→ May 20, 2025
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Mice 1961.

Mice 1961 was one of the three finalists for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which ended up going to a fourth book, Percival Everett’s James, causing a minor kerfuffle that I didn’t think was warranted, given how amazing James is and the awards it had already won. In the interest of completeness, however, I decided to read all three finalists to see if any had a reasonable case. Not only does Mice 1961 not have any argument that it should have won over James, it’s just a badly written, badly constructed book, one that never should have sniffed the final three (four).

Mice 1961 is built around two sisters, Jody and her albino sister nicknamed Mice, who you might have said at the time was a little off or perhaps “touched,” and today we might speculate was on the spectrum or something of the kind. The sisters are orphaned, their father long out of the picture, their mother recently deceased, and they live on their own in an apartment with the narrator, a peculiar woman named Girtle who was herself an orphan and ran away from some kind of institution. Mice, the younger of the two, is still in high school and is mercilessly taunted and bullied by the other girls because she’s different – she looks different, of course, and she tends to fixate on small things and ask the same questions repeatedly. The story takes place the night of a big party, to which their whole Miami-area town has been invited, and Jody’s efforts to get Mice to the party so she can socialize while also keeping an eye on her sister.

The fundamental problem with Mice 1961 is that these characters all suck. They’re not interesting, they’re not three-dimensional, and they’re certainly not sympathetic. Mice feels like a parody of an autistic person, and the fact that she’s an albino (Levine never uses the word, but I’m fairly sure that’s the case here) and also somewhat developmentally disabled feels particularly insulting; albinism is a recessive genetic condition unrelated to intelligence. Jody is constantly worried about her sister, but in the way you might worry about a valuable piece of jewelry, not another human; there’s no sense anywhere in the book that Jody cares about Mice, and she does almost nothing to addressing the bullying other than complain to the police officer who (I think) is sweet on Jody and humors her whining. I spent most of the book wondering if any of these characters weren’t really there, especially Girtle, because so much of what they say and do seemed nonsensical, and Girtle often describes things that she couldn’t have seen without becoming part of the scene. It might have been a better book if she were a ghost or spirit or something else unreal, because I couldn’t figure out what her purpose was other than to be a sort of third-party narrator without requiring Levine to use the third person.

The party takes up most of the latter half of the book, and it’s full of local people who speak and act in bizarre and totally unrealistic ways. The party is a potluck, and at some point there’s a contest, sort of, although it’s more like each person announces what they brought and then maybe someone jumps in to insult them. I mean, I wasn’t at any potluck parties in 1961, but I think they were probably more fun and less full of assholes than this one.

Needless to say, I hated this book from start to finish – and I can’t even figure out what its point is. Why does this book exist? What is it telling me? This isn’t some moment in time or history or the culture that required documenting. It’s not a story about interesting people, and it’s not a story about larger issues like gender or race or the times a-changing (which they were in 1961). Absurdity for its own sake wears out its welcome very quickly. How this book made the final three in the Pulitzers is completely beyond my understanding.

Next up: I just started Josephine Tey’s The Man in the Queue, the first of her six mysteries featuring the character Inspector Alan Grant.

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→ May 19, 2025
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Congo, Inc.

I hadn’t heard of the Congolese author In Koli Jean Bofane before seeing the Oscar-nominated documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat this spring, which featured Bofane and mentioned that he was an novelist. Two of his novels have been translated into English, the second of which, Congo, Inc.: Bismarck’s Testament, marries satire with hysterical realism in an insane and sometimes inscrutable story of life in the D.R. Congo today, with its endless corruption and continued meddling from colonial interests. It does not work, ultimately, although it’s an entertaining read anyway for its madness.

Isookanga is a young Pygmy living in a village where his uncle is the chief and life is reasonably prosperous by local standards, spending much of his time playing a 4X video game called “Raging Trade” which, frankly, sounds pretty badass. He’s learned that the path to riches in the game is through violence and intimidation, though, rather than innovation, research, or hard work, and apparently you can buy all sorts of weaponry and target your opponents with incredible precision. This encourages him to set off for the nation’s capital, Kinshasa, to make his fortune, rather than to live a comfortable if boring life in the hinterlands. His narrative brings him into contact with corrupt politicians, do-gooder diplomats, even more corrupt UN peacekeepers, a Chinese merchant who has been abandoned by a corrupt partner, and so much more that it’s often unclear how any of these even connects back to Isookanga, who just wants to make money – like everyone else.

