Right Stories, Wrong Time?

Determined to unplug for a short spell, I recently sat down with Ted Chiang’s latest collection of short stories, Exhalation. Chiang is an extremely talented writer, perhaps best known for “The Story of Your Life”, which was the basis for the movie Arrival. He has garnered several awards, too; he is an author that we’ll be reading for many years.

Chiang is sometimes described as a fiction writer and sometimes as a science fiction writer. One can be both of course – and fitting within a genre’s expectations is no recipe for success. My interest was piqued by curiosity and convenience. When one shelters in place, tethered to phones and screens, maintaining long-term focus can be a challenge. I thought that short stories were a safe hedge in a time when focus can be elusive.

Turns out that my plan was both wrong and right.

The stories in Exhalation are well-written and creative. Chiang is a writer who is interested in an idea, a speculation, and from that spins a tale. His ideas, too, are mostly very intriguing. Themes of free will, cognition, meta-cognition and what it means to be human are recurring questions that drive these stories. Chiang explores them with focus and clarity. There are no tricks, no narrative sleight-of-hand gimmicks, or even experiments with the prose itself. Instead, he writes with sense of purpose. It is though he wants to sort something out.

All well and good, and yet, I found myself less than fully engaged in the book while reading it. While I liked the ideas and found them provocative, there was little about the stories that stuck. Initially, I had difficulty figuring out why. I re-read, skimmed, and started to obsess, ever so mildly, about why I wasn’t all that engaged. Bear in mind, too, that I clearly was engaged since I was thinking about the stories quite a bit. It took some time to gather what was going on.

Chiang, I propose, is more focused on his ideas than plot, and more interested in plot than the development of his characters. His ideas are consistently intriguing. His plots are mostly strong. His characters, on the other hand, are less than fully developed. Chiang, to my reading, does not give them love or even all that much care. More often than not they seem to be vehicles for delivering his ideas.

Had Chiang stayed within the strictures of genre – hero/antihero; boy meets girl, loses girl, gets girl; stranger comes to town – the thinness of his characters would not be noticed. Without the well-worn clothing of genre, however, all aspects of the story are equally exposed. My reading was, as a consequence, probably more intense than necessary. Engagement indeed! Added to that, of course, that I’m reading them in a time of social distancing. My underlying hope was not to find ideas; it was connection, the kind of connection that can only come through fiction.

Exhalation is a thought-provoking collection of short stories that I’m confident will make you think. However, I am equally confident that I cannot predict what it will make you think about.

David Potash

March 30, 2020 Reviews

Bright Light on Grief

Brilliant in several senses of the word, Joan Didion is inquisitive, worldly, and extraordinarily intelligent. When Didion seizes upon a topic, she shines her mighty powerful brilliance on it. I picture it as a hot white light, so intense, in fact, that it can sometimes overwhelm, flattening out colors and feelings.

The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion’s 2005 account of her year of grief following the death of her husband. He was her soul-mate, though she does not call him that. He is John Gregory Dunne and John through the book. John suffered a massive sudden heart-attack at the dinner table in their New York City apartment. John had a heart condition, so his death was not wholly unexpected, but it was extraordinarily traumatic. He was with her and then he was not. Didion is unsparing in her account of the impact, nature and effect of her loss. She processed, engaged, disengaged, and imagined all manner of things. It was a year that her brain simply could not accept the sadness of the unacceptable. Yet she persevered.

The year was further worsened by the grave illness of Didion’s daughter. Her book reports on both with clinical precision. At the same time, she knows that there can be no final clarity, no resolution. It is, after all, of thinking and not thinking, of numbing loss and overwhelming tears.

I can’t say that I was comforted by Didion’s book; nor would I say that she wrote it to provide comfort. It is not a broader study and it did not shed much light on grieving and loss writ large. I have experienced enough loss already to have formed some thoughts and to have done a fair bit of research. This book is not a source for any of that.

What The Year of Magical Thinking does extraordinarily well is explain Joan Didion’s experiences, her processes, her feelings. She’s a frightfully clever and interesting writer – and that, in and of itself, makes this an important book. It underscores, in a myriad of ways, the isolation of loss, both direct and existential. She writes with great courage, with precision, and insight into herself and what made her who she is. It is powerful prose.

