Alden Mudge

FictionLiterary Fiction

Dixon, Descending

Review by Alden Mudge

In Karen Outen’s adroit first novel, Dixon, Descending, Dixon Bryant carries a lot of baggage up Mount Everest. And even more coming down.

Part of that baggage involves his relationship with his brother, Nate. Sixteen months older than Dixon and now approaching 50, Nate, the long-awaited first son, has always been the “gift” to their parents. Charismatic, irrepressible and sometimes irresponsible, Nate is a bright balloon floating high in the air. Dixon, the wise, soulful, solid brother, holds the string. It is Nate who proposes that the brothers become the first Black American men to summit Everest.

Everest and the people who climb it form a world all their own. Outen, whose endnotes describe her passion for the mountain, writes breathtaking passages about the brothers’ experiences there: the competitive companionability of other climbers; the smell and sounds of the ever-shifting mountain; and, of course, the gut-wrenching dangers of the ascent. Nate and Dixon and their climbing team have lighter moments in camp, but as the brothers climb higher, things get deadly serious. In the rarefied air near the summit, slowed by the long line of climbers and barely able to breathe, the brothers have to make impossible choices about their ambitions, responsibilities and love for one another.

Back near sea level in Maryland, Dixon has more to contend with. Family and friends, for one. But more pressing is a matter at the middle school where he works as a beloved school psychologist. He has taken a bullied boy, Marcus, under his wing. When Marcus is viciously beaten, in an uncharacteristic moment, Dixon violently confronts the tormentor, an irreparably damaged soul named Shiloh. As a result, Dixon goes on leave and follows an unexpected path to self-discovery and expatiation.

That Outen can rather seamlessly meld these two fraught strands of story is a marker of her flowering skill as a writer. An additional gift of the novel is how much it has to reveal about love and friendship among Black men. That alone makes Dixon, Descending a worthy read.

In the rarefied air near the summit, two brothers must make impossible choices about their ambitions, responsibilities and love for one another as they attempt to become the first Black American men to climb Everest.
NonfictionHistoryBlack HistoryAmerican History

Combee

Review by Alden Mudge

Edda L. Fields-Black’s extraordinary Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War will not be for every reader. It is long and very detailed. Reading it is sometimes like watching the slow, painstaking process of an archaeological dig—but readers who stick with the book will come away satisfied by Fields-Black’s patient unearthing.

The event at the center of her excavation is the June 20, 1863, Combahee River Raid. During that pre-dawn attack, 300 Black Union soldiers torched seven South Carolina rice plantations along a 15-mile stretch of the river, causing millions of dollars of damage to crops and property and striking “fear into the heart of the rebellion.” Their guide was Harriet Tubman—today known around the world for her work in the Underground Railroad, but less so for her courageous military history. With Tubman acting as intermediary, 746 men, women and children fled to the river’s edge and boarded the Union boats to escape slavery. The raid served notice that Black men—both formerly enslaved and free—could become effective, disciplined Union soldiers.

These events have been narrated elsewhere, but never with such a passion for factual depth and precision. Combee is often revelatory. The author of Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora, Fields-Black conveys that the South Carolina rice economy was essential to the Confederacy and involved remarkable feats of technology and engineering, much of them performed by enslaved people taken from rice growing regions of Africa. Fields-Black’s approach to the Combahee River Raid also provides insight into the remarkable abilities of Tubman to communicate across linguistic and cultural barriers and to move stealthily through the South unnoticed.

Prior to this account, many of these freedom seekers had been lost to history. Most, like Tubman, were illiterate and did not record their experiences; plantation records were destroyed in the raid. Through herculean research and cross-referencing of land, bank, U.S. Army pension and slavery transaction records, Fields-Black is able to name names (including her great-great-great grandfather Hector Fields) and offer readers a sense of who these people were and what their lives were like. Combee holds many additional revelatory threads and insights within its depths, but this act of resurrection alone makes the book profoundly important.

