A Portable Magic

We enjoyed some reasonable temperatures in the latter half of July but with August the heat has returned. There’s no guarantee that it’s going to get cooler in a hurry now that September is here, but we’re closer to that than we are to peak heat and for that I am grateful.

In Books…

• The Sunflower Boys: Artem has a relatively normal life growing up as a 12 year-old in Ukraine. He lives with his mother and younger brother Yura, who is nine, in an apartment in a small city. His father, or tato, is one of a handful among his classmates that lives and works abroad (in his case, in the United States) to earn more money. He’s been best friends, nearly inseparable really, with his neighbor Viktor since the two were seated together on the first day of school. And he’s realizing, slowly, that his feelings for Viktor may be something more than just friendship. Navigating the tension in that relationship is among his primary concerns until February of 2022, when he and Yura wake up one morning to the window of their bedroom blowing in because the Russians are bombing their city. Everything turns upside down in an instant, and the family flees quickly to the home where their mother grew up and their grandfather still lives. It’s remote, isolated even from the nearest village, so it seems safe enough…but with this war there is no real safety, and soon the boys are on their own, desperately trying to reach Lviv, near the Polish border, to reunite with their tato. But that is not the end of their journey to reach safety, and peace…peace is a whole other prospect. What a beautiful book! It did not read to me like a debut. Sam Wachman balances writing an Issue Book about the war being raged by Russia on Ukraine with telling an actual, compelling story about people with a deftness that eludes many authors. Part of it is that he gives his story room to breathe, with the book nearly halfway over by the time the Russians arrive on the scene. By the time peril strikes, we’re already invested in Artem and his increasingly complicated feelings about his tato living overseas, his relatively new diagnosis with a seizure disorder and his frustration with feeling babied because of it, his growing romantic interest in Viktor and the way their dynamic changes when Viktor starts to become aware of it. So by the time terrible things started happening, I was really invested in these characters and what would become of them. The peril they’re put through is realistic but not gratuitous, and Wachman doesn’t wallow needlessly in despair or prolong the tension about how any particular situation they find themselves in plays out. Are there some issues here? Sure. Artem is probably depicted as too level-headed and emotionally mature for 12. Some of the situations the brothers find themselves in after the invasion are resolved a bit too neatly. There’s a reunion near the end of the book that feels a little too much like wish fulfillment. But these are minor quibbles, really. I remember watching the early days of this war play out, at home shortly after my son was born, awake in the middle of the night with him and watching the bombs fall, the horror I felt. But this book really brought the situation home for me in a whole new way. I loved this one and highly recommend it to everyone!
• Darling Days: A quick note on pronouns: I will be referring to author iO Tillett Wright as “they” when referring to the time in the memoir, as they identified as non-binary when the book was released and recount experiences identifying as both male and female (they were assigned female at birth). When referring to Wright in the present, when he has transitioned to male, I will use “he”. This seems to make the most sense to me. Anyways, Wright begins their memoir before their own birth, with the story of the shooting death of their mother’s boyfriend, Billy. iO’s mother (Rebecca, called Rhonna in the book), an actress/dancer/model in New York City, never really recovered from the loss, but she moved on anyways, and iO comes out of her relationship with Seth Tillett, an artist. Though their child was unplanned and their relationship ends, both parents love iO fiercely and accept them unconditionally. When iO is about six, they’re thrilled to get their long hair cut off due to completely ungovernable snarls and shortly thereafter announce to their parents that they are a boy. Their unquestioning embrace of iO on their own terms is perhaps the best thing either of them do for iO as a parent, because both are facing deep, dark demons. Rhonna drinks heavily, her grasp on sanity and ability to hold down any sort of job that might provide steady income becoming increasingly unstable. Seth starts another family and is fighting addictions of his own, rendering him only an occasional presence in iO’s life. He is blind, presumably willfully so, to the chaos and deprivation his child lives in. It’s clear that iO doesn’t understand the precarity of their situation early on, but as they grow up and are exposed to kids outside of their bohemian circle, who know where their next meal is coming from and aren’t forcibly evicted from their apartment by it being knocked down around them after months of warnings and relocation offers, they have no real choice. For their own survival, they finally confess how bad it is to a school counselor and are sent to live with their father overseas. All that childhood trauma, though, does not render iO an easy teenager to live with. They’re sent to a boarding school in