The Year of Magical Thinking also made me wonder if it might sometimes be healthier healthier to think a little less. Asking and answering hard questions, it seems to me, may not always the best path to understanding.

David Potash

February 29, 2020 Reviews, Things someone who grew up in NJ might write

Hard Lives and Hardiness in Kansas

Sarah Smarsh is a fifth-generation Kansan who grew up amid grinding poverty. She found a way to get an education and become a journalist. Her first book, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth is a heartfelt and powerful account of her extended families and community. It is not a rags to riches story. It is not about luck or personal triumph, and it is not a political call for government action or this policy or that policy. Instead, Heartland is an empathetic and critical account of poverty, an up close look at the millions of ways that being poor affects one’s life.

In the trilogy of race, class and gender, Smarsh effectively carves out a perspective that offers a deep understanding of what it means to be poor, white, and a woman in the Midwest. She does it with care and an outstanding eye for detail. (It isn’t what mobile one home one lives in that matters – it is where the mobile home is parked) Readily acknowledging the problems of racism and the difficulties of class identity, Smersh situates herself and her family within larger structures of power and disadvantage. The book’s greatest strength is perhaps in its attention to how women work, work even more, and endure in extraordinarily difficult circumstances with limited options. She makes clear that for her and many of those around here, only one small mistake – a problem that could be readily overcome by someone in the middle class – could effectively derail a person’s life.

Smarsh attributes her education and career to some family stability, to good fortune, and to not becoming a teenage mother, something very common in her family and community. She explores the impacts of domestic violence, the cycle of power exercised by the powerless on those with even less agency. She also calls out the policies and practice that seem aimed at further marginalizing or simply punishing women. Some are known; others are less visible.

For example, women often move regularly out of necessity or fear. Smarsh’s maternal grandmother, Betty, moved constantly. When Betty found a good and reliable match in her seventh husband, Arnie, they were able to keep a farm. The farm, a very modest place, was an anchor, a haven, in Smarsh’s childhood. But like many other family farms that barely make enough, the farm eventually was lost when Arnie died. Just about everyone is working hard, but financial stability is elusive. Rural life in Kansas is tough and unforgiving. Nearby cities, Wichita and Topeka, are not easy, either.

Smarsh mixes government policies and big picture events with local histories. Politics is part of the climate. It is present, it has an impact, and it seems as though it cannot be changed. Smarsh clearly wants to see opportunities and at least some semblance of economic and social justice for many, but that’s not the thrust of her book.

Instead, what is haunting throughout the narrative is the everyday heroism of her kith and kin. Yes, they are flawed and yes, they do not always make the optimal choices. But they often make understandable choices. They are mostly good people and a few are really outstanding – loving, caring and deserving of much more of the good life. They struggle and work hard. Smarsh paints their stories with care and without romanticism. It’s an effective and moving memoir.

Heartland is very easy to read. It’s well written, really beautifully crafted. It is also difficult to digest. The unfairness is raw and uncomfortable, especially in a nation that has so much. If you give Heartland deep consideration, it will haunt you.

David Potash

February 5, 2020 American Culture Today, Reviews

Bellevue – More Than a Hospital

David Oshinsky is a Pulitzer-Prize winning historian, the kind of writer that is able to take a complicated story and render it entertaining, understandable and relevant. In 2016 he wrote Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital. For those not in the know, Bellevue Hospital in New York City was the first public hospital founded in the United States – in 1736, before there even was a United States. In the centuries since, Bellevue has been at the center of virtually all major health issues, as well as front and center in the history of New York City. A vast hospital center today, Bellevue has been an important health site for thousands upon thousands.

Oshinsky’s book is a fast-moving and serious attempt to chart Bellevue’s development as modern public health emerged in the US. He places the institutional history of the hospital within economic, political and historical events, from the election of mayors to outbreaks of diseases. These narrative threads are woven into the history of advances in medicine and health. For example, the debates around germ theory, which was vitally important to medicine as well as Bellevue hospital, is examined through the lens of President Garfield’s assassination and the powerful figures leading the hospital. It makes for fascinating reading.