Bofane’s worldbuilding here is by far the best part of the book. He sends up modern Congo with a series of characters who are all drawn ten percent more sharply than is realistic, just enough of an edge to keep it satirical rather than ridiculous; the video game is the only part of Congo, Inc. that seems to defy realism, and that’s an easy thing to forgive. No one is above the corruption, although different people seem to want different things – the researcher who comes to study Congolese people is after something different than the UN envoy in New York who is after something different than the crooked clan leader and so on. There’s a sort of symmetry in the resolution here, and Bofane does manage to tie up most of the loose ends in a satisfying and often comical way, although the whole is less than the sum of the novel’s parts because of how quickly some of those subplots reach their denouements.

Saying too much more would spoil the pleasures of the book, which lie in much of its absurdity; if you can keep the characters and settings straight, there are some genuinely funny scenes within Congo, Inc. that also act in service of the greater commentary. I knew going into the book that Bofane, who lives in exile in Brussels, has a low view of Belgium (whose king “owned” the Congo as a personal territory and committed genocide against its people), the United States (which conspired to assassinate Congo’s President Patrice Lumumba), and the D.R.C.’s current leaders, so I understood the slant of his satire and could grasp the anger seething beneath its text. I’m not sure I would have gotten it to the same degree without that subtext. I’d be curious to read another of his works, preferably one of his two subsequent novels, once they’re translated into English.

Next up: I finished Mice 1961 and am almost through Jim Thompson’s noir novel The Getaway.

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→ May 17, 2025
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Stick to baseball, 5/17/25.

I had one piece for subscribers to the Athletic this past week, a minor league scouting notebook on some Yankees, Nats, Rays, and Orioles prospects; it’s rained just about every day since then, so I haven’t been to a game since Sunday (despite trying, twice, only to have the games cancelled after I was at or nearly at the park).

I did finally send out a new issue of my free email newsletter this past week, and I’m going to try to get back to doing that weekly now that my spring travel appears to be done. I think I ended up in 15 different states this spring, seeing over 70 guys who are legitimate draft prospects along the way, and of course I’m still annoyed at a few I missed (like Gavin Kilen, who was hurt the weekend I went to Knoxville).

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: The Trump Administration pressured African countries to give more business to Elon Musk, according to this report from ProPublica. All of the other stuff is a distraction – all of the funding cuts, the hate laws, the executive orders are there to suck up the oxygen so we don’t notice that they’re using the power of the federal government to enrich themselves. Like with this Amtrak project that Musk’s Boring Company is probably going to “win.”
  • Meanwhile, Musk’s attempt to take over the Copyright Office flopped because of opposition from conservative media companies and content creators, who, as it turns out, do have some principles when it comes to protecting their own bottom lines.
  • A preprint that appeared last fall that claimed that materials scientists who had access to AI tools were substantially more productive – and that received publicity from credulous reporters at the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere – was almost certainly a complete fabrication. MIT issued a press release this week saying they had “no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in the paper” and that the author, former graduate student Aidan Toner-Rodgers, was no longer affiliated with the school. The link above argues that the paper was full of red flags, including impossible access to corporate data and too-good-to-be-true results.
  • Alex Shephard says in the New Republic that Trump is the most corrupt President the U.S. has ever seen.
  • Political scientists who study the decline of democracies say that the United States is sliding towards autocracy in the way that other previously-free countries like Hungary and Turkey have done in the last twenty years.

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→ May 16, 2025
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Chicago eats, 2025 edition.

I had a short run through Chicago last week, with some disappointing scouting looks at a trio of high school players, but I managed to hit a couple of spots on my wishlist, and found a great local diner out in the suburbs.

Robert’s Pizza & Dough Company is located downtown, right by the Navy Pier, and appeared on this list of the 50 best pizzerias in the United States, compiled by an Italian outfit and skewed towards Neapolitan-style pizzas. Robert’s isn’t Neapolitan, though – it’s thin-crust, but crispier rather than doughy, without the wet center, and damn is it good, about as perfect a marriage as you’ll find between Neapolitan and New York-style pizzas. Robert is Robert Garvey, who chatted with a number of customers and explained to me that the dough was the result of years of experimenting in his home oven, so it’s really not any style but his own. I’d read on that same Italian site that they loved the sausage topping; it’s made in house and has a strong fennel flavor, and paired well with mushrooms (my favorite make-your-own toppings). The pizza was about $30, but really could have fed two people; I ate maybe ¾ of it, mostly because I knew I wasn’t going to eat for seven hours or so afterwards. It would definitely make my top pizzerias list, somewhere in the top half.

