Midlife Crisis Bingo Recap: Buckle Up

In 1993, my partner and I climbed into my Ford Escort to go on a “backroads” trip across the country, inspired in part by William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways: A Journey into America. That book followed the author along literal roads less travelled and featured his conversations with people outside of the usual American gaze. "What does it mean to be an American?" was a guiding question for his trip, and ours.

 

Along the way, my car’s air conditioning crapped out, so we were able to experience America in all its summertime sensory glory: sticky and buggy. And also, this was before cell phones and GPS, so getting lost was very possible. In fact, getting lost was kind of the point.  

 

Most kids today will never know what it’s like to be lost. Their connection to their location is constant, and if for some reason their GPS isn’t working, they can always call their mom. In fact, their mom is probably tracking them right now, following their every move from afar with a Stalk My Grownup Baby app. Hint to young adults: Are you not in your dorm room tonight? Your mom knows this!

 

But back in the day, maps were paper and hard to read. Sometimes you’d go right instead of left or miss the turn. And you’d find yourself at the most amazing place, a place that felt like it was waiting for you to find it. Of course, that was also the moment that the car would start making weird noises, and your paper map would suggest that you were 10 miles from the nearest anything. You wished you had a way to call your mom, but you didn’t see a pay phone. And besides, you didn’t have a quarter to make the call. Your mom was probably out celebrating her empty nest anyway, not sitting around at home waiting to solve your problem.

 

One of the best parts about our trip in 1993 was stopping at just about every roadside historical marker. If you want to go beyond textbook broad-sweep history, spend a little time in the middle of nowhere! You’ll see towns that rose and vanished because of the railroad, groups that pushed others out, and you’ll see how those others fought back. The names of towns and rivers speak all about migration and aspiration.

 

However, lest we get caught up in the glory of purple mountains majesty and amber waves of grain, it’s important to remember that those historical markers are political storytelling. For the Midlife Crisis Bingo square, Buckle Up, I want to talk about How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith.

 

Category Description: Sometimes the way forward involves crossing difficult terrain. Read a book that challenges you, or makes you look something difficult in the eye, or asks you to do hard work.

The author asks the reader to consider the public history around slavery. He visits several sites that feature that story: some plantations, a prison, a New York City history tour, a cemetery, a local Juneteenth celebration, and a site of capture and departure of enslaved people before they were placed on ships to America. Each site offers a slightly different purpose – for instance, “to commemorate,” or “to give voice,” or even, “to make people uncomfortable.” The book leaves the reader with a set of questions about public history. First, in the face of limited historical evidence, how certain do the creators of the sites have to be to make what they say "true?" Second, what are the consequences of foregrounding some narratives (or objects or locations) over others? And third, how central should slavery be in American history and storytelling? Since the publication of Smith’s book, that final question has anchored all sorts of messy conversations on our political stage, leading to the likely possibility that some communities might not even put this book on their library shelves.

 

I don’t think that Smith would consider his work to be a “road trip” book, but I immediately thought about myself as a consumer of American history on my long-ago journey. I’m also struck by the fact it feels like our country’s air conditioner has broken. Things are sticky and buggy, and Smith wants us to lean into the heat.

 

Writing this post sent me on a deep dive into my old photo albums (remember when you took pictures and had to wait to see them until you took your film into the drugstore to be developed?).  I stumbled upon this unlabeled picture from our trip through the South in 2000.

 

I’m sure we just drove by it, snapped a photo, and said, “Weird!” After all, there was no smart phone in my pocket to quickly name and explain and situate every curious thing on demand. But all these years later, I do have a smart phone, and Smith’s book has made me wonder what this site was and why I am filled with unease.

 

Turns out that Wigwam Village No. 2 was built in 1937 in Kentucky to serve people on “automobile vacations.” Eleanor Roosevelt gave it some publicity in a newspaper column, and now it is on the National Register of Historic Places. The tents are not actually wigwams, but no one said that this venue was on the National Register of ACCURATE Historic Places, did they?* The website claims that the motel is “an enduring testament to a time past,” with all the comforts of home (WiFi, cable TV, coffee pots, a swimming pool, and “plenty of hot water”).

