→ October 28, 2020
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The Everyday Parenting Toolkit.

The Everyday Parenting Toolkit is a very specific set of tools for parents, with guidelines that apply to kids of just about any age but a stronger focus on kids younger than about nine. The subject here is behavior, and behavior change, and the book, authored by Dr. Alan Kazdin, describes some pretty simple rules for engendering behavior change in children that focus on positive steps more than negative, certainly different than the way I think most or at least many people parent. It’s often difficult to get through because Kazdin calls every step of the method by its technical name, but this is evidence-based behavior management, and could help all of us with kids get out of the cycles of discipline and punishment that don’t really work to create the changes you want.

The basics of the method revolve around the A-B-C framework of Antecedents, Behavior, and Consequences. Before you can do any of this, however, you have to define the behavior you want, and do so in clear terms that you can communicate to your child and that your child can understand in a way that they can execute. If you can’t explain it to yourself, or to your spouse or partner, in simple terms, then your child isn’t going to be able to follow it and make the change you want.

Antecedents come before the behavior in question, and changing them can change the behavior – thus, you create an environment with incentives (or disincentives) to encourage the behavior you want. Depending on the child, the behavior, and how far the status quo is from the desired behavior, you might even choose to simulate the activity and the behavior so that your child has a chance to practice the behavior you want in stages – for example, ‘practicing’ a tantrum, but one with less screaming, or where they keep their body more under control. You need to identify specific behaviors you want to change, rather than general traits like generosity or kindness, and then use Kazdin emphasizes that what you do before the behavior occurs can have far greater impact than what you try to do afterward.

The Behavior stage of his method involves providing reinforcement when you get the behavior you want, or even just part of the behavior you want. This might be the ‘positive opposite,’ where your child is doing the polar opposite of the behavior you want, and thus getting to your desired outcome requires working in stages. You create a plan to get from point A (present behavior) to point B (desired behavior), and develop a program, with any co-parents, to encourage progress with reinforcement – primarily praise, specific praise that is delivered as close in time to the good behavior as possible. The plan should set specific, achievable goals for the child, and each positive step should be met with praise, effusive praise for younger kids especially, and maybe with very modest rewards like a point system.

Consequences are not what you might think, or at least not what I thought they’d be. Kazdin emphasizes the importance of positive reinforcement programs, arguing that they’re just more effective than negative reinforcement (what we usually think of as punishment). Punishments should be mild when used at all, and should be accompanied by a reinforcement program that encourages the ‘positive opposite’ of the offending behavior. (He points out that parents should never use physical discipline, and there is substantial research on the long-term negative outcomes associated with even ‘light’ corporal punishment like spanking, from worse mental health outcomes to decreased immune function. Don’t spank your kids.) You may also need to withhold reinforcement from undesirable behaviors; every parent knows the situation where they’ve had to stop themselves from laughing at something their kid did that you really don’t want them to repeat, but that was actually quite funny. I remember my daughter, then four and a half, saying “Daddy!” and clapping twice to get my attention for something, and I had to turn away so she couldn’t see me cracking up; that would have provided positive reinforcement for a behavior that, while pretty astute (I had clapped a few times to get her attention before), was not something I wanted to see become a habit. Withholding that reinforcement thus would have been a key part of a behavior-change program, had I instituted one at the time.

Kazdin states multiple times that punishment doesn’t work on its own and should be rarely used, and only to decrease some behavior. It can confuse your child if you’re trying to use punishment, especially as a restorative method, while also working to change behavior and ‘impart other lessons.’ Punishment doesn’t teach positive behaviors, only works in the very short term, and often provokes side effects like crying, avoidance, and even aggression (especially if you use corporal punishment). He describes the most effective way to use time outs, including that the first minute of time out does most of the work, and that time outs beyond ten minutes probably do nothing at all.

The remainder of The Everyday Parenting Toolkit is devoted to the need to develop a strong environment, or context, in your home to allow better behaviors to develop; and to real-world examples from families who’ve visited the Yale Parenting Center, where Dr. Kazdin is the director, and the programs the center developed to help those families implement sustainable behavior changes. The context chapter would probably apply to the greatest number of readers, because the eight steps he recommends could start at any time, regardless of how old your kids are, to encourage better behavior or just discourage undesirable behaviors, and perhaps limit the need for you to use the A-B-C method so that it’s more effective and easier for you to maintain.

My daughter is 14, but I still found value in The Everyday Parenting Toolkit for parenting her, as well as far more tips for my partner’s kids, who are both still in the single digits. I have zero background in psychology, but much of what Kazdin recommends here follows principles from behavioral economics – not just incentives and disincentives, but timing (rewards and reinforcements must happen very soon after the behavior), misaligned incentives, and the nonlinear effects of many of these steps, like time outs. Kazdin does rely too much on jargon here, even though it’s a book for the lay audience, and I found it to be a slow read for that reason – seeing “positive opposite” fifty times didn’t make the phrase more meaningful in my head, for example – but there are lessons here I’ll be able to use at home for a long time, and that I think every parent should know.

