Bookshelf – Fat City, Leonard Gardner (1969) & The Shadow-Line, Joseph Conrad (1917)

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(Disappointed by several recent tomes, I am indulging in short, tasty reads).

“Fat City” is a boxing story – some say the best ever written – but it also is a tale of Skid Row, where the fight to make it through the day takes a greater toll on its denizens than a beating received in the ring.

Set in the late 1950s in Stockton, Calif., then a city of itinerant laborers and Mexican fieldworkers, “Fat City” follows the fates of two boxers, Billy Tully, a fry cook who almost made it to the big time and now dreams of a comeback, and Ernie Munger, a teenager who mans the pumps in a gas station.

The story is dark, but vividly so, meaning that the shadows these strivers cast are sharp and solid, palpable even. Their struggle, to make money, to find some serenity amid the chaos of their lives, to play the hand bad fortune dealt to them, is universally relevant. For example, Ernie thinks one night while next to his sleeping wife: “At times as he lay in bed listening to her breathing, a fear came over him that after marriage death was the next major event.”

Highly recommended.

***

One of Conrad’s later novels, “The Shadow-Line” follows a young man elevated to the position of ship’s captain for the first time. The title refers to the passage such new authority demands: “… one perceives ahead a shadow-line warning one that the region of early youth, too, must be left behind.”

The adventure (and misadventure) takes place in colonial times along the Malay Peninsula and in the waters of the Gulf of Thailand, just as sailing ships are giving way to steamers. The young master, who is never named, replaces an aged captain who dies of rampant self-indulgence and, as a spectral presence, fools with the fate of the ship and its crew.

I am no Conrad expert, having read but a couple of his books, and those years ago, so I can’t say if the language in “The Shadow-Line” is typical of him, but it certainly is enjoyable, laden with strong adjectives and vivid descriptions that, despite their formality, made me yearn for just such precision in many current books that seem to have gone directly from first draft to print. Oh, well.

A very satisfying read.

Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner (2024)

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I doubt there are many readers of “Creation Lake” who don’t pause in more than one section – perhaps in a passage about the values or Neanderthals vis a vis those of Homo sapiens – and wonder: What is going on here?” Or, “Why am I still reading this?”

Just such questions caused me to abandon “Creation Lake” at page 175, but the next morning, I read ahead a couple of more pages and became entranced by a lengthy antidote about a French boy named Bruno who, during World War II, finds a dead German soldier. Bruno grabs the soldier’s helmet, puts it on his head, and unwittingly infects himself with the dead man’s lice. His grandmother tries to kill the lice with kerosene, which damages his vision. The boy matures to be one France’s leading radical activists, and now, as an old man, he is the visionary for a nascent group of eco-terrorists.

It is this communal band, Le Moulin, and the freelance American spy, former FBI agent Sadie Smith, hired to disrupt them, around which “Creation Lake” revolves (and sometimes wobbles). There are several interwoven plots – the spy game, Sadie’s search for self-identity (which has gone missing after years of working undercover), and Bruno’s Aristotelian musings on love, war, politics, the purpose of life itself, and the aforementioned stages of hominin development, all fo which emerge from the cave where his retreat from late capitalism has taken him.

Sounds heavy, right? But it’s not if you approach “Creation Lake” as I did after my brief departure on page 175 – not as a novel, but as a journal in which entry, while mutually connected by strands either obvious or diaphanous, is complete unto itself. That perspective enables you to pass through the more maddening moments unperturbed and enjoy what the New York Times, in its gushing review, calls Kushner’s “floor-level interest in humanity,” meaning she doesn’t miss a tic or a trick of our post-evolutionary habits.

So, yes, amid Bruno’s philosophizing, Sadie’s searching, and the I-spying, there is fun amid the complexity. For the most part, I found “Creation Lake” engaging, entertaining and, even, thought-provoking. Yes, it is uneven, but all journals are.

Bookshelf – Home, Toni Morrison (2012), The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury (1950)

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In my quest this year to reach a three-digit number of books read, I’ve reduced the page count, favoring of late slim titles.

This less-is-more strategy has produced an unexpected benefit: an upgrade in quality. In recent weeks I’ve been entertained and enlightened by J.M. Coetzee, Meg Wolitzer, Joseph Conrad, Juan Rulfo, and, now, Toni Morrison and Ray Bradbury.