I didn’t love Rose Mary when I tried it last year, although it’s widely acclaimed and a few of you said you loved it, but I read that Chef Joe Flamm had opened a second place, Il Carciofo, featuring the cuisine of Rome, and managed to slip in there when the player I went to see on Tuesday was pulled after one at bat (I think because his team was already up 6-0). The best dish I had was the gnocchetti, which my server said was brand-new to the menu; despite the name, these were typical gnocchi (not small ones), with morels, asparagus, and Vacche Rossa Fonduta, the historical precursor to Parmiggiano-Reggiano. The gnocchi had just a little chew to them, while the sauce that formed around and from the other ingredients was a salty umami explosion. I also loved the fried artichoke – “carciofo” is Italian for artichoke – which was surprisingly light and delicate in texture. The filetti di baccalà, fried chunks of salt cod, came in a tempura-like coating, but were greasy, and the dessert I tried, maritozzi, sweet bread filled with whipped cream, had almost no flavor at all. (They often have a coating of crushed pistachios or chocolate to give them some kind of kick; this one didn’t.) I tried one cocktail, staying on theme with The Art of Choke, a combination of Cynar (an artichoke-based amaro), green Chartreuse, Flor de Caña rum, and mint, which was just a little sweet with a heavy herbal-vegetable undertone.

I tried Chicago tavern-style pizza for the first time, picking up a pie from Frank’s on Belmont Avenue to bring to a friend’s house for an impromptu game night. (He taught me Tiletum, which I liked, and we played 1987 Channel Tunnel, which I loved, and which finally got off my Shelf of Shame.) As much as I rag on Chicago pizza because I don’t like deep dish, I’m a fan of tavern-style pizza – it’s not too far apart from the Brooklyn coal-fired crust, crispy with enough structure to hold its shape when you pick up a square, and it practically screams for a cold beer.

I stayed out near O’Hare because it saved a ton of money, and happened on the Lake St Cafe, a fairly new diner in Addison that’s family owned, and serves huge portions for breakfast and lunch. I went there twice, the second day getting the veggie omelet, which was enormous. The menu says three eggs, but those had to be ostrich eggs or something. Anyway, it was one of the best diner omelettes I’ve had … maybe ever? They’re clearly using good eggs, and it had plenty of feta to give it some saltiness and acidity. The breakfast potatoes, however, had clearly been sitting for a while and were unchewable. The day before, I tried their chilaquiles, which came with a delicious, mildly spicy green salsa, but had what seemed like half a party-sized bag’s worth of tortilla chips, so after I ate the eggs (correctly cooked over medium, always a sign someone’s cooking things to order) and the chips with cheese on them, I had still had a giant plate of soggy chips in front of me. They may still be fine-tuning some recipes, but the foundation is good.

Maybe five minutes away is one of the locations for Brewpoint, a coffee roaster with a huge space in Elmhurst that is perfect for sitting to work for an hour or two. Their spring blend, The Botanist, is a little darker of a roast than I like, but if you like a medium roast it’s quite good. At Jack Bauer’s game, Caleb from Connect Roasters came by to watch the local flamethrower with me (I didn’t see the triple digits, unfortunately), and he brought me a cup of Guatemala La Colina that I desperately needed at that point; like most of the Guatemalan beans I’ve tried, it has cocoa notes with some small berries like raspberry.

And near Brewpoint in Elmhurst is a little sandwich shop called Zenwich, where I tried the fried shrimp sandwich with garlic, arugula, cilantro, and spicy mayo. It was sort of like a po’ boy by way of Vietnamese cuisine, and the shrimp had clearly just been cooked – and they were perfectly done, squeaking past the line between undercooked and done.

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→ May 15, 2025
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The Vegetarian.

Han Kang won the first Booker International Prize given to a single work of fiction for her novel The Vegetarian, and in 2024 she won the Nobel Prize in Literature for her entire body of work, much of which is still unavailable in English. The Vegetarian is a shocking novel in many ways, not least of which is how the title character, who is assaulted in multiple ways for deciding on a simple act of bodily autonomy, never gets to tell us her perspective.