Next up: I’ve finished Max Porter’s Lanny and am now reading Emily Oster’s Cribsheet.

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→ October 23, 2020
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Mumbo Jumbo.

I can’t believe Ishmael Reed’s 1972 Mumbo Jumbo escaped my notice until just this year, when I grabbed it for $2 for the Kindle. It would have fit perfectly in the class I took in college called Comedy and the Novel – which, as great as it was, did not include a single book written by a woman or a person of color – and should be in high school curricula around the country. It’s postmodern yet largely accessible; it’s funny, yet incredibly serious; and it deals with timeless topics of race and culture. It’s also about a nonlethal pandemic, making it an interesting read in the time of COVID-19. There were certainly parts I didn’t follow, some of which is a function of my cultural illiteracy, but the end result is an important and very compelling work of magical realism and postmodern fiction.

The pandemic at the heart of this story is called “Jes Grew,” and the primary symptom is the desire to dance and have fun. Needless to say, the white powers that be can’t abide this, and the Knights of Templar (who still exist) team up with the shadowy Wallflower Order to fight it, while various Black leaders, many of whom are voodoo clergy, work against them. The story twists and turns while incorporating major historical events from the first half of the twentieth century, placing great emphasis on the 19-year U.S. occupation of Haiti, with appearances by a cornucopia of real-life figures, including President Warren Harding, dancer/author Irene Castle, and W.E.B. Dubois.

In the world of Mumbo Jumbo, voodoo is real, but its history has been suppressed by white people (as have many elements of Black culture), and the true history of Judeo-Christian religions is quite different from the one we’re given today, involving a gallimaufry of spirits and prophets going back to ancient Egypt. The voodoo priests are led by PaPa LaBas, a voudou priest who is named for one of that religion’s spirits known as loas, but the characters themselves are secondary to the “anti-plague” of Jes Grew, a fairly obvious metaphor for the spread of Black culture and white efforts to stop it and, when they can’t, their efforts to appropriate and assimilate it. The story winds through jazz clubs and speakeasies, including Harlem’s famous Cotton Club, and art museums housing stolen art from the developing world. It works in the search for a mystical text from the goddess Osiris that may explain the origins of Jes Grew and hold the key to stopping it. Reed even works in the since-debunked story that Harding was part Black.

There’s plenty of intrigue here, including several murders by the warring factions, a demonic possession, and a tense hostage scene, which was more than enough to hold my interest for its scant 200 pages (and something like 50 chapters). There’s a lot of subtext here that I know I missed, though, from Black cultural history to voodoo and spiritualism, caused by gaps in my own education, that I’m sure limited how much I could understand and appreciate what was going on in Mumbo Jumbo. I understood his points about Black culture and the long history of white attempts to suppress it, probably because I’m at least old enough to remember mainstream resistance to rap music – and more than one adult telling me in the late 1980s that rap was “a fad” that wouldn’t last – and how it was characterized. The levers of power in the entertainment world are still controlled by white people, mostly white men, which is why Tyler Perry had to finance his own productions, and why some people of color have to produce and direct films in which they star. That’s part of why I said Mumbo Jumbo should be taught in schools – that aspect of the book is still extremely relevant – although I think this is also a text that would reward the closer reading of an academic setting, with guidance on some of the book’s allusions that I probably missed. It was rewarding enough as is, but I think reading it in a class would be even more so.

Next up: I just finished Graham Swift’s new novel Here We Are and am about halfway through Dr. Alan Kazdin’s The Everyday Parenting Toolkit.

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→ October 20, 2020
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Biased.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt is a social psychologist and professor at Stanford University who received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant in 2014 for her work on implicit bias and how stereotypic associations on race have substantial consequences when they intersect with crime. Her first book, Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, came out in 2019 and explains much of her work on the topic with concrete and often very moving examples of such bias occurring in the real world – often in Eberhardt’s own life – when Black Americans encounter the police.

The heart of Biased comes from Eberhardt’s work on racial bias and crime, and many of the stories that she uses to illustrate conclusions from broader research efforts involve the murders of unarmed Black men by police. One chapter starts with the shooting of Terence Crutcher, who was shot and killed by a panicked white police officer, Betty Shelby, who was, of course, acquitted of all charges in connection with her actions. (She later said that she was “sorry he lost his life,” as if she wasn’t involved in that somewhow.) Crutcher’s twin sister, Tiffany, has become a prominent activist focusing on criminal justice reform and raising awareness of the role white supremacy plays in endangering Black lives.

