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.

Review of Our Kids by Robert D. Putnam

In Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, Robert D. Putnam aspires to make the narrowing of the opportunity gap a political task, something that is urgent, broadly worthwhile, and achievable. He popularizes a great deal of research with the intent of making the general reader/citizen/voter motivated to take on what is both a moral and practical problem.

To do this, he and his research colleagues interview a range of people in a broad array of American locations, generating qualitative data on family structure, income, neighborhood, educational ambition and attainment, social supports, and affiliation. He prefaces all of this contemporary data with a nostalgic look back at his childhood town, where, he claims, the opportunities available for an individual to participate in community life and to be upwardly mobile were not dependent on the social class of his or her parents. His reminiscing allows him to create a working definition for the “American Dream,” which includes a “fair shot” at creating a life that is upwardly mobile. Parents in this 1950s idyll could be reasonably assured, no matter their station, that their children would be able to build a lifestyle that rivaled or surpassed their own.

He contrasts this historical context (for which he uses not just his warm memories but interview data with classmates from that era) with the modern experiences of affluent and poor families in different areas around the country.  These interviews suggest that today, the social class in which a person is born constrains his or her possibilities from the outset.

And with that, Putnam points to some very specific characteristics of modern life that are different for low-income and more affluent children: parenting styles and family supports, educational communities (and opportunities within those communities), and neighborhood institutions, and relationships. His political project involves getting ordinary Americans to promote reform in each of those areas, including supporting tax reform to benefit low-income parents, especially those who are unmarried or who aren’t in the work force; funding quality early childhood education; building mixed-income housing; advocating for public ownership of school activity fees; and investing in neighborhood redevelopment and organizations.

I am of two minds about this book. On the one hand, HOORAY for Putnam for pushing us to think about inequality in a concrete way. It is so strategic to have this kind of conversation starting just as a new election cycle begins.  And the idea of writing a book that is aimed at a general rather than an academic audience helps propel Putnam’s idea that grappling with inequality is everybody’s responsibility in a democratic society.

But on the other hand, I had issues with his analysis all the way through, beginning with his umbrella discussion of “the good old days.” It seems as if what he really wants to talk about is not “equality of opportunity,” but rather access to the middle class. His portrait of his small town in the 1950s as providing a level playing field tumbles when you consider the civil rights barriers and glass ceilings and structural barriers to opportunity that existed for some people at that point in time. It may have been –and importantly so – that there were more opportunities for everyone to be a functioning member of the middle class in that place and at that point, but that is not the same as having equal opportunities for each person to do whatever s/he wants to do.

And with that, if what he’s really talking about is access to the middle class, then there are large structural and economic barriers TODAY that need to be made explicit. Putnam makes an offhand comment in his “Conceptual Note” section (p.44) that he thinks of “upper class” homes as families where both parents have graduated from college. But he also says that he doesn’t want to address the “inconsistencies” of this classification, such as the fact that someone can be a “well-educated but poorly paid librarian.”

But that IS a modern issue of opportunity, isn’t it?  Many seemingly middle class jobs (librarian, teacher, social worker….) require significant higher education but don’t offer easy entrance or sustained access to a middle class lifestyle. Thinking about the economic forces that are making that so is part of the political work of addressing inequality. We need to get clear about who has real power in our society and what kinds of laws and systems got them there. My guess is that the “American Dream” is not as clearly in the reach of all of the “rich” people he interviews for this book as he suggests.

Putnam is an interesting guy. You can read about the research he did for this book here – the bibliography is fantastic! There are also all sorts of interesting related papers and links in his Saguaro Seminar on Civic Engagement in America at Harvard.

Review of Radical Equations by Robert P. Moses and Charles E. Cobb, Jr.

Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights is not like the other books that I read for Nonfiction November, in that it is not narrative nonfiction. Though he is telling a story, Robert P. Moses (with writing partner Cobb) is not trying to delight the readers with a suspenseful “plot” or a novel-like structure. For most readers, this will resemble the informative nonfiction you have to read for school.

However, this is an important book to revisit for people who are interested in public school reform. Most of us who read about school change or school problems have read journalistic accounts of public schools. Most of the authors are white. And, even more importantly, white people are mobilizing most of the reform efforts chronicled in these modern accounts (think: Teach for America; No Child Left Behind; Race to the Top….)

Activist and MacArthur Genius Moses situates his reform effort – The Algebra Project – not as “school reform” but as a civil rights movement. Drawing on his own history as an African American activist in the fight for voting rights in the South, he positions educational opportunity in math and science as a new access point for freedom. And he discusses how change in the educational system needs to come from the inside (minority and low-income communities) rather than from the outside (corporate reform).

The Algebra Project emerged in the late-1980s as a way to introduce algebra to middle school kids who were likely to be funneled off the college-prep track. Moses found that algebra was a gate keeper that prevented otherwise promising students from being prepared to take college-level math. He notes that schools often prepare students for the status-quo, meaning a world in which the power structure remains the same. And if kids are systemically kept out of the pathways to power (by being routed away from certain math classes, or being given access later than their white peers), they will not have the tools to make their communities powerful.