The Vegetarian has three parts, each of which is told from the perspective of someone close to Yeong-hye, a housewife in Seoul who has violent dreams about animals and decides to stop eating meat. Her husband, whose perspective we get in the first section, is bewildered and incensed; he found his wife to be boring and “completely unremarkable in every way,” and so this remarkable choice leads him to arrange an intervention that includes her sister, brother-in-law, and parents. The intervention ends in violence of one sort, leading into the second part, told from her brother-in-law’s perspective, which ends in violence of a different sort, before we get the perspective of her sister, who is the only person in Yeong-hye’s life who seems to care even one iota about whether she lives or dies.

While there are multiple shocking scenes in The Vegetarian, including sexual and physical assault and a suicide attempt, the manner in which Kang tells the story is so anodyne that these incidents appear to come out of nowhere. It is the ultimate “that escalated quickly” novel, where an ordinary situation spirals out of control within a page, and the settings of these jarring events – on gray days, in industrial apartments – just make them seem that much more out of place.

Where I struggled with The Vegetarian was less in its violence or shocking nature than in figuring out what the ultimate point was. Giving up meat is a common choice, for ethical, health, financial, or religious reasons; it is actually the most normal thing Yeong-hye does in the novel. What she does beyond that, including almost completely stopping speaking to anyone around her, is harder and harder to understand. She doesn’t want to die, but she doesn’t not want to die, even asking “why is it such a bad thing to die?” – twice, in fact, although the way in which she asks it varies subtly in a way I won’t spoil.

Is this, then, a story about death as an escape from intolerable conditions? Yeong-hye is technically free, but lacks freedom. She has no real agency in her own life, except for what she chooses to take into her own body – and even that decision to assert one fundamental bit of autonomy elicits furious, violent responses from her immediate family. She has no job, and thus no money of her own. Where she lives and what she does during the day is largely if not entirely dictated by her husband. Her consent to sex is not required in her husband’s view. After their marriage dissolves, ostensibly because she chose to stop eating meat (which, to her husband, means she’s gone crazy), she endures different assaults on her physical and personal autonomy, which seems to drive her further inward, reducing her interactions with and dependence on the outside world. When her sister visits her in the psychiatric ward where she is staying in the final third of the book – even though she seems far less disturbed than the other patients we glimpse – it’s as if she has decided to leave the physical plane, not to die, but to shed the parts of herself she can’t control. I’ve seen reviews referring to it as a satire or commentary on misogyny in South Korean culture as well, but knowing nothing of that topic, I didn’t see that in my reading.

That’s a long way of saying I respect and appreciate The Vegetarian, but couldn’t entirely connect with it, either. It’s challenging in multiple ways, some of which is very good – Kang’s intent doesn’t leap off the page, certainly, and that results in a book that, if nothing else, made me think about it long after I was done.

(Also, every time I say or think the title of this book, I hear Skoob saying, “no Parks sausages, mom, please!”)

Next up: I just finished Stacey Levine’s Mice 1961 and started Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier.

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→ May 13, 2025
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TEN.

Somehow I never reviewed TEN, a great small-box card game from the Flatout Games group (Point Salad/City, Verdant), even though I first played it at least two years ago. We broke it out again on Monday and played a quick two-player game, refreshing my memory enough for a writeup. It’s fun, and so easy to teach and play.

TEN comes with a deck of cards numbered 1 through 9 in each of four colors and currency cards of value 1 through 5, with various wild cards I’ll describe in a moment, and black and white tokens used as currency in the game. The goal is to create sequential runs of cards in each of the four colors. You’ll score one point per card in your longest run for each color, and if you complete a run of cards 1 through 9, you get an extra point as a bonus.

On your turn, you flip cards from the top of the deck until you choose to stop, or until you bust by exceeding ten in total value on the numbered cards or on the currency cards (but not combined). If you chose to stop, you can take all of the numbered cards into your hand and all opponents get the tokens shown on the currency cards, or you can take the number of black tokens shown on the currency cards and your opponents get nothing. In the latter case, you move the numbered cards into the ‘market.’ If you take the numbered cards, you then get to buy one card from the market by paying tokens equal to its face value.

If you bust, then the numbered cards go to the market and you get a white token, which is equal to three black tokens. You can use black and white tokens to buy cards or in the auctions of wild cards (put a pin in that), and you can also discard any cards from your hand for a value of one in any purchase action.