the English countryside because their father cannot realistically care for them while nursing his longstanding heroin habit, where they start living as a girl again and experience some small measure of stability thanks to the school environment. They fall in love for the first time. But the tie between iO and their mother is not sundered that easily and they’re drawn back into her orbit. iO finds new relationships, makes new friends, founds an underground art magazine, and finally manages to move out on their own at 22, where they leave the book. I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting here, though probably more focus on iO’s experience of understanding himself and living as a trans child. That sort of thing is in there, iO recounts his terror at using the boys bathroom and having his female body discovered leading to having accidents at school well into his elementary years, his refusal to attend a ballet school that would have required him to wear a leotard, his inclination to make himself charming but remote to his peers as a way to prevent questions about his gender. But it’s much more a story about coming to terms with parental failures and accepting parents on their own terms as people, even when those failures are of the “hoarding habit so bad that they live in filth and poverty so desperate they often do not have literally anything to eat” variety. The love that iO has for his mother, and hers for him, shine through thanks to his beautiful, evocative writing. But iO is equally clear-eyed that his mother was very much unable to care for him and his move to get child protective services involved was necessary. iO is open and honest about his circumstances and willing to share some very dark experiences, but it is not the kind of childhood that would create an adult comfortable with emotional vulnerability and I think that lead me personally to struggle to connect with his story. It’s a wildly different story than my own, of course, but there’s a sort of remove as well that rendered it even more foreign to me. The structure, dividing the book into short snapshot chapters of moments in time, perhaps also contributed as it felt kind of choppy, a series of incidents rather than a cohesive narrative. It’s remarkable that iO grew into a functional adult with the way his early years played out, he’s a gifted writer, but this memoir just didn’t do anything for me and I can’t recommend it.
• An Anthropologist on Mars: A collection of neurological case studies, here you will find stories on blindness (both color-blindness and a person who regained their eyesight through cataract removal surgery decades after losing it in childhood), amnesia, temporal lobe seizures, Tourette’s, and autism. As is typical for his writing, Oliver Sacks is much less interested in going into the minutae of symptoms that the people he writes about experience than exploring what it might mean to live in the world with those symptoms. I found particularly affecting the story of Franco Magnani, who grew up in a small village in the Tuscan countryside called Pontito. Forced from their home during WWII, his family left and returned only briefly, he himself went to school for a few years in a larger city before becoming a sailor to earn money, eventually settling in San Francisco. He lived a relatively normal life there, working as a cook, until he began having visions of Pontito. Not just fond remembrances, but full-scale, immersive visions of the place he hadn’t seen for decades. Consumed with these apparitions, he began to make paintings of the town, which proved to be incredibly accurate. Sacks quickly runs through the probable diagnosis (temporal lobe seizures) and their presentation and history, but he’s much more interested in what it actually means for Franco to live with them. The way his obsession with Pontito has driven away friends and even family members. The ambiguity he feels when he thinks about taking a trip back to Pontito, both excited and scared at the prospect. The way he feels when he eventually does decide to return. It’s not about the medical mystery. People live their lives with these disorders every day outside of the context of the medical system. What does that mean for their experience of life? What I enjoy about reading Sacks’s writing is his intense curiosity. He never puts on an air of anything being old hat, or seems to feel like if he’s seen one person with a particular condition he’s seen them all. Indeed, in this book alone he writes about two people with autism: Stephen Wiltshire, an artist with incredible recall who can draw detailed cityscapes from memory but engages in only very limited verbal communication, and Temple Grandin, the university professor who has done incredible work to improve slaughterhouse practices to help the animals die as peacefully as possible. They are wildly different people, and Sacks does not try to flatten either of them into a neat “autistic” box, but rather approaches them both as their own people with their own strengths and challenges. I will say I found this book less lively than his other major case study collection (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat), probably because there are only seven stories here as opposed to 24 in the other. It gives Sacks more time to dive deeply, but sometimes he does seem to be spinning his wheels and getting a bit repetitive. But it’s good, interesting reading, and I’d recommend it to those inclined towards a medical or psychological book.
• Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: Leila Majnoun, Leo Crane, and Mark Deveraux are all 30something Americans who haven’t quite managed to figure it out just yet. Leila works for a do-gooder humanitarian organization in Burma, where her journeys into the country’s interior to try to get a shipment of aid goods unstuck lead to her accidental stumble upon a pair of American defense contractors clearly up to something nefarious. Before she knows it, her school principal father has been accused of awful crimes and her visa has been revoked. Mark, a writer, is the son of a single mother whose magician father took of when he was an adolescent but left behind in his son the charisma and confidence to become a successful self-help bullshit artist when an essay he writes goes viral. He gets a book deal, the book sells well, and he becomes a sounding board for a powerful tech CEO…who he hopes can bail him out having to actually produce his contractually-mandatory second book, which he has no inspiration to write. Leo has been cushioned by the trust fund he inherited from his parents, who owned a successful board game company, from having to find a real direction in life. He’s long turned to drugs and booze to self-medicate his bipolar disorder, but his instability has undermined his attempts to secure gainful employment, all the way from a failed stint at running a bookstore to getting fired working in childcare. Their paths come to intersect as Mark’s tech guru patron reveals the depths of his plans to seize control of personal information, and a guerilla opposition group races against time to try to scuttle those plans before they can be fully implemented. I remember this as having been a bit of a buzzy book when it was released over a decade ago, but it seemed to have totally faded without making a real mark and I was curious about why. Now I know. The novel spends quite some time introducing its central trio, which would usually be something I’d be into as a character-oriented reader, but none of them wind up being all that interesting. Mark is a vain white-collar scammer taking his father’s low-rent confidence game techniques as far as he can manage, and his endless cycle of being unable to write, being plunged into self-doubt, and coping with that feeling by drinking too much and smoking too much pot is just not compelling. Leila’s motivations are surprisingly opaque given the amount of time we spend with her…her father’s situation drives her actions on the surface level, but what does she actually want? It’s hard to tell. She serves mostly as a foil to the story’s men. Leo is perhaps the most engaging, but he’s also someone who has used his unearned wealth to do exactly zero good for anyone and indeed, is seemingly not very interested in doing much for anyone else. He does show some growth in the latter portions of the book, but that leads me to the most significant issue with the book: its completely nonsensical pacing. The introductory portions drag along endlessly, with storylines not starting to converge until halfway through and the plot only starting to rev up around the 2/3rds point, leaving far too many things that require in-depth explanation to happen very quickly, getting brushed over faster than they should be to not fall apart upon further reflection. This culminates in an ending that’s less cliffhanger than just…sudden cessation of forward momentum. There’s no narrative arc, no climax, no falling action. The only explanation that holds much water to me is that the book was originally quite a bit longer and was split into two, with a sequel intended to be put out after this book became a hit. The book had a quite large initial printing for a debut novel (30,000 copies), indicating the publisher was excited about it and thought it would sell very well. When the demand for the book (not to mention a sequel) failed to materialize, plans changed. Which leaves this book to stand alone, which it is too unbalanced to do competently. A pity in some ways, because David Shafer’s prose is often quite clever and I would have been curious to read something else he’d written, but there has not anything else since this book came out in 2014. Way too many issues for me to recommend this book, even as a curiosity.
• At Last: When Helene’s son Tom marries Evelyn’s daughter Ruth, two very different women come into each other’s lives. Helene hardly knew her older doctor husband when they married and left West Virginia for Cleveland and their relationship was never emotionally close. She poured her love into their only child, Tom, determined to not let his father’s constant time at the hospital keep him from having a good childhood. Evelyn’s own parents separated when she was young, her mother determined to give her daughters opportunities in the city and away from the farm. A deeply practical woman, she had a warm, loving relationship with her husband until his death and three daughters, including whip-smart spiky Ruth, who comes into Helene’s life when the latter discovers letters written in German in her husband’s desk after his sudden passing and wants them translated. This leads Ruth to Tom, who she marries and has a daughter, Francie, with. Francie and Evelyn both dote on the sweet, anxious little girl, who is removed from their daily lives when her parents decide to move to New York for professional opportunities. As she grows up, she’s faced with bumps in the road and is faced with decisions that will determine the path of her life. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this book was not quite what it’s marketing would have lead me to believe. I was expecting much more drama between Helene and Evelyn, and it’s not that there isn’t any, it’s just that it’s not as central to the narrative as I had anticipated. If you’re looking for dramatic grandmas battling it out, that’s not much of what’s on offer here. What is on offer are stories about being a woman in the world and the options that are presented to us. Helene, the least-loved child of her parents, is obsessed with external validation and appearances. Evelyn, faced with early instability, marries a solid provider and raises her children with detached affection. Ruth, too smart for going along to get along, strains against the boundaries that would put her purely in the domestic sphere. Francie seeks escape from her anxieties in ways that might not be healthy for her. Their lives are presented to the reader in snapshots over time, which keeps the pace lively but leads to dropped plot threads. We learn little about Evelyn’s marriage, for example, her husband only appearing vaguely in her recollections. The information in the letters Helene hires Ruth to translate could have lead somewhere, but this is not pursued. The earliest portion of Francie’s life in New York is a mystery. I often complain that books should have had tighter editing, but this is one I actually feel like I wish had been fleshed out a bit more. I found it enjoyable enough, but there are hints of a richness and depth that could have been achieved but never is. Shafer’s prose is clear, her characters vivid. The story concerns mostly the small moments that make a life, someone looking for a propulsive plot won’t find what they were hoping for. But if you enjoy female-centered family stories, this is a very solid one.
