Poor Deer

 

Poor Deer came to me when I was small, and scared, and alone, and in need of hope, however fragile, that one day I would find a way to make up for what I’d done. Her hooves kick out at my shins. She nips and hurts. She clings and sighs. She demands justice. She never forgives. A tooth for a tooth, and a claw for a claw, she always says. A life for a life, she always says. She leaves scat on the rug, and cries easily. She is my oldest friend.

Margaret “Bunny” Murphy was four years old when she was responsible for a terrible deed, and although she has carried that burden ever since — a burden which manifests as a blue-robed, yellow-nub-toothed doe that clings to her back, hissing in the girl’s ear that she is a liar — no one in the girl’s life has ever noticed her pain or thought to discuss with her the limited responsibility a four-year-old should bear for her actions (indeed, with an overlay of Catholic guilt, the shame that Margaret is steeped in threatens punishment in the next life, too). I come to this having viscerally loved Claire Oshetsky’s last novel, Chouette, and while Poor Deer is something different — more quiet, less intensely bizarre — Oshetsky’s writing is still lovely and contemplative and digs deep into the human psyche. So, while my personal taste runs more to the bizarre, this was still a very worthwhile read; recommended!

I’ve been telling made-up stories for so long that the unadorned truth feels ugly and ungrammatical and the facts feel like borrowed broken things picked out at random from a jumble of hearsay and old gossip. Once I tried to tell my mother the truth about the day of the schoolyard flood and she slapped me and said: “MARGARET MURPHY, YOU WILL NEVER REPEAT THAT AWFUL LIE AGAIN!” and I never did.

When she was little, Margaret loved reading her aunt’s big book of fairy tales and making up her own — written in a cryptic language and stored in a shoe box — and always, Margaret’s stories had the happy endings that real life rarely sees. Now sixteen and having driven to a motel near Niagara Falls — in the company of a young mother and her little girl that Margaret picked up along the way — Margaret is ready to write out her “confession” on motel stationery, with Poor Deer piping up from her corner every time Margaret attempts to steer her story onto a happier path (I did like that I felt surprised every time that Poor Deer interrupts and Margaret would need to retread an earlier passage and branch it out into a different, truer, direction). Through her confession we learn how little support Margaret got from her single mother (her father having died “in the war”; the setting seems to be the 1950s), how everyone in her small hometown continued blaming her for what happened “on the day of the schoolyard flood”, and while she didn’t really have any friends (except, sometimes, heart-filling interactions with other outsiders), her aunt did try to be there for the girl — when she wasn’t working night shift at the mill and sleeping all day. It’s unclear whether Margaret had some kind of developmental delays, or whether that’s something her mother said to put her down, but the girl didn’t succeed at school, didn’t succeed socially, and couldn’t bring herself to participate at Church; unwilling to make a confession to the priest, unwilling to take communion. All because of the burden of guilt she felt for something that happened when she was four. As an examination of repressed childhood trauma (and the burdens, big and small, we all carry on our backs), and the cleansing power of shining a light in the dark recesses of the mind (we might not all need to pen an actual confession, but self-knowledge and -reflection are integral to mental health), Poor Deer brings forth ideas that aren’t talked about nearly enough, and I could appreciate the message.

I feel an ominous turn in this story coming. It’s looming over my future. I’m running out of time to find my happy ending. Poor Deer is giving me no guidance. She no longer interrupts my progress with caustic interjections or snide objections. At the moment my musty nemesis is nodding off in the corner. Her soft exhalations fill room 127 of Little Ida’s Motor Lodge with a pastoral peacefulness. She mumbles something incoherent in her sleep and sticks her long slow tongue out and licks her black nose and then she snuffles and sighs and tucks her head back under one hoof. Penny and Glo are sleeping the way they always do, all tangle-legged and a-tumble with their hair flung across the pillows. I’m rubbing the tip of my missing finger. I’m remembering the smell of bacon grease. I’m remembering a time when my mother loved me.

Much like the owl baby in Chouette, the deer riding Margaret’s back is a wonderful metaphor for a fact of human existence that might be otherwise hard to describe, and Oshetsky proves themselves, once again, a master of such metaphors. Lovely, touching — ultimately important — book.

The MANIAC

 

He knew the real challenge was not building the thing but asking it the right questions in a language intelligible to the machine. And he was the only one who spoke the language.

We christened our machine the Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer.

MANIAC, for short.

On its surface, the title of The MANIAC would appear to refer to the early computer tucked away in the basement of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, but metaphorically, it refers to those geniuses whose ability to see further and understand more deeply than us ordinary humans can appear as a form of madness (or mania) to those around them. Primarily the story of genius polymath John von Neumann — the overwhelming majority of this novel, sandwiched between the stories of Paul Ehrenfest (quantum physicist and friend of Einstein, who literally could not live with understanding reality at the subatomic level) and South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol (whose unrivalled mastery of mankind’s most complicated game was bested by early AI) — this reads like nonfiction, with the stories of these three men straightforwardly related by those around them. I was interested in everything that author Benjamin Labatut compiled here, could understand the warning to humanity that grouping these stories together provides, but something about it didn’t really feel like a novel. Still enjoyed the read and am happy to have picked it up. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

He was a fifty-three-year-old Jewish mathematician who had emigrated from Hungary to America in 1937, and yet at his bedside, hanging on his every word, sat Rear Admiral Lewis Strauss, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission; the Secretary of Defense; the Secretaries of Air, Army, and Navy; and the military Chiefs of Staff — all waiting for a final spark, one more idea from the mind that had birthed the modern computer, laid down the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics, written the equations for the implosion of the atomic bomb, fathered the Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, heralded the arrival of digital life, self-reproducing machines, artificial intelligence, and the technological singularity, and promised them godlike control over the Earth’s climate, now wasting away before their eyes, screaming in agony, lost in delirium, dying, just like any other man.