The hospital’s role in the development of forensic medicine is also extraordinarily interesting. When New York City moved from an elected to appointed coroner, the office was relocated at Bellevue Hospital. Much of modern forensic medicine began at Bellevue. And while the hospital did not have a research role in ending the AIDS crisis, the hospital’s role in attending, helping and addressing the crisis is another example that Oshinsky renders exceptionally well.

Size, location, and operating practices set Bellevue apart from most other hospitals. From its early years it was a teaching hospital and it has retained that commitment. It has also been a hospital that meets the needs of New Yorkers and the diverse immigrant community. That means that Bellevue staff often “see everything.” It has long been an innovator, an institution of many “firsts” – such as the site of the country’s first School of Nursing, first emergency room, first hospital with expertise and spaces for the insane, and so on. Lastly, the impact of the hospital on the city, and the corresponding impact of the city on Bellevue, provide a very useful lens to understand America’s largest municipality.

Oshinksy brings all of this to the page. It’s a very good book, surprisingly engaging. The history of Bellevue is much more than a history of a hospital.

David Potash

January 27, 2020 Reviews

Barth’s Early Efforts

John Barth has a well-deserved reputation as one of the more important American writers of the latter half of the twentieth century. His 1960 novel The Sot Weed Factor is a brilliant mash up of Fielding, Sterne, and probably a little South American magic realism. I recommend it heartily. It turns out, too, that novel did not spring from his head, fully formed. He tried and tried again before finding his voice – and success.

The two shorter novels that Barth write in the 1950s are The Floating Opera and The End of the Road. Conveniently enough, they can often be found in one thick volume. They are both philosophical; Barth stated that he was interested in exploring nihilism. Both feature a smart and untrustworthy first person narrator. The first is woven around questions of the meaning of life and suicide. The second is about absolutism and abortion. There are moments of satirical humor in both, but the overall weight of ideas and consequences colors the writing. In other words, both are intelligent but somewhat bitter books.

I would wager that perhaps one of the ways that Barth matured as a writer was by abandoning, to a certain degree, both the over the top intelligence and the bitterness. Yes, his literature remains incredibly informed and intellectually interesting. Somehow, though, his need to show it lessened. Along similar lines, his later work is imbued with greater patience and empathy for his characters situation and foibles. He allows the unfolding story to own much of the tragedy and conflict.

Stated differently, when we stop being angry young men we can share.

I wouldn’t rush out to read The Floating Opera or The End of the Road. However, if you find yourself with time and a copy, you could do much worse than to sit down and imagine an ambitious English professor finding the time to create these two extremely interesting works of literature. John Barth is a very good writer.

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David Potash

January 6, 2020 Reviews

Nemirovsky Belongs

There’s something fundamentally appealing – and just a little strange – about the Everyman’s Library. You’ve probably seen their volumes at a used book store. In fact, it’s impossible not to find them at a used book stores. Everyman’s are ubiquitous, with volumes on pretty much every classic work. The idea, thought of by an English publisher, began in 1905 as a way to make money bringing classics to the masses. It has been going strong ever since, with different publishers buying the rights to the series over the years. Whether or not one accepts the concept of a “cannon,” the Everyman’s titles are a good indicator of what mainstream scholars and writers think are important books, fiction and nonfiction.

Whenever I seen an Everyman’s that is new to me, I check it out. They are consistently worth the effort. I may not like the book, but I’ve never read anything weak under title. The streak remains, too, with a volume of four works by Irene Nemirovksy. Nemirovksy was a Ukrainian Jew who moved to France at a young age, became a very successful writer, and was unable to escape the Nazis. She died of typhus at Auschwitz in 1942 at the age of 39. The four-work set does not include her writing about life under occupation in World War II, known as the Suite Francaise. Instead, included are David Golder, her first successful novel, The Ball and Snow in Autumn, two short stories, and The Courilof Affair, a political novel. It is a powerful collection.

Nemirovsky’s writing is interesting, reminiscent of Russian literature and also French social commentary. She drives plot quickly, is comfortable examining character’s interior dialogues, and eschews sentimentality and happy endings. She is realistic in the sense that once a piece starts moving, she follows the idea and events through to their end. It’s accessible literature and hard, too. Nemirovsky wrestles with difficult ideas. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand her success. She most definitely wrote literature worthy of serious consideration. She belongs in the Everyman’s series. Nemirovsky’s talent and work also highlight the tragedy of her death.