• The Children Act: When we meet Fiona Maye, her marriage is in crisis. A respected judge in her late 50s, she’s floored when her husband proposes an affair with one of his colleagues, a woman nearly half her age. He doesn’t want to sneak around, he wants her to acquiesce to his desire to have one last fling. Naturally, she refuses this idea, but he walks out of their London home anyways. The same night, she receives an emergency filing. A young man called Adam, almost but not quite 18 years old, is dying of leukemia. A procedure requiring a blood transfusion will make his survival highly likely, but without it he will almost certainly die. Adam and his parents are devoted Jehovah’s Witnesses and refuse the transfusion on the basis of their faith. It will be up to Fiona to decide how to proceed. After hearing from experts, she decides to see Adam for herself. She travels to his hospital room, where he is obviously dying. Even so, he’s trying to learn to play the violin, and she impulsively joins in a duet with him, singing to the accompaniment of his string instrument. The decision she ultimately renders will have repercussions beyond what she might have imagined, especially as she tries to figure out how to proceed with her husband after his indiscretion. This is the third McEwan I have read, and he loves a certain type of morality tale. He enjoys setting up his protagonists as having a certain kind of self-righteousness, as people who perceive themselves and are largely perceived by others as holding a fundamental decency although they may have their foibles. This person then faces a moral crisis, and makes a decision they justify as correct to themselves, which is ultimately revealed to have been ill-considered, and they struggle with how to reconcile their error in judgment with who they believe themselves to be. McEwan is a talented writer, his prose is clever and his characters have the feeling of reality, with flaws that feel rooted in who he builds them to be. But I get the feeling as a reader that he actually kind of hates them even as he writes them, relishing the chance to bring them down out of their self-satisfaction. He encourages moral equivalencies that seem valid when reading the book and hold up much less well on further reflection. I find his books frustrating because there’s always a mean-spiritedness in place of an empathy that would render the stories more genuinely emotionally engaging. This will probably be the last one of his I pick up, and I can’t recommend it.
• We Should All Be Mirandas: I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting when I decided I wanted to read this book. Obviously it was prior to the debut of And Just Like That, which I have absolutely refused to watch but I understand took Miranda in a new direction as a character. I guess I thought it would likely be something pop-culture oriented and fun but still smart: maybe an in-depth character study of Miranda, how she changed between the original debut of Sex and the City and its last episode and/or the movies, comparisons with other pop culture figures in a similar bent, like fellow attorney Ally McBeal or career-focused strivers like Leslie Knope. But perhaps that was a bit much for a book that spun off from a novelty Instagram account about outfits. What’s on offer is totally harmless bog-standard life advice for late 20/early 30somethings, encouraging readers to find work they enjoy and stick with it, to date around even when it sucks, to nurture meaningful friendships, to develop a personal style that is true to their own sensibilities, and other similar kinds of things. All of it illustrated, of course, with references to Miranda’s plotlines on the series. There’s virtually nothing of substance here, just a bunch of references to the show strung together with enough pages to call it a book.

In Life…

• Another low-key month: C has been agitating for Halloween since even before this month began, so I’ve spent a lot of time listening to a toddler’s spirited rendition of “This Is Halloween”. Otherwise, we’ve been trying to keep ourselves and him reasonably entertained as we approach what will be a busier month!