 

I seem to recall that things didn’t go so well for the Cherokee people in Kentucky. One of the online reviews (one star out of five!) says, “The place was dirty and damaged, the bed linens had tears and stains.” At first, I misread that as tears of grief, like the kind one might cry on a violent, forced exodus. But no, this historical site must be telling a different story altogether. It occurs to me, uncomfortably, that what we are giving “enduring testament” to with this National Historic Register designation is twentieth century white people’s travel culture, where the land is yours to explore, and your comfort is the most important thing. It’s a memorial to the American road trip, just like the one I was on.

 

Well, crap.

 

History is messy and hard and full of dragons. We have a lot of work to do. 

 

This is a random dragon we found in Cullman, Alabama. It's at the Ave Maria Grotto, which is a four acre miniature city built by a really bored monk in the 1950s. It features 125 replicas of holy places, and also this dragon. The lesson? Keep at it with your weird hobby.

*The National Archives and Records Association has placed a "Potentially Harmful Content" warning on its webpage about Wigwam Village No.2. Does that help? Hurt? Add texture? Do nothing?

Blogtastic!: Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

BLOGTASTIC! We’ve reached the last and final square in the 2017 Leaning Stack of Books Diversity Challenge. Today will feature Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng, which fulfills the category, “Book by an Asian-American Writer.”

The book blogosphere loves Ng’s books, because they are very accessible family dramas that offer entry into complicated conversations about identity. Her debut, Everything I Never Told You, was the Amazon Book of the Year in 2014. Little Fires Everywhere was the Amazon Best Novel of the year in 2017 an the Goodreads Choice Best Fiction Book of the Year in 2017. So y’all love your Ng.

I like Ng’s books. I do! But I don’t love them, and that always makes me feel weird. It’s kind of how I feel about Star Wars. Sure, I’ll go, but I have no interest in standing in line in costume at midnight to see it. 

photo credit: Andrew Gombert/European Pressphoto Agency at nyt.com

Little Fires Everywhere is a book that is trying to do several things. First, it is a satire of sorts of white, affluent culture. The novel takes place in Shaker Heights, Ohio, which is the author’s hometown. Ng takes aim at the pristine appearance of the setting, the rules and conventions, and the supposed progressive politics of the very rich people. Second, it is an exploration of the complexities of motherhood, and the novel features several mother/daughter relationships that poke at all the ways that being a “good mother” is difficult. And third, the novel wants to explore intercultural/interracial/interclass adoption, which brings all three themes together. Ambitious, right?

The problem I have is that I don’t think that Ng really trusts her audience to grapple with the complex moral issues at the center of the book. I’m not truly spoiling anything with this discussion, but STOP RIGHT NOW if you are worried about finding out too much about the story. 

The interracial/cultural/class adoption controversy involves a legal challenge between affluent/white adoptive parents and a low income, young, Asian birth mother. Class issues are central here, because the baby will certainly grow up with all sorts of material advantages if she stays with her adoptive parents. But the birth mother’s biological connection and cultural connection sit as important, contrasting advantages.  There’s so much interesting (and tragic) possibility in this subject matter, but I don’t think that Ng allows us to encounter the difficult heart of this problem. I wanted to feel challenged, but the adoptive parents are so completely clueless that I felt manipulated. What if the adoptive parents had surrounded the daughter with people and experiences that would help her connect to her heritage? What if there was genuine goodness – though different goodness - on both sides of the legal aisle? Then the reader would have a real dilemma, just as we do when this issue plays out in real courts, when we have to ask, “How does race matter?” and “How does class matter?”

So read this for your book club! There’s a ton to talk about, clearly. You can even wear your Star Wars costume while you do so.

Original from pinterest.com. Then I mangled it.

Here’s an interesting interview with Ng. And here she is in The Atlantic talking about the significance of Goodnight Moon: “If you imagine this book without the words that accompany the pictures, it would be a mystifying work—even a little bit terrifying.”