The wild cards come in three flavors. One is just a straight wild card, which can be any color and any number of your choice; you don’t have to decide any of this until the end of the game. Then there are wild cards of a fixed number where the color is wild, and ones where the color is fixed and the number is wild. When the active player flips one over from the deck, they pause their turn and a one-round auction begins; the active player will always get the last bid. Then they resume their turn.

Play continues until the deck is exhausted; you alter the size of the deck based on the player count. Then each player picks the values/colors for their wild cards and scores their longest run of consecutively numbered cards in each of the four colors. That’s all there is to it.

TEN works best with more players, of course, as there’s more competition for the cards and within the auctions. You can’t plan on certain cards still being in the market, or know that once your opponent took a green 3, they’re not likely to keep another one, whereas in a two-player game, you’re probably going to get most of the cards you need, and the auctions are anticlimactic. Two-player still works, as long as you are fine with the higher scores and the probability that you’ll both finish at least two nine-card runs.

You can definitely throw this in a bag without the box – you don’t even really need the tokens if you have a pile of coins, and the cards are just a fat deck you can secure with a rubber band – and the teach is super quick. My younger stepdaughter had no problem grasping the game, and in our most recent play I beat her by just a single point, with only a little help required to get her to see how to maximize the points for the wild cards she had at game-end. The push-your-luck aspect of TEN is so fun and so easy for people to understand that I can’t imagine anyone over the age of 7 who wouldn’t be able to play it. I’m going to start bringing it on more trips.

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→ May 10, 2025
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Stick to baseball, 5/10/25.

I posted my first mock draft of 2025 this week for subscribers to the Athletic, and took questions from readers about that and other prospect matters on Friday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Finspan, the new fish-themed spinoff to Wingspan that features simpler rules and a faster teach.

I’m about to send out the first new issue of my free email newsletter since February, before my travel schedule went nuts; I’ve been to fourteen states to see players, just via air, plus two more around here.

A short list this week, for no particular reason, but here are the links…

  • Longreads first: Automakers are going back to physical buttons and moving away from touchscreens, like the massive billboard-sized screens in Teslas, as consumers prefer the physical buttons and touchscreens are associated with much-reduced reaction times. I rented a car with physical buttons and no touch screen recently, and it took me all of about 30 seconds to figure it out.
  • The Pulitzer Prize board chose to give the Fiction award to Percival Everett’s James, overriding the selection committee, which recommended three other titles. I just started one of the three, Mice 1961, because I want to see if I agree with the choice. I thought James was incredible.
  • Trump threatened to withhold $3 million in USDA funding from Maine schools because their Governor, Janet Mills, refused to comply with his extra-legal demand that they ban trans girls from playing girls’ sports. The USDA caved. If you don’t comply in advance, they back down. There’s still an ongoing court case over trans athletes in Maine, but the funding is restored.
  • Trump’s entire process for finding people to fill out executive branch jobs seems to be picking the worst purveyors of misinformation on Twitter: He made Vinay Prasad, a massive COVID and vaccine denier, in charge of the FDA’s vaccine regulation arm; and now he’s nominated a grifting “wellness influencer” without a medical license to be his Surgeon General.
  • Côte d’Ivoire had been one of the democratic success stories of Africa in the last decade-plus, but the recent court ruling that the leading candidate to oppose three-term incumbent President Alassane Ouattara is ineligible because of a technicality. The “little-used post-independence law” says that Tidjane Thiam, who was born in Côte d’Ivoire, should have lost his Ivorian citizenship automatically when he accepted French nationality, something he already had had through his father.

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→ May 8, 2025
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Rite of Passage.

In a not-too-distant future, where Earth is uninhabitable and humans have spread out to other star systems and colonized hundreds of worlds, a civilization on a starship has an unusual initiation for its adolescents called Trial: They’re dropped on one of those colony worlds with no information and no supplies, and if they survive for a month and are able to hit their rescue button, they pass. Many don’t return.

Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage, winner of the Nebula Award for Fiction in 1968, sounds like a YA novel by modern standards – and read that way, it’s quite a good one, not least because the main character, a girl of about thirteen named Mia Havero, is extremely well-written. She’s spirited and smart, but arrogant to the point of obstinacy, and her relationships with her peers, notably her best frenemy Jimmy, feel realistic within the artificial setting of the story.