Eberhardt uses Crutcher’s story and her words to frame discussions of how implicit bias – the kind of bias that happens beneath our conscious thought process – leads to outcomes like Shelby killing Terence Crutcher. We can all recognize the kind of bias that uses racial slurs, or explicitly excludes some group, or traffics in open stereotypes, but implicit bias can have consequences every bit as significant, and is more insidious because even well-intentioned people can fall prey to it. Multiple studies have found, for example, that white subjects have subconscious associations between Black people and various negative character traits – and some Black subjects did as well, which indicates that these are societal messages that everyone receives, through the news, entertainment, even at school. When police officers have those implicit biases, they might be more likely to assume that a Black man holding a cell phone is actually holding a gun when they wouldn’t make the same assumption with a white man. This becomes a failure of officer training, not a matter of all cops who shoot Black men being overtly racist, while also drawing another line between those who say Black Lives Matter and those who counter that All or Blue or Fuchsia Lives Matter instead.

No other arena has the same stakes as policing and officer-involved shootings, but implicit bias also has enormous consequences in areas like education, hiring, and the housing market. Eberhardt runs through numerous studies showing implicit but unmistakable bias in the employment sphere, such as when test candidates with identical resumes but different names, one of whom bears a name that might imply the candidate is Black, receive calls back at vastly different rates. Implicit bias can explain why we still see evidence of redlining even when the explicit practice – denying the applications of nonwhite renters, or the offers of nonwhite home buyers, to keep white neighborhoods white – has been outlawed since the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968.

Eberhardt also speaks to Bernice Donald, a Black woman who is now a federal judge but who experienced discrimination in education firsthand as one of the first Black students in DeSoto County, Mississippi, to attend her local whites-only high school, where she was ignored by some white teachers, singled out by faculty and students alike, and denied opportunities for advancement, including college scholarships she had earned through her academic performance. The implicit biases we see today affect not just students’ grades, but how students of different races are disciplined, and how severe such discipline is. Eberhardt doesn’t mention the school-to-prison pipeline, but the research she cites here shows how that pipeline can exist and the role that implicit bias plays in filling it with Black students.

Some of the studies Eberhardt describes in Biased will be familiar if you’ve read any similar books, such as Claude Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi or Banaji & Greenwald’s Blindspot, that cover this ground, but Eberhardt’s look is newer, more comprehensive, and punctuated by deeply personal anecdotes, including a few of her own. While she was a graduate student at Harvard, on the eve of commencement, she and her roommate were pulled over by a Boston police officer for a minor equipment violation, harassed, injured, and brought to the station, where a Dean from their department had to come vouch for their release. She eventually had to go to court, where she was acquitted of all charges – which included a claim that she had injured the officer, a claim the judge ridiculed, according to Eberhardt. Would that have happened if she were white? Would it surprise you to hear that the cop who hassled her and her friend was Black? And what, ultimately, does this, and research showing that Black motorists are far more likely to be stopped for the most trivial of causes and more likely to end up dead when stopped by police, tell us about solutions to the problem of implicit bias in policing? The answers are not easy, because implicit bias is so hard to root out and often isn’t evident until we have enough data to show it’s affecting outcomes. We won’t get to that point if we can’t agree that the problem exists in the first place.

Next up: I just finished Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo last night and am reading Graham Swift’s new novel Here We Are.

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→ October 9, 2020
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Air, Land, and Sea.

Air, Land, and Sea is a great, simple, quick-to-learn, and highly portable two-player game that manages to bring something new despite the fact that the game is really just a deck of 18 cards. It’s very clever and reveals quite a bit more strategy with increased plays, yet it’s elegant and simple enough that almost anyone could play it.

Each player in Air, Land, & Sea will get a hand of six cards to start the game, and unless they get a card that allows them to draw another, that’s all they get. The cards have the values 1 through 6, one set for the Air, one for the Land, and one for the Sea. Players play one card at a time and may play them face up, using the value and text on the card’s face, to the theater matching the color on the card; or face down, getting a flat value of 2 and no benefit from the text, to any theater. They play each card to one of the three theaters of battle, the three names in the title of the game, and the sum of the values on their cards will be compared at end-game to the cards on their opponent’s side, taking into account any adjustments from face-up cards elsewhere on the table. If you play to a theater that already has one of your cards, the new card covers most of it, which matters for certain card abilities. If one player wins two of the three theaters, they win the game; the start player wins any ties. The winning player gets some number of points, up to 6, and the players play further games until one of them has 12 points.

There are two major twists, of course. One is that the cards with values from 1 to 5 have extra abilities that can range from invalidating an opponent’s card to allowing you to flip any uncovered card on the table (face-up or face-down) to changing the values of other cards in the same or adjacent theaters. Thus, the timing of when you play your cards is a huge part of strategy in Air, Land, & Sea, both in terms of lining up your own cards so that you can maximize the benefits of those card texts, and in hoping your opponent will play cards you can counteract with cards still in your hand.

Air, Land, and Sea set up on the tabletop

The other twist is that you can concede the game before it ends and deny your opponent the full 6 points they’d get if you played until both players had exhausted their hands. The number of points you receive for winning depends on how many cards are unplayed and whether you were the first or second player (which alternates in each game). It’s often clear early on that you can’t win at least one theater, because you didn’t get the right cards in your hand or because your opponent has stronger cards, and I’ve had several games where I had two cards left in my hand and realized they weren’t enough to win two of the three theaters for me, so concession was the right strategy. It lets you stop a game early so you live to fight another day.

