The Golem of Brooklyn

 

Of all the supernatural creatures in Jewish folklore, the golem is basically the only decent one: a giant humanoid built of mud or clay, always by a learned and holy man, and always in a time of crisis. The Hebrew word for “truth” is inscribed on its forehead, certain esoteric prayers and rituals are incanted and enacted, and the golem animates. Talmudic scholars, who agree on nothing, are unanimous in rejecting the notion that the golem is alive.

In an act of stoned whynotism, Williamsburg-based high school art teacher Len Bronstein decides to create a golem — the five-thousand-year-old “crisis monster” of Jewish mythology — and when he realises that he’s unable to communicate with the massive, Yiddish-speaking, rampage-machine he brought to life, Len runs to the local bodega to beg the clerk there for her help. Between Len (culturally Jewish but won’t say no to a BLT) and Miri (an ex-Hasid who loves her heritage but couldn’t live within the strict confines of her orthodox upbringing) and a night of binge-watching Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Golem is brought up to date on the current climate for Jewish people. And as the creature states that he can only be summoned in a time of great threat, and Len and Miri insist that their lives are not in any imminent danger, a news report about an upcoming White Pride rally in Virginia forces the trio to consider what use a crisis monster might be put to in our times. Adam Mansbach (probably best known for his Go the F**k to Sleep series of tongue-in-cheek “children’s” books) treats this examination of antisemitism with a light and humorous touch (Len is a goofball and extremists — whether Hasidic or Supremacist — are satisfyingly lampooned); but through the memories of The Golem (who is always the same creature with an intact consciousness over time) the history of Jewish persecution is outlined. Ultimately, the question asked by The Golem of Brooklyn is: If Jews are directed to both follow the Golden Rule (what is hateful to you, don’t do to your neighbour) and to engage in tikkun olam (to repair and improve the world), how does unleashing a killing machine against one’s enemies satisfy these directives? All delivered with dick and stoner jokes and a cameo by Larry David. It’s an odd balance, but thoughtful and entertaining. I’m glad I picked this up. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Why there has not been a greater profusion of golems, given the number of extremely shitty situations in which the Jewish people have found themselves over the last fifty-seven hundred and eighty-three years, remains a mystery. But clues might be found in the literature of golems, which you can read about on the internet. In some tellings, the golem is a heroic savior. In others, he is an uncontrollable monster, a doltish brute, even a tragic lover. But perhaps we have not yet scratched the surface of what the golem means.

If I had a slight complaint it would be that the main narrative unspools alongside a series of unrelated stories — the first page begins to outline the long plot of a novel Len never got around to writing (which in the acknowledgements at the end, Mansbach explains is a novel he has never gotten around to writing), a character asks The Golem for a story and he tells of being summoned during the Babylonian Exile in order to defend against the baby-killing spirit of Lilith, Len asks Miri for a story and she recalls trying to find her way in New York as a runaway eighteen-year-old “baby lesbian” — and while these stories do add colour, there’s something unsophisticated about the way they are inserted. On the other hand, it’s probably the only way to share The Golem’s entire history — from his first appearance (after God had moulded Adam out of clay, but before filling him with the breath of life) to his last (standing amongst the thirty-three thousand seven hundred and seventy-one Jews who were shot to death by German soldiers in Kyiv in September of 1941, “the last time he appears in the folklore of the Jewish people”) — and it is The Golem’s history, his purpose and destiny, that are the interesting crux of the narrative.

“So now we’re trying to invent a superhero?”

Miri laid her fork down. “If I’ve learned anything since I left the Sassovs and joined the real world, it’s that people love superheroes.”

“Yeah, in movies. Shit, Miri — people already believe that George Soros controls the world economy and Jews have secret space lasers. You really think —” Len broke off, snarled in his thoughts. He was down to his last bite of BLT, and he was severely tempted to order another one. “You really think that would be good for the Jews?” he finished weakly.

Over the course of the novel, we are shown that Len and Miri are both good people — people who live by the Golden Rule and tikkun olam — but Mansbach does such a good job of representing the White Pride rally as a credible threat to good people everywhere, that the question of what they should do with the power in their hands is an interesting one to explore. In its details, this is a really interesting and entertaining read; not really what you might call literary, and not exactly "light reading", but I'll round up to four stars.