Mia narrates the book, so we know she’s survived Trial already, but the bulk of the book comes before she, Jimmy, and their group are dropped on a hostile planet, as she recalls some of her adventures growing up on the starship and getting into various sorts of mischief. She sneaks around the ship through the air ducts, going to forbidden areas and learning things about their makeshift civilization that only people like her father, one of the ship’s political leaders, would know. She also struggles to make friends, between her father’s position in the hierarchy – with some hints at significant political divisions among leadership, including what the starship’s relationships should be with the colonies – and her own attitude, something she struggles to understand.

Kids employ two general strategies during Trial – turtle, hiding out as much as possible to survive the month with minimal risk; or tiger, exploring the world and making an adventure out of it. I’m not entirely sure why anyone would choose tiger in reality, but Mia does, and of course runs into trouble almost immediately. This world has a native simian population that the human colonizers have enslaved, assuming they’re not sufficiently sentient or intelligent to have basic rights, one of many things during Trial that affects Mia’s very limited worldview.

There are other events throughout her month on the colony world that also force her to reconsider past prejudices, which is where the book really clicks. What comes before Trial is fun, but trivial; she runs around the ship like a kid who’s a little too smart for her own good, narrowly escaping punishment and/or death, thinking that she’s invincible in the way most kids do. Trial is stark, a way to weed out the weak or unintelligent in the thinking of the starship’s authorities, but it’s also a strong metaphor for the ways in which teenagers become adults through experience. For me, it was college, where I was first exposed to people from other backgrounds and beliefs, first forced to reconsider things I’d always assumed or believed to be true, and first forced to take care of myself for any period longer than three weeks. I did not have to escape angry colonists mad that my home ship wouldn’t share all their technology, though.

The prose and general style in Rite of Passage feel slightly dated, and give the whole book the YA feel I mentioned earlier – this is what a lot of sci-fi writing was like in the 1960s. A huge part of Robert Heinlein’s bibliography reads just like this, to pick one, even his books that weren’t explicitly for young adults. Some of the ideas Panshin is pushing still resonate today, including ideas of colonialism and imperialism, or the moral obligation of developed nations to share technologies or medicines with the rest of the world. And content that might have seemed “adult” in 1968 is pretty tame by modern YA standards – there’s some violence, and one reference to Mia having sex that’s almost entirely off-page (thank goodness), and that’s it. I was pleasantly surprised at how well this held up, given how poorly some early sci-fi award winners – the ones that haven’t maintained their status atop the genre – have fared over the last half-century.

Next up: Han Kang’s The Vegetarian.

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→ May 7, 2025
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Vermiglio.

Vermiglio was Italy’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature, making the 15-film shortlist, and earned a nomination in the same category at the Golden Globes, although it is probably just too small and intimate to win against bigger competitors like I’m Still Here or Emilia Pérez. It’s a simple story of a family in an Alpine village in Italy near the end of World War II whose nephew comes home with the help of a deserter, Pietro, who then falls in love with their eldest daughter, an affair that has unforeseen consequences for everyone when he leaves to visit his mother in Sicily. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

The patriarch of the family, who looks like someone asked an AI engine to make an Italian version of Sam Elliott, is the village’s schoolteacher, while his wife is the caretaker of their farm and does the majority of the work of raising the children. She’s already pregnant with their tenth child when Pietro arrives with Attilio, their nephew, who was injured and would have died had Pietro not carried him part of the way home. Pietro is extremely quiet, but settles in with the family and tries to help out around the farm while facing some backlash from other villagers because he’s a deserter and a southerner (there was, and still is, quite a bit of prejudice between northern and southern Italy, and in this case the village and Pietro’s home couldn’t be much farther apart). The eldest daughter, Lucia, falls for him immediately, although it also seems like she and the other girls haven’t exactly seen a whole lot of boys before, and Pietro is just an object of fascination. The next-oldest daughter, Ada, is pious to the point of parody, and writes out punishments for herself for anything she thinks is a sin – which, of course, doesn’t stop her from committing them. Meanwhile, Dino, their oldest son, chafes under his father’s strict rule, and wants to continue his studies while his father sees his son as the heir of the farm, and instead wants another daughter to be the scholar of the family and go away to boarding school.

Pietro and Lucia end up marrying before the film’s midpoint, and Lucia becomes pregnant almost immediately, which is about as much excitement as we get in the first hour-plus of Vermiglio, until they get word that the war has ended and he reluctantly leaves to go see his family. What follows is the one big event of the film, and it further exposes some of the cracks in the family’s dynamic, especially in how the father has ruled the house in the same way even as the children are reaching adulthood.

