schulz against a belief in life after death. Her father is entirely gone, not sitting around in heaven. It pleases her, on the other hand, to imagine a place where all the lost things are collected. L. Frank Baum called it the Valley of Lost Things. “In my mind,” Schulz says, “it is a dark, pen-and-ink place, comic and mournful as an Edward Gorey drawing: empty clothing drifting dolefully about, umbrellas piled in heaps like dormant bats, a Tasmanian tiger slinking off with Hemingway’s lost novel in its mouth, glaciers shrinking glumly down into their puddles, Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra atilt upon the ground, the air around it filled with the ghosts of nighttime ideas not written down and gone by morning.”

 

The period after her father’s death felt to Schulz like a visit to that random, melancholy world. She lost her balance, she lost her way. It was hard to know what to do, because she’d never imagined what would happen after the worst happened. Not only could she not write, she could scarcely read. “I did not exactly feel lost, as my father was to me. I felt at a loss–a strange turn of phrase, as if loss were a place in the physical world, a kind of reverse oasis or Bermuda Triangle where the spirit fails and the compass needle spins.” Exhaustion, irritability, boredom, occasionally sadness itself–all these had their way with Schulz, unpredictably and uncontrollably. 

 

The second section of the book, about falling in love, largely overlaps the first section in time, beginning a year and a half before her bereavement. I think Schulz is wise to treat them separately, but the connections between losing and finding keep making themselves felt. How much of either, for example, is due to our own efforts, and how much to the larger forces of the way the world is? How much is simply the luck of timing? For a long time, she was a single woman in her thirties, with a quiet home north of New York City and an established writing career. One fine spring day, a friend of a friend stopped in her town to break up a long drive, and they had lunch together. A few more emails, another meal a week later, and C. became the woman Schulz was going to marry. 

 

As with loss, Schulz gives us love on all possible scales, from the smear of jam on early-morning pancakes to the outer reaches of the Solar System. There’s the feeling of deep, homely comfort, and a profound astonishment, as of a new planet discovered. They agree on the weighty matter of baby corn (they disapprove); they have vastly different views on religion. Schulz leaves it alone, while C. is an Episcopalian with a serious church habit, yet the matter rests easily between them. 

 

Their origins seemed worlds apart, too: Schulz came from a wealthy Midwestern suburb, C. from Maryland’s rural Eastern shore. Schulz started to worry about that gap on their first trip to see her parents, but, really, she says, “Most of us fit only partially into our past selves, and most of us are only somewhat at home in our former homes. Even if we love them, even if we sometimes long for them, even if we know them down to the last ancient orange spatula in the kitchen utensil drawer, we inevitably outgrow them; the world is so big that anywhere you’re from eventually becomes parochial by comparison.” 

 

I love the writing in this book, and the thinking. I love its specificity, and its sense of spaciousness. It ends with a wedding, which abides in a haunting photo of Schulz and her mother, and the broad expanse of Chesapeake Bay where her father would have stood: “In a single image, it honors my joy together with my grief. That seems right to me. Life, too, goes by contraries: it is by turns crushing and restorative, busy and boring, awful and absurd and comic and uplifting.”

 

Let the people say, Amen.

 

 

Any Good Books, February 2023

 

The Hero of this Book: a novel

 

The Hero of this Book: a novel

Elizabeth McCracken (2022, Harper Collins)

“If you want to write a memoir without writing a memoir, go ahead and call it something else.” Well, all right, this book is a novel, shaped very much like a memoir, in the same way that an epistolary novel resembles a collection of letters. The plot, such as it is, is a simple solitary perambulation around London, on a warm August day in 2019. Our narrator, who declines to name or describe herself, is accompanied by her memories of her mother, dead since November, and several London trips they had taken together.

They liked London for museums and theater, but particularly for ease of access. The mother had difficulty walking all her life. She used two canes to get around, most of her life, graduating in later years to a motorized scooter; but in London, all of the black cabs have ramps, so she could go anywhere without a lot of planning and difficulty. In a sense, it’s a book about the mother’s particular body, small and fragile, and subject to falling; but since she’s never let it stop her, it seems to affect other people more.

Of course, there’s so much more to her life. There’s her marriage to the narrator’s father, who is tall and heavy in a way that makes them quite an odd couple. (“My parents were a sight gag.”) There’s her interest in theater, and her professional life doing editorial work for Boston University. And there’s her approach to motherhood: “...on some fundamental level I’m not sure my mother, anyhow, cared about my inner life. This was a parenting gambit: Therefore I was allowed to do, think, whatever I wanted.” Perhaps that’s how writers are made.