The Top Five of 2017: And the Winner Is...

I was into the big burgers this year. My #3, The Castle Cross… by Kia Corthron came in at around 800 pages. #2 The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne was 580, and #1, The Nix by Nathan Hill, is 620 pages. Do I get cosmic points for my high calorie reading diet?

So it looks like this is a poster you could buy and hang on your wall if you like bookish representations of big burgers. There's art for everyone, I guess. (on Pinterest, from Lexiconograph)

The Nix is a debut novel, and with that, this book isn’t perfect. It could be much leaner, certainly. But man, this novel hit me at a time that I needed it. That’s one thing that I’ve noticed about making a list of books that I “like.” Books can fill a need – a need to escape, a need to understand, a need to laugh. “Liking” can mean something different at different moments. This past year, I needed to place the feelings I had about our society into some sort of framework. And the best way that I can sum up my feelings about our ongoing series of awful political things is utter confusion about how I could have misunderstood people so profoundly. I clung, despite my increasing age, despite lots of historical evidence to the contrary, to the idea that people have been aspiring to a larger “common good,” even if they disagreed about the finer points of what that idea means. My idealism sat right there. I thought that when push came to shove, most people would be on the side of justice.

And how crazy was that? Of course people actively promote injustice, all the time and in all ways, political and personal. The best moments of #3 Kia Corthron’s The Castle Cross... involve the relationships between black children and white children. And spoiler alert! Even with their friends, those white characters fell back into their power. At the end of the day, those relationships were unequal.

The Nix is a book about failed idealism.  The book jacket paints the story as one of a son trying to understand the mother who abandoned him after she resurfaces in a political scandal. That relationship, the one between parent and child, is so often one where idealism gets its first shake. But The Nix is more than just a family drama. At every turn, the characters have to deal with their disappointment with what they think the world is like compared to what it is really like. Higher education isn’t all about deep inquiry and building ideas. People who say they are going to protect you can be liars. The real world can be way more disappointing than the virtual one. Leaders of social movements for justice can be motivated by completely different principles. And YOU can disappoint yourself, through inaction or misstep or misplaced faith. 

So far, I bet you’re thinking that this book is a giant downer. But believe it or not, this story is funny (there’s a student/professor section in particular that made me feel like I did when I read Richard Russo’s Straight Man for the first time). I read The Nix in the summer, while sitting in the sun. It was my beach book – a beach book for troubled times.

Here’s a New York Times story about Nathan Hill, in which he discusses his World of Warcraft gaming addiction and mentions that the editing process cut 400 pages from this novel. It turns out this IS the lean version.

Review of My Name Is Lucy Barton By Elizabeth Strout

My Name Is Lucy Barton by Pulitzer Prize-winning Elizabeth Strout is not a typical novel. I kept waiting for the gimmick that would make this fit some genre or category I’d recognize, but the gimmick never came. I guess I’d call it a novella, but it also feels a bit like a journal. In any case, the book is a reminder that families can be sources of epic, lifelong pain – or, really, that they are the sources of everything.

The book starts when Lucy is in the hospital, suffering from an infection. Her estranged mother shows up to be with her. I thought, “Mom’s a ghost! This is going to be a ghost story!" Then I thought, “Lucy is really dead! She’s on her way to heaven!” And then I thought, “Lucy’s really in a psychiatric hospital!” None of these things is true. She is really in the hospital with an infection, and her mom is really there.

The reader sits at Lucy’s bedside with her mother and gets glimpses of the deep poverty and abuse and neglect that characterized Lucy’s childhood. Strout only gives us little flashes of this past, however, and her restraint somehow makes reading about Lucy’s experiences all the more difficult.

The mother sits at the center of the back story, and it is devastating to watch Lucy --as an adult-- keep asking, “Do you love me? Do you love me?” We also get to watch Lucy’s relationships with her own daughters and her acknowledgment that she can (and does) cause THEM the kind of pain they will carry forever, too. 

