Mexican Gothic – A Horrific Treat

Traditional gothic novels have never been my cup of tea. Sure, it’s interesting when the screw is turned or there’s a flash of a caped figure on the moor. More often than not, though, I find the structure and the doomed romance to be predictable and less than thrilling. In contrast, a good horror story – preferably something with a twist – that is writing that will stick with me. My preference, too, is that the horror is in the story for a reason and is not the reason itself.

When an author is able to mix genres, play with our expectations, and craft a melange of horror, romance and gothic, I start to smile. Sylvia Moreno-Garcia does this exquisitely in Mexican Gothic, a thoughtfully crafted and thoroughly enjoyable novel. It’s a best-seller for a very good reason: it’s a frightfully good read.

The story takes place in 1950s Mexico. A privileged young socialite is called to the country to assist her cousin, a woman whose recent marriage was accompanied by a turn of health for the worst. A mysterious letter starts the chain of action. Our heroine, Noemi Taboada, is smart with just the right attitude to unravel a mystery. She travels to the country and stays with her cousin and in-laws at a dark and creepy house. There’s a racist and disgusting patriarch, two brothers – one dark, handsome and dangerous, the other weaker and nicer – an angry controlling older sister as matriarch, and a silent, almost zombie-like staff. It may sound contrived, almost cheesy, but Moreno-Garcia’s prose and tone are spot on. She’s cheerfully guiding us into the gloom of the crypt, the chill of the fog, and the confusion of the nightmare.

What’s real? What’s imagined or hallucinated? And does it matter? As the story unfolds the action is both familiar, in terms of structure and tropes, and different – for Moreno-Garcia keeps giving us clues and twists. While some may think of classic gothic or even H.P. Lovecraft (the subject of Moreno-Garcia’s graduate scholarship), I thought of Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Both mix horror with just the right amount of science and the main characters, like us readers, are constantly checking if we have our facts in order. It’s gaslighting on top of gaslighting.

Adding to the novel’s complexity, there are themes of colonialism, of rural-urban, of traditional-modern, and of race. Moreno-Garcia weaves these into the narrative without calling them out unduly. There are few signs of a 21st century sensibility in our 20th century characters. It all rings true, if somewhat fantastic, just such a novel should be.

A welcome break from streaming screens, Mexican Gothic is the right kind of book to curl up with on a cold and stormy night. Just make sure to have a good light nearby to scare away any demons or nightmares.

David Potash

January 5, 2022 Reviews

Sex & Drugs & California Back In the Day

A writer and visual artist, Eve Babitz passed away this December at the age of 78. Babitz had been out of style for years until the New York Review of Books began to republish her a few years ago. Her novels were dusted off and they have been purchased, read and reconsidered. Babitz’s voice is being noticed again as new readers are discovering her work. Count me among them. I took the recommendation and recently read Slow Days, Fast Company, a fictionalized journalistic account of Babitz in California in the 1970s. It’s hedonism in the most down to earth terms. The book makes for an interesting read, of a moment and of a time, distant and yet surprisingly familiar.

Babitz the person and Babitz the public figure are difficult to separate. She was a child of connected Hollywood artists. Igor Stravinsky was her grandfather. Her first brush with fame was being photographed, nude, playing chess against Marcel Duchamp. That image is still regularly reproduced. Babitz was an active artist, designing album covers in particular, and writing fiction and non-fiction, books, short stories and articles. She dated famous musicians and performers, from Jim Morrison to Steve Martin, Ed Ruscha to Harrison Ford. Babitz’s connection to celebrities is a recurring theme in articles about her. Nonetheless, reading Slow Days, Fast Company made it clear to me that Babitz was uninterested in fame for fame’s sake. She was an artist in her own right and she marched to her own priorities.