Edda L. Fields-Black’s revelatory Combee narrates the 1863 Combahee River Raid, in which Harriet Tubman led Black soldiers to liberate more than 700 enslaved people.
NonfictionHistoryCultural HistoryAmerican History

American Zion

Review by Alden Mudge

In the past two decades, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—widely known as the Mormon church—has relaxed its iron grip on its archives, allowing some historians to conduct research in its vast library. Professor of religious history Benjamin E. Park has availed himself of this new access and of the work of other contemporary historians to write an absorbing history of the church and its culture. American Zion: A New History of Mormonism argues that Mormon history is surprisingly complex, and its evolution mirrors the struggles of American society. 

Mormons were, from the outset, outsiders. They interpreted the Constitution’s protection of freedom of religion as extending to the practice of polygamy; this belief did them no favors as they sought a home. They were dispelled from state to state as zealots, sometimes through violence—their founder, Joseph Smith, was murdered by a mob in Illinois. Escaping to the Utah desert, they were beset by the federal government, which refused to let them form a “State of the Desert” unless they renounced polygamy. Wary, they zealously guarded their records, putting their own spin on their history. In this century, they allied with the religious right and the Republican Party in culture wars and more fully entered the American mainstream, even producing a formidable presidential candidate, Mitt Romney.

American Zion presents an engaging account of the personalities that loom large in the religion, especially Smith and the church’s second president, Brigham Young. But Park also shows how events and attitudes outside the church have divided the faith. He traces its complicated history of racial bias; its misogyny and, fascinatingly, history of feminism among early Mormon women; its stance on LGBTQ+ rights; and how a church still governed largely by elderly white American men is faring as its membership grows internationally. 

Park, a Mormon himself, tells the story from the inside with neutrality; while he’s critical of the faith’s leaders, he has no ax to grind. If you’re looking for a more dramatic treatment, a la Jon Krakauer’s The Banner of Heaven and its ensuing television series, American Zion may not be for you. But if you’re a curious, measured reader, you’ll likely agree with the author that “Mormonism is a deep well.”

Benjamin E. Park’s absorbing history of Mormonism, American Zion, effectively argues that the faith’s evolution mirrors the struggle of American society.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

Flight of the WASP

Review by Alden Mudge

There are WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants), the demographic that dominated American culture well into the 20th century, and there are WASPs, the subset of the demographic that the late political columnist Joseph W. Alsop labeled the “WASP Ascendancy.” These were the Americans who, Michael Gross writes in his delightfully provocative new book, formed “a hereditary oligarchic upper class” for most of our history. This ruling class, Gross admits, was not a monolith. But despite internal disputes, it ran the government and economy and defined the culture of the American experiment for 350 years.

Now WASP power is in eclipse. That’s not a completely bad thing, Gross says, because in addition to founding the Republic and enshrining lofty ideals, WASPs enslaved some, excluded others, fattened their wallets and jealously guarded their privileges. He writes that the presidency of Donald Trump “represented the clan’s nadir—a repudiation of the tattered remains of WASP virtue.” Still, Gross wonders if today, “a selfish, narcissistic, tribal, atomized nation might still look to WASPs for a restorative example of America’s civic conscience.”

This is the argument of Flight of the WASP: The Rise, Fall, and Future of America’s Original Ruling Class. The theory—though absorbing and debatable—isn’t the star of the show. The book’s real delight lies in its brisk biographies of the people who illustrate the ascent and descent of WASP hegemony. Gross begins with the Pilgrim leader William Bradford, who helped establish the New England theocracy that eventually gave rise to the ideals and practices of American self-government. A marvelous chapter spotlights the too-little appreciated Gouverneur Morris, often called “Penman of the Constitution.” Gross also describes less savory figures like John Randolph of Virginia, a virulent advocate for slavery who infamously caned an opponent on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Henry Fairfield Osborn, an esteemed paleontologist and longtime head of the American Museum of Natural History—and, alas, co-founder of the wildly racist American Eugenics Society.

Gross’ choices of biographical subjects are unexpected, even idiosyncratic. They will convince many readers of his overall argument, or send them on to further reading. Well-researched and well-written, Gross’ portrait gallery will, if nothing else, illuminate the odd corners of the lives of our nation’s elite and American history itself.