***

“Home” is the more soulful of these two titles. It tells the story of Frank Money, a young man just mustered out of the Army after a stint amid the slaughter of the Korean War, and his younger sister, Cee, a survivor of horrific abuse inflicted by an eugenics-obsessed doctor. Both carry secrets, one shared since childhood when they saw a band of white men burying a Black body in a field, and one Frank bears alone, a scarring memory brought home from war.

As they struggle to reunite in their rural Southern town, they must muck through the sheen of post-war racism that oozes across the country, subtle in some areas, but flagrant in the sibling’s native ground. Morrison, as she always does, infuses “Home” with humanity, and lets the narrative unfold from there.

Although the underlying themes are heavy, the storytelling is not. The dialogue is rich and uttered by an array of characters, some hateful, others delightful, all interesting. Well worth reading.

***

“The Martian Chronicles” – which I never read until now – imagines the colonization of the fourth planet from the sun by the denizens of the third planet. The story begins in the year 2030 when Earthlings once again face the existential threat of nuclear war.

Told through a series of short, anecdotal stories connected by context but distinct by time and subject, “The Martian Chronicles” is a cautionary tale. It warns, with both force and humor (if one can laugh at the fate of the world) that toxic culture is not detoxified by being transplanted in a more benign environment, but rather tends to infect its new host, as the Martians find out to their detriment.

Writing amid the geo-political pall of post-war America, Bradbury uses the anthems of the times – the red scare, the nuclear scare, the hegemony of the U.S., the rising nationalistic censorship of art, dissent, and differing points-of-view – to make his point: we are a flawed species and not much good can come of us. Again, serious stuff, but addressed with deft, irony and sarcasm.

The book is full of surprises even as it wends its way toward one of several imaginable endings –  a Door #1, #2, or #3 situation. No matter which door you choose, what lies beyond should please you.

Bookshelf – Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates (2)

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This is a short observation about reading vs. listening:

When I first read “Between the World and Me” three years ago (a bit late to the game), its unblinking directness astounded me and my truculent ignorance ashamed me. I wrote:

“There are sounds in life so distinct and universal they cannot be mistaken for anything else – the tumble and hiss of heavy surf onto sand, the guttural reverb of distant thunder, the ominous hustle of night winds through tall trees.

“To these voices of the world I would add that of Ta-Nehisi Coates, who speaks through the pages of this epistolary essay about blackness and whiteness in America with such honesty and authenticity that from now on I will measure the veracity of all other literary voices against his.”

Just the other day, I listened to Coates’s narration of the book and found it to be even more profound. His voice, eloquent, educated, but still inflected by the streets of West Baltimore, amplifies the wisdom, truth and necessity of his written words. Heard aloud, their poetry flourishes even further, as does their urgency.

If you have not read Between the World and Me, I urge you to do so. If you have read it, I suggest you also listen to it.

(Original review)

Bookshelf — Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder – Salman Rushdie

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All memoirs should be measured against this harrowing account by Salman Rushdie of the 2022 attack that nearly killed him and left him half-blind: detailed, unblinking, contextual, and surprisingly soulful – all packed with precision into two-hundred pages.

To hijack a phrase I’m sure I picked up from someone else’s review: “Knife” is a display of Rushdie in full command of his talents: inventiveness, intellectual breadth, insight into the foibles of humanity, and an emotional spectrum that runs from anger to fear to love to outrage.

Rushdie lived beneath the sword since 1989 when Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa calling for his execution, proclaiming that Rushdie’s book, “The Satanic Verses,” defamed Muhammad.  With time, the threat seemed to diminish. Still, says Rushdie, he was not surprised one day, while standing on stage, to see a young man appear from the audience and lunge toward him with a knife.

“I confess,” he says, “I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other and coming for me in just this way. So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing toward me was: So it’s you. Here you are. It is said that Henry James’s last words were ‘So it has come at last, the distinguished thing.’ Death was coming at me, too.”

The book begins here and follows Rushdie’s journey of recovery and rediscovery – of who he is, of what he loves and why, and of the importance of art and honesty in a pluralistic society.

“I had to write the book you’re reading now.” he says, “before I could move on to anything else. To write would be my way of owning what had happened, taking charge of it, making it mine, refusing to be a mere victim. I would answer violence with art.”