Slow Days, Fast Company is cleverly structured. Each section offers a different slice of California, each grounded in a particular place. The narrator, Babitz or a Babitz-like narrator, takes us on the journey across the state to meet her friends and acquaintances, along with a rich cast of characters, and to tell us stories. The tone is breezy, matter of fact – almost Midwestern in its sensibility. That observation, by the way, would have been greatly resented by Babitz. She’s an unapologetic booster for many things California.

Amid the driving, parties, tears and laughter, there’s sex, lots of drinking, and a fair bit of drug use. None of these are recounted in a titillating manner. Instead, it’s on the ground reporting. It seems to be, at least to the narrator, just what one does when at a party with lots of cocaine. That’s how Babitz writes, tequila and tears, smiles and champagne. There’s a lot of hoping and searching in the book, but not a ton of action. It’s of a piece, reflecting both a particular sensibility in a particular moment place. The days may have been hedonistic but the pace is unhurried. Through it all, Babitz’s observations, her clarity of present-ness, remain a bright light.

What I found most interesting about Babitz’s book is that what might at first blush seem to lure the reader isn’t what she is focused on – or what keeps the reader engaged. The company may be fast but that is not what is important. Babitz is reporting in her own manner, a scribe for the restless. Thinking back to that famous photo of Duchamp, I decided that Eve Babitz would have played a pretty mean game of chess.

David Potash

December 29, 2021 Reviews

Atwood’s Chilling Genius

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, published more than thirty-five years ago, remains a vibrant and troubling work of dystopian fiction that can still feel all too prescient. The Handmaid’s Tale has invaded our collective consciousness; it is a cultural force that has been adapted to television, movies, theater and even the opera. Along with Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984, it stands as a defining vision of a possible awful future.

In 2019, Atwood revisited Gilead, the fictional country of Handmaid’s Tale fifteen years on, in The Testaments, an impressive work in its own right. This novel won the Booker Prize, like its predecessor, and it, too, is brilliantly structured and frightfully smart. Atwood is a literary genius and an extremely intelligent writer. Her skills of perception, of reasoning, and of capturing complexity and making it resonate the the reader are extraordinary – and she does it without being clinical. That’s one of the many ways that her stories can be so chilling.

The violence and state-sponsored misogyny of Gilead do not shock in The Testaments. We have become familiar, over the decades, with its language, protocols and organized violence and repression. The complexities of real-life sexism and misogyny are more easily recognizable today as well. One need not go deep in a newspaper to read of women dehumanized, controlled and denied agency. Nor are these stories necessarily of faraway lands. Atwood’s acknowledgement of these and other changes is reflected in The Testaments plotting. Interweaving narrators and perspectives, Atwood gives great attention to questions of survival, of morality and choice, and of power. If The Handmaid’s Tale is akin to a fictional account of the rise of a patriarchal Nazi-like country and the early faces of resistance, The Testaments is reminiscent of life in Vichy France with its traitors, resistance, and the corruption that accompanies rule by fear.

Complicated questions of moral choice shape the novel. While we may yearn for clear cut categories of good and evil, Atwood problematizes definitions and actions. What will people do to survive in a political environment that is all about control? Die willingly or execute innocent colleagues and friends? Cultures like Gilead, or Nazi Germany, deny and twist human agency into grotesque shapes. Basic concepts of justice and fairness disappear. Darkness abounds and healthy life and relationships, which want to turn towards the sunlight and goodness, instead moves in different directions. The parallels to what is happening across the globe in our pandemic are frightening.

Atwood’s characters are carefully drawn. Their voices are distinct, their journeys independent and intertwined. The Testaments is a page-turner and a work of literature, a rare combination.

What I found most fascinating about the book is that despite its horrors and bleakness, above and beyond all the horror, Atwood still writes with hope. The Testaments paints a vivid and realistic picture of a dystopia. And yet, amid all the horror and darkness, Atwood finds small spaces for optimism, for human decency and for hope. That is a message that I very much welcome.

