Book Reviews

I’m always interested in what people are reading. Recently, a friend told me her book club had just finished My Antonia (1918). She had suggested it, remembering how much she enjoyed Willa Cather’s novel when she was younger. And I wondered: Why don’t we read the classics more?

Probably many of us were introduced to them too early. I’ve never fully recovered from George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss in eighth grade. Such assigned works came with an implicit message that they were supposed to be “good for you,” making them the literary equivalent of asparagus, broccoli, and other largely inedible foods in the young person’s mind. I suspect we weren’t ready for some of the books. We hadn’t lived enough, hadn’t experienced enough to appreciate them. (Middlemarch. Definitely, Middlemarch.)

And yet, some persist in our memories, sentimental favorites—Treasure Island, Little Women, The Secret Garden, David Copperfield—like warm recollections of a childhood friendship.

Italo Calvino said, "A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say." These are books that have stood the test of time. They speak to each new age, offering truths and insights into the human condition that continue to be relevant today. They are books that stay with us, long after we’ve finished them. In contrast, there is something ephemeral about contemporary fiction. Always has been—Fun activity for a rainy Sunday afternoon: Google the list of Pulitzer Prize-winning novels of the last hundred years. I’m betting you’ve never heard of most of them; very few are read today. And beware the book reviewer who proclaims some new novel “an instant classic.” Mmm, yeah, probably not.

Maybe it’s just me. After a summer of fun, frothy, easily forgettable beach reads, one craves something meatier. Like hungering for something more substantial after eating lots of cotton candy. In my novel, The Legacy of Emily Hargraves (yet to be declared a classic) the bibliophile Ashley recommends reading one classic each year. You don’t need to lead with the heavy hitters, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment or Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Start with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. You may appreciate her sly, wry social commentary that you missed in high school.

Or like my friend, re-read (and re-discover) a favorite from your childhood (Charlotte’s Web, Alice in Wonderland, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) or from when you were a teen (The Hobbit, The Count of Monte Cristo, Great Expectations.) If you liked Dickens, try his unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood—I remember racing through that book to see how it doesn’t end—and then pick up Dan Simmons’ Drood (2009) which plays with the novel’s mysteries in the context of the great novelist’s final days.

Or try Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, then read Percival Everett’s James (2024), which tells Twain’s classic tale from the viewpoint of Jim. Want something to steady and center you in these unsteady times? Try Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. He was one of the great and few good Roman emperors, probably the closest humanity has come to a philosopher king. Feeling lusty? Try D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). Somewhat tame by today’s standards, it was banned for obscenity and not published in the US until 1959.

Here’s an idea: Read classic works that were published one hundred years ago in 1925. For example, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, then watch Baz Luhrmann’s lush film adaptation with Leonardo DiCaprio; or read Mrs. Dalloway, following it up with The Hours (1998), Michael Cunningham’s creative riff on Virginia Woolf’s ground-breaking novel.

Some works are definitely challenging. Last year I tackled Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924). It is one of those great masterpieces of Western literature that everyone should read before they die, or die trying, or maybe die from trying. Consider it a chance to practice your skim-reflex, and it’s still less habit forming than most over-the-counter sleep aids.

For next year, you could consider works published in 1926: Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Franz Kafka’s The Castle (Kafka seems increasingly relevant these days) or maybe  The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie.

With each book, step into a different world and into a different age. You may need to adjust to a different pace, a different style of expression, a different sense of time—time is experienced differently when traveling in horse-drawn carriages than in cars. By doing this, you may also realize how many of today’s so-called historical TV dramas are really just modern sensibilities and attitudes dressed up in period costumes (I’m looking at you, “Bridgerton”!) Choose one classic and devote yourself to it, dig into it. Ask yourself: Why is this book considered a classic? Why have people continued to read it? What might it have to say about life in this 21^st century?

Try it. It will be good for you.

An immigrant story for our time.

We are a nation of immigrant stories, those family tales of how our ancestors came to this country from Ireland, or from Italy, from Mexico or Moldavia, from China, or Lagos or Laos. Each story is different, unique to a particular family and its origin culture. Yet there are similarities, too: these immigrants were usually driven by dreams and/or desperation. They experienced disorientation, needing to adapt to different customs, to a different language, often to different values, while also trying to hold on to their own cultural heritage.