Michael Gross’ delightful cultural history of WASPs illuminates the odd corners of the lives of our nation’s elite—and American history itself.
FictionWesternHistorical FictionFamily Saga

Straw Dogs of the Universe

Review by Alden Mudge

Ye Chun’s ambitious first novel, Straw Dogs of the Universe presents a concise dramatization of the history of early Chinese immigration to the American West. Many of us know the outlines of this era, which began with the importation of Chinese labor for the construction of the transcontinental railroad and ended with the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the first law to restrict immigration to the U.S. based on race or ethnicity. Using a relatively small number of characters, Chun personalizes both the fear and despair that pervaded the lives of so many of these immigrants, and the fortitude, hope and love that they cultivated anyway.

The central quest of the novel is for Sixiang to find her father, Guifeng, whom she has never met. Sixiang is 10 years old when her village in Guangdong, China, is destroyed by a flood and subsequent famine. She holds faith in her ability to survive even after her mother, for food and money, trades her to a trafficker who transports her to “Gold Mountain,” a Chinese name for the western U.S. in the period during and after the California Gold Rush. Too young for prostitution, she is sold as a house servant, then taken in by missionaries. After escaping the mission and sheltering with a man who had known her father while working on the railroad, Sixiang begins the journey that takes her into the Sierra near Truckee, California.

In alternate chapters, we learn about the life of Sixiang’s father, Guifeng. Tantalized by his own father’s dream of Gold Mountain, he leaves home and contracts with a railroad building team. On his first and only day in San Francisco, he sees a woman from his village he had loved from afar as a boy, Feiyan, who has been enslaved as a prostitute. Although he is sent the following day to a work site in the Sierra, he continues to obsess over Feiyan, eventually returning to help her escape and later starting a second family with her. But his new life falters when he becomes addicted to opium.

At each juncture of her story, Chun examines both large-scale injustices—Chinese people murdered and their white killers released—and smaller humiliations—a temporary employer finds Sixiang’s name too hard to say and instead calls her “Cindy.” The novel culminates with the expulsion of Chinese immigrants from Truckee, once the second largest Chinatown in the US. It is a time of shock and terror, but for this novel’s protagonists, also a time of adaptation and endurance.

Ye Chun personalizes both the fear and despair that pervaded the lives of 19th-century Chinese immigrants to the U.S. and the fortitude, hope and love that they cultivated anyway.
NonfictionReligion & SpiritualityMemoirLGBTQ+

Hijab Butch Blues

Review by Alden Mudge

As an immigrant from a “rich Arab country,” Lamya H was often asked by acquaintances in the American LGBTQ+ community how she could possibly remain a practicing Muslim, given Islam’s reputation for oppressing women and queer people. Hijab Butch Blues, Lamya’s memoir, is a generous, probing and candid response to that query.

Through its 10 chapters, the memoir generally follows the arc of Lamya’s life, beginning when she was a young girl in an international Islamic school, discovering her attraction to women and sometimes feeling suicidal. She moved to New York City at 17 to attend university, feeling unsure of her sexuality and of America’s gay culture. Now in her mid-30s, she has found love, her people and a life she could not have imagined as a teenager.

What is beautiful and brilliant about Hijab Butch Blues is that in each chapter, Lamya evokes a formative moment in her life through emotional and intellectual dialogue with a story from the Quran. The first chapter, “Maryam,” centers on a narrative that Christians will recognize as a version of the story of the Virgin Mary. As a young teenager, Lamya was transfixed by it because of how a despairing Maryam considers committing suicide, just as Lamya herself had. Thoughtful and questing, Lamya continued reading and found in Maryam’s story a way forward. The year she discovered this story, she writes, is “the year I choose not to die. The year I choose to live.”

Lamya H reflects on what was gained and what was lost by writing her debut memoir under a pseudonym.

In a chapter on Allah, Lamya recounts her questions about the nature of God, which she began asking as a 6-year-old. Is God a woman? A man? A pious religious teacher told her that Allah is not a man or a woman. This was a mystery and a revelation, and it helped her in later years as her family attempted to mold her in traditionally gendered ways. She learned how important it was “for me to use the pronoun they for God,” she writes, “my God, whom I refuse to define as a man or a woman, my God who transcends gender.”

