Essentially halfway down, halfway to go with session! The bad news is the hardest part, with the deadlines and the long hours, is what’s on the horizon still. But the only way out is through, so onwards we go.

In Books…

• Win At All Costs: I technically finished this one on the last day of last month but did not have time to update that post so here it is! If you watch any sort of distance running event, even very casually, you probably know that it’s unusual for Americans or Europeans to win them anymore. Alberto Salazar, a one-time champion of the New York and Boston Marathons, teamed up with Nike to try to reverse that slide, launching the Nike Oregon Project in 2001. Salazar, already controversial as a coach after one of his athletes failed a doping test in the mid-90s, wanted to bring American athletes back into the winner’s circle by pushing against the limits of doping rules. This is (or should be) unsurprising: world-class athletes are always looking for an edge, for something that will make them just that much faster or stronger, knowing full well their opponents are doing the same. Salazar and Nike recruited athletes like Galen Rupp, Kara Goucher, and eventually Mo Farah with deep pockets and the promise of innovative, cutting-edge training methods. And they achieved results…but flirting with disaster for long enough almost inevitably leads to actual disaster, and the Nike Oregon Project shut down for good in 2019 after USADA banned Salazar for anti-doping violations. Matt Hart published this book just about a year later, and in hindsight, it would have benefited from giving the situation more time to breathe. But only two years after the success of Bad Blood, the appetite for stories giving a behind-the-scenes look at white-collar corporate malfeasance was high, so he struck while the iron was hot. What the book lacks, and suffers for the lack of, is a smoking gun. Hart has quite a lot of circumstantial evidence, enough to make it clear that something was rotten in the state of Denmark (or Oregon, as it were), but relies on the reader to connect the dots. It of course beggars belief that virtually every high-level athlete recruited by the Project had thyroid disease requiring medication, that many had severe enough asthma to require steroid treatment. Goucher’s treatment bu Nike during her pregnancy, having her salary withheld despite gamely making appearances and being rushed back to racing to regain the financial support her family required, is appalling. Salazar’s use of his own children as guinea pigs regarding the absorption of topically-applied testosterone is obviously questionable. His use of weight-related criticism to express displeasure with and exert control over his female athletes is gross. While it’s clear that Salazar was an unkind person who toed ethical lines as a coach, there’s no big explosive reveal here. It’s well-written enough, though I suspect it would be most interesting to those who have more than a passing familiarity with the people involved (I am only vaguely aware of the running world). My interest level in it waxed and waned, it starts to feel quite repetitive at points. It’s far from necessary reading, but if you’re a reader interested in sports and doping, it’s solid enough!
• Maddaddam: Both of the two previous books in this trilogy end at more or less the same place…Snowman, once known as Jimmy, has become a quasi-mystical figure to the Crakers, a genetically engineered group of humanoids developed by Jimmy’s former best friend Glenn (or Crake) before Glenn deployed a deadly epidemic through pills sold as pleasure enhancers that wiped out nearly all of humanity. After sustaining an injury to his foot, which becomes infected, Snowman has fallen into a coma. Toby and Ren, both at one time part of a fringe religious group called God’s Gardeners founded by Adam One, managed to survive through isolation, but have found each other (and a handful of other survivors) when they come across the Crakers and Snowman. Margaret Atwood then takes us on two timelines, one back once again to the before times to trace how we got here, this time through Zeb (Ren’s one-time stepfather, Toby’s sort-of boyfriend, brother to Adam One), and the second moving forward as Toby’s group joins up with the Crakers and tries to heal Jimmy and deal with the violent men who threaten them all…all including the humans, the gentle Crakers, and the mutant pigs Jimmy was injured fleeing from in the first place, engineered with human brain tissue to provide transplant material that has rendered them even more intelligent than pigs already are. There is a lot to like here, including Atwood’s prescience in portraying a way that the world as we know it could plausibly end (the exploration of the nihilistic church led by Adam and Zeb’s father centered on supporting the oil and gas industry is particularly sharp) and a real sense of humor in rendering the stories that Toby tells the Crakers trying to explain the world in which they emerged and the figures that populate it, which she and the reader can tell will become central to the mythology they will develop. The story finds a good balance between the sweeping scope of the origin story it recounts and the small human dramas that make up real life, like Toby’s uncertainty about Zeb’s level of commitment to her. But it starts very slow. Though it was published four years after The Year of the Flood, it picks up right where it left off and I struggled to get reoriented in the narrative despite having read that book only about a year ago. I found it hard to get invested in Zeb until it was more obvious where his story was going, and even then it takes what feels like a few too many twists and turns to tie it in to both the Oryx & Crake and The Year of the Flood narratives. What grounds the book is the story of a group of smart, wary survivors trying to figure out if and how to have hope for the future, even after the end of the world. An incredible trilogy, capped off by a good-but-not-great ending chapter.