The Bad Muslim Discount is a more recent immigrant story, a novel set in 2016, that is timely, touching, and poignant. It’s also very funny. Anvar, the son of Pakistani immigrants, has grown up and been educated in the US, and is now an attorney. A product of American and Pakistani cultures, he often finds himself suspended uncomfortably between the two. Irreverent and endlessly joking, he is frequently at odds with his family's traditional values and more somber outlook (he's the "bad Muslim" of the title).

Family and friends express concern that he is losing touch with his religion. “I’m just trying to make sure you don’t endanger your soul,” a friend tells him. Anvar replies, “Don’t worry about it. They made me give it up when I passed the bar.” His mother comments, “This one thinks he is funny…He’s the only one who thinks so.”

A second, more serious story is told by Safwa, a young Iraqi woman from war-torn Baghdad. She is living with her conservative father and abusive fiancé. For her, culture is a prison, and this new country may offer her an escape. But she lacks proper documents.

Anvar and Safwa’s stories also reflect the immigrant experience in 21st century America. A presidential campaign is underway where one of the candidates is stoking anti-immigrant, and particularly anti-Muslim, sentiment, as a way to boost his campaign and fire up his base. Safwa worries at the increasingly hate-filled rhetoric. But Anvar reassures her. He has lived here much of his life. He knows this country. This man will never be elected, he tells her. The American people are better than that. Ouch!

Throughout the book, Anvar struggles with his faith, in God and in humanity, eventually coming to an uneasy peace for his soul that allows him to proceed amid life’s many complexities and uncertainties—“I no longer believed that I believed, though I did have faith without knowing what I had faith in.”

These wild and precious lives.

The Swedish writer Fredrik Backman is the author of the international bestseller, A Man Called Ove (2012). His wry, dry Nordic humor is again on display in his latest novel, titled simply My Friends. It’s a celebration of the healing, redemptive qualities of art and friendship.

Louisa, an eighteen-year-old aspiring artist and social outcast, is fascinated by a world-famous painting—a picture of the sea with three young people sitting at the end of a long pier—and she seeks to learn the story behind it.

She meets Ted, one of the three teens in the painting who’s now an adult. As her grumpy guide, he slowly unwinds the tale of them and of their friend, “the artist,” who painted the picture. (Like Ove, Ted is one of those lovable curmudgeons Backman does so well). Louisa returns with him to the scene of the painting and learns what became of the four teenagers.

With homes defined by abuse, grief, and loss, their friendship was a refuge from the brutality and bleakness of their lives, when “they lay on the pier and drank cheap sodas and watched the sunset for free.” They were fourteen, a magical time of terrible jokes and silly adventures and fights bringing them close to not speaking to each other ever again, only to return the next day the best of friends.

At the heart of the story is the gifted and disturbed teen artist, his life both tormented and made transcendent by “art that is a joy so overwhelming you almost can’t bear it.”  (“There’s something very wrong with him, he wants to say, and the only time he doesn’t hate himself is when he’s painting…That’s the only time he ever feels like himself.” Perhaps not surprising, Backman writes in an afterword, “Telling stories is the only time I really like myself.”)

The novel has a timeless, fable-like quality. We don’t know where it takes place, or in what age—there are trains and cars, so it’s a modern setting—but it has a Once-upon-a-time feel to it. And as with all fables, there are little drops of wisdom dispensed along the way which help the characters (and the readers) make it through the often daunting and lonely experience of living.

One of these is the Mary Oliver poem, “The Summer Day,” which ends Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?

In this modern fable on art and friendship, Backman reminds us that, whatever our age, we have one wild and precious life, and asks “What do you plan to do with it?”

Those who can’t remember their dreams

Ever since Ocean Vuong brought out his stunning debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), many of us have been eagerly awaiting his next. It has arrived, and The Emperor of Gladness is very different. Where Gorgeous was slight, tight, and focused, a letter written by a young Vietnamese American man to his illiterate mother, Gladness is much longer and sprawling, almost montage-like in presenting a range of characters and their stories. Although an undercurrent of sadness runs through both books, the first had a sense of hope and promise. This new novel is almost unrelieved in its bleakness, its emotional tones painted with a palette of grays.