Indeed, “Knife” is art – it is personal, yet universal; it is wisdom distilled from pain; it answers the question everyone must face when calamity confronts them: “One has to find life … One can’t just sit about recovering from near death. One has to find life.”

The Lede

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For my fellow wretches, an excerpt from Calvin Trlllin’s most recent collection of his writing, “The Lede”:

It is said that when James Thurber, as a young newspaper reporter, was told by an editor that his story’s first paragraph, what newspaper people refer to as the lede, suffered from wordiness, he handed in a rewrite whose opening paragraph was, in its entirety, “Dead.”

There followed a second paragraph: “That’s what the man was when they found him with a knife in his back at 4 p.m. in front of Riley’s saloon at the corner of 52nd and 12th streets.”

Bookshelf — The Reformatory, Tananarive Due

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I tried to make it to the end of this mash-up novel of ghosts and racists and the mid-century-America Black folks they haunt, but I didn’t. A couple of hundred pages short of the finish I realized I held in my hands an excellent three-hundred-page book that, unfortunately, sprawled across more than five hundred pages.

And that’s a shame.

The story of “The Reformatory” is based in part on the experience of the author’s great uncle, who was remanded to the infamous Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, the violent institution that was also the setting of Colson Whitehead’s novel “The Nickel Boys,” a powerful book that won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The two works differ in many ways (the ghosts, for example), but mainly in scope: Colson weaves a taut story, Due spins an overly complex web.

To be sure, my opinion is not widely held. On Goodreads, “The Reformatory” averages four-and-a-half stars. I gave it two, and here’s why:

During my first weeks as a newspaper reporter I scribbled what I thought was a first-rate piece of American journalism. After turning it into the desk, the crusty city editor shoved the pages back to me after scanning a few hundred words. What’s the problem with it? I asked, expecting some specific criticism about sources or emphasis. She withered me with a look rooted in years of suffering idiots, and said simply, “Too many words.”

Bookshelf – Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward

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This is a beautiful, emotionally challenging book about what happens when the complex pull of family abuts the hard truths of the world: Life is not fair, some people can’t escape suffering, and misplaced solace, no matter how inviting, often leads to more pain.

These truths, depicted with both savage and elegant bluntness by Jesmyn Ward, made “Salvage the Bones” hard to read. As calamity upon calamity falls upon the 15-year-old narrator, her three brothers, and their father, a family less alive than surviving, I wondered, alternately angered by the injustice and saddened by the grinding inevitability of their fate, How can anyone live like this? How can we morally allow our neighbors to live like this?

For the family – daughter Esch, sons Randall, Skeetah, and Junior, and Daddy – the questions are existential. It is 1995, and their Mississippi bayou town sits in the sights of Hurricane Katrina. However, the coming threat remains secondary to the urgencies of daily life: Esch’s need for love, Skeetah’s dog-fighting dreams, Randall’s basketball fantasy. Only Daddy tries to prepare – until he cannot.

What Ward does so well is not blink before the storm. She infuses her powerful prose with blood. She highlights sibling tenderness and then stains it with feral immorality: stealing is sanctioned, as is drunkenness, animal cruelty, and sexual abuse. She offers no hope, only endurance – which, as it turns out, is the more useful tool.

“Salvage the Bones” rewards those who persist, those who endure its harder passages. The closing section of the book, when Katrina engulfs the town, is a potent literary punch, mighty words crafted in full flex. Along with roads and houses and land, the storm sweeps away pain. What it leaves behind are better angels who emerge under the clearing skies and discover within them yet another truth: Life goes on. Dawn brings a new day.

Bookshelf – Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín

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In 1951, Eilis Lacey, against her wishes, leaves the small Irish town she’d hoped to spend her life in and boards a steamship bound for America.

Once in Brooklyn, she finds the familiar comforts of family replaced by the random cattiness of a rooming-house. Her dream of being a bookkeeper lays idle while she puts in six-day weeks at a department store, work arranged by the parish priest.

As the months go by, she begins to ground herself, only to be wooed by a young man, an Italian-American. Things happen fast until, suddenly, with Eilis facing pressure from her beau, what’s done can’t be undone.