The Future

 

It was dark already at the airfield. Lenk Sketlish’s bone-conducting mini-pods were playing The Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter. Inside his skull, the Beatles had broken up, the sixties were over, violent revolution was in the air and now, anything could happen. He felt alive, he thought, truly for the first time in his life. The night drive out, the music beating in his head, the future was just moments away. This was what he’d planned for. This was the midnight beginning. This was the smooth running-out of the old world and the birth of the new.

Set a few decades ahead of where we are now, The Future imagines us trudging inexorably forward along our current dangerous path: with climate change and income disparity both worsening, power and wealth further concentrating in the hands of a few tech billionaires, and the internet manipulated by algorithms to anger or placate us into partisan camps. This is an interesting plot-driven read — with a Bible-study subthread that I did find particularly fascinating — but honestly, nothing felt like we were any further into the future: the world is not the polluted hellscape of Ready Player One or the dystopic authoritarian state imagined in The Handmaid’s Tale; this reads like the billionaire heads of Amazon, Facebook, and Apple (just slightly more monopolistic and going by other names) collude to further enrich themselves, knowing that if the world were to end tomorrow, knowing that they had hastened that ending, they would have remote luxury bunkers in which to weather any storm. And I assume that this could be set in our current year and that that would still be true. Still: I was intrigued by the plot (even if I didn’t connect to it on a deep level as I did with Naomi Alderman's last novel, The Power) and I enjoyed the read. Three and a halfish stars, rounding down to three. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Although it was strictly against the protocol, Ellen checked the big survivalist site, Name The Day. If anything was out there, if anyone knew the big one was coming, it’d be somewhere on the site. But there was nothing out of the ordinary. Troop build-ups in the South China Sea. A pipeline explosion in eastern Europe. The same old prepper rants. Nothing that those people knew had boiled over. Still, somewhere out there something was happening. Alarms don’t go off for no reason. Somewhere in the world, a situation that used to be just about under control was slipping into ‘not under control at all’. A chain reaction. Somewhere in the jungle, there was a tiger.

As The Future begins, the three main tech heads are at an ecological convention in Northern California when an alarm, which only they have access to, goes off — prompting them to board a jet to safety, long before anyone else on Earth knows that civilisation is about to collapse. Through flashbacks, internet posts, and updates on current events, Alderman weaves together a satisfying and unpredictable storyline with a Blake-Crouch-sci-fi-light vibe. The tech billionaires themselves are blandly interchangeable with the Zuckerbezogates-type we’re all familiar with, but Alderman puts more colour into the people in their sphere who benefit from the money, but have a bit more moral conscience: the smart Black wife, the gay businessman who was squeezed out of his own company, the nonbinary child with the hacking skills. And tying both camps together is Lai Zhen: the lesbian POC, former refugee with a Masters degree (in Archaeology?) who has made a name for herself on the internet as a tester of prepper/survivalist gear. When Zhen lands on the wrong side of a fundamentalist doomsday cult, she and her hacker pals find themselves peeking behind the tech billionaires’ digital curtain. That’s the plot set up, and it works as a pageturner.

I really did like the philosophical bits from the survivalist website as a former member of the doomsday cult tries to explain what its founder, Enoch, meant by the parable of the foxes and rabbits (which explains the animal line-drawings on the novel’s cool graphic cover). In words that evoke the writings of Yuval Noah Harari and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (about humanity domesticating and diminishing ourselves with the dawn of agriculture and private property), the username “OneCorn” explains that right from the start, the Old Testament divides people into farmers vs. hunter-gatherers-pastoralists (Cain vs. Abel, Jacob vs. Esau, Lot vs. Abraham [incidentally, I didn’t know that Lot was Abraham’s nephew and that the destruction of Sodom reflected their different lifestyle choices]) and that the “civilised” farmers/city-dwellers are generally the immoral ones; folks who were more interested in accumulating wealth than respecting the rhythms of the Earth, and that there is a straight line from them to us today. “(Genesis) is about a war. The first great war. The war that lasted five thousand years and ended the world as all human beings had known it before. When the farmers won, they created a new future and we’re living in it.” Alderman also writes in passing that it is in order to justify our own lowly domestication that we settled people want to chase away or harm the Indigenous, the Travellers, and the Homeless; and I need to keep thinking on that. “We hate them to convince ourselves that we’re OK and safe. The story of Sodom is about urban people who had the illusion of a plan, and how they found out that there is no such thing as a plan.” Whether I agree with everything Alderman says or not, it’s the philosophical bits that elevated this beyond potboiler for me.

