Normally, these ‘Books Worth Keeping’ posts focus on a single work recently encountered and found (in one necessarily limited and idiosyncratic opinion) to be worth remembering and sharing. This time around, although I’m spurred by a specific book (“Tell Me Everything”), the subject is its author.
In this reader’s view, anyone who aspires to be a writer would do well to read Elizabeth Strout’s novels and consider deeply what she does and how she does it. Under the guise of limited lives in a limited setting, Strout illuminates the unlimited breadth and variety of what it is to be human. Out of deceptively ‘ordinary’ situations and circumstances, she mines complexity and contradiction (apologies to Robert Venturi for stealing your phrase) as her utterly believable characters struggle to understand themselves and the selves of those with whom they live, die and, especially, love.
Many other authors and books* are similarly revealing and rewarding, but few are as consistently insightful, illuminating and uplifting.
Elizabeth Strout’s works are a treasure.
*Mary McGary Morris’s A Dangerous Woman, Clare Messud’s The Woman Upstairs, and Michael Dorris’ A Yellow Raft in Blue Water come quickly to mind, as do the works of Emma Donoghue, Kate Atkinson, William Boyd, Ian McEwan and… Thankfully, the list goes on and on.
The romantic novel as still life painting – an unlikely assortment of exquisitely-rendered events (the objects) carefully arranged for maximum effect (starting with Evelyn and Dorothy in 1944, then moving forward in jumps and fits, then returning to Evelyn in 1901), the entire assemblage framed by the city of Florence in all its history and culture and gastronomic variety.
When I search the text for ‘still life’ I find reference to all the still life paintings Evelyn inherited; thought by some to be no more than decorations, to her they are the grail, which seems perhaps a comment on the genre as a female space. Another instance, also, in which she, having become an art professor, theorizes on the genre’s power as coming from, not in spite of, the seeming triviality of individual objects or domestic situations which actually contain specific phrases of the overall painting’s meaning and purpose. How it freezes time, raises up the contributions of those who provide for others (as opposed to the ‘movers and shakers’). And a final instance of the two words together in the passage “…Empty bowls. Rotting fruit. Passing time. But still life in all its beauty and complexity…” thus making clear the author’s multiple intents: still life as a genre of painting, life as a collection of individuals interacting and connecting as do the objects in a still life painting, an account rendered in the manner of a still life painting and, ultimately, that ‘life’ is still ‘life,’ whether one is old, or disappointed, grieving or alone or has serendipitously found what they’ve been looking for all along.
(Worth noting the large number gay characters; more than would be expected solely because of the novel’s interest in art, literature and other creative pursuits. Clearly the result of many decisions by the author, who herself came out in the 1980s, and a welcome reminder that human variety is not a product of the late twentieth century. Noted also that not quite all the hetero relationships in the book are constrictive, doomed and/or abusive, but the tally certainly trends in that direction.)
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Eight months after reading this novel and recording the notes above, I came across the title again and was not certain whether or not I had read it. Reading my notes at this remove, I’m struck by how interesting and satisfactory they make the book sound and yet I did not recall it (sincere apologies, M. Winman). Entire reason I started writing notes like these was the hope of no longer doing that…
Is it time, perhaps, to slow down and not consume so many books but rather to savor the few? But what other way to find those few, given that recommendations and reviews are so unreliable? And isn’t that dilemma just what life itself is all about? One has to experience its entirety – the exciting and the tedious, the success and failure, the love and the rejection, the yin and the yang and the black and the white and the good, the bad and the ugly – in order to learn what is truly astonishing and beautiful and we wish we had done a better job of savoring and holding onto – what will be so difficult to say goodbye to when one finally shuffles off.
Maybe it’s simply time for me to re-read some of those books which a first read confirmed to be worthwhile.