The game does have a few quirks that might send you back to the rulebook or just require a few plays to get accustomed to them. One is that some cards, like Maneuver, require you to take the action in the text, rather than giving you the option. Another is that cards can be moved to another theater when covered, but never flipped. And there is a distinction between playing a card, which may trigger other card abilities, and moving one, which generally does not. Once you get the hang of those, though, the game flies by – no pun intended – rather quickly, and you can easily play an entire match in 20 minutes. And despite the short ruleset and small deck, there’s a lot of replay value because of the sheer number of possible combinations (my quick calculations show over 18,000 possible sets of 12 cards from 18, without considering the two different hands of 6, but I suck at combinatorics). I missed Air, Land, and Sea when it first came out – it was self-published in 2018, then picked up by Arcane Wonders and published in early 2019 – but at $15 on amazon it’s an easy addition to my best two-player games list.

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→ October 8, 2020
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Grief is the Thing with Feathers.

I recently included a link to a podcast that featured authors David Mitchell and Jasper Fforde where, at the end of the program(me), they each had to recommend one book and make the case for it in some brief period of time – I think it was three minutes – after which the host would choose the winner. Fforde didn’t take it very seriously, naming the owner’s manual for his car, but Mitchell recommended a book by Max Porter called Grief is the Thing with Feathers, reading a passage from it as part of his allotted time. The prose was so unlike anything I’d heard before that I felt like I had to read it immediately – easy enough to do since the book is a scant 114 pages – to see how Porter could stretch that lyrical yet dark language into something the length of a novella.

The novel is certainly about grief, telling the story of a young father of two boys whose wife has just died unexpectedly, and who is understandably consumed by his grief. He is assisted, in a way, in his grieving process by the Crow, a probably-imaginary being who speaks to the Dad and protects the three of them, but isn’t always as helpful as he thinks he is, and brings his own stories of woe and insecurity. The narrative rotates from the Dad to the Crow to the Boys and back again as it traces the path of their grief from shortly after the wife and mother has died to the point where the Crow decides to leave because his work is done.

Porter’s technique here means that the book is all dialogue and internal monologue, yet he infuses so much of it – notably Crow’s, but the Dad’s as well – with imagery and a sort of curious wordplay, where Crow seems to be trying words out for the sounds of them, that it comes off a lot like poetry. Prose doesn’t look or sound or feel like this, at least not in the sorts of literature I inhabit, and it enhanced the sense of magical realism throughout the book in a way that made Crow seem far less ridiculous, even when Dad explicitly refers to him to the Boys as imaginary.

The grief of the father in Grief is the Thing with Feathers comes through intensely on these pages, with no efforts by Porter to soften or deflect the blows. The fact that the wife died without warning – it is explained how later in the book – gives the Dad’s grief an acute edge to it, combining the emotional abyss with the realization that he is now a single father of two boys who will now look to him for the emotional and physical support they had received from their mother. Porter tries to take us inside his suffering, and then gives us Crow as the foil who challenges the father in a way that helps the father towards healing without obviously (or mawkishly) doing so.

The Crow’s passages are the most memorable, and the most poetic. He’s part fabulist, part black humorist, part wordsmith: “He flew a genuflection … Ley lines flung him cross-country with no time for grief, power cables catapulted loose bouquets of tar-black bone and feather and other crows rained down from the sky.” Perhaps my favorite of Crow’s words are a bit of apparent doggerel, starting with “Gormin’ere, worrying horrid. Hello elair, krip krap krip krap who’s that lazurusting beans of my cut-out?” but ending with the revelation that “I do this, perform some unbound crow stuff, for him.”

Mitchell is himself a brilliant writer, and his recommendation was good enough for me to read Grief is the Thing with Feathers, especially when I saw how short it was. It’s one of the most remarkable novellas – not a novel, certainly, not when it’s probably less than 30,000 words – I’ve read in years, like little else I’ve ever seen, for its prose, and for its unflinching look inside the grief of losing one’s partner at the peak of love and life.

Next up: I’m treating myself with something a bit more fun than my other recent reads, Lois McMaster Bujold’s Falling Free, the first book (by chronological order) in her Vorkosigan saga series of novels.

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→ October 6, 2020
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Monos.

Multiple readers recommended Monos, the Colombian submission for last year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film (which didn’t make the nine-film shortlist), when I talked about the best films I saw in 2019. Now available on Hulu as part of that service’s deal with Neon, this modern twist on a Lord of the Flies setting is disturbing and grim, casting a dark light on indoctrination and how cults and similar movements take control of malleable young minds.