John von Neumann’s biography is incredible — from his earliest days, his spooky ability to understand and make connections was recognised and encouraged — and for the most part, this is the story of his education and career; from working with Kurt Gödel on the basic truths of mathematics (writing sixty some pages on how we know that 1+1=2, eventually coming to the conclusion that there are no fundamental truths) to his work on the Manhattan Project and early computers (building on Alan Turing’s work to create Artificial Intelligence in the 1950s), von Neumann’s superhuman mental abilities, coupled with obsessive focus, does seem a brand of ‘maniac’. And as I wrote above, we learn von Neumann’s story from those who knew him, from his oldest friend, Nobel Prize winner Eugene Wigner (‘There are two kinds of people in this world: Jancsi von Neumann and the rest of us’), his first wife Mariette (‘I married Johnny because, idiot that he was, he made me laugh, and we remained in lust during our entire lives’), co-founder of Game Theory Oskar Morgenstern (‘He wasn’t a man who sat down to think, he would be thinking continuously, so that by the time it was ready in his mind, it all came rushing out; infallible, he would dictate these carefully constructed sentences without a moment’s hesitation and making absolutely no mistakes’), Nils Aall Barricelli, whose use of MANIAC to replicate evolution on number sets was adapted by von Neumann, uncredited (‘Ire and fury, bile and hatred for that magpie, that smiling devil of a man’), and his second wife, Klara:

The thing about my husband that people don’t understand is that he truly saw life as a game, he regarded all human endeavors, no matter how deadly or serious, in that spirit. He once told me that, just as wild animals play when they are young in preparation for lethal circumstances arising later in their lives, mathematics may be, to a large extent, nothing but a strange and wonderful collection of games, an enterprise whose real purpose, beyond any one stated outright, is to slowly work changes in the individual and collective human psyche, as a way to prepare us for a future that nobody can imagine.

I do wish I knew what quotes can actually be attributed to their speakers, and which were imagined by Labatut, but I did believe the overall narrative: I believed that the man who advised a first-strike hydrogen bomb attack against the Soviet Union in order to end the Cold War could be the same man calmly accepting the idea of unleashing an uncontrollable self-replicating AI into the universe as a kind of inevitability: the math was written into the foundation of the universe so it will happen. I guess we’re meant to see that, in the first section, Ehrenfest anticipated all of this (to his own detriment), and in the final section, we must recognise that forces unleashed are already beyond human oversight; all because of those maniacs who saw further and understood reality more deeply and have scienced away our future. Again: I really enjoyed what I learned, I think I understand the point, and while I do enjoy reading nonfiction, it’s hard to think of this as a novel.

The Heart in Winter

 

There she was with Tom Rourke hand in hand in terrible love in the dead of night and the forest deep looking up to the sky and all at once yessir absolutely they could see fires on the moon. Now that there’s a suretell sign, Ding Dong said, that it’s come to a time in your lives you need to act. And the dude Ding Dong he spoke with this like weird authority.

Little river was moving some ice already and long picks of it gleamed like running knives in the dark. They walked on and further on. It was such a clear night and all the stars were out. It was very cold. They sat there together in the wood all huddled up in their coats and shivered and they were miserable in love and they held on to each other for a long time out of the need and they could hear each other breathing.

There is no decision, he said, we’ve just got to be together and she didn’t have to tell him he was right about that.

This is so up my alley: I’ve said many times that I love an Irish storyteller, and as it turns out, just maybe I love a Western, too. Set in October of 1891 in Butte, Montana (“screeching and crazy and loud as the depths of hell”), The Heart of Winter is at heart a love story — star-crossed, soul-struck, forbidden love — and in the hands of Kevin Barry, this story is funny, surreal, and tense. Like a mashup of everything I loved in Days Without End, The Sisters Brothers, and The Luminaries, this novel was thoroughly entertaining, emotionally touching, and delightful in its language; I could not have asked for more. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

He thought of them now as he lay dim-eyed and roostered. It was in a mood of sadness and fun combined that he thought of the pair. My-name-Tom and my-name-Polly. They were giddy and green and always kinda jumpin. They were in love with each other too much. They were drawn by natures twined and persuadable to a terrain vague was what the Frenchman of the olden times would call it. It was to a world between worlds they were drawn. They were headed into this unknowable place without map to it nor the sense to be afraid even and they were in this regard heroical. Death hovered close by the lovers always. It was around them like a charge on the air. It was like a blue gunpowder waft. It was like electricity. They had an aspect of cool affront to life and so it was deathwards they were drawn —

Or at least that’s how the philosophic Métis was figuring things.

Approaching thirty, Irish born Tom Rourke has grown up in Montana territory: he works as an assistant photographer, writes love letters on behalf of illiterate miners, and spends his evenings drinking hard, smoking opium, and visiting his favourite sex workers. Polly Gillespie — a mail order bride who isn’t quite as young or innocent as she had portrayed herself in her letters — comes into the photography studio for a portrait with her new husband, mine boss Long Ant’ny Harrington, and one glance between Tom and Polly cements between them that they were meant to be together. As the publisher’s blurb states (skip this if you want to go in blind like I did), the pair runs away together but Harrington hires some rough “Jacks” to hunt them down, and what follows is half romance/half tense and atmospheric adventure story.

