→ July 9, 2018
→ By

Exit West.

Mohsin Hamid first gained global notice for his 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which became a best-seller, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and won numerous smaller awards for the Pakistani author. His 2017 novel Exit West has been nearly as acclaimed, making the shortlists for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle’s Fiction award, and even earning a nod from Barack Obama as one of the best books he read in 2017. Working with just a hint of magical realism, Hamid gives us a clear-eyed look at the refugee crisis from the perspective of a young couple, Saeed and Nadia, who fall in love in their unnamed, war-torn country (resembling Afghanistan), and manage to escape through a portal, only to find themselves transient through various stops where refugees are less than welcome.

The only gimmick Hamid employs in the book is the doors, these magic portals that appear and allow people to slip through them and emerge somewhere completely different in the world, at least until authorities find the door and attempt to block it. This allows Hamid to focus on the problems refugees face of resistance from native populations, of the obstacles they face toward assimilation, and of the strain the displacement puts on relationships, while skipping the just as real problems of getting out of the original country and, perhaps, dying en route to somewhere else. The horrors of migrants packed on to tiny, un-seaworthy vessels, or crammed in the back of overheated trucks, are legitimate, but including that part of the refugee experience might overwhelm the parts of the story Hamid wants to tell – the way wars or famines create populations of homeless refugees searching for little more than a safe place to live and work, much as they may have had before the crisis hit.

Nadia and Saeed live ordinary lives in what appears to be a moderate or even progressive Muslim country, with Nadia living alone as a liberated woman who has cut off her conservative family. The two fall in love just as the country begins its collapse, with fundamentalist rebels encroaching on their city and eventually taking it over and enforcing Taleban-like rules on the populace. (Hamid never names the country, the religion, or any of the forces, but the details he does provide sound an awful lot like Afghanistan under the rule of the Taleban, while the movements of the refugees after they exit through the first door resemble the flight of Syrians during their civil war.) After several small incidents drive Nadia from her apartment into Saeed’s home with his father – Saeed’s mother is killed by a stray bullet in the street – they hear of a door that will allow them to escape to somewhere else, beginning a journey that will take them through several doors, to Greece, to England, and eventually the United States, an odyssey that changes them both as individuals and alters the nature of their relationship, permanently, by the time they find a permanent home in California.

Although the primary hook in Exit West is the magic of the doors, which boil down the leave/stay decision to one of money and family, the strongest element of Hamid’s narrative is the tapestry of mundane details of the itinerants’ lives once the social contract of their home city begins to dissolve. There’s a run on a local bank, and in the throngs of people crushing to get to their money, men grope women in the crowd, including Nadia, knowing well that there will be no repercussions, an early sign that without that social contract people will behave like animals. Refugees grasp at what might, to us, seem trivial details that reinforce their humanity – a warm meal, an actual shower, possession of items we take for granted.

At each destination, Hamid presents a different vision of the refugee crisis, none more potent than his version of London, where a military attempt to remove migrant squatters fails, and a new partnership between the natives and the refugees emerges, not merely a détente but an attempt to create a better life for everyone. These are interspersed with brief scenes of other people who pass through doors in search of safety, freedom, or merely something different, presenting the doors as metaphor rather than merely as a plot device to skip over the brutal conditions of migration.

The displacement takes a toll on Nadia and Saeed as well; neither character is the same by the time their journey ends, at least for now, in California. Nadia is also the more interesting and well-developed of the two characters, both at the start of the novel and by the time the two have evolved over the course of the book. The power of Exit West, however, is that the theme applies to any characters forced by circumstance to leave everything behind and step through the first door that appears – without any idea where they’ll end up.

Next up: I just started N.K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky, the final book in her Broken Earth trilogy that began with The Fifth Season.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ June 11, 2018
→ By

The Tale.

Documentary filmmaker Jennifer Fox won the Grand Jury Documentary Prize at Sundance in 1987, when she was just 28 years old, for her debut feature Beirut: The Last Home Movie, about a Lebanese family living in a mansion in the country’s capital during its extensive civil war. She returned to Sundance this year with her first traditional (non-documentary) feature, The Tale, which received rave reviews and was picked up by HBO, which debuted the movie at the end of May. Telling the story of how Fox’s track coach groomed and molested her when she was just 13, it stars Laura Dern as the adult Fox, whose memories around that summer mislead her into thinking of it as a romantic relationship, and who tries to uncover the truth of what happened to her, thirty years later, when her mother discovers a story Fox had written at the time that described the predatory “relationship.”

Rather than simply using flashbacks, Fox tells the story as if she (as Dern) were traveling through her own memories, not just witnessing them but interacting with them, including conversations with her younger self (played by Isabelle Nélisse) and interrogations of her equestrian teacher Mrs. G (Elizabeth Debicki) within the memories. Fox arrived at Mrs. G’s for a summer of horseback riding lessons, and is immediately introduced to the charming forty-ish neighbor Bill Allens (Jason Ritter), who is Mrs. G’s lover and who quickly turns the charm on for Jenny, then gradually grooms her for rape.

Nearly every revelation in Fox’s memory begins with a false start, some detail rendered inaccurately (including her own age at the time of the assaults) or person not remembered, so that The Tale becomes not just a story about a young girl sexually assaulted by an older man, but about how we respond to trauma within our minds – how our brains can try to protect us by creating a fictional shell around the more difficult truth. Thus the movie plays out as a true-life detective story, where the culprit is known but the crime is hazy, and Fox has to navigate her own memories by uncovering clues in the present day – talking to her fellow students at the time and visiting Mrs. G, who goes from helpful to stonewalling in the blink of an eye – so that she can peel away the fictional outer layer on those memories and show us the truth. The technique is jarring, as it should be given the subject matter, because any scene showing the past may subsequently be rewound and rewritten so we can see it as it actually happened, not as present-day Fox recalled it. It’s most striking when she discovers another young girl (older than she was) in photographs from that summer whom she hadn’t remembered at all.