The”monos” (“monkeys”) of the film are a dozen or so teenage guerrillas fighting the government in an unnamed South American country, although the similarities to the decades-long FARC insurrection in Colombia are obvious. They’re holding an American woman, known only as Doctora (Julianne Nicholson), hostage, and take most of their direction over short-wave radio, visited only twice in the film by The Messenger (Wilson Salazar, himself a former FARC child soldier), who drills them and gives them further orders. When left to their own devices, however, the monos act like teenagers, showing poor judgment, fighting among themselves, pairing off in couples, and doing a rather poor job of monitoring their one prisoner, while it becomes clear most of the kids have no idea why they’re fighting or even taking orders from unseen authorities.

Nearly all of the actors in Monos were making their screen debuts in the film; only Nicholson and Moisés Arias, who plays Bigfoot, had previous credits. You’d never guess by the performances, however, as the actors are entirely credible, perhaps because the script asks them to act like teenagers and because the shoot was so tough on all of the participants. Each has a distinct character and a nickname that sort of fits them, and despite the film’s brisk pace most of them have enough to do to make it clear who at least the key ones are, especially once their discipline begins to break down early in the film and multiple things go wrong.

The heart of the story is the kids, although Nicholson has more screen time than any individual fighter does because so much of the story revolves around their inability to handle any of the tasks they’ve been assigned, including guarding her. None of the child soldiers has a single line in the film that indicates any allegiance to or understanding of the cause for which they’re fighting – the audience never hears it from anyone, in fact. We just know they’re fighting the government, but not which one, or why, or what any of their goals might be. Their participation in this ragtag troop is the end in itself, and with none of them mentioning parents or other family at any point, you might assume they’re either orphans or kids who ran away from something at home, and have tried to replace that with their affiliation with this terrorist group. That leads to an inevitable conflict when interpersonal relationships interfere with their allegiance to the movement, and when obeying the orders from The Messenger and his superiors might mean betraying one’s friends, possibly even to the point of handing one of them a death sentence.

There’s also a political subtext here that I assume resonates more strongly if you know the history of armed insurrections in South America, especially Colombia (FARC, ELN) or even Peru (Sendero Luminoso, MRTA), which endured long, violent conflicts with guerrilla movements on the right and left. I’m not conversant enough with those histories to think I would understand all references within Monos, but at least know that FARC took many hostages during their 43-year terror campaign and conscripted children into their ranks, so I assumed we were watching a proxy for that group. Regardless of the real-world inspiration, this script shows the pointlessness of these guerrilla movements and the futility of the deaths they caused and lives they ruined by stripping the struggle of its ostensible goals, most of which would mean little or nothing to the children handed automatic weapons and a hostage to protect.

Monos is strongest when it focuses on the interactions between the child soldiers, though, getting into themes of homophobia and alienation as well as the sort of squabbling that readers of William Golding’s novel would recognize. They’re still just kids and they act like it, especially when they’re left to their own devices and handed responsibilities no teenager should have. When one of the soldiers realizes they’re no longer on board with the group’s mission or decisions, they try to leave, and then it’s clear that this hasn’t all been some elaborate game. It is that choice, to show what happens when we hand children and their underdeveloped brains adult responsibilities, that gives Monos meaning.

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→ September 16, 2020
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The Personal History of David Copperfield.

When word came out in mid-2019 that Armando Iannucci (The Death of Stalin, VEEP) was filming an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, I read the book in anticipation of its release, also rectifying a rather large gap in my own reading history. (I’d read five Dickens novels, two in high school and three by choice, but not this one, which Dickens himself called his favourite, and which the Guardian called the third “most Dickensian” of his novels.) The movie came out in the UK last year, but its arrival in the U.S. was delayed by COVID-19, and it just hit theaters earlier this month. It is marvelous, the best 2020 release I’ve seen so far this year, with a mostly faithful script, wonderful casting, and excellent use of the humor in Dickens’ rags-to-riches novel.

If you haven’t read the book, which I had not other than one of those Moby Books’ abridged, illustrated versions back in 1981 or so, it is the life story of its title character, from birth into straitened circumstances, through his widowed mother’s unfortunate choice of a misanthropic, controlling husband, to his indenture at his stepfather’s wine-selling business, and on and on in somewhat picaresque fashion. He encounters a host of eccentric characters, a few of whom, notably the venal Uriah Heep, have gained lasting reputation among the pantheon of literary creations, with several others providing comic relief among David’s series of misfortunes before he finally turns to writing as a vocation and finds success and financial security for the first time.

The first theatrical film version of Dickens’ classic novel in a half-century, The Personal History of David Copperfield might be most notable for the color-blind casting, although I’d argue that this choice is notable for how quickly you’ll stop noticing it. The casting itself is so perfect top to bottom that casting all-white actors couldn’t have produced a comparable result, notably Dev Patel as David himself, handling the pivotal role with aplomb, adapting to David’s changing views of the world and greater understanding of the people around him over the course of the story. Characters who are related by blood don’t share skin tone, and it couldn’t matter any less.

