I didn’t go anywhere this month, but we did get a visit…my dad came into town to hang out with the little guy! It was really nice to be able to have him come see us and the weather was great. Speaking of which, it’s already starting to heat up around here, we hit the mid-80s last week and it is toooo soon, I don’t want a roasty summer where we feel like we have to be indoors by 10 AM to avoid getting overheated and weather like that comes with real fire danger for us in the high desert, too.
In Books…
- Just Above My Head: James Baldwin’s final novel tells the stories of two sets of siblings, Hall and Arthur Montana, and Julia and Jimmy Miller, whose fates are closely intertwined. The book begins with Hall, who is in his early 40s and married with two kids, getting a call that his beloved little brother Arthur, a famous gospel singer, has died in London aged only 39. A few years later, Hall and his family are visiting Julia, a longtime friend who was once Hall’s girlfriend, when her little brother Jimmy arrives. This is the first time Hall has seen Jimmy, who was Arthur’s partner both romantically and professionally (as his pianist), since Arthur’s death. Their reminisces about Arthur form the backbone of the book. The Montana and Miller mothers were friendly, drawing the children together in New York City in the late 1940s. Young Julia, then just a preteen, was a child preacher who was a sensation in the African-American community. Her work brought the family fame, and more importantly money, so she is the point around which they all turn. Jimmy loves his sister but resents his afterthought status in the family. Arthur was of course also a performer…the Montana father plays piano and nurtures in Arthur a gift for song, assembling around him a group of other neighborhood boys, Red, Crunch, and Peanut, who become known as the Trumpets of Zion. Hall, oldest of all of them, is fiercely protective of his little brother but is also pulled towards adulthood and an understanding that he will likely soon be drafted into the Korean War. The Trumpets go on tour through the South, and while there is danger there for this group of four northern Black teenagers and their manager, it’s not the same as it will be on a parallel trip many years later. The Trumpets themselves are more innocent of the danger as well, and it is on this trip that Arthur has his first experience and relationship with another guy, sleeping with and falling in love with Crunch. By the time they return to NYC, though, things have gotten very dark in the Miller family after the death of their mother. Teenage Julia takes drastic action to free herself (and ultimately, Jimmy) from their circumstances, and by the time Hall returns from Korea a few years later she’s become a successful model and the two fall passionately in love, bringing their little brothers back together in what ends up being the most lasting legacy of their relationship. Arthur and Crunch have long since broken up, and Jimmy’s own long-burning torch for Arthur is rekindled. While Julia leaves Hall, who marries another woman and is happy in his family life, Jimmy and Arthur are together for 14 years, living mostly in Europe where their race and sexuality are less contentious than they would be in the United States, before Arthur’s death. This is a big book: relatively long, lots of characters, dense prose, and a lot of ideas. For the right reader, it is incredibly rewarding. I am very glad I didn’t try this one even ten years ago, I think that being around the same age as Hall (who is the main storyteller) made it all the more rich and powerful. Hall is not yet old, but his youth is behind him and the way Baldwin crafts the prose has a powerful feeling of both wistful nostalgia and very real loss. As someone who describes my own taste in books as “600 page bummers”, I absolutely loved this one. The characters are rich, deep, and psychologically complex. Their relationships are interesting and change over time. Baldwin’s writing is extraordinary, such care was clearly taken with his word choices, with developing the ideas he introduces. The whole thing is a meditation on love in its many forms (parental, between siblings, between friends, between lovers), the ways it can both free and trap us, the line between devotion and obsession, how much we need it but how it will not save us. It’s about the messy business of being human, of wanting and not getting, of heartbreak and the spark of a new connection, of wanting desperately to protect the ones we love and not being able to, of searching for direction and meaning and sometimes finding them but sometimes not. This is a book I already want to re-read, it was so lush that I know that there were things I missed that will be there to find a second or third time through. This won’t be for everyone though…it doesn’t have a lot in the way of plot mechanics, and if you’re not in the mood for something that will call for a lot of your attention, this would be a challenging one. There are about a million trigger warnings here, it deals with a lot of very heavy subjects. But for me, I’d be shocked if this wasn’t my best book of the year when we get to December.