Dern is riveting as Fox, carrying us through the stages of denial, anger, and eventually something like acceptance – she confronts Bill in the present day, in a scene that is truly fictional but also pivotal to resolving the film – and making her seem understandably irrational in her worst moments. There’s a fight with her fiancé, played by Common, that is anguishing to watch because it’s clear that he’s right and willing to help, but she’s incapable of even discussing what happened with the person who is, in theory, closest to her. And Ritter is so creepy in the grooming moments – let alone the utterly harrowing, barely watchable scenes of statutory rape (filmed with a body double for Nélisse) – that it’ll be hard to see him in anything else in the future. (It also doesn’t help that he looks so much like his dad, the late John Ritter of Three’s Company fame.)

There’s a recurring refrain in The Tale that’s used to hand-wave away any violations of social norms or boundaries, including the whole idea that a 40-year-old man shouldn’t have sex with a 13-year-old girl: “It was the seventies.” There’s such a note of dismissiveness in the quote, uttered by at least three different characters, that you feel how uphill Fox’s battle to get at the truth might have been for her. People don’t like to dig up the past in any unpleasant circumstances, even less so when they might feel some complicity in someone else’s crimes, and pointing to the sexual permissiveness of the era – which was used to try to whitewash the story of David Bowie sleeping with teenaged groupies after his passing – only adds another wall for the victims to scale as they try to grapple with their histories of trauma.

The Tale uses Jennifer Fox’s real name for her character, but changed the names of the real-life Mrs. G and Bill Allens, as both are still alive. There is no indication whether Allens ever faced any charges or even repercussions for what is later implied to be dozens of assaults on various underaged girls, or if the various buildings or wings of buildings named for him still bear his name. I understand the legal ramifications of using his real name in the film, but if he’s still alive, he may still be a threat, and there are likely may other surviving victims who would like answers, even if justice is still beyond them.

Because it hasn’t received a theatrical release, The Tale isn’t eligible for Oscar or other annual awards for movies, but should earn Emmy consideration this fall for the movie itself and for Dern, Ritter, and Fox both as director and writer. I’ll still rank it along movies that did go to theaters at some point, and I’ll guess even before the halfway point that it’ll end up in my top ten for 2018. It’s powerful without ever manipulating its audience, and the novel way it walks us down the false starts of memory gives the viewer such a sense of Fox’s confusion that you’ll crave the catharsis that Fox can never really receive.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ May 29, 2018
→ By

Beast.

Who is the actual Beast of this taut, Hitchcockian thriller’s title? Although we’re led to believe from the start that it’s the rakish, mysterious outsider, who quickly becomes the suspect in a series of killings of young girls on the British Crown Dependency of Jersey, the title, like many other names and aspects of this intense and well-acted film, carries more than one meaning. (It’s available to rent on amazon.)

Beast is the debut feature from director and screenwriter Michael Pearce, who has just a handful of British TV credits to his name, and hinges on a star turn from Irish actress Jessie Buckley as Moll, a young woman in her mid-20s who lives with her domineering mother and senile father in a giant house that still feels awfully close on screen. The film opens with Moll’s birthday party, at which she is quickly upstaged by her beautiful sister, leading Moll to flee to go out dancing all night, eventually leading her to a chance encounter with Pascal (Johnny Flynn), a rifle-toting loner who lives on his own and seems to be the only person who treats Moll as an individual. His status as an outsider from polite society – ironic, as he’s of old Jersey stock, evidenced by his French surname, Deneuve – makes him an easy target for the police as they look for the man who’s raped and killed three teenaged girls on the small island, pushing Moll into the quandary of having to lie to protect her new lover or to question the possibility that he’s a murderer.

Pascal posterAlthough the obvious implication of the title and the posters showing Flynn out of focus at the front of the picture is that Pascal is or might be the beast, the script regularly offers us potential interpretations of the term. Moll herself has something in her past that’s revealed in stages over the course of the film, but it’s clear from the start that she is at least a complex character with something serious and unaddressed inside of her, based on something she does before leaving the house during her party. There’s a graphic scene later in the film involving an animal Moll shoots under Pascal’s training that also reveals an unexpected rage within Moll that will also be gradually and incompletely explained as the film progresses. And her mother, Hillary (Geraldine James), who favors her other two children over Moll, is utterly terrifying in her controlling nature, reducing Moll to a blubbering child, and her instantaneous shifts to everything-is-okay mode, even concluding one scolding with, “Let’s all be friends again.” Even as we’re given a Moll-Pascal relationship that could be dangerous, we’re given plain evidence that the relationship between Hillary and her mother is downright toxic.

Pascal’s name itself feels like another ironic twist in a film laden with irony and misdirection. Pascal’s wager argues that a bet on God’s existence, and thus eternal life after death, has a positive payoff if correct but little or no negative cost if wrong, while a bet against God’s existence, thus living a life of sin, has a huge negative cost if wrong and little to no benefit if correct. Beast‘s version of Pascal’s wager for Moll is flipped on its head – she can bet that he’s not the killer, but that bet carries some rather substantial downside risk for her, and she may actually be chasing the illusion of love rather than a true version of it. Even when she sees a glimpse of what Pascal is capable of doing when angry, and gets evidence from her very creepy cop friend (or cousin?) that Pascal has hurt someone before, she still decides to believe in her lover rather than anything else she’s seen – and we are left in the dark right up until the end of the film on whether she made the right call.

The ending of Beast is wonderfully ambiguous as well; after Pascal does something I would call unforgivable, the tenor shifts, and the last layers of Moll’s exterior are peeled back, and their entire relationship changes color to something much darker and bleaker. Buckley’s performance as Moll is riveting – I doubt there will be five better performances by lead actresses in all of 2018 – as she seems to portray a set of interrelated characters all rolled up into one, at times appearing to be an awkward teenager, at times an independent and headstrong adult. The film also gives us clues as to her states of mind or roles within scenes by changing Buckley’s hairstyle, whether it’s pulled back, tightly curled, frizzy, even a little mussed, just enough to alter her mien and put her in different footing in each setting. (Also, I know that the fairy tale character’s hair isn’t red, but the scenes of Moll walking through the forest gave me a Little Red Riding Hood vibe … and we’re left to wonder if Pascal is a real human or just a wolf in disguise.)