David Potash

December 28, 2021 Reviews

Yellow Homes & Hearts

Shortly after my sister was born, when I was almost three years old, my family moved to a yellow house. It was a small frame house with crooked pine tree, a scraggly bent thing, looming over the front door. It had hardwood floors, a creaky staircase up to a small second floor, and back yard. I remember liking it immediately it because of the the neighborhood. It was full of other kids, kids that I think of to this day. There was a shared area with grass for playing – and we played together all the time. What sticks most in my memory about the house was its yellow color. We moved again when I was five. In the family it has always remained the “yellow house.”

As soon as I heard about Sarah Broom’s memoir, The Yellow House, I knew that I had to read it. Broom is a journalist and a writer. You may have read her in The New York Times or the New Yorker. She writes lyrically without being overly flowerly. There’s a directness and candor to her prose, a precision that I greatly admire. Her first book, The Yellow House, received the National Book Award for non-fiction, along with other awards and quite a bit of critical attention. The praise is well warranted. The memoir is a moving account of her family in New Orleans, the pushes and pulls that are her own personal narrative, and a broader lens that helps the reader more fully understanding the impact of Hurricane Katrina on individuals, families and communities.

As personal as Broom’s story is, and as careful as she is reporting the stories of her family and their voices, the book is also a larger account of Black history. Her mother’s decision to purchase the house in the 1950s is located carefully within a larger historical context, from the economic moment to the advertising that made the house so appealing. Broom is the youngest of twelve. She was not able to see clearly through much of childhood. She’s an outstanding listener, both in the family and outside of it. Broom is the family reporter and the collector of family voices. It is easy to see her at family events recounting tales of distant relatives. Broom’s ability to weave multiple voices and histories together into the book is extremely impressive. It also makes for an engaging read.

Ultimately, Broom’s mother and the family lost their yellow house. It exists now in their collective memory and in ours, thanks to the power of this book. It made me think long and hard about the very concept of home. It is physical, place-bound, but it mostly about people. Is is possible to have a home, truly, without a family it it? The Yellow House is a compelling story of family and place.

David Potash

December 18, 2021 Reviews

Special Ks, Amazing Kelloggs

I pulled out a box of Kellogg’s Special K Original Toasted Rice Cereal to sit on the table while writing this post. It features a large red script “K” along with QR code to connect in a whole new way with the cereal company, promising a breadth of health and wellness hacks. Some things change over the years while others remain strikingly consistent.

The Kelloggs: The Battling Brother of Battle Creek is an outstanding history of the two brothers that reshaped American health, history and eating, and along the way, how that “K” wound up on my table. The author is Howard Markel, who brings a perfect set of skills and expertise to the effort. Markel has an MD and PhD, and he holds the George E. Wantz Distinguished Professor of the History of Medicine chair at the University of Michigan, while also directing the university’s Center for the History of Medicine. He’s prolific, award-winning, and knows just the right mix of scholarly rigor and accessible language to bring to the task at hand. And what extraordinarily rich material with the Kellogg brothers: they were extraordinarily successful leaders, each in their own right.

The elder of the two, John Harvey Kellogg (1852 -1943), was a doctor, first and foremost, and then an influential public figure. Raised in a Seventh Day Adventist family, he studied medicine and founded the Battle Creek Medical Surgery Sanitarium, one of America’s most influential hospital and health resorts. Kellogg was a very effective surgeon, an early proponent of germ theory, and an even more effective publicist for a wide range of views. He wrote and spoke on health reform, diet, water cures and a host of other topics. Many famous Americans were treated under his care in the Michigan sanitarium, as were many people who otherwise could not afford medical care. Markel is sympathetic to John’s brilliance, his enthusiasms and generosity, and candid about his many shortcomings. He was an erratic businessperson, often indifferent to details. John was proud, consistently seeking the spotlight and often picking unnecessary fights with others. In his latter years he was an advocate for eugenics, which is one of the reasons his reputation has suffered. And most germane to the dual biography, he was awful to his younger brother, William.