In this sense, Eilis’s story is a universal story. In post-War America, especially in working-class communities fed by immigrants, the roles of men and women were well-scripted – by family, by church, and by social norms. So it is unsurprising that Eilis so willingly allowed these constraints (which bound women much more so than men) to remake her so easily.

Eilis Lacey is an untethered soul; she is adrift on the river of life, her own hand never on the tiller.

The chapters that follow Eilis’s transformation from wide-eyed hick to nascent New Yorker engage the most. Tóibín’s clear, clean writing makes for good storytelling, and I rooted for Eilis to navigate the labyrinth of her new life. Which she mostly does.

Then, as the book rounds the final turn, Eilis finds herself in a complex situation that compels her, in the course of a few pages, to chuck all she’s accomplished in America in exchange for the “sweetness, certainty and innocence” of the old sod.

I felt gob-smacked, ready to so some chucking of my own, namely some of the appreciation I’d gained for “Brooklyn.” I didn’t, though. It’s a matter of choice. I wouldn’t have ended the book as it does, but, that said, I didn’t write it.

So … yes, read “Brooklyn,” especially if you plan to read “Long Island,” Tóibín’s new sequel to the meanderings of Eilis Lacey. “Brooklyn” is enjoyable and insightful, and whether the ending sits right with you will depend on your palate and patience.

Bookshelf — On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan

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If there is one indelible line among the many memorable words that form this compact novel, it is this: “The entire course of life can be changed – by doing nothing.”

Edward and Florence are newlyweds. They are “young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.”

The couple is as inexperienced at communication as they are in the carnal arts. Their courtship was “bound by protocols never agreed or voiced, but generally observed;” in other words, they had friendship – but no benefits. Florence abhors the notion of sex. She does not want to be “entered or penetrated,” verbs she found in a how-to handbook for brides. Edward, his perception warped by priapic frustration, misinterprets Florence’s reticence as a dormancy awaiting a passionate reawakening.

Perched uneasily aboard their honeymoon bed in an inn overlooking Chesil Beach in Dorset, England, Edward and Florence attempt to reconcile their fantasies – he yearning for relief from his passive torment, she determined dutifully to grin and, ahem, bare it. Then, in an instant, these dreams collide, revealing sharp edges that had been hidden behind the dullness of cordiality.

“On Chesil Beach” is set 1962, “when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure.” McEwan, as artful as ever in nuance, and as theatrical as necessary when the tension tightens, captures the era perfectly: Edward and Florence are innocents, duped by cultural norms and lacking the means – neither language, patience nor honesty – to overcome their entrapment.

 “On Chesil Beach” is a penetrating story of loss – of love, of opportunity, and of saying the right words at the right time. I highly recommend it.

Bookshelf – Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Gail Honeyman

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If you believe everybody’s broken in some way, or at least capable of being riven by life’s random tribulations, then you will bond with Eleanor Oliphant.

Nine years ago, Eleanor showed up for a job interview with “a black eye, a couple of missing teeth and a broken arm,” got hired nonetheless, and, at age 30, alone and hermetic, holds her fractured self together through rigid routine, harsh dismissal of others, and wet weekends of self-dosing with bottom shelf vodka.

Eleanor is far from fine; she’s a mess. She’s also the keeper of horrific secrets rooted in past violence.

Yet, Eleanor yearns to be more, and thanks to a series of chance encounters with open-hearted people who look beyond her physical disfigurement and emotional deep-freeze, she slowly morphs, leaning more and more into life’s small pleasures. Ah, the kindness of strangers – such magical medicine.

Eleanor could be a caricature (another heroine of the “resurrection” genre) but Honeyman humanizes her via clever, direct writing that mostly scrubs the narrative clean of cringeworthy gasps and heart-tugs. She also astutely perceives of what it means to be different in a society where normality is prized perhaps even more than celebrity.

“A nose that’s too small and eyes that are too big,” says Eleanor in self-appraisal. “Ears: unexceptional. Around average height, approximately average weight. I aspire to average … I’ve been the focus of far too much attention in my time. Pass me over, move along please. Nothing to see here.”

But there is much to see in the pages of “Eleanor Oliphant.” It is an enjoyable mix of mystery and empathy, fun to read, but also a reminder that we humans are ourselves books whose content cannot be divined by our crumpled covers.