The scenes with Cliff and one with a stark, accented policewoman from off island are a bit forced, and it’s unclear why Moll or Pascal would be interrogated without attorneys or would agree to it when not obligated to stay; those are the only times when the tension flags and the element that puts the viewer right into the film starts to fade. The remainder of Beast is utterly intense from start to finish, and the conclusion is just ambiguous enough to let the viewer come up with another interpretation, Memento-like, to everything that came before. This deserves a much wider audience, and Buckley in particular should be on everyone’s short list for acting awards in the fall.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ May 16, 2018
→ By

Why We Sleep.

Why do we sleep? If sleep doesn’t serve some essential function, then it is evolution’s biggest mistake, according to one evolutionary scientist quoted in Matthew Walker’s book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, which explains what sleep seems to do for us, what sleep deprivation does to us, and why we should all be getting more sleep and encouraging our kids and our employees to do the same.

Walker, a sleep researcher and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at Cal-Berkeley, begins by delving into what we know about the history of sleep in humans, and how sleep itself is structured. Humans were, for most of our history as a species, biphasic sleepers – we slept twice in each 24 hour period. We retain vestiges of this practice, which only ended in the 19th century in the developed world with the Industrial Revolution, in our Circadian rhythms, which still give us that post-prandial ‘slump’ that led to customs like the siesta. (It had never occurred to me that the word “circadian” itself came from the Latin words for “almost a day,” because that rhythm in our bodies isn’t quite 24 hours long.)

Sleep is, itself, two different processes that occur sequentially, alternating through a night of full sleep. Most people are familiar with REM sleep, referring to the rapid eye movements visible to an observer standing not at all creepily over you while you slumber. The remaining periods of sleep are, creatively, called nREM or non-REM sleep, and themselves comprise three different sub stages. Both phases of sleep are important; REM sleep is when dreaming occurs, which itself seems to serve the purposes of helping the brain process various events and the associated emotions from the previous day(s), as well as allowing the brain to form connections between seemingly unrelated memories or facts that can seem like bursts of creativity the next day. Your body becomes mostly paralyzed during REM sleep, or else you’d start moving around while you dream, perhaps kicking, flailing, or even acting out events in your dreams – which can happen in people with certain rare sleep disorders. N-REM sleep allows the body to repair itself, helps cement new information into memories in the brain’s storage, boosts the immune system, and contributes to feelings of wakefulness in the next day. The part of N-REM sleep that accomplishes the most, called deep or N3 sleep, decreases as you age, which is why older people may find it hard to sleep longer during the night and then feel less refreshed the next morning.

The bulk of Why We Sleep, however, is a giant warning call to the world about the hazards of short- and long-term sleep deprivation, which Walker never clearly defines but seems to think of as sleeping for a period of less than six hours. (He calls bullshit on people, like our current President and I believe his predecessor too, who claim they can function well on just four or five hours of sleep a night.) Sleep deprivation affects cognition and memory, and long-term deprivation contributes to cancer, diabetes, mental illnesses, Alzheimer’s, and more. Rats deprived of sleep for several days eventually die of infections from bacteria that would normally live harmlessly in the rats’ intestinal tracts.

We don’t sleep enough any more as a society, and there are real costs to this. Drowsy driving kills more people annually than drunk driving, and if you think you’ve never done this, you’re probably wrong: People suffering from insufficient sleep can fall into “micro-sleeps” that are enough to cause a fatal accident if one occurs while you’re at the wheel. Sleep deprivation in adolescents seems to lead to increased risks of various mental illnesses that tend to first manifest at that age, while also contributing to behavioral problems and reducing the brain’s ability to retain new information. Walker even ends the book with arguments that corporations should encourage better sleep hygiene as a productivity tool and a way to reduce health care costs, and that high schools should move their school days back to accommodate the naturally later sleep cycles of teenagers, whose circadian rhythms operate somewhat later than those of preteens or adults.

One major culprit in our national sleep deficit — which, by the way, isn’t one you can pay; you can’t ‘catch up’ on lost sleep — is artificial light, especially blue light, which is especially prevalent in LED light sources like the one in this iPad on which I’m typing and the phone on which you’re probably reading this post. Blue light sources are everywhere, including the LED bulbs the environmentally responsible among us are now using in our house to replace inefficient incandescent bulbs or mercury-laden CFLs. Blue light confuses the body’s natural melatonin cycle, which is distinct from the circadian rhythm, and delays the normal release of melatonin in the evenings, which thus further delays the onset of sleep.

Sleep confers enormous benefits on those who choose to get enough of it, benefits that, if more people knew and understand them, should encourage better sleep hygiene in people who at least have the discretion to sleep more. Sleep helps cement new information in your memory; if you learn new information, such as vocabulary in a foreign language, and then nap afterwards, you’re significantly more likely to retain what you learned afterwards. Sleep also provides the body with time to repair some types of cell damage and to recover from muscle fatigue – so, yes, ballplayers getting more sleep might be less prone to injuries related to fatigue, although sleep can’t repair a frayed labrum or tearing UCL.

Walker says he gives himself a non-negotiable eight-hour sleep window every night. I am not sure how he can reconcile that with, say, his trans-Atlantic travel, but he does point out that changing time zones can wreak havoc on our sleep cycles. He suggests avoiding alcohol or caffeine within eight hours of bedtime — so, yes, he even says if you want that pint of beer, have it with breakfast — and offers numerous suggestions for preparing the body for sleep as you approach bedtime, including turning off LED light sources, using blue light filters on devices if you just can’t put them down, and even using blackout shades for total darkness into the morning.