William Keith (W.K) Kellogg (1860 – 1951) toiled in his elder brother’s shadow for many years. He made the Sanitarium profitable. He was a tireless innovator and an indefatigable worker. W.K. was also much less of a public persona than his brother. More quiet, more reserved and in many ways simply less happy, W.K. struggled to break out on his own. As both brothers were involved in the creation of healthy foods, W.K. quit the Sanitarium and built Kellogg foods. The first major success was, and remains, Corn Flakes. Kellogg today is a global behemoth valued in the billions. W.K. managed money, expansion, many lawsuits (with his brother and with other business competitors) and did it very well. Markel is especially strong on explaining how W.K. understood the importance of marketing in a rapidly changing environment.

The latter decades of the 1800s and early part of the 1900s were a period of tremendous economic growth in the US. Mass markets were developing as the nation’s economic infrastructure – communication, transportation, manufacturing and distribution – grew at an extraordinary rate. The Midwest was producing more and more grains. The growing middle class was living longer, reading more, and seeking ways to improve health and quality of life. The intersection of healthy eating and mass production and marketing was the target for Kellogg’s company. W.K. saw this and was brilliant in taking advantage of the opportunities. He made sure, for example, that his signature and personal guarantee of quality was on every package of cereal. That script “K” is still with us today, as his invention of waxed paper to keep cereal fresh.

It is fascinating history and the two brothers were extraordinary people. Markel is very adept at giving each their due, highlighting their individual impacts in separate spheres and in shared spaces. The story intersects with many key trends in American history. The brother’s tangled relationship with the Adventist Church is one of those strands, as is the ways in which health, eating and sanitation were intertwined with progressive thought. The darker impacts of eugenics is not forgotten, either. What impressed me about Markel’s history was his consistent empathy with his characters. No apologist, Markel explains – and does it with vigor and clarity. Above all, his history is also about an unhappy family. The two brothers fought in private and in the courts. Their relationship was toxic and they never reconciled. Even with all that success, this history, in many ways, is a tragedy.

Superb book, well worth your time, The Kelloggs is an exemplar of strong scholarship rendered accessible.

David Potash

December 13, 2021 Reviews

Suffrage Drama in Tennessee

The expansion of American democracy is often referenced as inevitable and unidirectional. However, anyone who takes a close look at history knows that nothing could be further from the truth. Political change is messy. That is particularly true when looking at the ratification of the 19th Amendment in Tennessee, the final state to make women’s voting part of the US Constitution. It’s a complex story and the focus of Elaine Weiss’s work of nonfiction, The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote.

Weiss, a successful journalist, brings a journalist’s perspective to the task at hand. Questions of who, what, when and how drive the book. She is very strong when it comes to the people in Tennessee involved in the summer 1920 battle at the state capitol. Weiss paints detailed pictures of the players: Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association and head of the “Suffs,” Josephine Pearson, leader of the Tennessee State Association Opposed to Women’s Suffrage and head of the “Antis,” their key followers, and many elected officials, ranging from state legislators to President Wilson and future President Harding. Weiss’s attention to personal detail emphasizes the contingency of struggle. Ultimately it was determined by an extremely close vote in the state legislature. The sausage making included hard-pressed lobbying, shifting alliances, threats and conspiracies, and crafty parliamentary maneuvers. Even though we know the eventual result, Weiss’s skill renders the action dramatic and engaging. It makes for entertaining reading. It is clear why the book has been optioned for a film.

If you do pick it up, I encourage reading more widely about the topic. The historian and the teacher in me want to stress that while the study of individuals and their behavior in specific events can be fascinating, broader understanding is possible when we also consider continuities, changes and context. It was a period of profound change and great conflicts. For example, the promotion of white democratic principles, as championed by President Wilson, had an international impact as well as one in the American South. Wilson, along with almost all of the elected officials in Tennessee, was steadfastly opposed of Black women voting. That is but one of the issues in the story that is essential towards knowing how and why the vote played out the way it did.