David Potash

January 2, 2020 Reviews

Barber’s Democratic Passion

Benjamin Barber (1939 – 2017) was an extremely influential scholar and political theorist. Prolific, insightful and super smart, his writing tends to work on two levels. First, he makes erudite and well-grounded arguments. Barber was an emphatic advocate of strong democracy. That theme, his commitment to democratic thinkers such as Rousseau and Jefferson, and his desire to democratic values advance, is consistent.

Simultaneously, Barber’s writing is studded with brilliant observations, asides and comments. He saw things, noted trends and reasons, and they often stop me in my tracks. In fact, I can find these more remarkable than the big picture arguments.

Recently I spent a few hours reading a collection of Barber’s essays, A Passion for Democracy: American Essays. Published in 1998, the book contains works that are even older; the volumes are from a different time. There’s no internet – Barber was a keen student of technology – and many of the references and concerns now seem like distant memories. We don’t worry about the Soviet Union or shopping malls today. Questions of equality and rights are woven throughout. It was a different time.

And yet – and this is what I admire about Barber – there is much to learn from him. He notes the relationship between strong leaders and weak citizens. He forecasts the splintering of viewpoints through new technologies. He notes how the market can censor. Barber repeatedly calls for citizenship, an active and informed people, as the best bulwark of rights, opportunity and justice. These are timely and relevant, still today.

Taken as a whole, I think of the essays in the volume as bright spot lights on particular issues. The light emerges from a hard to locate place – and time – but what it reveals, it does so well and with great clarity. The challenge is that unless one is familiar with what’s under the spotlight, context and relevance may be a problem. I would wager that this volume would have more immediate connection to an older reader, or perhaps someone keen on understanding the 1980s and 1990s when it comes to politics and political issues. Nevertheless, there’s some real wisdom in this.

Barber’s voice is missed. We would be better-informed and wiser if he was alive and writing today.

David Potash

January 1, 2020 Reviews

Curiosity and Community

Good journalism is about telling stories. Peter Lovenheim is a good journalist and he knows how to tell a story.

Lovenheim grew up in Rochester, NY. He traveled, married, began a career, and decided to raise a family back in his home town. He and his wife purchased his childhood house from his parents, giving Lovenheim an unusual perspective on his old neighborhood. As Lovenheim’s marriage was unraveling, a tragedy took place just a few doors away. A physician murdered his physician wife and then turned the gun on himself. The murder-suicide left two orphaned children and the neighborhood in a state of shock. No one in the neighborhood, an upper-middle class enclave with a good reputation, really knew the family.

Most in the neighborhood offered help, gossiped, and moved on with their lives. Lovenheim dug deeper, driven by curiosity, his loss of sense of community, and his personal issues. He wondered if engaged neighbors might have prevented the violence. He wondered, too, who his neighbors were and if they shared his worry about isolation. Were they really all strangers to each another? A year later, Lovenheim developed a plan to learn more about his neighbors and more about his community. The result was a well-received 2010 book, In The Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at at Time.

Lovenheim reached out and found some neighbors who let him sleep in their homes, who shared their day-to-day with him, who brought him to events. He ate breakfasts with his neighbors, rode with the newspaper delivery man, and visited people whenever and where ever he could. He made a few real connections, some true friendships. He interviewed the family of the slain couple. He also was unable to forge much of a relationship many who lived on the street. Lovenheim’s genuine curiosity about his neighbors and their lives makes for interesting reading. He tells a story of a neighborhood and the diversity of its people. What might initially look like a homogeneous upper-middle class community turned out to be something significantly more dynamic and heterogeneous.

Lovenheim also wrote about his life and his search for connection and meaning. Careful not to draw many broad conclusions from his experience, he also knows that his search is part of a bigger issue for many of us. In the Neighborhood is not a rigorous study but it aligns with broader work about contemporary society. Many of us feel isolated. However, if we seek companionship, it is possible to reach out and connect with others. We can build bridges and help each other out. It takes initiative and courage, but it is not impossible. And that when we do, we feel better about ourselves and our communities.