There are some chapters in the middle of Why We Sleep that would stand well on their own, even if they’re not necessarily as relevant to most readers as the rest of it. The chapter on sleep disorders, including narcolepsy and fatal familial insomnia (about as awful a way to die as I could imagine), is fascinating in its own right. Walker also delivers a damning rant on sleeping pills, which produce unconsciousness but not actual sleep, not in a way that will help the body perform the essential functions of sleep. He does say melatonin may help some people, although I think he believes its placebo effect is more reliable, and he questions whether over the counter melatonin supplements deliver as much of the hormone as they claim they do.

Why We Sleep was both illuminating and life-altering in the most literal sense: Since reading it, I’ve set Night Shift modes on my devices, set alarms to remind me to get to bed eight hours before the morning alarm, stopped trying to make myself warmer at night (cold prepares the body for sleep, and you sleep best in temperatures around 57 degrees), and so on. I had already been in the habit of pulling over to nap if I became drowsy on a long drive, but now I build more time into drives to accommodate that, and to give myself more time to wake up afterwards – Walker suggests 20 minutes are required for full cognitive function after even a brief nap. Hearing the health benefits of sleeping more and risks of insufficient sleep, including higher rates of heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s, was more than enough to scare me straight.

Next up: I’m halfway through Brian Clegg’s A Brief History of Infinity: The Quest to Think the Unthinkable.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ April 12, 2018
→ By

Isle of Dogs.

Wes Anderson might be the most divisive director making movies in English today, as his fans love his work, and everyone else hears his twee dialogue and heads for the exits. He’s been on a critical roll lately, with The Fantastic Mr. Fox (good, but not very faithful to the wonderful book by Roald Dahl), Moonrise Kingdom, and the Oscar-nominated Grand Budapest Hotel. I had only seen two complete Anderson films, The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Bottle Rocket (somewhat annoying), and turned off Rushmore (insufferable) after about 20 minutes. So when I tell you Isle of Dogs, Anderson’s new, animated film from an original script, is excellent, perhaps it means a little more than when an Anderson fanboy critic says the same. It’s just great, no qualifier needed.

Isle of Dogs gives us an alternate-history Japan, ruled by the Kobayashi clan, which hates dogs based on a centuries-old grievance. The current Mayor of the city of Megasaki, also a Kobayashi, comes up with a scheme to banish all dogs from the city to Trash Island, while scapegoating the dogs for numerous public health problems and overcrowding. Trash Island becomes a concentration camp, looking more like one as the scheme and the film progress, with dogs organizing themselves into packs and fighting over scraps of food.

Atari, the 12-year-old ward of the Mayor, who is his distant uncle, hijacks a tiny plane and flies to Trash Island to find his dog, Spots, the first canine exiled to the island. He lands near one group of five dogs who, despite not understanding Japanese, figure out why he’s there and resolve to help him – especially since he is the only owner who has tried to come rescue his lost pet. This leads them on a quest the length of the island, all the while the Mayor and his henchman Domo try to recapture him and advance their plans to eliminate all of the dogs forever. At the same time, an American exchange student named Tracy Walker, boasting a comically round head of curly blonde hair, leads her Japanese classmates in starting a pro-dog resistance movement, during which she develops a crush on Atari, who has become a folk hero to dog lovers in Japan.

Anderson’s conceit here is to have all of the human characters other than Tracy speak Japanese, with translations appearing in subtitles as needed, while the dogs’ barks are ‘translated’ into English by the voice actors (or magic, I’m not sure which). This lets Anderson set a movie in Japan while using most of his favorite actors, and this one has a whopper of a cast – Bryan Cranston, Frances McDormand, Scarlett Johanssen, Jeff Goldblum (playing himself in dog form), Tilda Swinton (as a pug, which just made me laugh every time she spoke), F. Murray Abraham, Bob Balaban, Yoko Ono, Fisher Stevens, and, as “Mute Poodle,” Anjelica Huston, with narration by Courtney B. Vance. It’s also lighter on the twee-talk than the other Anderson films I’ve seen, perhaps because the script is credited to four writers, and I can only assume someone in the room pointed out, “You know, nobody talks like this in the real world, Wes. This is why everyone thinks you’re a fuckin’ weirdo.”

The story is totally over the top, so if you have problems with absurd plots in animated films – the octopus driving the truck in Finding Dory or the baggage-cart sequence at the end of Toy Story 2 come to mind – you may find suspending your disbelief hard here. Anderson et al compensate by populating the island with so many unique and surprisingly well-defined characters (given how little dialogue some of them get) that I found it easy to just roll with the story, even when Atari and the dogs built a fleet of boats to get themselves back to the mainland for the final confrontation. But there really isn’t any avoiding the fact that Kobayashi and his group are Nazis, the dogs are Jews being rounded up and sent to concentration camps to suffer and die, and oh by the way doesn’t this resemble stuff happening in the United States right now?

Like The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Isle of Dogs — say that out loud, if you haven’t caught the pun — is a stop-motion animated film, and the animation quality here shows a marked improvement from the preceding film. Several sequences are just visually enchanting, like the preparation of a bento box of sushi, or Atari giving the dog Chief a bath. The use of what looks like cotton batting to depict fight scenes is a great touch, and the details on Trash Island, while occasionally a bit gross, are meticulous and often look surprisingly real.

There has been much debate over whether Anderson is appropriating Japanese culture, or doing it well enough to get away with it, in this film, a debate in which I feel unqualified to participate, so I will merely link to film critic Justin Chang’s piece on the topic and walk away. Anderson puts numerous works of Japanese art in the background of the film, including The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai (several times, with dogs added) and Evening Bell by Hiroshige, both major figures in the Edo period of Japanese art; he based Megasaki city’s design on metabolist architecture from the Japanese architect Tanga; and he makes use of classical Japanese drumming several times as part of the score. (It’s much better than the mumblemopey song “I Won’t Hurt You” that besets the film like a frightened skunk in two different scenes.) There’s a clear affinity for Japanese art and culture, but whether it is done in a sensitive or appropriate manner here is not really for me to say.