The sky was grey and saxe-blue*, the air very still. Small birds swung through the sky describing a parabolic curve between invisible infinities, snapping at flying creatures too small to see. Everything that has ever begun in the history of the planet has started with one tiny change, invisible to the naked eye. The sperm says to the egg: knock knock. The egg says: I’ve no reason to let you in. There are no guarantees. And yet, the egg opens up. And yet, the sperm wriggles in. And yet, two packets of information merge. That’s how all of us got here. That’s how nothing turns into something. That’s how a bare ball of rock ends up with gulls and shearwaters, with moss and lichen, with unfurling pale green leaves and scuttling millipedes and rabbits and foxes. That’s how we get life.

(*Not only can I not picture “saxe-blue”, but I was distracted by how many different shades of sky Alderman describes here: the blue can be bright, light, pale, dark, lucent; stone-blue, slate-blue, water-washed blue, “the blank blue chalk of the sky”. Not really a complaint, but not ignorable.)

It was interesting to read this at the same time we’re watching the TV show Succession , the same week that billionaires were lost during the implosion of the Titan submersible, and while I would agree that there’s something immoral about anyone hoarding assets by the billions (“eat the rich” is so obvious a thesis as to be lazy), the line that Alderman draws between some of our oldest writings and their inevitable consequences through today and into the future is a compelling point that I haven’t encountered before, and that elevated the whole for me. Better than good, maybe not great.

The Adversary

 

“God alone ordains the state of things,” he said.
The Widow shook her head. “O fools learn sense,” she said.
The Beadle flinched at those words, at the feculent gall of the woman to speak down to him with scripture. He said, “An adversary there shall be even round about the land. And he shall bring down thy strength from thee, and thy palaces shall be spoiled.”
“The Book of Amos?” the Widow asked and he nodded. “Am I the adversary, Mr. Clinch? Or would that be you?”
“We shall have to wait and see,” he said.

Set in the same timeframe (late eighteenth-century) and along the same stretch of Newfoundland’s northern coast as The Innocents (the Best siblings from that novel are referenced a few times here), The Adversary trains its focus onto those few who knew wealth and power in the isolated fishing port of Mockbeggar (to wit: we immediately meet the Mr. Strapp to whom the Best orphans were indebted). With a struggle for dominance at play between two rival operations — and with gender, class, and race imposing their own pressures — this gritty historical fiction is really the story of how the whims, egotism, and greed of those at the top translates into helpless misery for the working class. Plus ça change. Once again, Michael Crummey has brought breathing life into his characters and setting — with the sensibilities of a poet, his word choices are always evocative without being florid — and while his powerseekers are thoroughly unlikeable, it’s the little people caught in the crossfire that give the reader someone to root for. I was absolutely captivated by the storytelling here — from the sentences to the overall story arc — and I loved the whole thing. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

In the days after the killing, several men took young Solemn Lambe aside to advise him against doing anything rash to avenge Dallen’s death. Abe Strapp was best left to God’s judgement, they said. Solemn was not quite twelve and the notion of God’s judgement was too hypothetical to offer comfort. You won’t be helping anyone if you winds up dead like your father, people insisted. As if they wanted to make the boy complicit in their own infuriating helplessness.

“Infuriating helplessness” is the abiding atmosphere in Mockbeggar: Left to the whims of climate, disease, unreliable cod stocks, and marauding privateers, those trying to eke out a living on this fogbound stretch of rock can hardly keep their families fed at the best of times. Layer on the companies who hold everyone in debt — with the power of the Church and State backing their interests — and it’s a wonder anyone survived this life at all. But it’s in the small moments of resistance — the love between youngsters and newfound friends, the Quakers who refuse to meet violence with violence, the outsiders unafraid to stand up to petty tyranny — that grace may be found. Even so: the innocents may find themselves but pawns in the inscrutable games of their local gods.