It’s set in the fictional East Gladness, a post-industrial blight in Connecticut, polluted and forgotten by the politicians and polluting corporations, and reflecting the characters’ lives (“everyone rushes past us…We are the blur in the windows of your trains and minivans, your Greyhounds.”) These are people who have become accustomed to living without hope.

Among them is Hai, a nineteen-year-old Vietnamese American, ashamed and drug-addicted, self-medicating to assuage the pain of living. He lets his mother believe he’s attending college, studying to become a doctor. Preparing to end his life, he meets the aging, slowly dementing Grazina Vitkus, and becomes her caregiver, living with her in her old, decrepit house. The pair bond, finding comfort in their mutual caring for the other.

To help support them, Hai gets a job at a franchise restaurant called HomeMarket (“We turn food into feeling, folks.”) To Hai, it “was not so much a restaurant as a giant microwave…‘made by hand’ meant heating up the contents of a bag of mushy food cooked nearly a year ago in a laboratory outside Des Moines and vacuum-sealed in industrial resin sacks.” The manager proudly boasts theirs is “the third-best-grossing HomeMarket in all twelve locations in the Northeast.”

Here again, Vuong, an award-winning poet, has some lovely images expressed in some beautiful language: In spring, the cherry blossoms don’t just blossom, they “foam” across the county, the soft rains “pebble” against the window, in the fall, the aspens are “coppering along the shores.” Kids from the nearby Catholic prep school come pouring in to the restaurant, “a sweatered sea of suppressed, unrepentant hormones.”

Ours has been called a second Gilded Age, with all the excess, inequality, and corruption of the 1890s. In every Gilded Age, there are the un-gilded, those barely getting by, whose lives are sustained by cigarettes, cheap booze and street drugs, or over-prescribed opiates, and this week’s lottery ticket. Vuong is giving expression to the forgotten in this current age of glitz, glut, greed and gloom, reminding us that for some—for increasingly many—the American Dream has gotten so far out of reach, they can no longer remember their own dreams. They no longer dream.

Creativity: An Invitation to Play

Genius, for Thomas Alva Edison, was one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. Adam Moss, former editor of New York Magazine, comes to much the same conclusion in The Work of Art.

Moss interviewed more than 40 artists, including composer Stephen Sondheim, novelist Michael Cunningham (The Hours), playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America), filmmaker Sofia Coppola (“Lost in Translation”), dancer/choreographer Twyla Tharp, “This American Life” host Ira Glass, as well as painters, sculptors, visual artists, chefs, cartoonists, and other highly creative people. Key for all of them is the intense experience of inspiration—an idea, an image, a musical phrase—but then begins the work.

Nobel laureate poet Louise Glück well articulates the agony and the ecstasy of the creative process. The ecstasy: “This engagement is as absorbing as nothing else I have ever in my life known,” she says. “The whole of the self is utterly engaged in something that seems more important than anything in the world.” She describes a natural high where the self is participating in something greater than the self and beyond the self, a sense that one is a co-creator with a mysterious partner who knows you better than you know yourself.

And the agony: Those moments of dormancy, of No-Flow, of being cut off from that creative partnership are for her “a torment,” usually turning her “despondent.” During such times, “I feel doomed,” she says. “But I don’t react to those feelings by trying to eliminate them through diligence or intelligence, because what’s needed is not diligence or intelligence. What’s needed is an intervention of something outside yourself, better than yourself, but with access to yourself.” Outside yourself? asks Moss. Sounds otherworldly. Yes, she admits, for her it is.

Like Glück, many of those interviewed understand the process to be more about listening and discovering than actual creating. “I don’t think I’m gifted,” said the painter Francis Bacon. “I just think I’m receptive.”

So, what to do during those down times, when the muse, or the spirit, or the subconscious isn’t communicating? “I just wait,” says Glück. “For me, the really hard thing about writing is how much patience you need to have.” She adds, “I mean you can will things, but whenever I’ve tried to do that, the poem just goes to hell. Becomes a contrivance. An arrangement made with a mind instead of a discovery.”