This book was published in 2001, and Moses is looking backward to make sense of how the program grew over a couple of decades. It’s worth noting that the wide-ranging, progressive curricular reform that he is promoting does not feel particularly viable in today’s test-driven, back-to-basics, top-down era. The political pendulum about curriculum sat in a different place when the project originated, favoring community-controlled schooling and more autonomous decision-making. However, the specifics of the curriculum (though important) do not interest me as much as the way that the author conceives of the change process, with community members running the show. According to Moses, school change needs to be a “family” project – meaning that the ideas need to be owned and promoted by community members engaged in a struggle for freedom. And the very idea of freedom as a purpose and an anchor of the movement is significant – the reason for engaging in this school change project is not merely for kids to become workers in another man’s business; it’s to change the opportunity structure altogether.

If you’re interested in reading further about the insider/outsider dynamic in modern school reform, I highly recommend Sarah Carr’s Hope Against Hope: Three Schools, One City, and the Struggle to Educate America’s Children. Carr, like Moses, also addresses the tension in civil rights activism between mobilization for economic power and mobilization for political power. Moses’ project appears to be trying to bridge the two approaches to transformation.

Review of Hold Fast to Dreams by Beth Zasloff and Joshua Steckel

I was pleasantly surprised by Hold Fast to Dreams: A College Guidance Counselor, His Students, and the Vision of a Life Beyond Poverty, which I had assumed was yet another account of a white teacher trying to be a “savior” in an inner-city school. And indeed, Joshua Steckel is a white college counselor at a Brooklyn high school that serves a diverse group low-income and minority students. But this book is not a cliché and asks its readers to think critically about the promise and limits of higher education in an unequal society.

The narrative follows a set of students as they apply and then go (or try to go) to college. The authors rely on interviews and essays written by the students themselves, so the kids’ voices are front and center. We see the stumbling blocks to access (e.g. parents needing to file taxes early enough to be eligible for financial aid; visiting far-away schools; tensions between individual aspiration and family responsibility, etc.), and we also see the road blocks involved with degree fulfillment (identity issues on largely white campuses; lack of a supportive cohort; financial strain; family pressure; academic struggle, etc.).

What distinguishes this narrative from others like it is the teacher’s vulnerability in showing his initial assumptions about and eventual learning with the kids he serves (assumption #1: good students should absolutely go to a four year, residential liberal arts college) or about the colleges whose relationships he cultivates (assumption #2: colleges will really commit to a student for four years with social and economic support). And in the end, the reader gets a picture of the featured kids as real human beings developing identities, rather than as statistics or exemplars or ‘future workers.’ The reader also gets a sense of teaching as a deeply relational activity.

This is the second book this month whose title gives me pause. The idea that this is a book that focuses only on “the vision of a life beyond poverty” does not fully reflect the nuance of the stories in the account.  Zasloff and Steckel themselves grow to understand that higher education – even for students who come from challenging circumstances -- is often part of the process of building a “good life.”  A good life definitely has an economic component, but it also involves “interests, passions, and abilities,” [296] the balance between responsibility and self-fulfillment [296], and “a search for meaning.” [297].  I wish the title would reflect that complexity.

This is a provocative read, and a good one. I recommend it.

One thing of note -- The New Press, which is a nonprofit, "public-interest" publisher, put out this book.  It looks like they also published The New Jim Crow, which I've been meaning to read. The role of the publishing industry in narrative nonfiction is an interesting one, and I’d like to explore it more.

Review of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace by Jeff Hobbs

I was drawn to this book by Alex Kotlowitz’s blurb on the book jacket. Kotlowitz is one of my favorite urban storytellers, in no large part because he is self-conscious about his role in that storytelling.  In There are No Children Here, he discusses the muddied waters of the friendship he developed with the family he was “reporting on,” and elsewhere he has played around with the concept of “narration” as an idea.

The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League is being discussed as a flashlight of sorts on the complicated relationship between poverty, race, education, and success. On the surface, this is the story of a young African-American achiever who heads to Yale, but who dies violently a decade later in the same community where he started, presumably due to his participation in the drug trade. The author, who was his college roommate, sets out to give more context to Peace’s story and does, indeed, paint a puzzling and real portrait of a man who was enigmatic to many of his friends and family members even in life.

I found this to be an engaging and provocative book. As a reader, the title lets you know that Peace dies young, but it is a gripping page-turner nonetheless. This is good narrative nonfiction.

However, I don’t think this is a story that ultimately sheds light on the topics the author intends. I don’t even think it’s a book about Robert Peace. I think this is a book about the author himself – his unfinished feelings about interracial friendship, the fact that he could never really understand the man he roomed with and cared about, the fact that even with a shared educational experience, they seemed to share little at all. This IS a story about race, but it’s not necessarily the story I was expecting or, perhaps, the one that the author planned to tell.

The fact that this is Hobbs’ own story explains his very dominant narrative voice. There are few quotations here. Though he admits to countless interviews, the voices of the people he’s describing aren’t clear. The reader hears his questions and his inability to really get the answers he seeks (Why didn't Robert Peace take advantage of the opportunities that seemed to be at his feet?).

I do think that the title is not the best one for the book. If we are to believe the author's account, Robert Peace didn’t have a tragic life – the reader learns all about his devotion to his family, his love of ideas, his entrepreneurship, his steady wisdom, his love of travel, and so on. His death was tragic, but not his life. We can wonder why he made the choices he did, and we can mourn the outcome. But it seems like the author is working hard to show the richness of a life that is reduced to a cliché in the newspaper accounts of his death. The title only reinforces that cliché.