She lifted her head to look away from that feeling and caught sight of the mirror above the fireplace, the shattered glass reflecting her back in slivers that almost adhered, the figure there riven and distorted and still undeniably herself. It made her think her instincts had been right all along — the world agitated against coherence, against concord, and the truest portrait a person could manage was fragmentary, incomplete.

I’ve tried to avoid spoilers with the overall plot (which was compelling and surprising), but I have to say that it was in the details that Crummey most engaged me: the disinterment of the Pilgrim, the horrific game of “mumble the sparrow”, the impenetrable slang of the ark ruffians; rough scenes told in the voice of a poet go down smoothly. And I want to end by noting that I was delighted to make the connection between The Adversary and The Innocents and would happily read anything else Crummey wants to set in this world.

The Observer: A Novel

 

I loved being an observer, not a participant. I got a nice shot of two old guys who reminded me of Hardy’s grandfather and mine, both named Horace. Heads close together as they talked, probably because they were deaf, their intent communion looked like a Fellini movie. I wrote down their names and hoped/prayed the photo would turn out.

The Observer reads as chatty and candid — as though the main character, Julia, is conversationally recalling the highlights of a past experience — and that is fitting as this is a novel based on Marina Endicott’s own early years as the spouse of an RCMP member in 1990s rural Alberta. As Julia puts her career as a playwright on hold in order to join her partner, Hardy, on his first posting, she’ll find herself not only distanced from the long-term residents of this tight-knit community but also increasingly distanced from Hardy as he struggles to deal with his policing duties (from domestic disputes to countless fatal car accidents) on the understaffed force. Salvation comes for Julia in the form of an intermittent job with the local newspaper, The Observer, and as she gets out into the community, she makes friends with both locals and other RCMP spouses, growing to understand what pressures the stoic Hardy is truly suffering with. Set in a time before a Mountie would have felt comfortable asking for mental health supports, this novel admirably exposes the stress and sacrifices historically expected of RCMP members, and their families. The chatty style makes this seem like a breezy read but Endicott uses it to creeping and devastating effect; this is true and tragic life exposed and I loved the whole thing. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Whatever a life ever means, in the end it’s a set of stories you tell yourself, or whoever will listen. Old Mabel, wanting to be left alone out there in the woods — I had always imagined that it was better to have company, better for people to be together than alone. But then I thought of Mrs. Benson, with her broken arm. And Jim Miller, finding that difficult old maid stiff and strange in the bed, and that became his life from then on. With her. I thought about my own parents, and Hardy’s. We live, as we dream — alone together.

Overworked and underpaid, forbidden from discussing the details of his duties with anyone outside the force, as a new recruit, Hardy was rarely home — and when he was home, he was increasingly exhausted, shaky, and bottled up. Lonely, worried about the bills, and unable to get any work done on a new play she was supposed to be writing, Julia jumped at the chance to become an interim editor at The Observer. As she interviewed locals and chased down stories, Julia began to realise the trouble stewing beneath the surface of their sleepy town; trouble that Hardy needed to deal with every day, and then keep to himself. The pair stays at the posting for four years — their arrival and departure marked by passing comets — and along with exposing the pressures Hardy’s job imposed upon their lives, this is a lovely story of a relationship made stronger by those pressures.

People in Medway helped me, were kind even when I was blanked out with fear and grief. I made a few good friends. But I was always standing to one side looking on, seeing what was none of my business. The things that were my business stand out in strong relief: Hardy and the state of his mind and body and soul; my child, who needed my good attention; and in a sideways sense my self, standing and observing me, just as I did the world.

Without giving away any more of the plot, I’ll just stress that this story is relatable and engaging and feels like a slice of true life; for, after all, it is based on the author’s own experiences. All good stuff.

If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

 

Question: If an Egyptian cannot speak English, who is telling his story?