Creative writing teachers urge their students to “just get words down on paper.” But too often, without that creative connection, you’re left with only a bunch of inert words on the page. Glück advises, “If you want a discovery that will surprise you, too, you just have to wait.”

Surprise and discovery have always been part of the creative process. The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood likened it to being a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat. Art happening is “the extra rabbit coming out of the hat, the one you didn’t put there.”

The other message from Moss’ survey of artists is that, while we can’t control the 1 percent inspiration, we can decide to engage in the 99 percent of genius that’s perspiration. We can do the work of art.

For many artists, creativity is an act of play. Composer Brian Eno sees play as essential to learning and living fully, an activity that most of us lose as we grow older. He says children learn through play; adults play through art.

Anyone can make art, Moss argues—which is not the same as becoming a great artist, and anyway, that may be the wrong way to think about creativity and art. The cartoonist Lynda Barry notes how differently we think about art than about, say, riding a bicycle. “When we hop on a bicycle, no part of us thinks that we’ll be able to win the Tour de France, but with art, we think if we’re not really good at it, we can’t, or shouldn’t, do it.” Her point is we can still enjoy the bike ride, even if we’re not Lance Armstrong or Eddy Merckx. It’s the same with the process of creation. It’s the playing, the “engagement,” that’s important.

Moss is finally left with the mystery of the creative process. Maybe someday science will solve it, but until that time, the best we can manage is to explore the mystery ourselves by participating in it when lightning strikes, when the spirit moves us, when the opportunity arises, and let ourselves become engaged in something greater than ourselves.

Do-It-Yourself Obituary

Bud Stanley writes obituaries for a living. Forty-four, divorced and adrift, he’s living his life on automatic, coasting along without aim or purpose. The book opens with a work colleague setting Bud up on a blind date. The woman arrives. She’s attractive, smart, personable—and accompanied by her ex-boyfriend with whom she’s just reconciled. The date is not a great success.

Returning home, Bud begins drinking, and “in the muddled, whiskey-soaked place where terrible ideas pose as good ones,” he starts writing his own obituary: Bud Stanley, the first man to perform open-heart surgery on himself, died today in a hot-air balloon accident…Stanley was married anywhere from four to nine times. His ex-wives, all friends, praised his unique lovemaking technique, one they said could last upward to twenty-eight seconds. The obituary adds that he was a member of the Jamaican Bobsled Team, ninth in line to the British throne, and the inventor of toothpaste…You get the idea. This drunken exercise would have been innocent, good fun, had Bud not accidentally uploaded his obituary into the wire service system.

The next morning, he is promptly placed on leave, an administrative step prior to being fired. Howard, his boss, mentor and friend, tells him, “I don’t think anything matters to you anymore, Bud. And that kind of breaks my heart…You are an obituary writer who does not understand the first thing about life.” Reading this modern urban tale, I kept hearing the Beatles circa 1965: He's a real nowhere man/ Sitting in his nowhere land/ Making all his nowhere plans for nobody.

In a scene mirroring the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), Bud learns he can’t be fired because the system now has him listed as deceased.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m a little confused. I’m not dead.”…

“For all intents and purposes, you are dead to the company. Which is why you have rights.”

“But if I were alive?”

“You’d be fired and we would end your COBRA due to negligence on your part.”

“So I’m better off dead?”

“Certainly in terms of health and dental, yes.”

I See You’ve Called in Dead begins as a funny, breezy beach read, but as Bud starts taking stock of his “nowhere life,” the story expands emotionally, prompting readers to examine how we live our own lives—or don’t. Through a series of incidents, he begins to understand that the measure of a life is not in the quantity of its years but in the quality of its moments. Or as the Stoic philosopher Seneca expressed it: Life, if lived well, is long enough. By the end, Bud is writing a very different obituary for himself.

Warning: Amid the many laughs, there will be tears.