Another important realization from The Woman’s Hour is that history is framed and written by those that are successful. It’s a truism that is worth repeating and re-emphasizing. The change of one or two votes, establishing a majority, can be extremely powerful in the casting of a historical decision. Was Tennessee all that more democratic (with a lower case “d”) than Maryland, which voted against ratification? Giving historical change close attention, as Weiss effectively does in this book, often clarifies and complicates history. And that, by my account, is very much to the good.

David Potash

November 15, 2021 Reviews

Nice Shoes

In 2020, the global estimate of athletic footwear sales – sneakers – was just under $100 billion. That’s an extraordinary amount of money. Forecasts for growth are optimistic and aggressive. The world’s insatiable desire for sneakers is both understandable, for it’s been growing consistently for several decades, and amazing, for fifty years ago the athletic footwear market was much, much smaller. What gives?

Kicks: The Great American Story in Sneakers is fascinating account of how this happened. It’s a cultural history, packed with personalities and anecdotes. While not a business study, the book, nevertheless, uses a very effective lens to understand sneakers’ importance and relevance to modern life. Explaining how and why so many people care so much about their sneakers, it makes for a very interesting read.

The author is journalist Nicholas Smith. He’s not a sneakerhead but he clearly is a fan of stylish athletic footwear. Smith’s enthusiasm and dogged curiosity drives the book’s enthusiasm and pace.

Charles Goodyear was the father of sneakers. An American self-taught chemist who had an unshakeable faith in his ability to unlock the secrets of rubber, Goodyear invented the process of vulcanization, leading to the tire and sneaker industry. Smith tells Goodyear’s story and moves quickly through the late 1800s and early twentieth century as the footwear industry adopted rubber in various formats. The book digs into the rise of sneakers with the growth of professional sports in the 1920s. Athletes became major media figures and major sporting events, like the Olympics, were massively important public spectacles for the use and success of athletic footwear. Chuck Taylor was a consummate salesman of Keds and a very good basketball player. Jones is great on the German Dassler brothers, whose footwear company and dramatic split led to Adidas and Puma. We learn about innovations in the 1960s and the connection of sneakers to teen life in Southern California and skateboarding. Footwear initiated and tracked many trends.

Where Kicks truly takes off is the story of Nike and the relationship between sneakers and urban culture. Smith is very good on Nike’s gamble to invest everything in Michael Jordan. He rightly explores the many connections between hip-hop, Black culture, and footwear. It’s a relationship actively sought by footwear companies, which were growing into lifestyle brands. What’s most telling is that Smith highlights the skillful marketing and campaigns that captured millions upon millions of Americans – and later the world. He is not critical, but the very story he tells opens up all manner of questions about race, racism, and many ways that modern capitalism and advertising/marketing structures cultural identities. The story simply begs for discussion and consideration.

Reading Kicks was enlightening and troubling, entertaining and thought provoking. It calls into question the many ways that we’ve been marketed into ideas of what is and is not stylish, authentic or cool. It’s informative and fun. I will never look at my sneakers the same again.

David Potash

October 26, 2021 American Culture Today, Reviews

Grim & Real: The Costs of a Mill Town

Why recommend a work that asks more questions than it answers, or suggest reading a book that tells a terrible story without a villain or resolution? Don’t we seek clarity in our non-fiction? Usually I do, but I have been wrestling with this after reading Keri Arsenault’s haunting Mill Town: Reckoning With What Remains. Part personal memoir, part investigatory journalism, part essay on a dying community and way of life, it is a messy and complicated book. It’s also one that I keep thinking about, a book and story that touches larger issues.