Chapter by chapter, readers will feel a growing appreciation for Lamya’s intelligence, eloquence and courage. Along the way, we learn vivid details about her life and outlook—that, for example, she was a diligent, bright student with a disruptive sense of humor; that her parents immigrated to an Arab nation from a South Asian country for better opportunities and, as a result, that she and her brother experienced bias because of their brown skin; that she was immediately uncomfortable in New York’s gay bar scene and struggled to feel “authentically gay”; that she is ambivalent about America; that she loves her parents and feels OK not coming out to them.

Lamya H is a pseudonym, and her reasons for using one make sense. But even without using her real name, in Hijab Butch Blues she is observant, passionate and anything but voiceless.

Lamya H’s memoir is a generous, probing and brilliant response to the question of how she could be both a queer person and a practicing Muslim.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Victory City

Review by Alden Mudge

With a magical protagonist and a vivid cast of heroic and devious characters, it’s easy to imagine Salman Rushdie’s fantastical 15th novel as a thrilling, multipart Bollywood epic. Victory City marks the author’s return to the long arc of Indian history, taking readers on a frisky romp through nearly three centuries of south Indian lore.

Rushdie’s endnotes cite numerous historical works he consulted about the Vijayanagara Empire (14th–17th centuries) while composing the novel. Google Vijayanagar, the city in which the novel is set, and you’ll discover its translation from Sanskrit is indeed “City of Victory.” Search the internet for the shepherd brothers Hukka and Bukka, and you’ll find they were the first kings of the empire. Look for Domingo Nunes, a character who humorously reappears in various incarnations to Pampa Kampana, the novel’s heroine, and you’ll encounter an amalgam of two Portuguese men who wrote with amazement about their early travels through the empire.

But search for Pampa Kampana, and nothing. She is Rushdie’s marvelous invention. At 9 years old, she witnesses the downfall of the old king. She sees the submissive women of the defeated kingdom, including her mother, go willingly to their deaths by fire. But Pampa rejects this path, steps away from the fire and, in anger and anguish, is overtaken by the voice of the gods. She becomes a prophet who gives the shepherd brothers the magical seeds to grow Victory City. She whispers the history of the future empire into the ears of its newly formed citizens. She gives them a past and a present. 

Over the 247 years of her life, Pampa sees the birth of the empire, suffers exile in the Forest of Women, stealthily returns to eventual triumph and then experiences the empire’s final fall. She writes this history down as the empire collapses and hides her account in an urn. Four hundred years later, her words are discovered.

Rushdie tells his tale with a generous and irreverent spirit. Victory City is accessible in a way that suggests he had fun writing it, but this is no lightweight novel. Pampa is the incarnation of the humane values of this (or any) empire, and when she is in ascendance, the empire’s arts and beneficial technologies are ennobled. Women serve as warriors and empire officials. People of all religions are embraced. The empire comes close to being what today we would call an open society, and its collapse is a direct result of turning its back on these values.

Victory City is accessible in a way that suggests Salman Rushdie had fun writing it, but this is no lightweight novel.
NonfictionSocial ScienceBusiness & Finance

The Big Myth

Review by Alden Mudge

Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway call their deeply researched new book, The Big Myth, “the true history of a false idea.” The false idea in question is not really a single idea but rather many connected assertions, promoted throughout the 20th century, that have gelled into the “quasi-religious belief that the best way to address our needs—whether economic or otherwise—is to let markets do their thing, and not rely on government.”

Both Oreskes and Conway are highly praised historians of science and technology. Their blockbuster 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt, examined the effort by a small number of scientists to undermine the evidence of climate change. One common denominator they found among these scientists was a distrust of government. The scientists’ ideological and economic biases led them to oppose anything that would admit a need for governmental action. In the introduction to their new book, Oreskes and Conway say that this discovery was what led them to do a deep dive into the ideology of neoliberal, free-market, anti-government thought, which has persuaded many Americans that unregulated markets are inseparable from democracy and freedom.

But are those things really inseparable, the authors wonder. In an early chapter, Oreskes and Conway point out that Adam Smith, a seminal theorist of capitalism, believed that government regulations were in fact needed to preserve a competitive playing field. Another chapter examines the moment in American history when power companies decided it was just too expensive to bring electricity to rural farming communities. They believed the market was too small, but at the same time, they resisted community alternatives. In the end, it was the government, not business, that literally brought power to the people. This leads the authors to wonder, how do markets alone supposedly make people free? In later chapters, they examine the economic, political and public relations efforts that have fostered our belief in this pervasive myth that government is the problem and markets are the solution.

