Books

Jun

2021

Deacon King Kong

I just finished reading Deacon King Kong by James McBride. McBride is a wonderful writer and I really enjoyed this book as well as his previous books, The Good Lord Bird and The Color of Water.

Deacon King Kong is the story of Sportcoat and others in and around The Cause House housing project in south Brooklyn, Hot Sausage, Bam Bam, The Elephant and many others.

One day in 1969, Sportcoat, inebriated as usual on the local hooch called ‘King Kong’, strolls up to Deems, formerly the star pitcher on the neighborhood baseball team and now the number one drug dealer in the Cause project and shoots Deems ear off. Naturally, his friends all think Sportcoat is now walking dead because the drug dealer’s team is going to come after him, but things turn out differently.

Sportcoat is the only one who can hear his dead wife Hettie who walked into the bay leaving Sportcoat figure out where she hid the church Christmas fund between his many odd jobs and drinking. Many try to save him from what they expect will be certain death at the hands of Deem’s henchmen but he ignores all of them and keeps on trying to revive the baseball team and preparing for his first sermon as a deacon at the church.

The book is a crime novel, a mystery novel, a humor novel and many other things. McBride has a wonderful connection to his characters and is both beautifully written and profoundly humane. It’s clear he’s having fun writing the novel but he never loses sight of the suffering of the African American and Latino inhabitants of the projects. The ending is straight out of a Shakespearean comedy and I very much enjoyed it. You should read it; you will enjoy it too!

May

2021

Hamnet

I recently finished reading Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. It took me a few pages to get into it but it turned out to be a marvelous novel and one that I really liked.

This historical novel switches back and forth between two different timelines. One on the day the plague first affects Hamnet’s twin sister, Judith and the other some fifteen years earlier when Hamnet’s father, never named, meets the woman he marries – one Agnes Hathaway.

Agnes (pronounced Ann-yis) is a free spirit, daughter of a farmer and connected to the natural world. She is a kind of Cinderella in her stepmother’s household where the poet, and future playwright is teaching latin to her brother to settle a debt incurred by his father. There is strong chemistry between them and soon there is a first kiss and then wild sex in the apple shed.

When the book opens, Hamnet has discovered his twin sister ill and desperately searches for someone to help, but his father is away in London writing plays and his mother is off tending to her bees. His grandmother and aunt are nowhere to be found.

The book builds through the marriage of the playwright and Agnes as he leaves her and his children to go to London and write plays. He sends money home and buys property in Stratford but he rarely comes home which places incredible stress on the marriage. After the death of Hamnet the two of them feel deep grief but he returns to London and, five years later writes a play using a common version of Hamnet’s name in which the father dies rather than the son.

O’Farrell’s writing is lyric and often poetic and it’s an easy read. The novel was one of NYT’s best books of 2020 and I strongly recommend it.

May

2021

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

I’m falling behind in my book reviews…like everything else. But while I have a pause in my work, I thought I’d tell you about this book which I recently finished reading.

This is an unusual book. It was a runaway best seller in France and, to be sure, across much of Europe, but hasn’t generated that level of interest here. I hope it becomes more popular. I really enjoyed it and I hope you will too.

It’s the story of Renée Michel, the the dumpy, nondescript, 54-year-old concierge of a small and exclusive Paris apartment building. and Paloma Josse who lives in the building. Paloma is acutely intelligent, introspective and philosophical. This 12-year-old views the world as absurd and records her observations about it in her journal. She despises her coddled existence, her older sister Colombe (who is studying at the École normale supérieure), and her well-to-do parents, especially her plant-obsessed mother. After careful consideration of what life is like, Paloma has secretly decided to kill herself on her 13th birthday.

Renée skulks like a spy among the intelligentsia, an apparently unlettered concierge who secretly disdains Husserl’s philosophy, adores Ozu’s films and is so passionate about Tolstoy she named her cat Leo. A widowed concierge in her 50s who calls herself “short, ugly and plump,” she is a self-consciously stereotypical working-class nobody. She is also an autodidact — “a permanent traitor to my archetype,” as she drolly puts it — who takes refuge in aesthetics and ideas but thinks life will be easier if she never lets her knowledge show. Even the slippers she wears as camouflage, she says, are so typical, “only the coalition between a baguette and a beret could possibly contend in the domain of cliché.”

The story flits between the two women in alternating short chapters. Renée’s story is addressed to no one (that is, to us), while Paloma’s takes the form of a notebook crammed with what she labels “profound thoughts.” Both create eloquent little essays on time, beauty and the meaning of life, Renée with erudition and Paloma with adolescent brio. Neither character realizes they share such similar views, from “the pointlessness of my existence,” as Renée says, to their affection for Japanese culture. Paloma adores reading manga, while Renée goes into raptures over an Ozu scene in which the violet mountains of Kyoto become a soul-saving vision of beauty. Both of them hide their true selves from the residents of the building, though.