_______________________________

We fall asleep in each other’s arms. We watch a film together and fall asleep in our outdoor clothes, in each other’s arms, her scratchy head beneath my chin. The grief numbs us both. I find myself measuring for the first time how far America is from Cairo, let alone Shobrakheit. How to bridge this ocean? How to explain all I left behind to get even this far?

If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English had me captivated from the start: Throwing us into a disorienting, alternating POV — between an Egyptian-American woman who decides to move to Cairo against her immigrant parents’ wishes and a poor cocaine-addicted Egyptian photographer from the countryside who became disillusioned after the fizzling out of the Arab Spring revolution — author Noor Naga creates a freighted love story that explores power imbalances, identity politics, and the absolute inability of anyone to understand life from a different culture’s lived experience. And just when a reader might get too relaxed with the novel’s unusual format (each short section starts with a puzzling “koan” as in the opening quote, followed by quick jumps between the POVs; a format that eventually becomes rote), Naga flips the script in the second section (omitting the introductory questions) and begins to insert frequent footnotes (which even retroactively explain undefined terms from the first section), and I was further intrigued by the change in the format. When the third section changes format yet again, I was gobsmacked by how, in a fairly short work, Naga was able to demonstrate just how hard it is to tell a relatable story: not touch nor words nor photographs can be understood separate from the entire history of the person who offers them. From the sentences to the overall effort, I loved absolutely everything about this novel.

We believed, we really believed that the revolution would succeed on the strength of our brotherhood, and the nobility of our cause. Had we been less occupied with documenting the losses, circulating names and dates, video footage, we might have noticed earlier that everything was not as it seemed. There was money pouring in from overseas, along with vested interests. We thought we were toppling a regime, but the whole world was involved. It seems so obvious now, but if you weren’t there, you can’t possibly judge. I can’t tell you what it was like.

The unnamed “boy from Shobrakheit” happened to arrive in Cairo before the start of 2011’s revolt; and while he was able to sell his photographs to the foreign press for an unimaginable price, he became disillusioned when he learned that in the revolution’s aftermath, his pictures had been used to identify — and penalise — activists, and as the novels opens, he has not taken a picture with the camera he still wears around his neck for eleven years; living in a rat-infested rooftop shack, he has decided to cold turkey his addictions just as he meets a beautiful young foreigner at a friend’s cafe. As the (also unnamed) young woman decides to return to her roots — living in an airy Cairo apartment and working as an English teacher; both of which her mother arranged for her in advance — she meets the photographer, and with her “baby Arabic” that doesn’t quite create understanding between them, she finds herself performing a subservient role for him (cooking and cleaning and washing his shabby clothes after working all day as he — unbeknownst to her — detoxes and watches videos on his phone in her apartment all day), and they spend their time both loving one another and using one another until the disconnect reaches a breaking point. The results are explosive.

William doesn’t even realize what’s at stake when I am asked by shopkeepers and street children and sugar-cane juicers where I’m from. And why should he realize? They ask him too. Those outside of a language, of a culture, see furniture through a window and believe it is a room. But those inside know there are infinite rooms just out of view, and that they can always be more deeply inside.

I’ve read reviews by readers (presumably authentic Egyptians) who are offended by the female character’s cultural ignorance and poor opinions regarding Cairo’s underclass residents, but to me, this feels like the point: she had ideas about who she was (a lost Egyptian who was actually a privileged American slumming her way to authenticity), and without a true language or lived history in common with those around her, her disdain of her freedoms and advantages were bewildering and off-putting to life-long Egyptian residents (and especially to her outcast lover). The fact that the third section of this novel dissects those ideas felt brilliant and elevating; as much as Naga (who is also an Egyptian-American who has made the move to Cairo) might be accused of not understanding the true Egyptian experience, I believe that this novel is an acknowledgement of the impossibility of anyone achieving precisely that understanding across cultural lines. This is a bold and subversive novel of social and literary commentary and it all worked for me.

Kennedy gave me this book for Christmas, knowing that we were planning a trip to Egypt (and knowing that I have developed a penchant for posing with books in interesting locales). As it turned out, I saved this book for the end of the trip and read it at a resort on the Red Sea:

I was really glad to have saved this book for our trip — and especially glad that I had read it after our time in Cairo — because there were quite a few references I wouldn't have gotten if I had read it earlier; from the bonkers traffic that pedestrians have to negotiate to the Stella beer served everywhere, I felt like I had just the faintest idea of the disconnect between cultures that Naga was trying to explore. 