I took my daughter, who is nearly 12, to see this, since she loved Mr. Fox and does indeed love dogs (and all animals, as far as I can tell). She thought much of the movie was sad, and had a hard time seeing references to dogs that died off screen. There’s also one death of a human in the film, and a lot of tears from human and dog characters. Her final verdict was that it was good, but she preferred Mr. Fox, which isn’t so graphic and which keeps dark elements in the dialogue rather than in the imagery. It’s animated, but it’s not a kids’ movie. We both laughed quite a bit, although I think I laughed more than she did, perhaps because I caught more of the subtle jokes about dog behavior and a few references she didn’t catch. (Yoko Ono’s character name is one; don’t look it up till you see the film.) With The Incredibles 2 coming out in two months, we might actually have a real fight for the title of best animated film this year.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ April 10, 2018
→ By

Lincoln in the Bardo.

George Saunders is best known for his short stories, including the award-winning collection Tenth of December, so there was tremendous anticipation for his first full-length novel, Lincoln at the Bardo, when it was released last year; the transition from short form fiction to long is not a simple one, given how few writers (F. Scott Fitzgerald comes to mind) excelled at both. Lincoln at the Bardo is short, experimental, comprising entirely quotes from real and fictional sources, set in a sort of purgatory on earth, where Saunders gives us a grieving Abraham Lincoln among a multitude of shades who have yet to cross over, including that of his eleven-year-old son, Willie. (In Tibetan Buddhism, the bardo is the period of existence between one’s death and next rebirth.)

The novel, which won the prestigious Man Booker Prize last year, opens with Willie dying of fever in an upstairs bedroom even as a White House party takes a place below, while we are also introduced to the three shades who will be our guides to this mysterious netherworld Saunders has constructed in the graveyard where Willie will be laid to rest. These spirits can interact with each other, but can’t be seen or heard by any living characters in the novel (a cheat I’m glad Saunders avoided); they can ‘enter’ a living body, and see his thoughts or feel his feelings, but the living are unaware of the shades’ presence or existence. The spirits appear incorporate to each other, and most carry some manifestation from their lives, often delivering substantial comic relief to a novel that by its very subject is weighty and tenebrous.

The three guides – Reverend Everly Thomas, who is unsure why he appears to have been condemned to hell; Roger Bevins III, a gay man who killed himself when his lover left him; and Hans Vollman, whose story is too funny to be spoiled here – try to convince Willie’s shade to cross over to the afterlife, which the shades we meet in the graveyard by and large have declined to do. Willie’s reluctance comes about because his father visited him in the graveyard and has promised to return, so Willie decides to stay, unaware of the significant consequences that can arise from this refusal. His father does return, leading to the climactic sequence where the shades all work together to try to convince Willie to cross, or to get his father to say something to accomplish the same, with unintended, tragicomic results.

The story unfurls entirely through quotes, many of which are drawn from contemporary newspaper accounts or later anthologies of letters or remembrances of the period, often showing how inconsistent descriptions of the same event can be – or how diverse sources can still agree on something like the sadness of President Lincoln’s visage even before his son’s death. Most of the quotes in the book are fabrications, either narrated by the three shades or attributed directly to the spirits who spoke them, and they run the gamut from the loquacious to the sentimental to the ridiculous, especially the Barons, a deceased husband and wife who seem locked in an eternal competition over who can swear the most, and have little shame about any peccadilloes from their previous lives. Some of these chapters are so tangential that they lead you well away from the main story around Willie and his father, and thus from what appears to be the ostensible point of the book: How do we love when those we love must die, and how do we move on with our lives when they’re gone?

Historical records of the time describe Lincoln as consumed by grief, visiting his son’s grave many times and talking aloud to his deceased son, providing Saunders with an ample starting point for this story, which gives us a President who knows he must persevere for his remaining family and for his country, but who is constantly drawn back to the graveyard and to his memories. (His wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, appears but briefly in the novel.) Saunders has also given us Willie and his comrades in the land of shade as grief incarnate; none of them can cross over until they acknowledge that they’re dead, as survivors can’t move on with their lives until they grieve and accept their losses.

I could have done without the glib ending, where Saunders gives Lincoln a little extra nudge in the direction in which the President actually took the war and his domestic policy, which felt too much like a wink and a nod to the audience. The myriad ways in which the shades interact with each other and attempt to do so with Lincoln provide plenty of comic relief, often bawdy and frequently hitting its mark, but having that aspect of the story touch actual history at the novel’s conclusion left me with a bitter taste, as if Saunders wanted to tell the reader he was just kidding about all the serious philosophical stuff that came before.

The few reviews I’ve read of Lincoln in the Bardo focus on Lincoln’s character in the book and how Saunders explores the father’s grief at the loss of his son, but that was less compelling than the novel’s inherent exploration of the temporary nature of our lives and of all of our loves. Was Lincoln’s love of his son somehow worth less because his son died so young? How do we cope with knowing that those we love will die – die before us, leaving us heartbroken, or die after us, a grief that we can only imagine and wish to prevent at any cost? Saunders tears open the paper covering up these questions, without providing pat answers, but revealing something about the human condition that I haven’t seen before in another novel.

Next up: Joan Silber’s 2017 novel Improvement, winner of the most recent National Book Critics Circle Award.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
→ April 9, 2018
→ By

Killers of the Flower Moon.

David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI is a non-fiction ‘novel’ that manages to combine a real-world mystery with noir and organized crime elements while also elucidating historical racism against a population seldom considered in modern reevaluations of our own history of oppressing minorities. Drawing on what appears to be a wealth of notes from the initial investigation as well as private correspondence, Grann gives the reader a murder story with a proper resolution, but enough loose ends to set up a final section to the book where he continues exploring unsolved crimes, revealing even further how little the government did to protect the Osage against pitiless enemies. It’s among the leading candidates to win the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction on Monday.