Our narrator is a writer, a published novelist and sometime teacher of writing, which makes the veil between author and narrator very thin indeed. She’s wonderfully wry about it, though. Of her time at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, she says, “Authorial intrusion was seen as a great aesthetic crime in the 1980s. We accused one another of it all the time, those moments our shadows fell across our fiction. I can’t remember why we thought it was so awful. Maybe it was supposed to be a sign of ego.”

That makes sense, as one of the tensions McCracken is exploring. How do you celebrate your parents while preserving their privacy? You make them characters. It’s none of our business as readers whether the events of the story are eighty per cent factual, or twenty per cent. As we say of the Gospel where I go to church, “Just because it didn’t happen doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

She’s just one person, but having aging parents (with their health problems and their overstuffed, deteriorating house) is a widely recognizeable story, verging on universal.

As for ego, I leave you with this gem: “As a writer, I claim to be modest, but I have delusions of grandeur. I call them delusions in order to sound modest.” Again, I can’t really tell, and don’t really care, if that’s the author or just her persona. It’s as good an explanation of the authorial impulse as I’ve ever heard.

Any Good Books, January 1 2023

An Odyssey

An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

Daniel Mendelsohn (2018, Vintage)

Daniel Mendelsohn is a critic and classics scholar. You can't be surprised that he begins this book with a proem, an explanation of what the book is about; he has to cite the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid to explain what a proem is, and why he needs one. We learn that when he was teaching at Bard College one spring term, he offered a freshman seminar on the Odyssey, and his father asked to audit it. "At ten past ten each Friday morning, he would take a seat among the freshmen who were enrolled in the course, seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds not even a quarter his age, and join in the discussion of this old poem, an epic about long journeys and long marriages and what it means to yearn for home."

The Odyssey is the ideal vessel for this journey they make together; the father is a retired scientist, teacher, and autodidact who, it turns out, had studied Latin in his schooldays; but only through Ovid, not scaling the heights of Virgil. But he will trek in from Long Island and up the Hudson, spending the night with his son to make the trip a little less arduous. The two of them will even spend ten days of the next summer on a Mediterranean cruise retracing Odysseus's voyage from Troy to Ithaca. "'Retracing the Odyssey' was an 'educational' cruise, and although he was contemptuous of anything that struck him as a needless luxury–cruises and sightseeing and vacations–my father was a great believer in education."

So this will be the story of a literary journey, and a physical journey, and a journey of understanding between the two men. Mendelsohn is at pains to explain that Homer's storytelling is as full of twists and turns as the journey itself. The technical term is 'ring composition', and it refers to the practice of putting digressions about the past or the future in places where they explain the current action, sometimes at great length. "As complex as it is to describe this technique, the associative spirals that are its hallmark in fact re-create the way we tell stories in everyday life, looping from one tale to another as we seek to clarify and explain the story with which we started, which is the story to which, eventually, we will return–even if it is sometimes the case that we need to be nudged, to be reminded to get back to our starting point." You have to trust that the narrator has control of the direction of the story, the way a captain knows where his ship is, even when the passengers don't.

In a very satisfying way, Mendelsohn is exemplifying everything he's telling us about. He states his major themes and names his characters in his proem, as Homer and Virgil did in theirs. As the class proceeds, week by week, through the Odyssey, he describes the action of the story, and how the class responds to it. His father, who had thought he'd sit quietly, turns out to have definite opinions. Why, he wonders, is Odysseus considered such a hero, when he lost the entire contingent of twelve ships and their men, and staggered home alone after twenty years? As it happens, the first four books of the epic are not about Odysseus at all; he's still imprisoned by Calypso. They're about his son, Telemachus, who was a small child when the Greeks forces were assembled to besiege Troy.

Telemachus has his own voyages to make, and much to learn. Mendelsohn says, "With his unpredictable swings between endearing swagger and utter cluelessness, the Telemachus of the first few books of the Odyssey can remind you of a college freshman." At the same time that we're meeting the (suitably anonymized) freshmen in the seminar, we're getting more of a look at Mendelsohn and his father. The relationship between them is unfolding, and is being set in context of the rest of the family. Mendelsohn, a gay man, has two sons with a friend, and spends most weekends with them in New Jersey. His father grew up in the Bronx, during the Great Depression, which gave him a certain pugnacious prejudice in favor of the little guy. He grew up to be a New York Mets fan, scorning the Yankees for 'buying their success.' And perhaps Telemachus, with the goddess Athena's consistent support, has it too easy...