Cold

 

Something merciless, frigid, and cruel was descending upon Toronto. Many would say it was too late in the season for such an anomalous and severe weather manifestation to develop. Spring was technically just a few weeks away. Then there were those who were frequently ignored, but whose understanding of the world was far older, and they would say the icy climate was being called, beckoned even. In the age of science, who had ever heard of such silliness. Regardless, the cold came. And something, deep in the city, was delighted.

Cold is a twisty thriller, set in modern-day Toronto and overlaid with Indigenous mythology, and while it was consistently entertaining — and very often funny — I didn’t find this to be particularly deep or meaningful. Still, an engaging read that I took with me on a plane, despite knowing that it starts with a crash; I do enjoy Drew Hayden Taylor’s voice and I look forward to reading his work again in the future. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Cessna 206s are generally designed to fly higher than this particular plane was at the moment. A good, reliable utility aircraft, barely twenty years old, it was currently finding the principles of aerodynamics versus the laws of gravity somewhat problematic. It was in an argument of lift versus acceleration versus gravity versus ice on the wing, and to be blunt, the plane was losing.

A small plane crashes in the frozen muskeg of Northern Ontario, and after a brief and tense narrative focussed on the flight’s two survivors, the story jumps to a year later as one of those survivors is on a Canada-wide book tour with her rushed-to-print memoir of how she found her way to safety. Interwoven with her tale is that of Paul North — a defenceman in the Indigenous Hockey League who, at thirty-five, might be about to age out of semi-pro hockey — and Elmore Trent — a professor of Indigenous Studies who, despite having been born on a reserve and raised in a Residential School, treats his First Nations ancestry more as a subject for academic study than as culture to be lived. These strands, and characters, intersect in unpredictable ways, and the thriller is set up.

“Hmm, interesting. So, are you saying legends, in whatever their form, are restricted to time immemorial? There are no potential legends in the making today? The days of free-ranging legends or traditional stories regarding Indigenous people, places, and things are unfortunately a thing of the past? That’s a very dim view of contemporary life, Ms. Fiddler.”

As an unseasonable cold descends upon the city and a series of gruesome murders occur — which put both Elmore and Paul, unrelatedly, on the investigating detective’s radar — the professor is forced to wonder if the murderer is actually a legendary monster from his people’s mythology come to life. And if that is so, where can he find a modern day warrior to help him defeat it?

All of this was sounding crazier and crazier. But sometimes in life, the world became crazier and crazier through no action of your own . And coincidently, leaning in to the absurd was the only way you could fight back. In the frozen blizzard of the conundrum that had suddenly enveloped him, Elmore Trent could see a trail sketched hesitantly ahead of him. The question was: would he be walking it alone?

That’s as much plot as I’ll share, but I also want to note that Taylor discusses many other Indigenous authors’ works in this book. In the voice of his professor character, he positively recommends both Waubgeshig Rice’s novel Moon of the Crusted Snow and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (which I also enjoyed as dystopic explorations of the fears of Canada’s modern day First Nations peoples), and it makes sense that Elmore would recommend Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse to Paul (as it’s about hockey). Less enthusiastically, he refers to Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road as “well-written but contextually questionable” and Tomson Hiway’s play Dry Lips as “more a misogynistic play than a play about misogyny.” And it’s in the context of these other works that Taylor references that Cold felt lacking to me: it’s a decent mystery with thrilling elements, but I didn’t learn anything from it. Still: entertaining for what it is and I am happy to have read this.