It was hard to choose quotes for this review because the magic comes in long passages, rather than pithy bites, but I did find the whole thing magical. The dialogue is snappy, the setting is gorgeously rendered, the characters (and especially the supporting characters) are unique individuals, and the plot is unpredictable. The romance is believable, but over everything, is a layer of fate and enchantment and access to otherworldly powers:

She leaned in close then with her claw to his chest and whispered some crazy stuff and he laughed and he laughed harder again the stranger the words got. It was like she was speaking in the tongue but it had no connection with any god you might think of. She just let it come from inside. She didn’t even think about it. These were words that came from a place that was deep inside. A place that was before our world and time. That was a deepdown place and forest-like. And he laughed and shook a bit and she let the words come with her claw to his chest and she was raking him pretty good. She let him know they both came from this same place. We can be in it still, she said. We can be in it whenever we need to be and we can always talk to each other there. He was on top of her then biting at her neck and breast and they surely understood each other and the whole thing was just the kind of luck that don’t even come once in a lifetime for most.

Some paragraphs took reading through two or three times before I could make sense of them, and I don’t know if you’d call this writing style heavily ironic, post-modern, or straight-up surrealism, but I was thoroughly entertained, intellectually engaged, and emotionally touched throughout. This may not be to everyone’s tastes, but it suited my own precisely. My favourite by Barry so far.

Crooked Seeds

 

For this is action, this not being sure, this careless 

Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow,

Making ready to forget, and always coming back 

To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago. 

— From “Soonest Mended” by John Ashbery

 

Almost at once she began tapping her fingers on the crutch handles, her throat dry and wanting. She glanced across at the queue, hoping to catch an eye, to ask if someone had a cigarette, but no one looked at her. Nothing else to see in the dawn other than rooftops starting to appear slowly, a series of them, going back and back into the gray light, each straddling something dark and stillborn — the empty rooms of empty homes. So many people had left. Yet even in the ones that were inhabited, there was only darkness. Everyone was here now, in this queue. There was no other life.

Set in a near-future drought-stricken South Africa, Crooked Seeds begins like a dark dystopia, following a one-legged woman as she joins the early morning queue at a water truck. This Deidre is bitter and abusive — a self-proclaimed “thing of need and desperation” — and as she makes aggressively self-pitying demands on the people around her, it begins to dawn on the reader that, yes, there’s a water shortage and wildfires and government incompetence putting pressure on these citizens, but for the most part, the dystopia that Deidre lives in is of her own making. I was very impressed by the allegorical nature of Karen Jennings’ Booker Prize nominated An Island and Crooked Seeds continues in this tradition, with Deidre standing in for a certain kind of post-colonial white South African; resentful of what she has lost and willfully oblivious to the guilt of her forefathers. This is quite a short novel but it packs a powerful punch; light spoilers ahead. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

She woke with the thirst already upon her, still in her clothes, cold from having slept on top of the covers. Two days, three, since she had last changed; the smell of her overcast with sweat, fried food, cigarettes. Underwear’s stink strong enough that it reached her even before she moved to squat over an old plastic mixing bowl that lived beside the bed. She steadied her weight on the bed frame with one hand, the other holding on to the seat of a wooden chair that creaked as she lowered herself. She didn’t have to put the light on, knew by the burn and smell that the urine was dark, dark as cough syrup, as sickness.

Deidre’s life is suffused with her own stink and filth: living alone in public housing — her father is dead, her mother in a nursing home, her adult daughter is in England (Deidre refusing invitations to join her there), and her “genius” older brother hasn’t been seen since the incident that cost Deidre her leg at eighteen years old — she hobbles along on her crutches, bumming cigarettes from the security guard, bullying the young mother down the hallway to help her with chores, begging the bartender at the local club to extend her just a bit more credit to quench her “thirst”. When police detectives start to ask Deidre questions about the house she grew up in — a property that had been expropriated by the government because of its location over an untapped aquifer — she will be forced to reckon with what kind of man her brother, affiliated with a pro-apartheid group in the 90’s, really was.

There are subtle hints of racism in this narrative: The self-pitying Deidre is on disability — living in public housing, blowing her government cheques on cigarettes and boxed wine — but everyone she takes advantage of (the security guard, the neighbour, the bartender, her daughter) is revealed to be a hard-working Black person. Even the detectives are Black (when one of them is referred to as Constable Xaba, pronounced with “a small click in the side of the mouth”, Deidre scoffs that it would be easier for her to pronounce it Zaba, “With a name like that, she must be used to it by now”) and, post-apartheid, her demoted social standing is the real dystopia:

There had been stories about that in the tabloids. About white people losing their jobs, not being able to find any others, of losing everything and having to live on the streets, where they were starving to death. There were photos of white children begging, of white women working as domestics for black families. A world on its head. A world that had been feared by some and that was easy to point at now, these few cases, and to say, “You see, you see.”