Vermiglio is a slice-of-life film without the traditional narrative arc, and even downplays certain events – the death of a child, an unexpected wedding – that would normally be high points in a movie. It moves at its own pace, allowing for more characters to move to the center and for the script to develop them, even secondary ones like Dino, whose ambition is crushed by his father’s domineering parenting style.

Indeed, the patriarch seems at first like a gentle sort, an intellectual who takes care of his family like an Italian Pa Ingalls, but over the course of the film it becomes clear that he’s the source of many of the family’s problems. He’s why they have too many mouths to feed, why they don’t have enough money to feed them, why his daughters are utterly clueless about the world, why his son drinks too much, and so on. He views himself as the lord of the manor and his wife and children as his serfs, which the film never points out explicitly, but rather demonstrates through large and small events that beset the family.

The excellent review of Vermiglio that appeared in The Guardian said the film had “an almost Hardyesque intensity,” just without the class struggles of Thomas Hardy’s novels, and I have no better comparison. Even though it’s set in the 1940s, it has the pastoral quality of all of Hardy’s novels that I’ve read, and the same sort of bleak outlook, and the same contrast between the two. Hardy was a prose master who wrote beautiful phrases about tragic people. Vermiglio is a beautiful, leisurely film, where some of the tragedies are quieter than others, that throws one small match into the window of a family’s home and waits for something to catch.

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→ May 5, 2025
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Telephone.

Percival Everett’s Telephone is the most serious of the six of his novels I’ve read so far, with the only humorous elements some of the smartass dialogue coming from his main character. A finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (which it lost to the inferior The Night Watchman), Telephone finds Everett exploring how people respond to grief and the search for meaning in a world that appears to have none at all.

Zach Wells, another author surrogate for Everett, is a geologist and college professor who lives with his wife and their one child, a daughter named Sarah, who is the apple of Zach’s eye like Bonnie Blue was in Rhett Butler’s. Sarah starts to have absence seizures and reports some other neurological symptoms, and when Zach and his wife take her to the doctor, they learn that she has a fatal neurodegenerative disorder called Batten disease that will kill her in a few years, and on her way to dying, she’ll lose her faculties and won’t even recognize her parents.

Meanwhile, Zach orders a piece of clothing off the internet and finds a note that just says “ayúdame” (“help me”) in one of its pockets. He orders another item from the same place, and gets a similar note. He’s stymied, but eventually decides he has to do something to figure out if there is someone in trouble wherever these garments are made or repackaged. And at work, he has a younger colleague who procrastinated for years on publishing her work and now may not get tenure as a result, but Zach finds that her work is good enough and embarks on a late push to save her.

In just about all of Everett’s books, at least the ones I’ve read, he’s asking important questions and only hints at the answers. Here, Zach is a tragic figure from the start – his father killed himself, his marriage has stalled, he doesn’t seem to particularly like his work – and the one facet of his life that seems to give him real joy is going to be taken from him in the cruelest possible fashion. When you can’t save the most important person in the world, do you turn to try to save someone else? A colleague you respect, not even a friend, just someone who you think deserves more than she’s getting? A complete stranger, or more than one, who may not even exist, and if they do it’s in another country and maybe you’ll get killed trying to do it? Would any of this matter in the grand scheme? Would it help you save yourself?

Where Telephone ends up was something of a surprise, as I’m used to Everett concluding his novels in uncertain fashion – at least three of the other five lacked concrete resolutions to their plots. Wells gets an ending in fact where the ambiguity is interior to his character. Has anything changed? When he goes back to his regular life, will he be altered by the experiences, or has he just pushed away the grief that will be waiting for him at his front door?

Wells is an Everett stand-in in the same vein as Kevin Pace, the protagonist of So Much Blue, as middle-aged men facing some kind of emotional crisis, although Pace’s was more of his own making and Wells’s definitely is not. They’re well-developed, flawed, and very realistic. They make mistakes, especially in their marriages. They do not talk easily or openly about their feelings. And they are ill-equipped for what hits them, a combination in both cases of how they were raised and the choices they’ve made as adults. Telephone is just another piece of evidence in the case for Everett as our greatest living novelist.

Next up: Congo Inc.: Bismarck’s Testament, a satirical novel by In Koli Jean Bofane, who appeared in the documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat.

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