Death Comes As the End

 

Esa paused and said slowly: “Nofret is beautiful. But remember this: Men are made fools by the gleaming limbs of women, and lo, in a minute they are become discolored carnelians…”  

Her voice deepened as she quoted: “A trifle, a little, the likeness of a dream, and death comes as the end…”

It’s commonly known that Agatha Christie accompanied her archaeologist husband (Sir Max Mallowan) on digs throughout the Middle East; and while those settings served as inspiration for some of her more famous novels, Death Comes As the End is the only mystery that Dame Christie actually set in antiquity. This makes for an interesting tradeoff: the reader doesn’t get the familiar experience of watching Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple unravel mysteries, but we do get an insider’s view of a wealthy functionary’s domestic life in Ancient Egypt (maids are forever counting the linens; scribes catalogue the granaries; the bodies pile up on the banks of the silver Nile). There is quite a lot of domestic melodrama here — the sons of an ageing Ka-priest have their prospects diminished when their father brings home a beautiful young concubine who has ambitions of her own — and I wasn’t necessarily invested in the mystery itself, but as always, Christie makes astute psychological observations about her characters, proving here that people (and their self-interested motivations) haven’t changed at all in four thousand years. An enjoyable read; a little different than the typical Christie mystery and a perfect Mother's Day present from Mallory in anticipation of an upcoming trip to Egypt.

From her early childhood Renisenb could remember hearing these elder brothers of hers arguing in just those selfsame accents. It gave her suddenly a feeling of security…She was home again. Yes, she had come home…Yet as she looked once more across the pale, shining river, her rebellion and pain mounted again. Khay, her young husband, was dead…Khay with his laughing face and strong shoulders. Khay was with Osiris in the Kingdom of the Dead — and she, Renisenb, his dearly loved wife, was left desolate. Eight years they had had together — she had come to him as little more than a child — and now she had returned widowed, with Khay’s child, Teti, to her father’s house.

As the novel begins, recently widowed Renisenb returns to her childhood home and is comforted by the bustle of her brothers and their families. The eldest brother, Yahmose, performs their father’s rituals during his frequent absences — and is assured of inheriting the position of Ka-priest at his death — but two other brothers (the cocky and handsome Sobek and the young and impetuous Ipy) both believe that they deserve to one day assume their father’s role. When their father, Imhotep, eventually returns home from his estates in the north in the company of a beautiful and haughty concubine, Nofret, Renisenb’s sisters-in-law will begin a back-of-the-house “women’s campaign” against the upstart that will come back to undermine their own positions. And after several characters say that they would like to see Nofret dead, her body is discovered at the bottom of a cliff: was it an accident or a murder? And why is her spirit spotted on the nights of other deaths?

“What persecution — what vindictiveness — is this! My concubine whom I treated well, to whom I paid all honor, whom I buried with the proper rites, sparing no expense. I have eaten and drunk with her in friendship — to that all can bear witness. She had had nothing of which to complain — I did indeed more for her than would have been considered right and fitting. I was prepared to favor her to the detriment of my sons who were born to me. Why, then, should she thus come back from the dead to persecute me and my family?”

There’s a large cast of murder suspects (and, as seems to be Christie’s usual schema, the list gets shorter as the bodies pile up), but again, the mystery aspect wasn’t the most interesting part of this novel for me. I did like the setting and the way that Christie used it, and I did like the psychological observations (even if I didn’t love that Renisenb was so naive that other characters needed to be constantly explaining to her how people and the world really work), and overall, this was a worthwhile entertainment.

Mallory gave me this book for Mother's Day — knowing that we were planning a trip to Egypt and that I have developed a penchant for posing with books in interesting locations — and, yeah, I pulled it out in King Tut's tomb:

Normal Women

 

Despite their appalling faults, Dani really did like the Normal Women. She really, really did. Usually. Sometimes, anyway. And maybe, eventually, she could persuade the Normal Women to not be dicks; show the Normal Women, at the very least, that all the best-looking people held the same views that Dani did.

Just as with her last novel, Motherthing, Ainslie Hogarth has written a truly strange/entertaining/relatable/feminist work of fiction this time around with Normal Women. And it maybe won’t be for everyone, but I winced and laughed and nodded my head with recognition throughout; and while straight married women might benefit from seeing themselves in this, men might benefit even more by getting a peek inside their wives’ secret thoughts. I loved the whole thing. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final form.)