- The Cooking Gene: Michael Twitty is many things. He is a cisgender man. He is gay. He is Jewish. He is Black. He is American. He is a cook. And he’s boundlessly curious, especially about his family history in particular and the history of people Black cooking in the South writ large. This book is a chronicle of his exploration of that curiosity. I think a reader’s enjoyment of this book will hinge significantly on how much one appreciates Twitty’s prose and style, which I suppose is the case with a lot of memoir. I did not expect, going in, how much of it exactly was going to be a memoir at all. I figured it would be mostly about food, a little bit about his own story. Turns out his own story, and that of his family, is central to the book. I think I’ve said this before, about another nonfiction book about a family history, but I tend to reach my maximum interest level for them pretty quickly and then find it increasingly grating. While I can appreciate how genetic ancestry information can be an especially fraught subject for Black people whose ancestors arrived here through the slave trade, reading exact breakdowns of Twitty’s results from various ancestry websites is just…not at all engaging. The portions of the book that do focus on the food were much more appealing to me, even if I’m not a foodie by any stretch of the imagination. Twitty clearly did a lot of research and his obvious passion for his subject matter kept my attention, even when some portions got a little repetitive. I feel like this is a book that would have been MUCH better on audio. In print, his tendencies towards digressions were grating to me, making the whole thing feel like it had no structure. I kept wanting to get back to the actual food parts. There were some turns of phrase that really got under my skin as well, like one time when he describes half-siblings (children born to two Black mothers from the same white father) as looking “like fraternal twins”. Fraternal twins are just siblings who gestate at the same time, so what he’s saying is just that they look like full siblings. Half siblings looking like full siblings is not uncommon. It’s a throwaway line but it felt like it exemplified what I found irritating about his prose style. I wish the book had been about 100 pages shorter and focused much more tightly on the actual culinary history, because that was for me by far the best part. But as is, I did not enjoy reading it and wouldn’t recommend it.
- Purple Hibiscus: Fifteen year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja might seem to have charmed lives. They live in a big house with a housekeeper because their father, Eugene, is a wealthy man. He owns factories and a well-regarded newspaper, is renowned for his generosity, strong Catholic faith, and dedication to using his paper to tell truth to power. Her schoolmates and even her own cousin think she’s a snob because she barely speaks to anyone. That’s because they don’t know that behind the tall walls of their home, their father controls every aspect of their lives. He creates daily schedules that are to be adhered to. He expects that his children will be at the top of their class. He delivers pre-meal graces that are practically homilies. And if anyone disappoints him in even the smallest respect, they face violence. Their mother miscarries after being beaten. The children are beaten, burned, terrorized. She doesn’t talk because she’s so afraid of putting a foot wrong. Everything changes when their father’s sister, their Aunty Ifeoma, somehow persuades Eugene to let her niece and nephew come to visit for a week. Ifeoma, a widow, is a university professor with three children of her own, who she has raised to be bold, curious, and strong. Kambili discovers a Nigeria she’s never known and a way of being she’s never imagined. Neither she or Jaja is able to fit back into their home life in the exact same way they had before, and a showdown with their father becomes inevitable. This was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s debut novel, and it shows. As compared to her later works that I’ve read, it’s significantly less well-developed. The basic plot beats are very simple: a sheltered, abused teenage girl escapes her environment, learns that the world is very different than she thought it was, starts to develop connections with other people that affirm her basic humanity, and starts to become herself, a self she’d never dreamed she could be before. Even as someone for whom the plot is virtually never the point, I found it sometimes frustratingly cliche. What I didn’t think about until after I read more about the book was its relationship to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and once my attention was dawn to the connection, I appreciated more of how Adichie riffs on those themes: Christianity v traditional Nigerian spiritual beliefs, the way colonialism teaches Africans to hate themselves and aspire to be more like white people, the use of violence by angry fathers to control their children. I think it’s quite successful in that respect! And the clear, strong prose that would become, to me, her trademark is also already in evidence. It’s the kind of debut novel that’s more or less fine but really just makes you excited to read what that author does in the future, and Adichie would more than live up to that promise. This book is well-written, if a bit underbaked, so there’s no reason I wouldn’t recommend it but I’d probably point someone in the direction of Americanah if they wanted to read her work.
- Kitchen: Mikage Sakurai is only in her early 20s when she finds herself fully without family. Her parents died when she was young, and the grandparents who raised her died first one, and then finally the other. She’s lost, but Yuichi Tanabe, a young man who worked at the flower shop Mikage’s grandmother frequented, comes unexpectedly to her rescue. He invites Mikage to move in to the apartment he shares with his mother, Eriko, a beautiful and glamorous nightclub owner. There are no ulterior motives, just kindness and companionship. To show her appreciation of them, Mikage cooks food for Yuichi and Eriko. Kitchens are where she feels comfortable, food is a way she expresses love. She comes to be quite close to the Tanabes, and learns that Eriko was once Yuichi’s father and transitioned after the death of his wife. Being with Yuichi and Eriko gives Mikage the space to grieve and get ready to head back into the world, where she moves into her own apartment and works as an assistant to a famous chef at a cooking school. But when Yuichi experiences a profound tragedy of his own, Mikage is forced to confront her own relationship to and feelings about Yuichi and figure out how to proceed. This is a very brief book, even for a novella (it seems like most editions, including mine, have a short story called “Moonlight Shadow” bundled with it but it still barely hits 150 pages). But it still manages to pack in a lot of feeling without going for naked emotional manipulation, though it might seem like grief bait based on the plot. The restraint of the language helps, it doesn’t wallow in sadness. There’s an overall sense of determination, an understanding that grief will pass eventually but will hurt very badly right now, that also keeps it from mawkishness. Despite the very real darkness to some of the material, there’s an overall sweetness, an affirmation of the importance of the kindness and connection. It didn’t make a huge impression on me, but I enjoyed reading it and I’d recommend it!