Poetics of the profound

At the beginning of the 19^th century and well into the Industrial Revolution, William Wordsworth wrote: “The world is too much with us; late and soon,/ Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;/ Little we see in Nature that is ours;/ We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

Wordsworth’s sonnet was both a lament and a warning: With the benefits of science has come “disenchantment.” We have outgrown the old mythologies with their gods and spirits. But we have lost a sense of the sacred and our connection to it. This is the theme of Cosmic Connections by esteemed Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor.

For Taylor, poetry is much more than pretty words. It can point to a profoundly different way of perceiving the universe and our place in it (“What does poetry do? It begins to transform our experience.”)

Ancient cultures viewed the cosmos as a meaningful and interconnected whole. However, with Newton and the Scientific Revolution, there came a perceptual shift. The universe was now understood as a machine governed by natural laws. This mechanistic view understood the cosmos as a vast, impersonal system of forces, waves and particles, and eliminated the kind of spiritual connection that once gave meaning and purpose to human lives. “God is dead,” claimed the German philosopher Nietzsche.

Re-inventing Huckleberry Finn. Again.

This graphic novel reminded me of the pleasure I once enjoyed reading Classics Illustrated comics as a child: the bright colors, the vivid drawings, the story flowing from one panel to the next in a cavalcade of images, they all fed my young imagination. It’s how I first “read” The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, Treasure Island, and other classics.

The book industry officially recognized graphic novels as a unique genre in 2001, and ever since then they have become increasingly popular, particularly with younger readers. Over the years, they have continued to gain visibility and legitimacy as an art form, especially after 1992, when Maus, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about the holocaust, won the Pulitzer Prize.

Though primarily a visual art form, the graphic novel can convey narrative, nuance, and insight. This is certainly the case with Big Jim and the White Boy, a re-imagining of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It joins other recent retellings, or extensions, of Mark Twain’s classic, like Robert Coover’s Huck Out West (2017), where Huck as a young man witnesses the “winning” of the West—the gold rushes, the homesteaders, the Indian wars, the massacres—that was a formative chapter in this nation’s history; or like last year’s National Book Award-winning James (2024) by Percival Everett, retelling Twain’s tale from the point of view of the enslaved character Jim.

A novel for our time.

People read novels for different reasons. Probably most read for a good story. We read some novels for the beauty of their language (Think Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead) or to learn something new, or experience vicariously what we would never experience in our own lives. We also read novels to expand our world. It’s rare to find one novel that can do all this, but Richard Powers’ amazing Playground does just that, and more.

Author of the 2018 Pulitzer-prize winning The Overstory, Powers tells interlocking stories of four people over a half century. Todd Keane is on the cutting edge of Artificial Intelligence (“I was helping to build the next big way of being.”) He shares a close and competitive relationship with best friend Rafi Young, for whom life is decanted through literature. Both are in love with Ina Aroita, who finds her meaning through art. Meanwhile, ninety-something Evie Beaulieu, whose father developed the first aqualung, has found life most fulfilling in the ocean. Together, these characters’ lives embody the novel’s main themes.

Powers’ story is as capacious as the Pacific which Evie spends her life exploring. Through his exquisite prose, we share her exhilaration in the watery underworld, amid its abundant life. He makes an argument that our planet should be called Ocean rather than Earth. (“Ninety percent of the biosphere is underwater!”) We terrestrials are in the minority.

Bigfoot and his followers

In preparation for this month’s sQuatch Fest at the Cowlitz County Expo Center, you might bone up on the legend and lore of the big, hairy guy with this recent (2024) book by John O’Connor, which offers “the secret history” of Bigfoot—as against, what, the standard, well-known history? (One suspects the influence of a marketing department.)

O’Connor began by reading Robert Michael Pyle’s 1995 Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide, judging it “far and away the most literate of the Bigfoot literature.” “It was the first book I’d read during my research, which was probably a mistake, as it seemed to have said it all.” (We’ll return to this point.) O’Connor starts his own exploration by visiting the sage of Grays River, finding the good gray poet-naturalist to be a delightful, entertaining raconteur.

From Grays River, O’Connor begins a wide-ranging trek that takes him to Maine, Ohio, Kentucky, Louisiana, Florida, northern California, as well as familiar parts of the Pacific Northwest.