Many of the side characters are superbly cast as well, but none more so than Hugh Laurie as the befuddled Mr. Dick, which sees Laurie at his Woosterian best, and also gives that character a bit more to do than just to serve as comic relief. Mr. Dick’s host, David’s aunt Betsy Trotwood, is played by Tilda Swinton, who can certainly dominate a film in the wrong way when she gets to play a severe character; here, she gives Aunt Betsy more depth than the character has in the novel, making her more sympathetic and thus making it easier to understand why David is so generous to her as her own circumstances decline and he finds their relations reversed. Ben Whishaw delivers an unctuous, loathsome performance as Uriah Heep, complete with bowl-cut and affected speech that Patel later mimics to great comic effect. Peter Capaldi, the Twelfth Doctor, has a lot of fun with the shifty but good-hearted Mr. Micawber, making him a little less exasperating on the screen than he is on the page.

The movie is brisk at two hours, and spends far more time on the first half of the novel than on the second, with great length given to David’s childhood and early adulthood, including his relationship with Mr. Micawber and time in a boarding school where he meets James Steerforth (Aneurin Barnard). That choice gives us rather more prologue than David requires and rushes some of the resolutions, so that David’s marriage to Agnes is treated almost as an afterthought, and the unmasking of Uriah Heep plays out in a far less satisfying manner, because the audience has so much less time and reason to despise him, and also has less time to appreciate Whishaw’s deft portrayal of Heep’s scheming nature. The first half of the novel is important, but the second half is the payoff. The film gives you all of that payoff in the last thirty minutes, and it’s still fun, just condensed.

Iannucci and his co-writer Simon Blackwell play the story extremely straight until close to the very end. The compression of the last half of the book requires a large change to the arc with Dora, which the screenwriters handle in a way that also comments on Dickens’ original story, where David marries Dora, realizes it’s unsuitable because she’s dull and needy, so Dickens has her conveniently die after suffering a miscarriage so that David can marry Agnes. Dora here is even sillier than she is in the book, making her a great comic presence, but rather than kill her off, the writers give her the perspicacity to find her own way off the stage. The Ham/Emily/Steerforth subplot, itself rather tangential to David’s own narrative, also has a rather significant change that I would argue is less successful even though Dickens’ own handling of that arc relied too much on coincidence.

I had no trouble following the plot, because I’d read the novel recently, but I do wonder how well viewers could follow the plot, especially the last half hour or so, if they had no exposure to the book or previous adaptations. It’s the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy problem – a novel of 500+ pages is hard to condense into a two-hour film without losing something, and you’d rather lose details or exposition than plot or character development. Perhaps the Emily subplot could have gone instead, as essential as it is on the page, because so much time is spent on David’s childhood visit to the seaside hovel where she lives, to give us more time with Heep and David at the law firm so we better understand their rivalry and why Heep is so odious. (We do see plenty of Mr. Wickfield, played by Benedict Wong, in various stages of inebriation.) Yet The Personal History of David Copperfield is joyous because of what Iannucci and Blackwell retained – Mr. Dick, Dumb Dora, the Micawbers – and how well Dev Patel brings that title character to life.

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→ August 28, 2020
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The City We Became.

N.K. Jemisin became the first author ever to win three straight Hugo Awards for Best Novel when all three parts of her Broken Earth trilogy took home the honor; she also became the first black woman to win that award at all, which is hard to believe in a field that brought us Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson, but the Hugos have had their issues with gender and especially race.

The City We Became is Jemisin’s first novel since the last book of the previous trilogy came out in 2017 (although she has written some short stories and a lauded novella called “Emergency Skin” in the interim). This new novel, which marks the beginning of a new trilogy or series, feels like a complete departure in tone and style from the Broken Earth novels, trading the dark, forbidding atmosphere of her future earth devastated by climate change and tectonic shifts for a modern New York City that’s full of life and humor, and also extradimensional superbeings.

Cities in this new novel can come to life, and express that through individual people – usually just one person for a city but, because New York is the Greatest City in the World, it gets one person per borough. When a person becomes a city, they gain powers related to that city’s identity and characteristics, or in this case the borough’s characteristics. Each borough of New York City has different demographics, and a different reputation, and Jemisin infuses the book with all of that, not least with the way Staten Island is a borough apart from the rest, and the quiet enmity that exists between it and the rest of the City.

As the novel opens, however, there’s another enemy that requires the immediate attention of the various City-humans, who also include Saõ Paolo and later Hong Kong. Something is invading New York City from an alternate dimension, although it appears to be coming up from below the ground, and it’s causing real damage even though only a few people – the City-humans and, for reasons never explained here, a few people with them – can see its physical form. The five boroughs are all ‘born’ simultaneously across the city, and have to find each other so they can team up, assuming they can work together, and try to fight their new, common enemy. She is, as you might guess, no pushover, and she comes with some serious attitude.

If the often funereal tone of the Broken Earth trilogy was an obstacle for you, you might find The City We Became a much easier go, because this book is madcap. If Zadie Smith wrote a speculative fiction novel, it would probably look a lot like this. Some of the humor is specific to New York, and maybe not everyone will enjoy Jemisin’s digs at Staten Island as much as I did, but plenty of it is situational and often laugh-out-loud funny.