Arsenault is a writer, editor and teacher. She grew up in the tiny town of Mexico, Maine, which existed, in great part, because of a paper mill. The paper mill was the economic engine for the area and it dominated the lives of those in the community. Arsenault reflects on her childhood, what was and was not said, and the direct and indirect impact of the mill. As she moved out and explored the world outside of Maine, she began to think more critically about her childhood community. Increasing numbers of illnesses and cancer deaths deepened that process, particularly with the death of her father. The book is a investigation of her community, a hard look at what can and cannot be know about the town and the great costs of working for and around a paper mill. What is a “mill town” today?

Mexico is an insular, tough community, like many other working class towns. People try to take care of each other and they tend to suffer quietly. Once Arsenault taps her personal connections with townspeople, she collects more and more stories of difficult lives, rare cancers and quiet struggles. She finds inconclusive studies, ineffective environmental agencies, and a terrible sense of powerlessness. Her writing throughout is lyrical, honest and descriptive in a way that explains without filling in the silences. Members of the community are not given to emotions and expression. We can smell the chemicals, see the darkness of the forest, and recognize the small spaces of light, love and caring in the community.

Arsenault is strongest, I think, about her family and her personal story. Her family and friends, her jobs and her day-to-day attempts to navigate her home ring extraordinarily true. She gets it and she writes about with clarity, avoiding nostalgia and pathos. Nor does she cast blame; she has deep understanding. She uses the town’s river both as a narrative fixture in the book and also as a metaphor as it sweeps us and carries things along.

That all said, Arsenault is keen on shining lights on the great injustices faced by the people in and around Mexico, Maine. There are poisons in the air, soil, water and everyday environment – and no one is willing to own up to their risks or consequences. Science, after all, is rarely completely conclusive. It is enraging and all too understandable. Like Fagin’s Toms River – another study of a community and its environmental poisons – Mill Town calls into question a way of life and way of living.

So why recommend the book? Because Mill Town is a incisive and thoughtful study of us and our communities – and the costs that we are bearing for them. It is, in many ways, a reckoning, an accounting of benefits and loss. That’s extremely important for making sense of our today and considering what sort of tomorrow we might want for ourselves and our children.

David Potash

October 21, 2021 American Culture Today, Reviews

Sunshine State of Mind Names

Looking for a laugh, a diversion, a book that will make you smile? I have a reliable recommendation: Carl Hiaasen. He’s a journalist, novelist and humorous who writes for adults and children. He has won awards, his writing has been made into movies, and he focuses on the eccentricities of Florida. Goodness knows that there are enough of them. Environmental issues are woven throughout his works of over the top crime and retribution. Above all, he’s funny – laugh out loud funny. There aren’t many writers who can consistently deliver satire and make you laugh. Hiaasen does.

Plotting and reviewing Hiaasen is a fool’s errand. Like explaining a joke, it kills the fun. What I can offer, though, as a teaser to Hiaasen’s amazing talent is his ability to name characters and places. His latest book, Squeeze Me, is nominally about Burmese pythons and politics in South Florida in the time of a Trump-like president. Don’t worry about the plot; simply enjoy these Hiaasen names from the novel. It is a rare talent that few writers possess. Hiaasen’s naming ability is off-the-charts genius.

Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons is an elderly widowed and wealthy presidential supporter, whose first husband was Huff Cornbright. They had two children, Chase and Chance Cornbright. The Trump-esque president, code-name “Mastodon,” regularly gets Kiki’s name wrong, calling her “Kikey Pew.” Fitzsimmons political friends, all wealthy widows, call themselves the “Potussies” – and their names are memorable: Faye Alex Riptoad, Dorothea Mars Bristol, Yirma Skyy Frick, Dee Wyndham Wittlefield, Deirdre Cobo Lancome, and Kelly Bean Drummond. Much of the action takes place at the resort favored by the president, Casa Bellicosa, but there’s also Lipid House. Don’t forget the villainous Tripp Teabull, Prince Paladin (whose real name is Keever Bracco), and Uric Burns. There’s a stripper named Farrah Moans.

You’re reading these aloud, right?