Bookshelf – Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman

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What if?

There is hardly a more revolutionary question. All human accomplishment rises from this two-syllable query, both beneficial and malevolent. The seeds of tools, language, art, philosophy, and science always sprout from an imagining of possibility.

In this context, think of young Albert Einstein, on the verge of publishing his famous formula, his mind churning with dreams about “the many possible natures of time.”  What if, he wonders, that unlike our familiar concept of linear time, there are worlds in which “time is a circle, bending back on itself,” or where people live just one day or, the opposite, live forever? What would life be like in such worlds?

In “Einstein’s Dreams,” physicist and novelist Alan Lightman answers that question with short, fantastical scenarios that presume how other versions of time would shape human behavior. In one imagined world, for example, where time advances more slowly at higher altitudes, the wealthy occupy the most vertiginous terrain in order to live longer. In another world, one without future, “each laugh is the last laugh” and “beyond the present lies nothingness (so) people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff.”

In each tableau, people do what they always do: some conform to the demands of time out of greed or fear or simple acquiescence, others choose their own paths, occupying eddies of tranquility amid the surging river of time. These choices offer meditative lessons for your consideration.

Lest “Einstein’s Dreams,” seem too wonky, I assure you it is not. Lightman writes in spare, entertaining language whose rhythmic nature at times flirts with poetry. It is highly descriptive and fun to read.

Bookshelf – Liliana’s Invincible Summer, Cristina Rivera Garza

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Cristina Rivera Garza stands in a Mexico City police station, asking for the case file on her younger sister, Liliana, who was murdered thirty years earlier. The indifferent clerk tells her, “Do not believe for a minute that records live forever.”

Without this file, Rivera Garza fears Liliana’s “experience on earth will be as good as nothing, Her memory erased.” That moment, she says, “is when I realized that I must write, I must replace this file … this is the split second in which I understand how writing defies the state.”

The result is this sobering and multi-layered account of Liliana’s murder, likely by her jealous boyfriend, of the plague of femicides in Mexico, and of Rivera Garza’s search not only for justice, but for a sisterly understanding of who Liliana really was and why she was killed.

Rivera Garza, a prolific author and a professor at the University of Houston, achieved only a part of her quest. She never found the case file and the prime suspect, Ángel González Ramos, remains at large. She does, though, preserve Liliana’s life and frames her death in preceding years of abuse.

Using Liliana’s own words, found in letters and notebooks, and interviews with university friends, Rivera Garza follows her sister’s breadcrumbs from high school, when she first met the man accused of killing her, to when, at age 20, “femicide violence arrived one night at my sister’s house … placed a pillow over her face, and took her life.”

If there is a singular emotion that infuses “Liliana’s Invincible Summer,” it is anger. Rivera Garza creates streaming, rhythmic sentences that sizzle with such rage they beg to be read aloud – not just about Liliana’s death, but also about the values in her native country that consider a woman’s wife to be lesser than that of a man’s.

In Mexico, she writes, “Femicide is a hate crime, one committed against women because they are women. Ten of them take place in Mexico every single day, leaving a trail of heartbreak perceived by impunity and flanked by indignation.”

“Liliana’s Invincible Summer” is an amalgam – part Liliana’s writing, part reporting, part memoir. The latter two propel and deepen the story and the first (which I found to be overly extensive) provides the perspective of a young woman navigating a difficult and ultimately dangerous relationship. In combination, they create a powerful book.

Bookshelf – The Trees

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Finally, a way to never be disappointed by yet another so-so book: Only read what Percival Everett writes.

A few weeks ago, I gushed over “James,” Everett’s current reimagining of “The Tales of Huckleberry Finn,” this time told from the perspective of Jim, the slave. Seeing my comments in an online book group, someone suggested that “The Trees” was equally terrific.

And it is.

“The Trees” also uses history as a fulcrum, in this case the 1955 murder in Mississippi of 14-year-old Emmett Till, who was tortured, shot and lynched after being falsely accused of flirting with a white woman. Till was one of more than 4,000 Black victims of lynching and other documented acts of racial terrorism that occurred in the United States between the Civil War and World War II. (Read more: https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/).