The promotional material for this novel calls it a book about mothers and daughters, but it is not the kind of book that will turn into a Hallmark Channel movie of the week . Note that the cover of the book does not feature flowers! The father in the story is also key, as are siblings and partners and children. I think that ultimately this is a book that intends to remind us that family permanently shapes us, and what happens to us in our families becomes, as Lucy learns, our one and only story to tell.

You can find an interesting article about Strout here.

Thoughts About Re-Reading and The Big Storm Knocked It Over by Laurie Colwin

Once upon a time, I had just finished a round of interviews for graduate school and was struggling with the unsettled feeling that only comes when I stand on the edge of a life-bending decision. I was lost metaphorically as well as physically, with only a paper map to get me around a strange new city (I know that some of you are asking, “What’s a paper map?”).

I went looking for a coffee shop so I could think about the choices that were in front of me. This was a time when there wasn’t a Starbucks on every corner, and most coffee shops were unique, with their own character. On the way, I passed a used bookstore, one with appropriately scholarly Ivy on the brick exterior. I couldn’t resist a visit.

When I came out, I had acquired Laurie Colwin’s A Big Storm Knocked It Over.  At the time, I knew nothing about this author’s long catalog of cooking-related books or about her early death. Imagine being without a smart phone to look at reviews before purchasing!  All I knew is that I couldn’t walk out of a bookstore without a book in my hand, and this one was cheap ($1.50!) and a family drama (my favorite!).

At the coffee shop, I started reading the book and found it boring. I remember being disappointed that a book that looked so promising was so slow and plotless. I finished the novel, but if Goodreads had existed, I would have given it only 2 stars.

Last summer, my family and I went to New York City, and I was swept away by the noise and the people and the constant action. Of course I went to The Strand, and of course I had to buy books. I ended up picking several that had a Manhattan setting, and one of them was, once again, Colwin’s A Big Storm Knocked It Over. I wondered if the issue I had years ago was that I wasn’t old enough yet to imagine the feelings of the main character, a woman who married “late” and was worried about all the things that were involved with becoming a couple and a mother after being single for so long. It seemed worth a second shot. Plus, the book was cheap ($6!), and it was a family drama (my favorite, still!).

A Big Storm Knocked It Over is my first read of 2016, and it turns out that sometimes a boring book is just boring, no matter where you are in your life when you read it. At first, the story feels a little bit like a slightly more dated version of Sex in the City – if Carrie and the Gang did nothing at all except for sit at a restaurant and talk about how weird it is to be them. The main character, Jane Louise, gets married and then gets pregnant. And she thinks about that. Sometimes she talks about it with her best friend. Sometimes she tries to talk about it with her husband, but he doesn't really like to analyze things. Her smarmy boss wants to talk about it, but she tries to avoid him. The end.

I don’t like to dwell on unsatisfying books, but this experience made me think about re-reading. I don’t usually re-read, because I am worried about falling out of love with my favorites. But in this case, I tried to revisit a book that I felt wasn’t quite ready for me all those years ago. And it’s still not right, even though I have changed so much as a reader.

What about you? Are you a re-reader? What kinds of books draw you back?

Seeking the Dysfunctional Sweet Spot: Review of Adult Onset by Ann-Marie MacDonald

When my kids were little, there was a flood of shows on TV featuring British nannies that helped ineffective parents improve. Remember these shows? The allure was that the families in question were just a little bit more insane then the average family (mine). The parents’ decisions were just a little bit more questionable. The kids’ sleep issues were just a little more pronounced. The tantrums were just a little bit louder. The nannies’ advice was usually straightforward (“Don’t give your kids so much candy!”), but my main takeaway was, “At least my parenting isn’t as bad as that!”

For me, a good novel about a dysfunctional family has the same payoff (“At least my family isn’t as bad as that!”). The reader gets to live a while under the roof of a house where things are familiar but just a little bit crazier than life under her own. However, if the dysfunction goes too far – where events are too painful – the novel can be oppressively sad. At the same time, if the dysfunction doesn’t go far enough – where events are too common – the novel can be dull.  I guess I’m saying that there’s a dysfunctional sweet spot, a reading experience that is riveting but that doesn’t break my heart all the way to pieces.