The novel’s title is inspired by the poem “Soonest Mended”, excerpted in its epigraph (and above), and this analysis of the poem (noting that it “explores alienation, learning the lessons of life and personal history”) was influential in my understanding of the novel. Seemingly the story of one person (highly unlikeable because she refuses to take responsibility for herself) being forced to make a reckoning with her family’s past, the themes of Crooked Seeds can be extrapolated to any colonised country: the first step in moving forward is acknowledging and taking responsibility for the traumas of the past. Really well done; especially impressive in such a short work.

Good Material

 

“Andy!” he shouts from the window as he rolls it down. “Remember: a broken heart is a jester’s greatest prop.” I smile defeatedly. “You’ve been handed a clown wig and collar. You could get some of your best work out of this.”

I was pleasantly surprised by Good Material, having not read Dolly Alderton before. Funny and poignant, this story of a break-up and its aftermath went down smooth — and just when I was beginning to wonder if it was fair for a female author to be giving us this intimately emotional story from a man’s POV, Alderton pulls off a subtle trick (I was so pleasantly surprised that I’ll give no spoilers) and ultimately, this is a wondrously relatable, feminist perspective on modern life and relationships. The ending bit is the best bit, but I was happily entertained right up to the wow moment. I’ll definitely read Alderton again. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Comedians make the best drinking companions. They will never have enough validation, enough success, enough love, enough good stories, enough material. They will always be looking for something else. A good time needs the fires of tragedy underneath it to keep it on a rolling boil.

Andy Dawson is a thirty-five year old London-based comedian (of middling success) who finds himself homeless and emotionally adrift when his girlfriend of four years, Jen, decides to break up with him; seemingly out of nowhere. Andy soon discovers that a break-up at thirty-five is different from a break-up in your twenties: his friends are all married now and having kids and generally unavailable to join him for drinks at short notice. Alderton contrasts the lacking emotional support Andy receives from his friends with what he hears Jen is getting from hers (complicated by the fact that they met through their best friends and had been a best-friend-foursome for the past four years) and it is touching to watch as Andy deals with just how much he has lost. I appreciated that Jen was never made out to be a villain, and as we get to know her, little-by-little, we realise there’s always two sides to every break-up. Along the way, Andy has a string of funny misadventures — from discovering that he’s losing his hair to renting a room from a doomsday-prepping old man (as the calendar flips over to the year 2020) — and as a comedian, at least it’s all “good material” for his next Fringe show:

Throughout the hour, he reads passages from a book his mum gave him about the science of heartbreak and relates it back to examples of how he processed the break-up. The last section he reads is about how elephants grieve. “If this were a previous show of mine, it’s at this point I would say that elephants and I have more in common than just a large trunk, but I won’t,” he says as he gets a laugh. “I won’t say that. Because I’m trying something different, ladies and gentlemen.” He puts the book down. “I think, if I try to make sense of the madness of the last six months, I could say that I’ve been doing what the elephants do. I’ve been scattering the bones of us and who we were together. Reading all our old messages, throwing bottles of discounted Armani She into a canal, trying to recreate our memories, standing on stage and talking to you. It’s a weird kind of mourning and a weird kind of celebration, to examine the skeleton of something that was once so magnificent, before you scatter all the fragments of it out into the world to say goodbye.”

There are a few things I would like to write about this book’s ending — but won’t, to prevent spoilers — yet I will note that in her afterword, Alderton thanks the dozen or so men who vetted the voice and friendships of her male narrator, and ultimately, that felt like a fair use of the male perspective to illuminate the female experience; and that’s what elevated this (admittedly entertaining throughout) book from good to great.

Losing the Plot

 

He’s always wanted to ask what she hoped to achieve, ‘without me’, without displacement, without history, a sentence without words to follow, a life without a plot. She’d say, she’d make life, what that means, he’s never known, looking back, what she sees, he needs to let go, let her be.

Losing the Plot is a jumpy, episodic account of a woman who moves from Ghana to London: confusing and playful; jarring and poetic; this reads like a love letter from the woman’s son (who acts as narrator, providing explanatory footnotes throughout), and while the whole is difficult to parse — and especially with untranslated passages in the woman’s native Twi — that would seem to be the point: how could a young man, born and raised in London’s Tottenham neighbourhood, possibly understand his mother’s immigrant experience at an intimate level? Although quite short (I read it through twice, back to back), author Derek Owusu has created something weighty and intriguing here, and I loved the whole thing. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

She was sent away, told Auntie would watch her from now, because the house was too small and she was the eldest, she’d had more life with family, her arguments not allowed to conclude even though when she lands, new documents will read her younger than every sibling.

To begin at the end: the Epilogue is called a “factless interview”, in which the narrator interrogates his mother and she laughs and evades and passes on his questions. I’ve read where Owusu says this is not an actual transcript of an interview with his own mother, but it serves to underline how unknowable we can be to one another, and especially if one chooses to be unknowable: she won’t even answer questions about her first job (Ah, are your immigration officer?). So while we see some events from her point of view — singing at a pentecostalist church, sleeping beside a rough man, taking off her shoes to leave no marks in her apartment building’s hallway — it’s through the interruptions of the narrator that we learn she became a British citizen before his birth, that she has worked three cleaning jobs, married two Englishmen, birthed two children, and lived in London for thirty years. The main body of the novel is jumpy and hard to follow, and some shorter chapters read like verse:

The binding piece shrivels, though she
returns to it every day; she’ll mother every
piece of him, even if parts must be taken away. Will she stroll through another childhood with dusty and deserting feet.
Will she cry when hands reach, will she
let her son suffer her defeat.