In the Neighborhood is a thought provoking book. Lovenheim certainly has me thinking about my neighbors, and my community, in different ways. No immediate plans for sleepovers, though.

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David Potash

December 19, 2019 American Culture Today, Reviews

Rethinking Rufus

A friend and colleague recently loaned me Thomas A. Foster’s Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men. The first monograph to tackle the difficult issue of sexual violence against enslaved men in the United States, it is an important study. It is also chilling and horrific, bringing a deeper and different kind of understanding to the evil that was slavery.

Foster is a historian and dean at Howard University, a scholar who works on issues of sexuality, gender and slavery. Foster knows both theory and history, and is as comfortable with primary sources as he is with queer theory. That range and skill set gives Foster the ability to re-examine and re-cast historical accounts through different eyes and with different tools. Perhaps the best example of that is drawn from the book’s very title.

Rose Williams was a former slave who was interviewed by the WPA in the 1930s as part of a slave narrative project. These interviews and other first-hand accounts of slavery are well-known to historians. Williams’ account, which the book includes in its entirety, tells of her forced pregnancy by Rufus, another slave, who she characterizes as a “bully.” Williams had two children by Rufus, her first at the age of sixteen. Once freed from bondage, Williams also freed herself from Rufus. It’s a terrible account of a woman’s hardship. Foster explain the story and also looks at it from a different perspective, that of the enslaved man. Rufus had no agency in the matter. As a slave, he was forced into the relationship. Male slaves had extremely limited agency when it came to issues of sexuality, as the book explains. Rufus’s body was a symbol and site of enslaved violation.

Rethinking Rufus’s chapters look at key themes without following a traditional chronology. Foster draws from a wide range of primary sources, from court cases to songs to art. Chapter One examines the objectification and distortions around black men’s bodies. Chapter Two explores manly autonomy and intimacy; families and more “traditional” forms of living a male ideal as husband and father were impossible in slavery. The ugliness of coerced reproduction is explored in the third chapter. Foster provides an overview of the debates with scholarship over the years, sketches the ways that the issue was interpreted, and concludes that the practice was widespread and a key component in the narrative of pain and suffering of slaver. Chapter Five focuses on white women and enslaved black men; the penultimate chapter looks for ways of exploring same-sex relationships in slavery. The historical record does not offer the scholar much of direct sources. Foster’s conclusion calls for a rethinking of the community in slavery.

The book is well-researched, well-written and well-argued. I expect that it will be taught for many years to come. It is also an important reminder that as we do more research and more work on slavery, the more we are aware of its lasting evil.

David Potash

December 9, 2019 Reviews

High-Quality Humanized Potboiler?

One of the challenges living close to Myopic Bookstore – perhaps Chicago’s best used bookstore – is that it’s convenient, inexpensive, stays open late, and (did I say this already?), is perhaps Chicago’s best used bookstore. My shelves seem to fill without planning. It’s not a lack of discipline, either on my part. There are just so much good things to read . . . .

Recently I picked up a novel by John D. MacDonald, one of my favorite writers. Known for his mysteries, MacDonald also penned more than a few stand alone novels. He wrote, wrote – and wrote some more. If you like his style – taut, cleverly plotted, every character sketched with care, ample philosophizing but rarely in a didactic manner – you will recognize his prose within a paragraph or two. It’s tight and consistently entertaining.

At a recent Myopic visit I picked up one of his books that was a complete unknown to me. Written in 1984, One More Sunday is a sprawling novel about a large and successful evangelical church in the South. Chock full with a wide range of characters, the book is also about good and bad behavior. In fact, most of it is about wickedness. It covers the loss of faith, lust, adultery, envy, lying, murder, extortion and theft. There’s enough crime and creepiness in the book that it could veer into parody.

However, MacDonald’s skill gives the reader a page-turner with tolerance, ambiguity, and more than a little reflection. He leavens the luridness with compassion. That’s a welcome trait in a book that could only become an R movie.

If you run across it, give One More Sunday a chance – especially for the beach, the vacation, or when you want a high-quality diversion.

David Potash

November 13, 2019 Reviews, Things someone who grew up in NJ might write