• Dream Count: Chiamaka is a bit like Emma Woodhouse…handsome, clever, and rich. The daughter of a very wealthy Nigerian family, she has spent much of her adult life based in the United States, where she dreams of a career as a writer and an all-consuming love. Her best friend Zikora is also a Nigerian living in America. She’s become a very successful lawyer but longs for a husband and children to complete her life. Chiamaka’s cousin Omelogor, on the other hand, spends most of her life in Nigeria apart from an ill-starred stint in graduate school in the US. Kadiatou, the woman who takes care of Chiamaka’s home, is the only woman the novel follows who is not from Nigeria. A widowed Muslim from Guinea who underwent female genital mutilation, she wants nothing more than to raise her daughter in peace. Each woman is followed in turn, with their stories overlapping relatively little. Trapped inside in the early days of the pandemic, Chia thinks about the men she’s loved before, from the years she spent with art history professor Darnell, who treated her (and allowed his academic friends to treat her) with casual cruelty and disdain, to her broken engagement to the solid, steady Chuka, who she cares for deeply but does not thrill her. Zikora, living through the birth and early days of her child, reflects on her own former lovers, including the absent father of her son, and learns more about her mother than she ever thought she might. Kadiatou lives through hardship after hardship, finally winning some security in her life until an unexpected assault turns her whole world upside down. And Omelogor wonders if she’s really as content as she thinks she is with her life as a single, childless woman in her mid-40s, having finally escaped the profound depression into which her failed stint in graduate school plunged her. I had been so excited when I found out Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was publishing a new novel a decade after Americanah, which I and so many others loved. I’d vaguely recalled a small hubbub a few years back about some comments she’d made about trans people that were a bad look, but I hadn’t heard anything since and assumed it was in the past. But the book makes very clear that Adichie is still feeling the sting of the criticism she faced. Virtually every Western progressive is portrayed in a negative light. Darnell is awful to Chia for no reason, making her feel small and ignorant, openly resenting her and chastising her for her wealth while being sure to accept any offered largesse. But it’s in Omelogor’s portion of the book, in which she takes a leave from her career in banking to do a master’s program in America, where things struggle the most under the weight of serving as a proxy for Adichie’s criticism. Omelogor has come to believe that pornography is too often used, especially by men, to learn about sex, teaching lessons about denigration of women. She wants to study the educational role of the material. But…she doesn’t seem to actually have any ideas about it, besides that it is “bad” in this context. There’s no indication she intends to do any sort of original research about how and when young people first encounter porn, or how they feel about its role in the development in their romantic lives. But when her advisor pushes back on her underbaked idea, she’s portrayed as the one who is out of touch rather than Omelogor. Omelogor’s classmates criticize her work as a banker and denounce its immorality without any apparent interest in asking any questions or learning about any actual moral issues in banking, content to rail against it as an established, uninterrogated evil while also hypocritically participating in it. These other students are also depicted as coddled, with one getting an extension on an assignment due to their dog having an ear infection. Omelogor comes in as confident, even sometimes brash, but by the end is depressed and drinking too much, unable to find a foothold among these people and their slippery words, their implied refusal to live in reality. While Omelogor isn’t generally depicted as being above criticism, she is clearly meant to be the sympathetic party in this portion of the book but doesn’t actually come off as especially sympathetic. The whole storyline also doesn’t go anywhere…Omelogor returns to Nigeria, to banking, and apart from talking to her friends about whether they learned about sex from porn, doesn’t seem to take any continued interest in the subject. The best portion of the book for me was Zikora’s, in