Spending time in Hiaasen’s Florida world, where one might think that satire couldn’t be possible, is reassuringly ridiculous, over-the-top, and out loud funny. He never fails to make me smile and I hope that he does the same for your, too.

David Potash

October 12, 2021 Reviews

Storytellers and Writers

Reading two works of fiction in a row – an unusual thing for me – has me thinking about reading and writing. My regular practice for reading is a predictable routine: non-fiction, non-fiction and then a bit of fiction. And occasionally a dash of “literature” as opposed to fiction to stretch myself. Non-fiction is my bread and butter. The regained ability to visit in-person bookstores and browse has upset the apple cart. I am enjoying the disruption.

Wells Tower’s collection of short stories, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned was a fiction treat. It had been on my “wouldn’t it be good to pick this up?” list for several years after reading a glowing review. Everything in this work of fiction aspiring for literature is good. It is polished, especially the rough bits. Tower’s prose is muscular and confident. He writes with expressive masculinity, direct with just enough distance. It’s engaging and interesting. The characters are memorable and there are lovely phrases sprinkled throughout. But as soon as I picked up my next book, it started to fade – and quickly.

Stephen King’s Billy Summers is a crime novel from the prolific horror author. King, impressively, continues to write and publish and write and publish – and do it consistently well. At first Billy Summers seemed like an exercise in a well-traveled theme, the last crime gone wrong crime genre. Hard-boiled and gritty might be the description that immediately comes to mind. In this novel, Summers is a hit man who only kills bad people. He is morally compromised but not without charm. He’s a very good protagonist. King, as usual, gives us a cast of well-drawn characters, somewhat familiar plotting and backstory – a decorated soldier sniper with terrible childhood trauma – and you think you know what’s going to happen. It is familiar terrain.

And then, halfway through the book, King shifts the direction with giving his protagonist a moral choice. It was unexpected, powerful, and it charged the novel with a new direction and energy. The latter sections of the book are outstanding. It’s storytelling at its best. I was pulled into the novel, cared for the characters, and wondered what King could do with a Reacher-like theme. King’s prose throughout is clean, crisp and carefully crafted. He doesn’t draw our attention to it, though, even though it’s worthy of consideration. What he is doing is writing to tell a story. I remember the plot and characters; they have remained vivid and I’m confident that they will do so for years. It has happened with other King writing, too.

In Billy Summers King gives his character multiple undercover identities. It is both plot device and an opportunity for King to enjoy himself writing with different voices. One of Summer’s identities is as a writer. King, through his narrator, and then through his narrator’s created fake identity, attempts to tell his “story.” It’s unreliable first-person narrator through unreliable first-person narrator, with commentary on what it is to write and why.

Does a book’s ability to remain with us signify quality? Often, but not necessarily so. Sometimes writing sticks with us because it is extreme; it shocks or disturbs. It can also remain with us if it is simple and recognizable. And there are also very well-written thoughtful works of literature that are complicated and profound. Some of these remain with us and others engage and we move on. I may not remember much of the book, but if it was assigned (and I’m thinking of all those papers in years ago college), parts will stay with me. I loved Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier the first time I read it. Much of it has remained vivid, including that amazing first sentence. But I would be hard pressed to map the book’s plot. What did stick, both as a reader and as an object of study and reflection, is Ford’s use of an unreliable narrator to tell the story. I wonder if that is a literary device that works for me.

The contrast between King and Tower is about more than structure and style. It is about perceived intent, or perhaps how I understand what they are trying to do. Tower is a writer who is focused on his writing. He wants us to pay attention to his prose. King is a story teller who writes to tell stories. He wants us to engage in his stories and characters. Reading Tower and King led me to a realization after all these years: my preference, truth be told, is for stories. Some stories stand on their own. However, what makes for a truly memorable is a skillful story teller.

David Potash

October 10, 2021 Curiouser and Curiouser, Reviews