Ackerman, takes a risk here, venturing into the mind of an Iraqi-American attempting to join the Syrian resistance to Bashar Al Assad’s brutal regime. Published in 2017, this may have just predated the current literary judgement that any such attempt at empathetic fiction constitutes an unjustifiable act of appropriation. For this reader, the complexity he portrays in both the would-be fighter and the rest of his cast – all but one of whom are also of Middle Eastern nationalities and ethnicities – justifies the premise. No, this is not the novel a native Iraqi or Syrian might have written, but neither is it an opportunistic rip-off spawned in ignorance. Ackerman’s record as a journalist and as a Marine (decorated for actions during tours of duty in both Iraq and Afghanistan) gives him enough credibility, in my view. Besides, his writing of his book in no way prevents anyone of other background from crafting their own. (That he gets published and someone else might not is more properly a comment on the nature of the publishing industry/market than on the right of any author to spend their days following their own visions.)
Moving past all that, Dark at the Crossing presents a convincing and valuable portrait of the desperation endemic to a wartime refugee movement – boys living on handouts along the side of a highway, families hoping to subsist on what they can grow from a single envelope of seeds, a mother’s love warped beyond repair by the unmanageable violence of urban insurrection, lives casually dispatched by blasé warriors barely out of adolescence and under no close command.
More deeply, this dramatic and eventful story is concerned with the question of why men fight such wars. Yes, there are individuals or moments in which the desire to topple an illegitimate regime is clear and pure, but often the motives are more muddled. Revenge against previous cruelties and atrocities is a deep strain, the need to be active in one’s fate rather than a passive victim seems another. Also, and perhaps wrapping around all those, is the need to become part of something which feels simply too large to ignore: when your entire world is burning, is there not a moral obligation to pick up a bucket, no matter how small? Is that not actually an act of love – for those who might be saved today, tomorrow, next year or next decade?
In that, the novel recalls Chris Hedges’ War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (though Ackerman does not judge such a search for meaning nearly as harshly), and also John Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory (despite a perspective which could hardly be more different, its depiction of the personal cost such impulses can exact raises similar issues).
For raising and considering such questions, Dark at the Crossing is more than worthy of the time it takes to read and the fraction of an inch it now occupies on my shelf.
Posing as satire of the Western world’s self-help book genre, this clever volume starts out strong (“Look, unless you’re writing one, a self-help book is an oxymoron. You read a self-help book so someone who isn’t yourself can help you, that someone being the author.”) and finishes even stronger. There is a stretch about three quarters through its slender 220 pages that treads close to familiar crime and corruption thriller terrain, but happily that is only a dalliance, employed by Hamid to bring his protagonist down to earth and set up the final chapters wherein we realize what sort of wealth is really being promoted here, and in what way this book truly proposes to help its readers help themselves.
Along the way, we get a glimpse of what life is like for many hundreds of millions across the globe. A lesson given greater impact by being written in the second person, casting the reader as protagonist (“The whites of your eyes are yellow, a consequence of spiking bilirubin levels in your blood.”) This choice is particularly effective at impressing readers from prosperous northwestern-quadrisphere cultures (such as myself) with the realities of life for those who indirectly support our affluence (“The virus affecting you is called hepatitis E. Its typical mode of transmission is fecal-oral. Yum.”) Later, when a different range of emotions arise among characters in circumstances superficially different from our (my) own, this second-person setting makes plain the conclusion that we are all the same underneath, no matter how different our economics make us seem at first glance.
Lest this sound like a civics lesson, I want to emphasize that the writing throughout is full of wry insight and humor. To that, the final chapters add great warmth and sympathy for the human condition and an understanding of love, aging and the grace with which those can be faced – when complex and imperfect beings rise to their best potential. An unexpected and very welcome reward at the end of a brisk and entertaining trip.
Ultra-impressive work by Hamid, who is fast becoming a favorite author. Originally from Pakistan, he has dual English citizenship, degrees from Princeton and Harvard Law and experiences in the worlds of corporate law and McKinsey consulting to complement his South Asian frame of reference. Author of five novels so far and at least one work of non-fiction (Discontent and its Civilizations: Despatches from Lahore, New York and London, 2014), his is a voice which deserves to be heard, and widely.
RobinAndrew 