Adult Onset by Ann-Marie MacDonald features a solidly dysfunctional family, but it doesn’t quite find the sweet spot. The novel features Mary Rose, who is a successful Canadian author with two beautiful little kids. But she feels that she’s coming unhinged – she’s forgetting things and finding herself inexplicably filled with rage. On top of that, she is feeling some significant pain in her arm, at the site where she had surgery years before.

The story lasts a week, and, slowly, the reader learns that all was not right in Mary Rose’s past. Her parents had several children who died at birth, but these tragedies were rarely talked about. Her mother was sent away for a while, and when she returned she seemed disconnected. Mary Rose wonders if the source of her current unraveling might lie in childhood experiences she can’t clearly recall. The catch is that her mother, who should hold the answers, is in early stages of what seems like dementia. She is forgetting just at the moment that Mary Rose is trying to remember.

MacDonald has an amazing way with words. Individual paragraphs are gorgeous and witty. But this book suffers from too little plot – we watch Mary Rose walk back and forth to the preschool and the park. We watch her buy flowers, twice. We go with her to Starbucks. All of these little events are important (e.g. putting on boots becomes a meaningful thing), but they pull this much of this book into the realm of “too common dysfunction.” The other part – the part that she can’t remember – is more gripping (and also possibly more terrible), but the reader can mostly see what’s coming from the outset.

I have noticed recently that I have been reading bundles of books with similar themes. I was struck by the commonalities between this book and Toni Morrison’s God Help The Child, which I finished last week. Both of these stories concern the replication and endurance of childhood wounds. But Morrison’s novel has the benefit of connecting to larger cultural trauma – racism and its legacy – to give it relevance.

Oprah Winfrey chose MacDonald’s first novel, Fall On Your Knees, for her Book Club in 2002. Here's an interview from back then. Her current book is largely autobiographical, and you can find a current interview with her here.

Review of The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer

In The Children’s Crusade, Ann Packer gives us the long history of the Blair family. The father, Robert, purchases a piece of land in what is now Silicon Valley and builds a home for his future family. As his children grow up, the house becomes the family’s anchor and also the wedge between its members.

The story switches back and forth between the 1970s and the 2000s, when the family’s four adult children are deciding whether to sell the house after Robert’s death. The reader’s task is to figure out how and why the family comes to this particular crossroads.

As each child’s story unfolds, the reader begins to see how separate the mother is from the center of the family. In fact, the mother essentially moves out of the house into a shed on the property. But at the same time, her self-isolation becomes a new center around which the family begins to orbit. The “Children’s Crusade” in the title refers to the plan the kids hatch to get their mother’s attention. Packer wants us to consider the psychological dimensions of family roles.

I really did want to enjoy this book, and while it was very readable, I did not love it. For one, there’s not a lot of action here. This is a slow, meandering story. The chapters are long, with multiple changes in narrative perspective happening within each one. Finishing this novel required a surprising amount of perseverance.

But my biggest issue with this story was the development of Penny, the mother. For all of the attention Packer gives each character, rooting out each person’s shame and secrets and motivations, Penny remains rather one-dimensional and unsympathetic. And while Bad Mothering is a fascinating topic, I would have liked Penny to have the same complexity as the other characters.

(For fun, I just googled, “Bad mothers in literature,” and it turns out that Penny is not the only one! Who’s your favorite Mommie Dearest?)

I do tend to seek out and enjoy novels about dysfunctional families. Recent favorites in this broad category include The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing by Mira Jacob, Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng, and We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas. The Children’s Crusade is the second novel I’ve read in the last few months that has a “What should we do with the family house?” question as its centerpiece. Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread also follows adult children navigating their relationships with each other and the family legacy. In both cases, I struggled with the books’ pacing and structure and, ultimately, with the heavy hand of the house metaphors.

Most of the interviews with Ann Packer focus on her older work. Here’s one current article, and here are her tips for successful writing.