As I did with Motherthing, I’m going to start with a longish quote that gives a representative sense of the style: Here, the main character, Dani, is remembering being out for lunch with a group of moms (the “Normal Women”) while pregnant and having asked what a “fourth degree tear” is during childbirth (and one having replied that it means a bad rip, from “poo hole to goo hole”) :

Maybe that’s why the C-section happened. Because Dani had just wanted it so very badly: sweating, panicked, coiled helplessly around every contraction, incapable of just letting go, of breathing, her mind’s eye yoked to Ellen’s salted lips, tight around the vowels: “poooooo hole to goooooo hole.” And the body is just such a mysterious thing, especially as it pertains to childbirth. In fact, after reading book after book about the connection between fear and pain, the orgasmic, ecstatic, rapturous birth experience, the power of visualizations — I am petals unfurling, I am huge, I am opening wide as a cave, exactly as I should, for my baby to spill without pain — one might even come to the conclusion that the body is only mysterious as it pertains to childbirth. That otherwise it’s actually pretty predictable: a system of sphincters and pipes and cables that harmonize chaos like the warming of an orchestra pit, ins and outs and organs thumping, processing fuel, petals unfurling, becoming huge, ejecting waste and sometimes life, and that was Lotte, Dani’s precious baby, who mercifully bypassed her vagina, cried only when she really meant it, and completed a truly sublime figure eight when she pressed her face into Dani’s breast to eat.

That’s not going to be for everyone, but it worked for me. The review proper:

No one had to tell Clark to be good. He simply was good. He bought ethically sourced coffee. He donated a dollar when prompted by cashiers. He never took a sick day and doggedly pursued promotions and took on extra projects and stayed late and mentored his juniors. Clark did everything correctly, and all he asked for in return was everything.

While pregnant with their first child — and living in a cramped one bedroom condo in the city — Dani’s husband, Clark, announces that he’s up for a big promotion — one that means Dani can be a stay-at-home mom if she wants — but the catch is that they would have to move back to Dani’s hometown; which is complicated given the well-known family legacy that she had tried to run away from. On the one hand, Dani (with a degree in philosophy) doesn’t have a “career” per se — and they already know that finding day care will be an issue — but on the other, Dani understands the power and freedom that she’ll be giving up if she allows Clark to make all the money. In the end, moving closer to her mother and her oldest friend (who introduces her to her mommy group, the “Normal Women”), and being able to buy a large family home, convinces Dani to make the move. But when one of Clark’s coworkers is diagnosed with colon cancer, Dani realises how financially vulnerable she and her infant daughter are; and when she notices how glamorous and carefree the staff of a local yoga studio/spa/nightclub/ (brothel?) appears to be, she begins to wonder if working somewhere like that could be her safety net.

The relationship between Dani and Clark is 100% believable: they are both a little selfish, a little guarded, but make efforts to take care of one another (with both feeling resentful when those efforts aren’t recognised). They are also unequivocally devoted to their daughter, Lotte — Clark being the kind of dad who bristles when someone calls it babysitting as he cares for his own child; Dani being the kind of mom who scrolls online mommy forums to confirm her ideas about motherhood — both of them giving Lotte constant attention and love and care. Dani’s new friends are wealthy and chic — with their cocktail brunches, athletic tights, affogatos, and momfluencer blogs — and while the details of Dani’s modern experience are different from my days as a stay-at-home mom, Hogarth absolutely captured the ambivalence of the situation; of feeling both gratitude and resentment; being both anchored and trapped. When Dani starts a friendship with the owner of The Temple, this Renata explains that men, too, are trapped in their roles, as they have had the “crucial feminine” stamped out of them since birth:

“Imagine if men could enjoy tenderness, could connect with other people, the way they did when they were infants. Imagine the world this could be. Right now, a lot of men, not all men but a lot of them, when they indulge in tenderness, when they experience vulnerability, they become enraged, ashamed, humiliated. It makes them want to kill us, literally. Hurt people. But the men that come to The Temple, the men we work with, they’re changing. And they’re changing each other. They’re changing their brothers, their nephews. Their sons. We’re making a difference here, Dani. Maybe even saving the fucking world.”

I’m just hitting some of the beats here — there’s plenty more plot going on to develop the characters and relate the truths — but again, I winced and laughed and nodded my head with recognition throughout; this reads like lived experience, and I saw myself in it. I enjoy Hogarth’s voice and style and I will read her again.