Set in the present day in Money, Mississippi (where Till was killed), “The Trees” begins as a crime story: A white resident, Junior Junior, turns up dead and emasculated in his home. Near his bloody corpse lies the body of a Black man. Both cadavers are hauled to the morgue, but that of the Black man disappears, only to reappear again in similar circumstances.

When the dead won’t stay dead, it’s a mystery enough for the state police to send a pair of Black detectives to Money, where they find a townful of cartoonish Southern crackers, a 105-year-old great-grandmother who has amassed thousands of files about lynchings, and a passing-for-white diner waitress who is hiding more than her skin color.

Little by little, “The Trees” reveals itself to be less of a crime story and more of an artful, incisive indictment of America’s shameful past and of the shameless persistence of racist values disguised as regional culture.

Everett pulls off this impeachment with a mix of violence, sarcasm, caricature, and humor (the latter especially evident in the book’s wonderful dialogues). To say more is to reveal too much, so I’ll end with this: “The Trees” is inventive, entertaining, and enlightening, a virtuoso work that anyone who loves good books should read.

Bookshelf: James, Percival Everett

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Some books are so good – and so widely praised – that not much needs to be said about them. James is such a book.

A reimagining of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” that puts Jim, the runaway slave, at the center of the story instead of Huck, James is a fast-paced, compelling, and moving novel. It is also, because of its clear, descriptive writing and its forceful, focused narration, a rarity, a gem that glistens amid the slag heap of mediocrity that holds most current popular fiction (sequel-driven dross churned out by publishing houses that believe no story can be told too often as long as it turns a buck. End rant.)

I read James in two sittings and had I not needed to sleep (or drink whiskey) I could have finished it in one. The story had me from get-go when Jim code-switches from the shuffling, submissive, yes-suh-ing enslaved man he presents to white folks to, when with other Blacks, an erudite, educated husband and father who reads Voltaire and instructs children in linguistic survival skills.

During one lesson, for example, Jim asks: What do you say if you see a white women’s house on fire:

“Fire, fire,” said one child.

“Direct. And that’s almost correct,” I said.

The youngest of them, lean and tall five-year-old Rachel, said, “Lawdy, missum! Looky dere.”

“Perfect,” I said. “Why is that correct?”

Lizzie raised her hand. “Because we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble.”

“And why is that,” I asked.

February said, “Because they need to know everything before us. Because they need to name everything.”

More than anything, Jim continues, we need to make sure white people feel good.

“And the better they feel, the safer we are,” says a child.

“February, translate that.”

“Da mo’ betta dey feel, da mo’ safer we be.”

This mechanism of portraying the intellectually free inner being held in chains by the need of his owned outer self to survive is a more powerful and impactful depiction of slavery’s horror than any description of a lashing or a lynching. The latter kills, the former erases a life while it is still in progress – a living death.

There is plenty more to read about James online, and I encourage you to do so. I suggest also you read about Twain and the original book, both its acclaim and its criticism. Of course, I urge you to read “James” itself because more than anything it does what all special books do: it educates while it entertains.

Bookshelf – Annie Bot, Sierra Greer

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Be careful what you wish for, wheezes the cautionary bromide, or you just might find yourself overcome by it.

This vexatious thought traverses the easily troubled mind of Doug, a thirty-ish New York bro possessing no last name but enough cash to buy what he always wanted: the perfect girlfriend, a beauty who cooks and cleans and services his libidinous desires, doing it all with the smiling compliance of a high-class robot, which, in fact, is what she is.

In Annie’s company, Doug has never been better fed or better bedded – especially since he had Annie designed to look just like his ex. Being autodidactic, Annie becomes more and more humanlike, which also thrills Doug – until she acquires some of the lesser qualities of the species.

Annie is a Stella, a sentient blend of a CPU, AI, and a human embryo. She is capable of being a nurturing nanny, an efficient housekeeper, or an insatiable pleasure partner when switched to Cuddle Bunny mode, Doug’s preferred option. She is the best $220,000 can buy.

Danger, Will Robinson!

It turns out the complexities of human relationships remain intact even when one of the partners needs to carry a charging station with her. When “Annie Bot” moves beyond the story of a boy with a toy (these passages are NSFW), it reaches for a morality tale of endangered male dominance vs. awakening female independence – the eternal clash of the chromosomes. At minimum, “Annie Bot” is a well-told preview of an inevitable future. At its best, it is an admonitory tale of powerful machines possessing the failings of the humans who design them.