That’s possible because Jemisin has put so much time and effort into creating these five main characters, giving them diverse identities, back stories, and personalities, so that each of them feels fully realized and their interactions with each other come across as natural conversations. So much of what’s funny in this book is organic, and even though the humor is entirely beside the rather serious points Jemisin is making, it also allows the seriousness to play better on the page.

And there is a lot going on under the surface, too. This is a novel of man’s impact on the environment, but it’s not anti-urban or anti-development; it’s a love letter to cities, to the life and culture they bring, and to the way they bring people together despite differences. The enemy’s tactics may make her rather unsympathetic, but, like Killmonger, she also makes some good points. When you learn why she’s so adamant about destroying New York – that the birth of a city here has dire consequences where she exists – and consider the parallels to real life, that there’s no such thing as unfettered growth without consequences, you can at least see her point, and why she might be able to convince one of the boroughs to listen to her.

Jemisin has clearly set up a larger story arc here beyond what happens in this one novel, although this story does have a concrete ending that’s more complete than those of the first two Broken Earth books. There are multiple unresolved questions, even some minor details (like what happened to Brooklyn’s townhouses), that point to a sequel. But there are also more characters in here to whom you might relate on some level, and the fact that these novels are written in the present day and in a very contemporary voice put me more into this story than I ever was in the previous trilogy, making this the best Jemisin work I’ve read to date.

Next up: Jessica Luther and Kavitha Davidson’s Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back.

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→ August 20, 2020
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Port Royal.

Port Royal came out in 2014 and was brought to the US in 2017 by Steve Jackson Games, one of the oldest extant board game publishers, who first rose to prominence with the 1980 game Car Wars and have since had success with the extensive line of Munchkin games. Designed by Alexander Pfister (Isle of Skye, Great Western Trail), it’s a very simple press-your-luck card game with a pirate theme to make Sid Meier proud, where players draw cards from a common deck and take one per round, but you can bust if you push too far when trying to draw something better, with the ultimate goal of becoming the first player to accumulate 12 victory points from cards and expeditions.

That deck has three main card types: ships, persons, and expeditions. The ships all have gold coin amounts ranging from 1 to 4 coins, and if you choose to take that ship, you get that many coins, represented by cards drawn face-down from the deck. (Their face-up side has no meaning when they’re used as coins.) They can also show a number of crossed swords on the bottom of the card, ranging from 1 to 6, or just a skull and crossbones. If you draw two ships of the same nationality on your turn, however, your turn ends immediately and you get nothing.

The persons can cost anywhere from 3 to 9 coins to hire, and they come in seven basic roles. The most common are the Sailors and Pirates, who are worth one or two swords each, respectively. You can use all of your pirates together to ‘repel’ any ship with a sword number equal to or less than your pirates’ total number of swords, discarding that ship card but keeping your pirates. This is one way to reduce your odds of busting on a turn, although you can’t do anything to repel ships with the skull & crossbones on them.

Other people you can hire give you lasting benefits for future turns. The Settler, the Priest, and the Captain all can help you complete Expedition cards, which require two or three of those in a specific combination and grant you 4 or 6 victory points. The Jack-of-all-Trades costs a bit more but is a wild card that can represent any of those three people for the purposes of fulfilling an expedition. The Governor lets you take a second card on your turn. The Admiral gives you 2 extra coins if it is your turn to take a card and there are at least 5 cards in the display. The Mademoiselle lets you pay one fewer coin to hire a person. The Jester gives you 1 coin if there are no cards in the display when it’s your turn to take a card – even if that’s because you busted. Traders give you an extra coin if you ‘trade with,’ meaning take the gold coins from, a ship of their matching nationality.

Once you’ve completed your turn by taking a card, if there are any cards remaining, all other players get the opportunity to take a card from the table by paying you 1 coin and then paying the regular cost to hire a person or simply taking a ship and receiving its gold value. This means what you leave on the table might be a consideration for what you take, or how far you keep pushing your luck – it may be better to keep going rather than take a mediocre return and leave a valuable card on the table for another player who has the coins to buy it.

Pushing your luck can yield another benefit as well. If you can get four ships of different nationalities on to the table without busting, you get to take a second card on that turn; if you get ships of all five nationalities, you can take three cards. There are also a couple of taxation cards in the deck, where all players with 12 or more coins must give back half of their stash, and either the player with the most swords or the fewest victory points gets a one coin bonus.

Person cards can be worth 0 to 3 victory points; expedition cards are worth either 4 or 6 points each, although they require you to turn in Settler, Priest, or Captain cards that are worth 1 point each, so taking an expedition adds 2 or 3 net points to your total. The official victory condition is 12 points, after which you complete a full round so every player has had a chance to be the start player an equal number of times. You can also just agree to play to any point total you like, or to say you can’t win without completing an Expedition, two popular variants.