About half way through the book, though, a Japanese gentleman, Kakuro Ozu, buys a vacant apartment and immediately realizes that the two women are not whom they appear to be. Before long, Monsieur Ozu is gently contriving some little tests to discover more about their secret lives. And this leads to developments that range from the comic to the touching to the heartbreaking.

It’s an enjoyable, interesting and thought-provoking book. There is a certain suspense about it as the characters’ loves are changed and it’s quite well-written and easy to read. I urge you to give it a try. It might be a bit different than what you’re used to but it will be worth it.

Apr

2021

Nomadland

I note that the film, ‘Nomadland’ is nominated for several Academy Awards. I read the book it is based on in 2018 and posted a short review on Facebook. It’s the story of the many thousands who have lost their homes and been forced to live in campers, trailers, vans and so forth…’wheel-estate’. It’s a very difficult existence, scrabbling to make a bit of money and always at the mercy of those who can evict them from their bit of hardtop at any time. It’s just going to get worse when the eviction moratoriums expire soon and thousands, maybe millions are evicted from their homes.

So do what you can to encourage affordable housing policies and, if you see someone in a van or camper parked in the woods or in a parking lot overnight, don’t call the cops…they may have nowhere else to go.

Here’s what I wrote back in 2018:

I just finished reading ‘Nomadland’ by Jessica Bruder. It’s a rather depressing book about the tens of thousands…maybe more, no one knows…who lost essentially everything in the Great Recession and have traded in their middle-class lives for ‘wheel-estate’. hopping from one temporary, low-wage job to another while living in their vans and trailers.They are working as Amazon ‘Camperforce’ – 70 and 80-year olds walking 15 miles or so on a concrete floor stooping, reaching, bending and pulling for trivial wages to help Amazon deliver its goods during the holiday season. Amazon has dispensers on the walls giving out free ibuprofen and acetominephen.The work as campground hosts in the summer, again for minimal wages and they work the sugar beet harvest in North Dakota in the late fall – all just to get by for another year.Check out their website – Amazon has one for camperforce and workamper.com is informative about the jobs that are available.For those of us who are comfortable in retirement, it’s worth a read to understand the challenges facing those who aren’t.

Apr

2021

In the Kingdom of Men

I recently finished reading ‘In the Kingdom of Men’ by Kim Barnes and I liked it. It’s well-written and an easy read but with frequent twists, turns and surprises.

As the NYT reviewer points out, it takes a bit of self-confidence to name the book after a quote from the Bible and then start chapter one with ‘In the beginning…’, but Kim Barnes pulls it off. The protagonist and narrator, a young American girl from Oklahoma named ‘Gin’ is raised by her fire-and-brimstone grandfather who tells her that she is a ‘daughter of Eve, a danger to herself and a temptation to all around her’. The book is the story of what the men around her view as her many transgressions. Gin is filled with defiance against all the rules that box her in and her refusal to be looked down upon.

Gin demonstrates her defiance (and transgressions) by getting pregnant on her first date with young Mason McPhee, a local college-bound boy. Her grandfather shuns her but Mason does ‘the right thing’ in 1967 by marrying her, giving up his dream of college and going to work in the oil patch. Gin has a miscarriage and cannot have any more children so things look bleak in their little honeymoon shack.

But Mason is recruited by Aramco which is building an American empire in Saudi Arabia. Just like that the two find themselves in a spacious, sumptuously-appointed house with a houseboy and a gardener in an American ‘compound’ in Eastern Saudi Arabia. After a few hours of orientation, Mason is sent to an offshore oil rig and Gin is left to figure out life in the Aramco compound and the rules. There are lots of them. Women are not allowed to leave the compound except in the company of men. They are not allowed to drive where they might be seen by Arab men. While alcohol is officially forbidden, most houses have a still to manufacture their own ‘sadiqi’. “Houseboys” tidy up; husbands go off to work; wives laze in bathing suits by the pool and have discreet affairs. “You take a bunch of healthy men and women, fence them up in the middle of the desert, throw in some sadiqi juice and see what happens,” one woman tells Gin. “It’s like ‘Peyton Place’ around here.” Outside are the realities of Saudi Arabia: women can’t walk alone or drive, and must dress in modest attire.

Gin manages to defy most of these rules. She becomes friends with her Punjabi houseboy and treats him as an equal – something viewed with horror by the other wives. She defies Islamic custom by wandering a market town with a bare-armed friend. She defies her husband by going off with an Italian photographer to film student protests during the Six-Day War. She makes one girlfriend but refuses to play by the rules. She doesn’t take golf lessons or learn to play bridge from the boss’s wife despite repeated invitations.

Meanwhile, accidents are happening off base and Mason gets involved in trying to stop them and the corruption and bigotry that fuel them and Gin, driven mad by loneliness and the strictures that surround her gets involved in dramas of her own. It’s a complex story about American venality and greed and those who defy the norms or try to change things get dealt with…one way or another.

As I said at the beginning, I liked this book a lot. I think most of you will too. Put it on your list.

Books

Deacon King Kong

Hamnet

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Nomadland

In the Kingdom of Men

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