(Those are the line breaks as they appear in my electronic ARC.) While the footnotes often make the son sound kind of tough, and as though he’s talking to another tough character about his mother, the love he feels for her (and from her) is never in doubt:

He prefers son to any other calling, loves the drop of tone through those three letters, sounding stretched but comfortable in their balance, a name he’s proud of, a lustrous designation so small but brilliant, a reaction of love touching his entire body when his mother summons him with such a small word capable of palpitating all the air around him. He forgets annoyance, every anger an act when love struggles to escape.
Yes, Mum.

Everything about this simply feels truthful; capturing the shape of what can’t be known is a skillful feat.

This Strange Eventful History

 

This strange eventful history that made a life. Not good or bad — rather, both good and bad — but that was not the point. Above all, they had been, for so long, wildly curious. Just to see, to experience all that they could, to set foot anywhere, to speak to anyone, taste anything, to learn, to know.

This Strange Eventful History is “inspired by” the stories of author Claire Messud’s family (she stresses in an afterword that this is a work of fiction, but that “the Cassar family’s movements hew closely to those of my own family”), and initially, I thought that that would be fascinating: the novel begins with a mother fleeing with her children back to the Algeria of their birth at the dawn of WWII as her Navy officer husband watches France fall to the Nazis and awaits orders from his diplomatic posting in Greece. There was a nugget of something very interesting in that — a white family whose ancestors had been in Algeria for over a hundred years, and who thought of themselves as 100% belonging there and also 100% French citizens — and after the African country gained independence in 1962, these “pieds-noirs” had to make a home elsewhere in the world (along with the “harkis”: the reviled indigenous Algerians who had fought on the side of France in the war of independence), and this was a history I didn’t know and was eager to explore. But that’s not really what this novel is about. Instead, this reads like a domestic drama as we follow three generations of the Cassar family — from France to Australia, Argentina, and Canada — and delve into their educations and relationships and careers; flitting among a largish cast of characters in a book that ultimately felt too long. I was often bored, recognised that many long stories were probably included because they were based on real events (although with little literary or entertainment value), and when something startling did happen, I recognised it as one of those “truth is stranger than fiction” situations that probably shouldn’t be included in a novel. This might have worked better as a straight memoir — with plenty of Algerian history included — and while I can’t deny that Messud writes lovely sentences, this was, overall, just okay for me. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

I’m a writer; I tell stories. I want to tell the stories of their lives. It doesn’t really matter where I start. We’re always in the middle; wherever we stand, we see only partially. I know also that everything is connected, the constellations of our lives moving together in harmony and disharmony. The past swirls along with and inside the present, and all time exists at once, around us. The ebb and flow, the harmonies and dissonance — the music happens, whether or not we describe it. A story is not a line; it is a richer thing, one that circles and eddies, rises and falls, repeats upon itself.

François was eight when he travelled with his mother and younger sister to Algeria to wait out the war, his father writing to him that, “it was their place, the part of France where they belonged, that they were still building and perfecting.” And although François would eventually move to Paris for his education, when he received a Fullbright scholarship to Harvard, he was determined to perfect his American accent and reject his Frenchness; eventually marrying a Canadian woman and (after several other adventures) settling down in the States. François aspired to an academic career, and although he made it to grad school, having a wife and responsibilities forced him to compromise his dreams; becoming a corporate stooge, an alcoholic, and an unhappy bully to his wife and daughters.

Meanwhile, his parents — who had a perfect, storybook marriage — joined the expat community in Argentina with the daughter who felt responsible for taking care of them, and when they visited François’ family in America, it gave the only opportunity to revisit the question of the French in Algeria. François’ teenaged daughter Chloe (as “the writer of the family”, I assume she’s a stand-in for Claire Messud herself) “volunteered the accepted truism that the French presence in Algeria had been fundamentally wrong”, and while her Aunt Denise would bristle, “De Gaulle threw away our lives and our history because it was expedient, because of public opinion, the opinion polls of arrogant people in the metropole who couldn’t find Algeria on a map, who didn’t even know we spoke French, for God’s sake,” Denise and François’ father, Gaston, had a more provocative response: “When France embarked upon the Algerian undertaking, it was in the spirit, exactly, of the British in America or Australia…Might we not acknowledge that Australia and the United States are simply more successful examples of settler colonialism — no less unjust, no less brutal, simply with a fuller obliteration of the native cultures?” Naturally, like all of us in North America (and, one presumes, in the antipodes as well), Chloe doesn’t like this comparison, but that’s pretty much the end of the debate — and I would have liked much more of it.

Again: what we do get is a lot of writing on the domestic; from the lingering death of François’ father-in-law to Denise’s secret diaries (found by Chloe after her aunt’s death and shared with us here because, “surely she’d hidden the notebook there for someone to find, the stuff of novels: if she’d wanted it never to be found, then she would have thrown it away. What was writing for, if not to communicate? There was no such thing as writing that did not signify.”) There was a mundanity to it all that gave the sense of real life: and although in the prologue Messud writes that bit about constellations and connections and everything repeating upon itself, there were just too many “characters” swirling about in this, doing ordinary things despite an extraordinary backstory, for a wholly satisfying novel (and, again, I would not have minded all of the minutiae if this was a straightforward biography.)

To be sixty-five was to know that you dreamed the lazy lunch beneath the plane trees and window shopping along the Croisette, but that death was what was real; to be thirty-two, as Chloe was, meant you could still pretend the inverse was true. And still, why not, for the afternoon, dream?