I'd certainly recommend this book as a companion to a rereading of the Odyssey, but I enjoyed some of its other dimensions even more. We get a glimpse of philology, the 'science' of word origins, and we see a classroom from a skilled teacher's point of view. I especially enjoyed the way Mendelsohn circles around his story like a skilled artist working a sketch up to a finished painting. Done ineptly, ring composition is kind of maddening, but in this case, it's delightful. The proem can tell you what's going to happen, but you still have to read through to find out why it happens, and what it all means. 

 

 

Any Good Books, November 2022

 

You Never Forget Your First

 You Never Forget Your First: a Biography of George Washington

Alexis Coe (2020, Viking)

People have been writing admiringly about George Washington since before he died; it's reasonable to wonder what can usefully be added to the shelf. You Never Forget Your First stands out for several reasons.

First, it's concise. The text is just a little over two hundred pages; the notes and index add only another fifty-five. Alexis Coe read Joseph Ellis, Richard Brookhiser, Ron Chernow, and all the rest of the doorstops with studiously dull titles: "George Washington: A Biography. George Washington: A Life. George Washington: a President....With titles this stodgy, presidential biographies will always appear as if they are for men of a certain age, intended to be purchased on Presidents' or Father's Day."`

Second, as the title suggests, it's refreshingly cheeky. For instance, Coe dubs the (invariably male) authors of the standard biographies 'the Thigh Men', because they seem so attached to Washington's physical stature and prowess. Their books frequently feature covers with a head-to-toe portrait of Washington, showing his manly thighs.

By no coincidence, perhaps, they are at pains to make some explanation of the fact that Washington had no children of his own. In all likelihood, if he was sterile, it followed from some illness in his early life. In fact, Coe says, "Washington's lack of heirs gave him a distinct political advantage; it comforted people to know that he had no bloodline to preserve, no power-hungry scion to worry about." He clearly had a paternal relationship to his wife Martha's two young children. Martha's son Jacky left four children, two of whom George and Martha took in, in turn. And, after all, he is reputed to have fathered a whole country; what more do you want?

As Washington's first significant female biographer in many decades, Coe makes some corrections to the character of his mother, Mary. Coe cites –in a handy chart!–Chernow's many descriptions of her as shrewish, anxious, and demanding. "For the Thigh Men, Mary's histrionics begin when she declines to enlist her fourteen-year-old son in the navy and continue to the very ends with her griping about elder care."

Considering both the actual epistolary evidence at hand, and Mary's economic and social circumstances, Coe gives us a much fuller view. Her husband died when George, her eldest, was only eleven, so a certain anxiety might be justified; to keep and raise small children, and see her daughter married well, was not an easy job. It was also one she'd have precious little help with, unless she chose to marry again. Her objection to making George a midshipman was that it was more likely to thwart his career than to advance it, and in that she was quite right.

Instead, he learned surveying, in which his horsemanship and his head for math were great advantages. It gave him a chance to see new land first and bid on it early. He sought a position in the Virginia militia. "Despite having no military experience, he worked his connections and ultimately got the job–along with its annual salary of one hundred pounds." He made a name for himself in the French and Indian War of the 1750's - indeed, he partly precipitated it, by killing a French diplomat with whom he was meant to be negotiating.

He moved from the Virginia militia to the British army, serving with Brigadier General Edward Braddock in the Ohio territories, and becoming a hero in the battle of Fort Duquesne–which the French actually won. Still, there were clearly limits to how far a colonial subject could advance in the British forces; he resigned his commission and went back to his land. He married Martha (and her fortune) in 1759, and enjoyed a good decade as a gentleman farmer at Mount Vernon, keeping horses and dogs, and raising cattle, fowl, and bees. (He liked butter and honey with his breakfast hoecakes.)

Coe does not let us forget that Washington's wealth depended on enslaved people. Coe describes their miserable housing, their poor diet, and their general mistreatment, often by way of ironic contrast with Washington's revolutionary zeal for liberty. In his will, Washington directed Martha to free his slave, which she duly did in 1801, shortly before she died. Her own slaves, however, she willed back to her grandchildren. Coe has a heart-breaking breakdown, again in chart form, of the known families who were broken up by this development.

You could certainly give this book to a Dad; you could also give it to a feisty or bookish teenager. (If it's banned from school libraries, it will be for all the best reasons.) But we can all stand a fresh look at Washington's special skills, in diplomacy and espionage even more than in battle. We owe him a lot, all in all. 

 

Any Good Books, December 2022