The Osage were one of the Native American tribes banished to present-day Oklahoma when that area was known as “Indian Territory,” marked as such on many maps of the late 19th century; Oklahoma as we know it didn’t exist until 1907, when it became the 46th state. (It always amused me to think of the ‘hole’ in the map of the U.S. as late as 1906, before Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico attained statehood.) By a fortunate accident, the plot of apparently useless land to which the federal government exiled the Osage sat on top of one of the largest petroleum deposits in the continental U.S., which made the Osage mineral millionaires. The government couldn’t quite revoke their rights, but instead ruled that the Osage, being savages, were incompetent to run their own affairs, and that Osage adults required white ‘guardians’ to oversee their financial decisions, which, of course, led to much thievery and embezzlement and, in time, foul play, such as white citizens marrying Osage members and then poisoning their spouses to gain legal control of their headrights and the income they provided.

Two murders in particular attracted the attention of authorities outside of the county, however, as both Osage victims were shot in the head at close range, so there was no question of claiming natural causes, as was often the case when victims were poisoned (often in whiskey, so alcohol could be blamed). These murders were part of a spate of dozens of killings, many of which didn’t appear at first to be connected other than that the victims were either Osage themselves or were in some way investigating the crimes; the sheer scope of this and some media coverage brought in the attention of a young, ambitious bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover, who decided to put one of his top agents at the nascent Bureau of Investigation (no ‘federal’ in its title) on the case. The subsequent unraveling of the deceptions and the revelation that the mastermind of the plot was someone closer to the Osage than anyone expected included both early forensic science and dogged investigative work, leading eventually to one confession that toppled the criminal enterprise – only to have the trial twist and turn more than once before the final verdict.

Grann couldn’t have picked a better subject for the book, because these characters often seem plucked from Twin Peaks, from the Osage woman Molly, a survivor of a poisoning attempt whose sister was one of the victims killed by gunshot and who had several other family members die in suspicious circumstances, on up to the head of the scheme, a man whose greed and malice lay hidden behind a façade of benevolence toward his Osage neighbors. Killers of the Flower Moon would make an excellent dramatic film if told straight, but it would take just a little artistic license to turn it into the sort of crime tapestry in which HBO has excelled for years by sharpening or exaggerating some of the individuals’ personalities.

The story of the murders and the federal agents’ work to convict the killers is, in itself, more than enough to stand alone as a compelling narrative work, but Grann explains how the federal, state, and county authorities regularly worked to strip the Osage of their rights, fueled by outright racism and by jealousy of the tribe’s good fortune (with, it appears, no consideration of how racism and avarice drove the tribe to Oklahoma in the first place). After the verdict and what might normally stand as an epilogue, Grann himself appears, writing in the first person about his experiences researching the book and how he found evidence that the Bureau didn’t solve all of the murders, or even most of them, but assumed that they’d gotten the Big Foozle and had thus closed the case. Grann may have solved one more murder himself, but as he interviews more surviving relatives of the victims – many of whom ask him to find out who killed their fathers or uncles or sisters – it becomes clear that the majority of these killings will remain unsolved, a sort of ultimate insult on top of the lifetime of indignities to which these Osage victims were subjected.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion, although Grann never makes it explicit, that this would never have happened if any of the governing (white) authorities viewed the Osage tribe members as actual people. Dozens of killings went unsolved and unaddressed for several years before Hoover’s men arrived, and some unknown but large percentage of the killings will never be solved. What white officials didn’t do for the Osage in the 1920s continues today in what mostly (but not always) white officials don’t do today to address violence in urban, mostly African-American communities, including right near me in the majority-black city of Wilmington, nicknamed “Murder Town” for its disproportionately high rate of deaths by gun. If the governments responsible for the safety of these citizens don’t see those citizens’ deaths as important, or as equal to the deaths of white citizens, then it is unlikely that anything of substance will be done to stop it.

I listened to the audio version of Grann’s book, which has three narrators, one of whom, actor Will Patton, does an unbelievable job of bringing the various characters, especially the conspirators, to life. The other narrators were fine, but Patton’s voice and intonations made this one of the most memorable audiobooks I’ve listened to.

Next up: I just finished George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2017 and is among the favorites to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction next week; and have begun Joan Silber’s Improvement, also from 2017.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ March 26, 2018
→ By

The Beak of the Finch.

Winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction, Jonathan Weiner’s The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time should have ended most of the inane arguments still coming from creationists and other science deniers about the accuracy of the theory of evolution. Weiner tells the story of the Grants, a married couple of biologists who spent 20 years studying Galapagos finches – the same species that Darwin spotted on his voyage with the Beagle and that helped him develop his first theory of adaptation via natural selection – and observed natural selection and evolution in action. This remarkable study, which also showed how species evolve in response to changes in their environment and to other species in their ecosystems, was a landmark effort to both verify Darwin’s original claims and strengthen them in a way that, again, should have put an end to this utter stupidity that still infects so much of our society, even creeping into public science education in the south and Midwest.

The finches are actually a set of species across the different islands of the Galapagos, with the Grants studying those on Daphne Major, an uninhabited island in the archipelago that has multiple species of finch existing alongside each other because they occupy different ecological niches. Over the two decades they studied these species, massive changes in weather patterns (in part caused by El Niño and La Niña) led to years of total drought and years of historically high rainfall, with various species on the island responding to these fluctuations in the environment in ways that affected both population growth and characteristics. The beaks of the book’s title refer to the Grants’ focus on beak dimensions, which showed that the finches’ beaks would change in response to those environmental changes. In times of drought, for example, the supply of certain seeds that specific finch species relied on for their sustenance might become more scarce, and there would be a response within a few generations (or even one) favoring birds with longer or stronger beaks that gave them access to new supplies of food. Many Galapagos finches crack open seed cases to get to the edible portions within, so if those seeds are rarer in a given year, the birds with stronger beaks can crack open more cases and get to more food, given them a tangible advantage in the rather ruthless world of natural selection.