As the novel ends, the fourth generation is running around while their forebears wink out one by one: this is a long way from WWII and Algeria and France — these kids are fully American and divorced from their pieds-noirs roots. For this reason, I can appreciate why Messud would want to memorialise her family’s history for future generations — and why she would want to include so many people who don’t really affect the “plot” — but I found it a bit of a slog to get through.

Liars

 

I wrote down the story again: I was proud of our family and of John’s career, so when he played video games all night, spent weekends painting, or stayed out bodysurfing in deep water while the child and I waited, shivering, on the beach, I didn’t push back. I multitasked and made my own needs as small as possible because, I thought, I was just more capable than he was. I assumed that made me valuable.

I took three shits before breakfast and two tranquilizers before the mediation session. John said that he wasn’t to blame for the divorce but that his hand had been forced. He described me as volatile and unsafe for the child to be around.

I wrote the word LIAR on a sticky note and stuck it onto the computer screen. It covered John’s face.

Liars is the story of a tumultuous relationship — from “first ferocious hunger” to the “strange dread at suddenly being divorced” fourteen years later — as related by a woman whose successful writing career seems unthinkable in the conditions under which she worked: with a flaky and jealous artist for a husband, a need to micromanage all the details of their household, and the (not entirely unwelcome) demands of motherhood, Jane is still able to release some well-regarded work; using various grants and fellowships to pay for part-time child care so she can continue to eke out work. The storyline is not quite stream-of-consciousness, but it does jump along in fragments; highlighting all the lowlights of this relationship and making it very clear to the reader that we are getting this story only from Jane’s POV — and while she makes the case that she married a liar, someone “bad at gaslighting”, Jane tells us a few times along the way that she’s a liar, too (it’s not incidental that the title is plural.) This reads a lot like a memoir — I suppose any novel about a novelist does — so I snooped around the internet to learn about author Sarah Manguso’s life, and the major strokes line up. Whether or not the fine details are a faithful account of Manguso’s own marriage, Liars positively has the ring of truth: I absolutely believed that Jane would enter this relationship, and that even if she was lying to herself along the way, that she made the choice to stay in this relationship and work on it — to the detriment of her professional life and mental health — and the truthiness here was like a punch to the gut; you know this is the kind of chosen misery some people live in and Manguso explores it beautifully. I haven’t read the author before, but I will definitely be looking into her backlist. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

John and his co-founder had landed an investment in their little film production company, and we would move to Los Angeles to staff it and build it in a cheap warehouse space. I feared that, after we moved west, John would divide his time between Cloudberry and his art, and I would be a lonely wife with no support system, maybe saddled with a baby, unable to write or teach — a real wife, the one thing I’d sworn to myself I’d never be.

Young and beautiful, bursting with creative energy, Jane thought she had found her soulmate in John: a visual/digital/filmmaking artist (he could do anything but write), dark and handsome with a cool, green gaze; the mental and physical attraction was immediate and intense. But while all Jane required in order to work was space, John soon got big entrepreneurial ideas that would see him wanting to move back and forth across the country several times, taking frequent business trips, and spending late nights out boozing and schmoozing when he was at home. All of the moving prevented Jane from getting on a tenured teaching track, and after their baby was born, Jane was mostly concerned that John’s job had health insurance and that their moves would land the family in good school districts for their son. Throughout their relationship, Jane did all of the housework, managed all of the bills — including John’s perpetual debt — took on the vast majority of child care, and spent long, lonely stretches of time waiting for a husband who was decreasingly interested in sex with her. This isn’t only the story of how challenging it is for a mother to be an artist (although it explores that, too), but the fact that John was jealous of Jane’s artistic success did contribute to their collapse; a singular tragedy, universally relatable .

Quotable bits:

• Elegies are the best love stories because they’re the whole story.

• A wedding vow is a mind game. You have to guess whether the person currently on his best behavior will someday value your physical, emotional, and financial health above the convenience of being able to just break the contract.

• My husband frequently asked me why I was so much angrier than other women. It always made me smile. I was exactly as angry as every other woman I knew. It wasn’t that we’d been born angry; we’d become women and ended up angry.

• I had infinite patience with my one-year-old, whom I held to the behavioral standards of a two-year-old, and almost no patience with my husband, whom I held to the behavioral standards of a mother.

• On the one day John had to take the child to school, he forgot to pack a lunch. I was in charge of everything and in control of nothing.

In my sleuthing, I found a couple of interesting interviews with Manguso online. On The Creative Independent website she says:

As a young person, I did not have any responsibilities beyond myself. I wasn’t part of a family. I wasn’t a mother. I didn’t even have a cat. It was very easy for me to identify with this kind of masculine ideal of the writer only ever writing. Then, of course, time passed and I made culturally inflected decisions that worked against myself as a writer. I married a man. I’ve since divorced that man. I had a child. I still have the child.

And in a conversation with fellow author/mother Kate Zambreno in The Paris Review, Manguso says:

After giving birth, if I wasn’t teaching or working on a contracted magazine piece, I worked on the infinite mountain of household tasks until I fell, already basically asleep, into bed. The sort of work necessary to make a book, the sort of work that looks like nothing, that doesn’t accumulate daily, that might require that you write two hundred pages only to throw them away…I was imprisoned in a system of capital within which that kind of work held no value, and, chillingly, it very quickly stopped holding value to me. The books I’ve written since my son was born have been written one pebble at a time, not at all like the books that I once wrote while suspended in a prolonged dream state. It’s worth adding that I was privileged as hell during this entire exercise, and it still, as you say, devastated me.