The Big Myth is deeply detailed in its argument. Readers will be intellectually enlivened by chapters such as “No More Grapes of Wrath,” which looks at the ideological shift in the movie industry, and the revelatory chapter “The American Road to Serfdom,” which explores the popular rise of economist Milton Friedman and the “Chicago school,” which deftly promoted the libertarian argument against government involvement in markets. The way the book challenges each component of market mythology is hugely impressive—but the book is sometimes so detailed in its pursuit of the truth that some readers will surely become intellectually exhausted.

Still The Big Myth’s arguments do add up. “Markets are good for many things,” the authors write, “but they are not magic.” In a world facing existential threats like climate change, markets alone do not suffice, they argue. Governments must act.

Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway boldly challenge the American myth that unregulated markets are inseparable from democracy and freedom.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Dust Child

Review by Alden Mudge

Vietnamese writer Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s first novel to be translated into English, the award-winning The Mountains Sing (2020), spun an epic family saga centered on the Vietnam War. Her luminous new novel, Dust Child, is less spacious but still focuses on reverberations from that war. Through intersecting stories of Vietnamese and American characters, Dust Child portrays the heart-wrenching collateral damage that resulted from a fleeting love during the war.

In the opening chapter, set in Ho Chi Minh City in 2016, Phong is a middle-aged man applying for visas for his family to emigrate to the U.S. under a program for children of American soldiers and Vietnamese mothers, so-called Amerasians. Phong’s application is rejected because of a youthful infraction. In later chapters, Quế Mai develops a visceral sense of Phong’s life as an outcast, “a child of the enemy,” a “dust child” who is half Black American, half Vietnamese.

In the book’s second chapter, also set in 2016, we meet Dan and Linda, who are flying to Ho Chi Minh City for a vacation. Linda hopes the trip will help her husband, who was a young helicopter pilot during the war, with his PTSD. Returning to the country for the first time since the war, Dan wants to discover the fates of his Vietnamese girlfriend, who went by “Kim,” and the child he fathered with her, a secret he has kept from his wife for many years.

In the third chapter, set in 1969, we meet 20-year-old Trang and her 17-year-old sister, Quỳnh, working in the family’s rice fields. Crushed by debt from their father’s illness, the sisters decide to go to Saigon to work. They wind up working as “bar girls,” catering to American soldiers, and Trang takes on the alias “Kim” for her work in Saigon’s boisterous Hollywood Bar.

With this setup, the novel’s plot takes on a sense of urgency. How are these characters connected? Will they find one another, and if they do, what will be the outcome? At certain junctures, the plot creaks and shudders as it turns. But Quế Mai provides readers with wonderful linguistic play, and through her deft and illuminating descriptions of the intimate details of her characters’ personal lives and difficult choices, we end up caring deeply for them and hoping for their well-being. 

In the novel’s afterword, Quế Mai writes movingly of her research into the challenges of Vietnam’s disparaged Amerasians and how she drew inspiration from the many stories she heard and documented. Through her imagination, she has transformed those stories of dust into something akin to gold.

Through intersecting stories of Vietnamese and American characters, Dust Child portrays the heart-wrenching collateral damage that resulted from a fleeting love during the Vietnam War.
NonfictionMemoir

Orphan Bachelors

Review by Alden Mudge

Growing up in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1950s and ’60s, novelist Fae Myenne Ng (Bone) and her youngest sister accompanied their father to Portsmouth Square to visit the elderly “Orphan Bachelors” who gathered in the park “like scolds of pigeons.” Because of the United States’ exclusionary immigration laws, these men couldn’t bring their wives or children when they came to work in America. Ng’s father instructed his daughters to call these men Grandfather.