“Annie Bot” is Greer’s first published book, and there are moments where this shows through (what does Doug do for living? why is Annie alternately bold and timorous? who is that guy at the end?), but there are not enough lapses not to recommend the book.

Bookshelf – Be Mine, Richard Ford

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My father, who served all of his jokes with a side of corn, would look up from the morning newspaper after reading the obit of some well-known person and lament with mock horror to my mother, “El, people are dying who never died before!”

And therein lies the fundamental flaw with life. No, not Dad Jokes – but dying. Life comes with an expire date. It’s non-renewable. No refills, no second-helpings, no do-overs. Living is, quite literally, a once in a lifetime opportunity.

In “Be Mine,” a father and son share a road trip whose final destination is – ahem – one where every man has gone before. The father is Frank Bascombe, Richard Ford’s Boomer Everyman, who in four previous novels traversed careers and marriages. Now, at age 74, he is behind the wheel of a rented RV chauffeuring his 47-year-old son, Paul, diminished by Lou Gehrig’s disease, across the cold, upper heartland of America.

The father and son are an odd couple. Amid the dissonant commercial clutter of malls and corn-country crossroads, Frank stoically seeks philosophical answers to eternal questions: What is good? (“the absence of bad”); he also longs for the comfort of intimacy, but he looks for love in all the wrong places, including a Vietnamese massage parlor near the Mayo Clinic. Paul, in contrast, is on-the-spectrum manic, grasping at whatever glitters, embracing the ephemera of roadside attractions to compensate for the drip-drip-drip of his coming demise.

Frank and Paul are dying – who isn’t? – but tomorrow’s death does not preclude today’s happiness. As Frank says, “… to go out the door and not bother with being happy is to give life less than its full due. Which, after all, is what we’re here for. To give life its full due, no matter what kind of person we are. Or am I wrong?”

Reviews of “Be Mine” were mixed. “It’s hard to see a better novel being published this year,” said one newspaper critic; the “thinnest and least persuasive of the Bascombe novels,” opined another. I lean more toward the former, in part because I cannot compare this novel sharply enough with “The Sportswriter” and “Independence Day,” which I read years ago, but more so because many of the “chin-stroking proverbs” that Frank utters in a laconic acceptance of our inevitable end seem less like clichés than hard-won truths, loving cups earned during the long game of life.

 “Be Mine” is not a perfect book (is there such a thing?), but it is rich with observation and insight whose value is not attenuated by repetition. The experiences of Frank and Paul, some humorous, some sad, some hard, seem, in a word, authentic. Yes, there is some drag at the end, but not enough for me not to recommend it, especially to anyone struggling with the vagaries of aging, be them their own or those of a fellow traveler.

Bookshelf – Generation Loss, Elizabeth Hand (2007)

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There’s not much to like about Cass Neary, the New York photographer who anchors this intriguing, uneven, but ultimately entertaining mystery of artistic crime. If she’s awake, she’s lying. When you’re not looking, she’s stealing. Her anger is always on the prowl, seeking any whiff of a slight. She is high much of the time and when she’s not, she’s drunk. “I have,” she says, “as many words for ‘hangover’ as an Inuit has for snow.”

Cass was a star at age 20, famous for photographing the human detritus of the city’s punk era: needles in arms, semi-public sex, and young bodies, dead from ODs on the streets. Three years later, her fame is flamed out. Emotionally cauterized by a rape, doped into stagnation, she can’t make pictures anymore. And when she does try, she is told her images are both passé and overly violent.

“It’s too raw,” a gallery rep says. “It’s too much like being right inside someone’s head.”

“It is inside someone’s head,” Cass answers. “It’s the inside of my head.”

Rejected and angered, Cass retreats. Two decades later she remains sheltered — working in a bookstore stockroom, hiding out from everything but her rage – when an opportunity arrives via an old friend: a magazine assignment to interview and photograph a reclusive photographer, Aphrodite Kamestros, who published two books of dark, haunting images and then disappeared to an island off the coast of Maine. Cass is reluctant, but takes the job because Aphrodite’s work was a guiding spirit of Cass’s own.