- A Fine Balance: Okay, I’ve described my own reading taste before as “600 page bummers”, but there’s a difference between that and what this is, which is just pure misery porn. I really do not care for this kind of deliberate, clumsy attempt to heartstring-pull. Terrible things happen to people who don’t deserve them. There’s some good character work but like…to what end? I hated it, and I don’t want to spend time writing anything more about it.
- The Glass Palace: In the early 1880s, an Indian kid called Rajkumar finds himself in Burma. His whole family has died and he’s only about 10 or 12, but he’s big for his age and scrappy and determined to make it, and somehow he does. In 1885, though, a minor dispute between Burma and Britain escalates very quickly into a brief war. The royal family is deposed. At the news of this development, their palace in Mandalay, called “the glass palace” for a mirrored room within it, is broken into and looted by some of the city’s residents…including Rajkumar. While there, he comes across someone who will change his life. Dolly is a few years younger than him, an orphan taken into service by the royal family, and incredibly beautiful. He sees her again the next day when she and the rest of the retinue are leaving to follow the royal family into exile in India, gives her some food, and promises he will find her again someday. He’s as good as his word. He grows up, becomes successful, and happens to find himself in the coastal town where the royals remain in exile, with Dolly as one of their last remaining servants. They marry, but the world does not stop turning and the events that transpire in India, Burma, and Malaya across the beginning of the 20th century impact them and their loved ones in ways they never would have thought possible. For a book that spends a lot of time with a relatively small cast of characters, it’s honestly surprising how poorly almost all of them are developed. Rajkumar and Dolly are the focus of a good chunk of the first half of the book, and continue to feature heavily throughout it, but I’d be hard-pressed to describe either of them or their motivations outside of a few hackneyed cliches. Major character moments, like the friendship that forms between Dolly and Uma, the wife of the chief provincial official overseeing the Burmese royals in India and persists for the duration of their lives are just kind of hand-waved around in the narrative. What draws them together and keeps them connected for decades afterwards, despite mostly living in separate countries in a time when communication was difficult and slow? Who knows! Certainly not anyone reading this book! It’s no more elegant in its time jumps, particularly the final one, which sees Rajkumar and Dolly’s granddaughter venture to Burma to find out more about her family’s history there. Writer Amitav Ghosh does nothing to get the reader invested in her or her quest. To me, it seemed clear that Ghosh intended the character of Arjun, Uma’s nephew, who is introduced about halfway through the book to be the distillation of the themes he wanted to emphasize in the novel. Arjun joins the British military as an officer after an indolent adolescence, becoming a true believer in the institution, tightly integrated into his Indian unit and uninterested in the perspectives of others who ask questions about oppressed people serving in the military of their oppressors. His journey from that position to the end of the book, when he has not only defected to a group of Indian nationalist military members but become their leader, fanatically enforcing loyalty among those who try to abandon the cause when it is hopelessly lost, takes the book from being about colonialism in a general sense to About Colonialism in a much more specific one. Characters deliver long monologues to each other in a way that real people do not do. It’s not that I disagree with his point, it’s that these portions of the narrative feel less like a story and more like a polemic, the latter of which is much less engaging to me as a reader. I did appreciate learning more about the history of this part of the world, especially from an author with roots there. I don’t believe I’ve ever read historical or even contemporary fiction with any significant portion set in Myanmar, so that was refreshing. But this was just too underwhelming as a story to recommend to anyone.
In Life…
- C started preschool: My son has only ever been cared for by us and his grandparents, but once he turned 4 I knew it was time to think about getting him into school. He won’t start kindergarten this coming fall, not until the next one, but I want him to go in being ready to go into a classroom full of other kids, prepared to play and learn, and so we can ease into it a little more this way because we’re starting with just two days per week. It feels like such a big step!
Leave a Reply