As she relates in her luminous, sometimes sorrowful memoir, Orphan Bachelors, Ng’s own maternal great-grandfather was one such bachelor. Born in the 1870s, he fathered two sons before leaving China to work in the abandoned gold mines in America. On a visit back to China in 1907 (it was common for Chinese workmen to travel home on occasion), he fathered a daughter, Ng’s grandmother. Nearly 50 years later, Ng’s mother arrived in America and found and cared for her grandfather, but Ng’s mother’s mother never met her own father.

No wonder Ng’s life was filled with secrets and mysteries. She peppered the Orphan Bachelors with questions about their lives and families, but most of these were ignored or answered with wildly inventive fictions meant to scare and instruct. Ng suggests that these stories seeded her desire to write.

Ng’s father, who worked as a merchant seaman and a laborer, arrived in San Francisco in 1940 as a “paper son,” a man who had purchased his identity from another family and studied a “Book of Lies”—a coaching book containing the “correct” answers to give during his immigration interview—before entering the U.S. Although some restrictions had been lifted since the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, Ng’s mother was one of only 105 Chinese people allowed into the country in 1953. After Ng’s father decided to participate in President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Chinese Confession Program and admit (with the promise of forgiveness) that he had entered the U.S. using falsified documents, she and her sister eventually changed their surname to Ng; their younger brothers, however, retained their father’s “paper name,” Toy.

A simple confession is never simple, however, and much of the memoir tells the story of an immigrant family in conflict. Ng’s mother, who worked first as a seamstress in a sweatshop and then as a shopkeeper, and her father, who was often at sea, did not see eye to eye. At some point the children chose sides. This family story will resonate with readers partly because of the crackle of its conflict but also because of the keen observations of its writer.

Orphan Bachelors feels intimate and evocative, quiet rather than strident. Ng’s grace as a storyteller makes it possible to understand in one’s bones how heartless policy bends and misshapes lives for generations.

Fae Myenne Ng’s luminous, sometimes sorrowful, memoir recounts how racist U.S. immigration policies have shrouded four generations of her family in secrets and mystery.
FictionLiterary Fiction

August Blue

Review by Alden Mudge

Deborah Levy’s slender, enchanted novel August Blue has all the piercing detail and bewildering movement of a midafternoon dream.

In August, at a flea market in Athens, Greece, Elsa M. Anderson encounters a woman she comes to believe is her double. Perhaps to taunt Elsa, the woman purchases the very objects Elsa planned to buy for herself. “I felt she had stolen something from me, something that I would miss in my life,” Elsa thinks. She pursues her double, and the woman drops her black felt trilby hat, which Elsa retrieves and wears until the following August, when the story ends.

Elsa, we learn, is 34 years old, a musical prodigy who has apparently, quite suddenly, lost her gift. Her recent performance in Vienna came to a jarring halt when her “fingers refused to bend for Rachmaninov and [she] began to play something else.” Orphaned at birth, she was adopted by a family in rural England, and when her musical talents became evident, was taken under the wing of Arthur Goldstein, her teacher and promoter. Her teacher is now old and ailing. Elsa eventually goes to visit him in Sardinia, where she resists his offer to see the adoption documents that would reveal her parentage. 

In the meantime, she travels to teach piano to the disenchanted and unseen children of the elite. She has fraught, fleeting encounters with her double and carries on an internal dialogue with the woman throughout her journey. People recognize Elsa, photograph her and wonder about her.

Sergei Rachmaninov, the feel and weight of his music, is certainly a motif in August Blue. So too are the works of philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche. Beneath the novel’s surface thrum questions and observations about civilization, culture, identity, the self and the many forms of love. The narrative, such as it is, unfolds until an encounter in Paris resolves some of Elsa’s questions.

In addition to being a novelist, Levy is also a poet. Her storytelling moves to its own music. Her sentences are sharp, sensuous, crackling with ironic humor. Her paragraphs are compact, full of tension that pulls the reader forward. The novel offers the reader a dazzling gaze at the conundrums of existence.

Deborah Levy’s storytelling moves to its own music. In August Blue, her sentences are sharp, sensuous, crackling with ironic humor. Her paragraphs are compact, full of tension that pulls the reader forward.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

Owner of a Lonely Heart

Review by Alden Mudge

The astonishing first line of Beth Nguyen’s revelatory memoir Owner of a Lonely Heart reads, “Over the course of my life I have spent less than twenty-four hours with my mother.” That time consisted of six brief visits over the course of 26 years, beginning when Nguyen was a 19-year-old college student and reunited with her mother in Boston for the first time since Nguyen was 8 months old.