I’ve played more than 100 games of Port Royal online, and I own the physical game as well (which is just a deck of cards, so it’s really portable). I definitely have my preferred strategy, and I think the Just One More Contract… expansion helps address some of the base game’s issues with certain cards being too valuable. But even the base game is still kind of a blast, because it’s a gambling game at heart. Every turn is a bet, one you can make a little smarter by collecting swords and maybe keeping an eye on what ships have gone by, but ultimately it’s no better than smart luck, and I find it very enjoyable even when I bust a few times and know I can’t come back to win. (Although I did do that once, busting three times early in a game, taking more risks after that to try to get extra cards, and storming back to overcome an 8-point deficit. Good times!) If you’re into push-your-luck games, like the Quacks of Quedlinburg, Clank!, or Can’t Stop, I definitely recommend Port Royal.

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→ August 4, 2020
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Utopia Avenue.

David Mitchell’s new novel Utopia Avenue is, by his standards, almost a weirdly straight story, riveting and clever but mostly grounded in the realistic and the mundane. Following the rise and fall of a fictional English rock band in the late 1960s, featuring copious cameos by real-life rock figures from the British and American scenes of the time and more than a few references to Mitchell’s other works, the novel runs 570 pages and somehow feels like it’s still insufficient.

Utopia Avenue is also the name of the band in the novel, formed by an ambitious if not-very-successful producer Levon Frankland who assembles the band from the ashes of other London groups. Singer and keyboardist Elf Holloway is the most established, while guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet seems to have come from nowhere, bassist Dean Moss is about to hit rock bottom when Levon grabs him, and drummer Griff is looking for a new band. The four seem like they shouldn’t get on, let alone create music that will resonate with critics and fans, but it does happen in credible fashion. Mitchell chronicles their ascent from obscurity to moderate success in such detail that even mundane events and conversations become compelling.

The band’s story, at least their rise, is somehow that of every real band of the time but of no band at all. Each band member has some off-field drama, mostly drawn from the annals of rock history but deconstructed and recombined in Mitchell’s hands so that most of the parallels are obscured to the point that you won’t particularly care. Jasper’s trouble with mental illness derives from Syd Barrett’s, but Syd shows up in the pages of Utopia Avenue and Jasper’s story goes in a different direction than Syd’s did. Dean probably gets more than his share of the plot that happens away from studio and stage, although much of that is of his own making, and it’s not as if any of what he provokes or endures is unrealistic anyway. Perhaps there’s a bit too much of the Yoko Ono myth here, a bit too much sex-and-drugs there, but the current of the stream here is strong enough to keep the story moving despite those liberties.

The only misstep comes with the lyrics – granted, many rock bands’ lyrics are less than scintillating, but Mitchell’s strength in prose does not translate well to verse, and it doesn’t quite fit the praise the band members receive from critics and other musicians for their lyrics. Each chapter in Utopia Avenue is also the name of a song from the band, which one band member wrote in reaction to a real-life event described therein. It’s a clever conceit for the plot, but translating those ideas into lyrics doesn’t read well on the page.

I’ve only read two of Mitchell’s previous works, Cloud Atlas and Slade House, so I caught many of the references to characters from the former but also know I missed copious allusions to some of his other novels, notably Bone Clocks and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I loved Utopia Avenue, but I almost certainly didn’t get the full experience because I haven’t read all of his prior works; it has convinced me to go read the other five, starting from his first, Ghostwritten. Luisa Rey, my favorite character from Cloud Atlas, appears as a secondary character. Robert Frobisher gets a mention. You can see Jasper’s surname appears in one of his earlier books, and if you know what Horology is – I only barely knew, by way of Slade House – that ends up playing a role in one of the characters’ stories. The universe across Mitchell’s books is intricate and I assume rewards deep reading, leaving what I presume was a layer below the surface of this novel that I couldn’t appreciate.

Utopia Avenue’s fictional stay at the top doesn’t last, of course, but even with the detailed description of their gradual rise, it’s still somehow too short. All four band members are wonderfully three-dimensional; the three men are all emotionally complex and flawed, while Mitchell gives Elf a different sort of complexity without imbuing her character with as many negative traits. Even Levon, who gets quite a bit less screen time, has his moments and at least gives the sense that Mitchell drew him more completely even if it didn’t all appear on the page. How well Mitchell handles the various cameos by real people is probably a question beyond my capacity to answer, given how little I know about what these men and women were like in real life, but I’d like to know if any of their contemporaries weigh in on the topic.

Mitchell has been shortlisted for the Booker twice, and my sense of that award is that, like so many awards in the arts and in sports, the more you’re considered for it, the more likely you are to get it at some point. I’ll be curious to see if Utopia Avenue at least gets him on the shortlist again, as it feels less ambitious than, say, the nested six-novel structure of Cloud Atlas, yet in the perspective of his entire oeuvre it’s clearly a more progressive work than it might first appear. At worst, it should grace many best-of-2020 lists this December.

Next up: I’ll be interviewing Dr. Angela Duckworth for my next podcast, so I’m reading her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

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