From this point on Cass steps through the looking glass into a world where nothing is what, or who, it seems to be. Contrary to the Maine farmer’s oft-quoted quip, “you can’t get there from here,” in Cass’s version of Maine you can definitely get there, but you probably shouldn’t go.

Heavy with colorful dialog, the story sprints through an obstacle course of missing persons, aging hippies, clannish townsfolk, and artists in the clutch of malevolent muses. With a few exceptions, it’s all fun stuff.

“Generation Loss” has pretensions of being more than just a mystery – and it fulfills some of them when it describes the magic of seeing and making photographs (especially with film) – but it works just fine as a somewhat edgy, somewhat quirky whodunit.

Bookshelf – The Gathering, Anne Enright

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Some people carry so much drag and ache and dread that they cannot separate the weight from themselves. They are what they suffer.

The fate of these tormented beings, thinks Veronica Hegarty as she laments the death of her brother, Liam, older by only eleven months and drowned by his own hand in the cold of the English Channel, is imprinted in their bones.

“History is biological, that’s what I think,” says Veronica as her family gathers in Dublin for Liam’s wake. “What is written for the future is written in the body, the rest is only spoor.”

What Liam bore, etched into his marrow, was the scar of a terrible incident that befell him when he was nine, a moment witnessed by Veronica. Liam lives with pain, Veronica with shame. “After a lifetime of spreading the hurt around,” she thinks, “(Liam) managed to blame me. And I managed to feel guilty.”

Veronica feels guilt for her escape from the claustrophobic environment of a family of a dozen children, a mother vanishing into herself, and a rough-cut father. She made it to the middle class. Liam, her soulmate, didn’t. He drank and practiced enough general fecklessness to earn labels like gurrier, messer, and thug from even his siblings.

Liam’s death unleashes not only Veronica’s memories of what happened that fateful day in her grandmother’s house, but also brings to the boil long-simmering dissatisfactions with her own “normal” life – materially rich, emotionally impoverished.

“The Gathering” asks some patience of the reader. Veronica, seeking to make sense of her brother’s death, hopscotches through the calendar — her grandmother’s time, her own childhood, the present, when she is 39. Hard things happen, and both their overhang and portent infuse the story with a heaviness, but it is tolerable because nothing occurs in the story that couldn’t occur to anyone at any time in real life. It is the heaviness of being human.

Enright is a masterful writer and a pleasure to read. The narration is almost elegiac, but also precise and not at all wimpy. When, for example, Veronica speaks of her jumbled sex life, Enright endows her with schoolyard language that shocks with directness. In all, “The Gathering” is as complicated and mysterious as life itself, and just as rewarding.

Bookshelf – Amsterdam, Ian McEwan

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To adhere to the adage: sometimes bad things happen to good people, and these tragedies we bemoan. But what of those calamities that also happen to fall on bad people, do we exchange our lament for applause?

They had it coming! So cry those who believe revenge is sweet, no matter at what temperature it is served.

I stumbled upon “Amsterdam” during a recent library visit. Its author and its svelte form called from the “recommended” rack. The book was a fortuitous find, a – per the New York Times – “morality fable, disguised as a psychological thriller,” one told with the descriptive, perceptive precision found in McEwan’s novels.

The story is that of two Londoners, a symphony composer, Clive, and a newspaper editor, Vernon, who find themselves outside of a crematorium on chilled winter’s day. Both are ambitious, both stand at the apex of their respective games (a location that hints of future diminishment), and both are former lovers of the deceased, one Molly Lane, a tempestuous woman of fierce carnal appetites whose other paramours included the current Foreign Secretary of Great Britain.

Molly took ill and died rapidly, and her abrupt descent from eros to ashes shakes Clive and Vernon. The composer feels the cold clamp of mortality on his hand as he struggles to complete his greatest symphonic achievement; the journalist feels invisible amid the chaos of daily publishing and the need to swap ethics for more readers. Neither wants to go out as Molly did, under the incarcerating care of another, so they make a euthanasia pact: When one approaches the brink of the abyss, the other will, painlessly, nudge him into it.

Little more can be said about the plot without revelation. But there is deviousness, cowardice, and avarice, and each exacts a price from Clive and Vernon. McEwan guides the story with expert assuredness, and it is a delight to follow him to a clever, satisfying ending that leaves just enough left unsaid to make you wish for a few more pages.