Weiner focuses on the Grants’ project and discoveries throughout the book, but intersperses it with other anecdotes and with notes from Darwin’s travels and his two major works on the subject, On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. He incorporates the discovery of DNA and how that has accelerated our ability to study and understand evolutionary changes. He goes into the famous example of the white English moth that found itself at a severe disadvantage in the polluted world of the early Industrial Revolution, and how a single gene that determined wing color led to a shift in the moth’s population from mostly white to mostly black (to match the soot covering trees near Manchester and London) – and back again after England finally took steps to clean up its air. This one example is especially instructive in our ongoing experience of climate change, which Weiner refers to throughout as global warming (the preferred term at the time), and opens up a discussion about “artificial selection,” from how we’re screwing up the global ecosystem to antibiotic resistance to the futility of pesticide-driven agriculture (with the targeted pests evolving resistance very rapidly to each new chemical we dump on our crops).

Although Weiner doesn’t stake out a clear position on theism, the tone of the book, especially the final third, goes beyond mere anti-creationism into an outright rejection of any supernatural role in the processes of natural selection and evolution. While that may be appropriate for most of the book, as such processes as the development of the human eye (the argument about the hypothetical watchmaker) can be explained through Darwinian evolution, Weiner does overstep when he discusses the rise of human consciousness, handwaving it away as perhaps just a simple change in neurons or a single genetic mutation that led to the very thing that makes us us. (Which isn’t to say we’re that different from chimpanzees, with whom we still share 99% of our genes. Perhaps David Brin was on to something with his “neo-chimps” in the Uplift series after all.)

The most common rejoinder I encounter online when I mention that evolution is real is that we can’t actually see evolution and therefore it’s “only a theory.” The latter misunderstands the scientific definition of theory, but the former is just not true: We do see evolution, we have seen it, and we’ve seen dramatic shifts in species’ characteristics in ordinary time. Some speciation may occur in geological time, but the evolution of new species of monocellular organisms can happen in days (again, if you don’t believe in evolution, keep taking penicillin for that staph infection), and natural selection in vertebrates can take place rapidly enough for us to see it happen. If The Beak of the Finch were required reading in every high school biology class, perhaps we’d have fewer people – the book cites a survey from the 1990s that claims half of Americans don’t accept evolution – still denying science here in 2018.

Next up: David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, among the favorites to win the Pulitzer for Non-Fiction this year.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ March 12, 2018
→ By

The Warmth of Other Suns.

Isabel Wilkerson says she spent 15 years researching the book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction in 2010, and the research shows in the incredible depth of detail in this tripartite narrative about the mass movement of black Americans from the Jim Crow South to the north and west from 1915 to 1970. Wilkerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for journalism while working for the New York Times, interviewed over 1200 people, and focused this sweeping saga on three African-Americans who fled the south’s limited opportunities and overt, violent racism, fleeing Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana for Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Their stories are interwoven with each other’s and with other related histories of others who followed similar paths, and the tragedies of some of those who chose to stay behind.

Wilkerson gives us three characters who will accompany us through the book’s 600-odd pages (for me, 22-plus hours of audio): Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife from Mississippi who followed her husband, George, to Milwaukee and eventually the south side of Chicago; George Starling, a fruit picker from Eustis, Florida, who tried to organize other fruit pickers to earn better wages but fled from white landowners who set out to lynch him; and Robert Pershing Foster, a doctor from Louisiana who became a successful surgeon in Los Angeles and served many celebrity patients. The three all marry and raise children, and all find greater prosperity in the north than would ever have been possible where they were born, but all face the normal travails of any working-class life, and each carries some of the baggage of their birth and upbringing as outcasts in a racist country well into adulthood.

All three have compelling, often heartbreaking individual stories – although I think Wilkerson’s touch here is so deft that she could make anyone’s life story compelling – but none was more fascinating than the path taken by Dr. Foster, who left Monroe, Louisiana, and found success as a doctor in California both by outworking other doctors and by bringing an intense, precise sort of personal attention to his patients. Shedding his childhood name of Pershing after he moved to go by the more conventional name of Robert, Dr. Foster seems to have achieved the American dream against long odds, earning material wealth, marrying well, raising three daughters who themselves became successful, thus creating an ongoing chain of success and upward mobility from his own struggle. Yet he never seems to be able to escape the scars of a childhood (and possibly a marriage that brought him in-laws who never thought he was good enough) in a way that allows him to enjoy his success. Wilkerson illustrates him as a demanding, controlling husband who was meticulous about his own appearance and that of his wife, while he also was a compulsive gambler who clearly enjoyed how his spending at casinos bought him a form of respect at the casinos he frequented. Later in the book, Wilkerson tells of a gala Foster threw in his own honor, and how he agonized over every detail of the party, and how he couldn´t enjoy it during or afterwards because of perceived imperfections in the result.

At times a brutal, unsparing look at the treatment southern whites doled out to the black underclass as a matter of course, The Warmth of Other Suns is also deeply personal and empathetic. Wilkerson tells several stories of lynchings, including Leander Shaw and Claude Neal, the latter of whom was brutally tortured before he was hanged for a murder he may not have committed. She details the violent, racist reign of Lake County, Florida, Sheriff Willis McCall, accused at least 50 times of abusing or killing black suspects in his custody, once shooting two handcuffed black prisoners in cold blood and finally ousted from office after eight terms when he kicked a black prisoner to death. (McCall’s son, now 64, was arrested in January for molesting a young girl and possessing child pornography. He had stated in the past that his father was innocent of all charges of civil rights violations.) George Starling leaves Florida because a friend tells him local whites are going to take him to a swamp for a ´necktie party,´ racist slang for lynching. Ida Mae and her husband, also George, leave their life as sharecroppers under a benevolent but still manipulative, controlling landowner after a friend of theirs is beaten into senselessness over the theft of some turkeys that, it turns out, had just wandered off. Robert Foster isn’t driven out the same way but realizes that as a black doctor who can’t even receive admitting privileges at the white hospital, he’ll end up as just a ‘country doctor’ if he doesn’t move out of the land of Jim Crow.