*Both articles are worth reading in their entirety; Manguso is thoughtful and fluent throughout.

Our relationship had been a fourteen-year conversation about the intersection of mental health and art, but really it was two arguments that never touched: John’s twin insistences that he was a great artist and that I was a deranged lunatic.

And back to the title: Despite the undeniably hard domestic conditions of Jane’s life, she does leave open the possibility that John’s not entirely wrong to call her “crazy” sometimes: there are frequent crying jags and screaming matches, (idle?) threats of self-harm, daily tranquillisers, and an obsessiveness to her cleaning and organising; along with his own failed artistic dreams, in the face of Jane’s successes, it must have been a hard relationship for John, too. Making the title of Liars plural seems an act of grace; an admission of shared responsibility, and the novel is stronger for it. I loved everything about this.

Dream Wheels

 

I’m talking about us, son. I’m talking about the stories of the lives of a people. Doesn’t have to be a nation. Can be a family or a town, a valley like this or a broken-down old truck like that old girl out there. A dream wheel is the sum total of a peoples’ story. All its dreams, all its visions, all its experiences gathered together. Looped together. Woven together in a big wheel of dreaming.

I’ve read quite a lot of Richard Wagamese and I’ve come to the conclusion that I prefer his nonfiction: Wagamese was a deep thinker, a powerful storyteller, and generous in his love for humanity and willingness to share his hard-won wisdom. I connect deeply with his wit and wisdom when he’s flat out telling me about his life and lessons learned, but I don’t connect so completely with his fictional style; and I can admit that that comes down to personal taste. Dream Wheels is basically the story of two young(ish) men: Joe Willie Wolfchild (the best rodeo cowboy on the circuit, about to win the coveted World Champion title at the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas in the novel’s first pages, but a massive bull named See Four has other plans for Joe Willie) and Aiden Hartley (disaffected teenaged son of an African-American single mom, Aiden makes bad choices that seem to doom him to a life of criminality). The storyline rotates between these two men — with Joe Willie recovering from his injuries at his family’s working ranch (and being encouraged to restore the old jalopy of a truck that drove generations of his family around the rodeo circuit; a truck ironically referred to as “Dream Wheels”) — and with Aiden doing a stretch in juvenile lockup and being trained as a mechanic, there’s nothing very surprising about the plotlines eventually converging, with two bitter young men, each trapped in a kind of mental hopelessness, and eventually seeing that they each had much to teach and learn from the other. At the ranch, the Wolfchild family recognises that city slicker Aiden is a once-in-a-generation natural bull rider (because, of course), and like any great sports story, the most exciting writing comes when Aiden is training and competing. Along the way, Wagamese writes beautifully of the rugged landscape, shares deep and universal truths about humanity, and peoples his rough-and-tumble masculine story of cowboys and prison with wise female characters who remind everyone that what’s most important in life is community, connection, and tradition. All this to say: the plot and its execution didn’t wow me here, but I love Wagamese’s sentences and thought that he was a wonderful teacher; another reader might connect with this more completely.

He’d always been strong and tough, but Johanna had found a way to make him graceful. Graceful. You didn’t learn to cowboy by being graceful but you learned to be a man that way. First thing you had to learn in order to cowboy well was how to fall. First thing you had to learn to be a man was how to stand up, dust yourself off and move on. The grace was in the dusting off.

Grit and gumption and grace, being both talented and lucky: that’s what takes you to the top of the rodeo circuit, and Joe Willie was fortunate to have been born into a family that both taught and lived these virtues. On the other hand, and this made me a bit uncomfortable, Aiden's mother, Claire, provided no stability for her son; hopping from weak white man to bad white man; none of them as interested in being a father figure to Aiden as bedding his beautiful Black mother. I don’t know if I bought the scenario that put Aiden in lockup : Okay, Aiden did come up with a plan for a heist, bought a gun, and hid it at his friend, Cort’s, house, but when Cort decided to pull the stickup on his own — and actually shot at police officers while it went down — Cort was able to get a reduced sentence of a few months by blaming everything on Aiden? Yes, Aiden gave Cort a beating for being a rat when he eventually got sent to juvie to do his own time, but even if this was meant to demonstrate that Black youth get harsher sentences than white, it still didn’t follow to me that a fifteen-year-old with no prior record would get years for “conspiracy” while another kid actually shot at police officers and could get a plea deal by blaming everything on someone who wasn’t even there. That’s too convoluted for me to just accept, and ultimately, I don’t know if Wagamese should have brought in African American characters to this novel to use in this way. And I don’t know if I bought how the convict and the cowboys came together: I don’t understand why the detective, Golec, based on available information, would have wanted to take a chance on Aiden and arrange to send him, and his mother, off to his old friends’ ranch to work on their demons. By the time Aiden was released — now seventeen, hardened in jailhouse attitude, and with a violent attack on his record — Golec hadn’t seen him in years; knew nothing of his character, but somehow intuited it would all work out. Also: we learn that Claire has sworn off men, has a good job (maybe as a counsellor; it’s not clear), and an apartment she had spent two years setting up for the return of her son, and she’s just going off to the ranch for an open-ended stay? There’s no mention of a leave of absence from her job, no mention if it’s hard to keep paying rent on the apartment — is she contributing to their keep at the Wolfchilds’? — without working, and although it was telegraphed along the way, I don’t know if I liked that the author chose to have this “confirmed celibate” start a romance with broken Joe Willie (whose age I couldn’t get a hold on). But if I didn’t buy the plot, I did appreciate the lessons it was teaching:

That’s what everyone thinks, son. That it’s too late now. But we’re all tribal people. Every last one of us living and breathing right now started out as the same kind of people. People who lived in community and together on the land. All the things we call Indian were the same for everybody at one time. The reason we get so far away from each other is because we’ve learned to think we’re different. But we’re not. Take anybody and put them in the middle of something as beautiful as that alpine lake up in the pass over there and they’re going to be touched by it, feel something move inside themselves. Hear that old voice that tells them they remember. It takes time and commitment to remember how to really hear it, but anyone can do it.

Sitting by a fire and talking into the night, working our bodies to healthy exhaustion, communing with nature and recognising our places within it: these are our common heritage and the medicine that can heal individuals and society. In a nice bit of symmetry, these are exactly the lessons laid out in the nonfiction work, Challenge to Civilization that I recently read by another Indigenous writer, Blair Stonechild; confirming that if I’m having trouble buying an author’s fictional plot, I’d rather have his lessons laid out in plain language; a personal preference that’s not necessarily universal. There is much to admire and enjoy in Dream Wheels, and as it was the only book*  given to me for Christmas of ‘23, I am grateful for this gift and what it taught me.

* Mallory got this for me and it was the perfect gift: She apparently googled for books similar to Cormac McCarthy, cross-referenced those against their ratings on Goodreads, and then looked for those books that it didn't appear I had read before (taking the chance that I hadn't read this one before joining Goodreads in 2013). There is so much effort and thoughtfulness in that process — I have had people tell me that they would buy me books if they had any idea what I liked and what I've already read; this does prove it's possible to figure those things out — and the book didn't need to be a perfect read to be a perfect gift: much thanks to my wonderful child. As for the Cormac McCarthy vibes, this opens exactly to my taste, with Joe Willie in the chute atop old See Four:

The Old Ones say that fate has a smell, a presence, a tactile heft in the air. Animals know it. It's what brings hunter and prey together. They recognize the ancient call and there's a quickening in the blood that drives the senses into edginess, readiness: the wild spawned in the scent. It's why a wolf pack will halt their dash across a white tumble of snow to look at a man. Stand there in the sudden timeless quiet and gaze at him, solemn amber eyes dilating, the threat leaned forward before whirling as one dark body to disappear into the trees. They do that to return to the wild, to make all things even once again: to restore proper knowledge. The Old Ones say animals bless a man with these moments by returning him to the senses he surrendered when he claimed language, knowledge and invention as power. 

The great bull sensed it and shivered...

Perfection.

Two Women Walk into a Bar

 

I met her in a bar, my mother -in-law, though she wasn’t my mother-in-law yet. I was twenty-seven and waiting tables in the lounge section of a fancy French restaurant, where she happened to be going for a drink with her girlfriends before they went to a Neil Diamond show. My boyfriend, Brian, had told me to expect her, so I spent the first hour of my shift feeling terribly expectant, my heart lurching with anxiety and anticipation every time another customer walked in.

Two Women Walk into a Bar is a short account of Cheryl Strayed’s challenging relationship with her mother-in-law; brought into focus when Cheryl and her husband, Brian, were informed that his mom had only weeks to live and would need to move into the assisted-living section of her seniors’ complex. Because I had read Strayed before (and particularly Wild), I didn’t need more information than what is in here in order to understand how Strayed’s family background might affect her relationship with the prickly Joan; this felt like a continuing conversation with an old acquaintance. As this is the story of Joan’s end-of-life experience — and the feelings that it stirred up in her daughter-in-law — there is a universality to this narrative that doesn’t require one to have read Strayed before, but taken all together, I found this very affecting. A worthwhile, if short, read. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Over the previous two decades, we’d come to love each other, but it was a particular, conditional sort of love, one based on circumstance and courtesy rather than connection and compatibility. Brian was the fulcrum on which our relationship rested, uncomfortable and unsteady as a playground seesaw. We both loved him, and so we were determined to love each other, a resolve that deepened when Brian and I had children — a girl and a boy who were ten and twelve by the time Joan was dying.

Between Joan informing her daughter-in-law that there is no greater love than that between a mother and son (perhaps especially so with an only child), and Strayed not being able to take up her mother-in-law’s invitation to start calling her “Mom” (so soon after Strayed had tragically lost her own mother), there were plenty of factors that created distance between the pair. Strayed recalls several instances in which Joan had hurt her feelings over the years, admits that Joan would probably have been happier with “a different sort” of daughter-in-law, but in the end, as Strayed sat at her dying mother-in-law’s bedside, they arrived at a sort of understanding:

It had been more than twenty years since she’d walked into that bar and I’d picked her last. She’d been alive in my life for nearly as long as my mother had. She was my family, my ancestor, no matter our distance or difficulties or disappointments, the truth of that finally crackling between us.

It’s a (too common) shame when it takes this kind of circumstance for a frosty relationship to melt, and books like this serve as a good reminder that time is running down for us all. As ever, Strayed writes in a relatable and engaging voice and I am pleased to have read this account.