The explanation for this startling fact is fairly straightforward. In April of 1975, as South Vietnam fell to the forces of the North Vietnamese, Nguyen escaped Vietnam by boat with her older sister, paternal grandmother, father and uncles. Her father and uncles had fought for the losing side and now faced “reeducation,” or worse. So they came to America and ended up in a tiny community of Vietnamese refugees in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Nguyen’s mother had been living with her own mother and her other children in another part of Saigon during the collapse. She only discovered that her daughters and their father had fled some days later.

The feelings and implications of these circumstances, on the other hand, are anything but straightforward. Fittingly, Owner of a Lonely Heart is not a chronological memoir. It circulates among memories, embellishing and deepening the reader’s and Nguyen’s understanding of them. In a chapter called “My Mothers,” she writes not of her biological mother but of her grandmother Noi, who provided a safe place for Nguyen in a chaotic household, and of the woman her father married when Nguyen was 3, the daughter of Mexican migrants whom Nguyen credits with saving her life. In another chapter, Nguyen writes of her “white mother,” a high school boyfriend’s parent who taught Nguyen the “ways of whiteness” and helped her read the hieroglyphics of a coded society. Throughout the memoir, Nguyen also writes movingly about being a mother herself, something that has clearly shifted her perspective on her experiences.

During her childhood, Nguyen’s family did not talk about Vietnam or the war. They had no vocabulary for trauma, and her father’s unacknowledged PTSD bodied forth in anger, drinking and home improvement projects that never reached completion. A superb writer, Nguyen gives readers a tactile sense of her childhood home life and the love and anguish she felt there.

“Growing up,” Nguyen writes, “I was afraid all the time. It was a low-lying fear that I couldn’t explain to myself or dare admit out loud.” In her beautiful memoir, Nguyen finally acknowledges this fear—and much, much more—out loud.

Beth Nguyen has only spent 24 hours with her mother over the course of her adult life, and her revelatory memoir depicts all the love and anguish bound up with this fact.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The Last Ranger

Review by Alden Mudge

Ren Hopper, the protagonist of Peter Heller’s The Last Ranger, is a park enforcement ranger in Yellowstone National Park. He’s also a man often overwhelmed with righteous anger. We witness this first in the novel’s prologue, when he reacts with satisfying harshness to a couple whose careless speeding has resulted in the fatal injury of a bull bison. Through backstories we learn that Ren’s rage and anguish have something to do with his guilt about the death of his young wife, Lea, and his broken relationship with his mother, whose life was destroyed when she was accused of precipitating a mercy killing.

Even more alienated from human society is Hilly, Ren’s neighbor in the park employees’ cabins and his closest friend and possible love interest. Hilly, a researcher studying the park’s wolf population, loves wolves far more than people and spends most of her time in far ranges of the park, observing pack behaviors. 

Throughout the 20th century, wolves were eliminated from the park and much of the American West but were reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995. Now, poachers have begun to target the wolves for the value of their fur. Hilly and Ren suspect a surly local trapper named Les Ingraham. Hilly, an excellent marksman, regards Les with murderous intent, especially after she has a near-death encounter with a leg trap. Les, of course, has his own backstory, which helps to explain the novel’s surprising end.

Peter Heller (The River) was an outdoor adventure writer before he became a novelist, and he displays a keen sensitivity to wild places. When describing wildlife and landscapes, he deploys the precision and cadence of Ernest Hemingway. Breaking through the pervasive thread of ranger routines—mundane encounters over coffee, directing traffic on overcrowded park roads—are dramatic encounters between privileged or naive tourists and wild animals, like the parents who position their daughter near an agitated moose for a photo op, seeming to think they are in a petting zoo. In a subplot, Heller also dramatizes another threat to our national parks: militias and business interests who want to turn public land into private holdings.

Heller’s swift environmental thriller reminds us that humans are the most successful predators—but not the only predators.

Peter Heller’s swift environmental thriller reminds us that humans are the most successful predators—but not the only predators.

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