which her understanding of who her mother is and what she has lived through undergoes dramatic, unexpected shifts as she herself becomes a mother. I found it affecting and rendered with nuance. Chia’s portion has some lovely prose and moments of sharp insight (the way Chia’s thrill of excitement at talking to a publisher about putting together a collection of her writing curdles into dismay as she realizes that what the publisher actually wants is a memoir about African tragedy instead of stories of a rich girl traveling in fine style), but I found myself reminded a bit too much of Carrie Bradshaw in the tale of a writer in love with the idea of love who follows up a romance with a narcissistic commitment-phobe who breaks her heart by seriously dating a down-to-earth man who is straightforward about his desire to marry her, only to leave him because she longs for the intensity of instability. And then there’s Kadiatou, who Adichie writes about in her author’s note as having been inspired by Nafissatou Diallo, the hotel room attendant raped by then-IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Despite having critiqued in Chia’s story the editor who is only interested in the worst parts of Africa, Adichie creates a story focusing on the worst parts of life as a woman. Kadiatou is raised in a patriarchal social model in which her uncle’s family takes charge of her own when her father dies, she undergoes genital cutting, her beloved sister dies of an unspecified and untreated reproductive condition, she is married off to a man she does not love because her family will not consider the man she cares for, her husband is not kind to her, and on and on. I have no doubt that there are many women for whom this is their lived experience, completely unremarkable to them for its ordinariness. But it doesn’t make for especially compelling storytelling. Adichie is a gifted prose stylist, the writing in this book is often stunning. It’s good overall, often very good, and I enjoyed a lot about reading it. But at the end of the day, I wanted so much for it to be great and it just was not.
• Bone Gap: This is a book I likely never would have heard of but for positive word-of-mouth. Bone Gap is a small town in rural Illinois where everyone knows everyone else’s business. Everyone knows that pretty, flighty Didi O’Sullivan picked up and left several years after the death of her husband Hugh for a rich man in Oregon, leaving behind her two sons. Everyone knows that Sean O’Sullivan had to give up his dreams of being a doctor to work as an EMT and raise his little brother, Finn. Everyone knows that teenage Finn O’Sullivan is even more beautiful and even more odd than his mother was. Everyone knows that one day out of the blue a lovely young Polish woman, Roza, appeared at the O’Sullivan’s home and they took her in. Everyone thinks they know that both Sean and Finn were in love with her. And everyone knows that one day Roza disappeared. Finn claims to have seen her be taken, but he can’t describe the man who took her, so no one knows what really happened. It’s two months later now, but Sean is still barely speaking, barely looking at his brother. Finn is trying to focus on studying for college entrance exams to give him a way out of Bone Gap, where he’s referred to as often as not as “Moonface” or “Spaceman” for his dreamily disconnected manner, but he’s distracted by his crush on Petey, the daughter of the local beekeeper who is mocked for her unconventional looks. And Roza? She’s trapped in a nightmare, being held captive by a cold-eyed man who sees in her only a beauty he wants to possess. The through-line throughout the book is perception, who sees what and how. The web of love and guilt and resentment with which Sean and Finn perceive each other, the way Roza is perceived by men who see only her allure and not who she is, the way Petey learns from others how to perceive her own features and it makes her afraid to trust Finn’s interest in her, the way the people who live around them look at all of them and pass judgment. The characters are rendered with sensitivity and understanding. What kept this from being truly excellent, for me, were the magical realism elements of the story. It’s not a style that I tend to find especially appealing, though I think it can be effective. And it’s not that this is particularly poorly rendered, but just…it doesn’t feel necessary. It doesn’t add anything to the narrative or increase its power. Very much worth the read, but it could have been even better.
• Everything I Never Told You: Lydia Lee is the center around which her family turns. Chinese-American James Lee, a Ph.D. student, met WASPy beauty Marilyn Walker in her first year of college and their instant connection changed the trajectory of both their lives forever. James has always felt himself to be an outlier, has always wanted desperately to assimilate, and sees in Marilyn the undeniable American-ness he’s craved. Marilyn loves science and dreams of being a doctor, even in the early 1950s, defying the expectations of everyone…especially her dedicated homemaker mother. She is proudly, defiantly different and is drawn to James because he’s unlike anyone she’s ever known before. When she becomes pregnant before she graduates, they marry, vaguely aware of but not fully understanding the way the family they create will permanently set them apart. Despite his brilliance, James is passed over for a professorship at Harvard, his alma mater, and finds a university job he’s grateful to have in small-town Ohio, where the Lees are the only Asian and only mixed-race family in town with their three children: Nathan, Lydia, and Hannah. Lydia, their second child and first daughter, becomes the focus of the dreams her parents have never quite been able to achieve: her father wants for the her popularity and social ease that have always eluded him, her mother dreams of seeing her daughter enroll in medical school. And then, when she’s only 16, Lydia disappears unexpectedly…only for her body to be discovered in the local lake shortly thereafter. She had never learned how to swim. The fissures laying underneath the surface of her grieving family are suddenly thrown into sharp relief, and the narrative follows them both backwards, to see how it all began, and forwards, as they threaten to pull apart at the seams. This is the kind of debut novel that’s exciting to read, because while it is obviously a debut in some ways, Celeste Ng clearly has a knack for balancing plot and character work, with the mystery of how Lydia died giving the tale momentum, and the sharply observed family dynamics providing texture and emotional resonance to the Lees. They are not the picture of suburban contentment they might at first appear to be. Firstborn and only son Nathan, called Nath (which I spent quite a lot time wondering was pronounced to rhyme with “bath” or “lathe”), studious and ambitious, reminds James of everything he doesn’t like about himself, while Marilyn focuses so much on righting the generational wrong of her gender having ultimately derailed her goals that she can’t fully devote herself to her son. It is to Lydia, with her all-American blue eyes, that both of them look to be everything they always wanted to be but couldn’t. Hannah, whose birth reconnected her parents when it seemed they might be on the verge of a permanent break, has always been a bit of an afterthought and her lower visibility makes her a deft observer of what lingers unsaid among the others. Ng does an impressive job conveying how the role of family golden child is as much a gilded cage as anything else: her parents are so busy trying to make her into a popular high achiever that they can’t see her being pressed, like Giles Corey at Salem, under the weight of their expectations. There are some things that don’t quite work. We understand what drew the parents to each other in the first place, but we don’t see enough of the happy times in their lives to make the times when their marriage might flounder have the impact it really should. Similarly, most of the time the reader spends with the Lees are in times of duress, so the idea that they were a relatively happy family prior to Lydia’s death is told more than shown. I had questions about aspects of Marilyn’s character that felt like something the narrative should have engaged with but it did not. I’m usually a proponent of tighter editing, but I feel like this could have used another 50-ish pages to round it out. Nevertheless it’s a very good book and a very impressive debut!
• Woodworking: Erica Skyberg is having a bit of a rough one. She’s just gone through a divorce, and her ex is already in a new relationship…with a baby on the way. She still has feelings for her ex, who happens to have just been cast as the lead in the play she’s assistant directing, so that’s awkward. Oh and also she’s just figured out she’s trans, something she has spent the last few decades of her life trying to not have to acknowledge. She hasn’t told anyone yet…until she trades spots with another high school teacher in small-town Mitchell, South Dakota, to take over detention duty because Abigail Hawkes is in detention. Abigail has just transferred to Mitchell for her senior year after having had to leave her parents’ home and move in with her sister because she’s trans. Erica has never known anyone who might understand what she’s experiencing, but when she shares the truth with Abigail, the two start to develop a connection as the only transwomen in Mitchell. Abigail, who ordered her hormones over the internet, is living as herself and navigating her senior year of high school, her relationship with her older sister Jennifer, a budding friendship with overachiever Megan, and a potential relationship with Caleb, a sporty type and the son of Brooke Daniels, a wealthy local mommy working on the campaign of a transphobic state legislative candidate as well as being the primary director of the play Erica is working on. As one might imagine, complications ensue. I’ve been following Emily St. James’s writing since she was at The Onion AV Club and have generally found her a smart, insightful cultural critic. It’s not always easy to navigate a transition from that form to something like writing novel-length fiction, but I shouldn’t have been concerned. St. James’s writing is fantastic. Some aspects of the storytelling didn’t quite work for me, but she writes her vivid characters with humor and a tremendous empathy. Each of the women she follows in her narrative has a distinctly different perspective and a voice that rings true. Having read some of her writing about her own transition previously, it seems like she’s writing from a place of personal experience in many ways when it comes to Erica, who has to work hard to find the courage to live as herself knowing the effect it will likely have on not only her career as an English teacher, but her increasingly complicated relationship with her ex-wife Constance and her role in the community at large. The internal struggle between a safe but stifled life in the closet and the possibility and terror of what might come next if she does come out is beautifully rendered. My favorite character was probably Abigail, who wields a sharp sense of humor as armor but is far from a snarky teenager stereotype. She’s vulnerable in the ways most teenage girls are, and she makes mistakes, but her energy practically bursts off the page. I appreciated the way St. James let her characters be messy in ways that feel very true. They screw up, they do things that are hurtful to others…they act, well, like people. They are not meant to be completely virtuous depictions, because being trans doesn’t make you inherently better (or worse, obviously) than anyone else. One of the aspects of that messiness, though, was the relationship between Erica and Abigail, which I found to be hard to sit with. To be clear, there’s absolutely no suggestion of any attraction between them at any point. Rather, it is the way that Erica, a woman in her mid-30s, comes to be emotionally dependent in some ways on Abigail, who is 17 and a student in her class. Regardless of the gender of anyone in that scenario, that’s a not-great dynamic. It’s not uninterrogated in the text, other characters raise it and Erica acknowledges the truth of it. But I still found it a sticking point in my ability to really get emotionally engaged in the story, which was very compelling in many other ways. That quibble aside, this is a very good book, and a very promising debut novel. I can’t wait to see what St. James writes next!
• The Emperor: In 1974, Haile Selassie was deposed as Emperor of Ethiopia after a 44 year reign. Four years later, Polish foreign correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski published this look back at the final years of his rule, conducting interviews with many of the palace functionaries who were there at the time and shaping them into an oral history to narrate how it all came crashing down. It’s not a pretty picture: Selassie surrounded himself with greedy, flattering acolytes who competed viciously with each other for powerful posts which would enable them to  embezzle resources from the vast numbers of the country’s poor. The occasional honest man who came to prominence was quickly cut down by this pack of wolves. There was astonishing waste, like an entire luxurious palace constructed for the Emperor in the countryside only visited once, and astonishing poverty, with tens of thousands of Ethiopians dying of starvation. Palace functionaries lay much of the responsibility for Selassie’s overthrow at the feet of the small but growing educated class. who agitated against the horrifying stagnation and corruption they saw playing out. The combination of student protests and military unrest created an unsustainable situation for the ruling class, emptying the palace of officials (mostly by throwing them in jail) and then, slowly but surely, of household staff and personal servants (mostly just sent home). This is a pretty short book, and I found myself turning to Wikipedia several times to get more context for some events like the famine, but its strength lies in the oral history formatting and I don’t know how he would have been able to give additional context without undermining that. I also tried to keep in mind that this was originally published only a few years after Selassie’s overthrow, when the events that inspired it would have been much more in the realm of common knowledge. It’s the kind of non-fiction that doesn’t overly trouble itself by trying to pretend objectivity, but the trick that makes it work is that the interviewees are almost uniformly supportive of their late Emperor while still damning him with what they reveal in their defense of him. It’s remarkably consistent in some important ways with accounts of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia as the little father who was deceived by his evil ministers, and if he realized the truth of what they had been doing, he surely would have set things right…this language is applied almost verbatim to Selassie, and is all the more resonant as a reference because Kapuscinski was writing as a citizen of Communist Poland. The internet seems to think there is real reason to believe that the book was meant to serve a dual purpose as a satire of that country’s governing leadership, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was. From the United States in 2025, there seem to be parallels to our own moment as well. An interesting read.

In Life…

• Session continues: I am always tired, I am super stressed, I very rarely get to work out or do anything healthy. We’re very close to halfway done but the easy half is behind us. I can’t wait until June.