The stories of violence and outright suppression are hard enough to fathom today, but the smaller indignities that the three protagonists and other African-American characters in the book faced fill in the gap and have even more impact because they’re easier to ingest today, when lynchings like that of James Byrd Jr. are extremely rare and result in actual convictions of the killers. When Dr. Foster is driving to California and can’t find a hotel room, even though some white proprietors are kind in rejecting him, lying to his face about vacancies, you can see and feel it. When Ida Mae has to take a series of temporary jobs in Chicago, where most employers will still choose only white candidates, she ends up in a situation right out of #MeToo. Even positive stories often come with a bitter reminder of what came before; George Starling, working as a porter on a north-south rail line, is told to direct black passengers to certain cars when the train passes into the south even after Jim Crow has been made illegal, and has to subtly inform these passengers of their right to say no, at risk of his own employment.

Wilkerson’s personal approach to the book does not exclude the academic research on the subject, but she instead sprinkles details and observations of experts on the timing, motive, and extent of the migration – which came in waves, and finally slowed after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 and slowly implemented over the following decade. (And, of course, we now see one party trying to roll it back, along with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.) This is a work of scholarship, yet also a labor of love, as no author could spend so much time and become so invested in a subject unless it were of abiding personal interest to her in the first place. It’s also a potent reminder of why African-Americans today remain at an economic disadvantage relative to whites, and how we are simply repeating the sins of our fathers when we deny black Americans their right to vote, or incarcerate them on nonviolent drug charges, or underfund urban schools as if they were the ‘colored’ schools of the Jim Crow era.

Next up: Margaret Creighton’s The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City: Spectacle and Assassination at the 1901 Worlds Fair.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 21, 2018
→ By

A Fantastic Woman.

A Fantastic Woman (Una mujer fantástica), Chile’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and one of the five nominees, is notable simply for its casting: A trans woman plays a trans woman who happens to be the film’s main character. Daniela Vega delivers a tour de force performance as Marina, the fantastic woman of the movie’s title, a woman whose life is suddenly turned upside down when her cis male lover dies suddenly, putting her in conflict with the man’s estranged family – most of whom refuse to accept her for what she is.

Marina is a nightclub singer who by all external appearances is a woman, but whose status as transgender appears to be known by everyone she encounters, even characters who should be complete strangers to her. She and Orlando, a somewhat older, genteel man, have an unremarkable, romantic relationship, where she has just moved in with him and he surprises her for her birthday with plans for an exotic vacation together. This all goes right to hell when he dies suddenly and his ex-wife and son enter the picture, complete with their bigotry, hatred, and threats of violence, all of which show how they don’t even see her as human, let alone as a woman. The movie documents her refusal to surrender to them, and society as a whole, even in the face of physical attacks and a system that dehumanizes her at every turn.

Vega is remarkable in a role that demands that she go through numerous events that I would imagine would trigger awful memories for any trans person (and perhaps any non-binary person, period). Because Orlando falls down the stairs while Marina goes to get the car keys to rush him to the hospital, the authorities assume that she was a prostitute who’d fought back when a client assaulted her, or that she even assaulted him for reasons unknown. There’s an early scene where a doctor and a police officer refer to her in the third person, as if she’s not even there, using male pronouns, even though – again – you wouldn’t think she was trans even after talking to her for a few minutes. (I found this a bit confusing; perhaps the doctor looked at her neck, but that wouldn’t occur to an ordinary person.) Later, Orlando’s son, who proves the most bigoted of all, asks if she’s had “the surgery” (I think Laverne Cox made it clear to everyone that it’s not an appropriate question) and asks the most dehumanizing question of all, “What are you?” Her answer – “I’m flesh and blood, just like you” – and his inability to respond to it spell out the constant fight that trans people face in a society full of people who, frankly, are just too damn obsessed with other people’s sex lives.

This is a star-making turn from Vega, although she dominates so much of the film that there’s little room for anyone else. (Why she wasn’t nominated for Best Actress is beyond me; she’d be a worthy winner, and deserved it over at least two of the nominees.) Gabo, Orlando’s brother, played by Luis Gnecco (star of 2016’s Neruda, Chile’s submission to the Oscars last year), is the most three-dimensional of the other characters, showing uncommon empathy for Marina and the mere willingness to use female pronouns for her. The script, co-written by director Sebastián Lelio and Gonzalo Maza, doesn’t dispense with these characters lightly, but their appearances in the film are a function of their relationship to and interactions with Marina. They’re real because the dialogue feels real, because the treatment she gets at the hands of almost every single person she meets is exactly what you would expect in a majority-Catholic country that only recognized gay marriages in 2017.

Transgender characters have had extremely poor representation in film; other than Boys Don’t Cry, Dallas Buyers Club, and The Danish Girl, all of which featured cis actors in trans roles, major films that have featured trans characters have largely done so for shock value or comic effect. A Fantastic Woman features a trans character, played by a trans woman, in a story that is about everyday life as a trans person in an intolerant society – but in a way that can be interpreted more broadly, too, to capture that feeling of being utterly alone, of feeling unsafe in your own skin, and of the need to find something that helps define you for yourself as opposed to the way that others define you.

I still have Loveless and The Insult to see of the five nominees for Best Foreign Language Film, but Sony Classics has been so slow to roll Loveless, a Russian film that won the Jury Prize at Cannes last year, that I may not catch it before the Oscars.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , ,