Alden Mudge

NonfictionMedicine

Taking the pulse of medical history

Review by Alden Mudge

What makes Rob Dunn’s narrative history of advances in heart research so fascinating is on vivid display in the opening chapter of The Man Who Touched His Own Heart. Here Dunn tells the story of a Chicago surgeon who performed the first-known repair to the pericardium, the protective sac around the heart. The year was 1893, and Chicago was abuzz over the World’s Fair. The patient, a railroad worker, had been stabbed in a knife fight at a local bar. The surgeon, a talented, ambitious African-American man, had been forced by racial prejudice to found his own poorly funded hospital, serving Chicago’s lower class. At a time when a knife to the heart was almost always fatal, the revolutionary procedure was delicate and complex because there was no technology to sustain the heart while a surgeon worked on it. To everyone’s amazement, the procedure succeeded.

There, in a nutshell, is the enticing weave of biography, social history and heart-related scientific drama that will entice and satisfy readers throughout the book.

From this opening, Dunn relates many fascinating stories, ranging from Leonardo DaVinci’s contributions to our understanding of the heart to the complexities of developing the heart-lung machine. The book takes its title from an experiment by Werner Forssmann, an ambitious surgeon wonderfully described as “more forearm than frontal lobe,” who, in a dangerous stunt, inserted a catheter in his arm, running it all the way to his heart, an exploit that eventually earned him a Nobel Prize.

Dunn, a biology professor and widely published popular writer on science, says we are far more ignorant about the workings of the heart than we think, and there is much more to learn. That is undoubtedly true, but for a general reader, Dunn’s book is a great contribution to our understanding of the lifelong work of our beating hearts.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

What makes Rob Dunn’s narrative history of advances in heart research so fascinating is on vivid display in the opening chapter of The Man Who Touched His Own Heart. Here Dunn tells the story of a Chicago surgeon who performed the first-known repair to the pericardium, the protective sac around the heart. The year was 1893, and Chicago was abuzz over the World’s Fair. The patient, a railroad worker, had been stabbed in a knife fight at a local bar. The surgeon, a talented, ambitious African-American man, had been forced by racial prejudice to found his own poorly funded hospital, serving Chicago’s lower class. At a time when a knife to the heart was almost always fatal, the revolutionary procedure was delicate and complex because there was no technology to sustain the heart while a surgeon worked on it. To everyone’s amazement, the procedure succeeded.
NonfictionMemoir

Exile from the Motherland

Review by Alden Mudge

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, January 2015

If Elena Gorokhova’s splendid second memoir merely conveyed to readers a vivid, almost visceral understanding of the sometimes paralyzing sense of dislocation she experienced arriving in the United States in 1980 from the Soviet Union, that alone would be reason enough to read it. On her first day in the U.S., for instance, she visits the air-conditioned Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum with the American husband she barely knows, and wonders, “Why are there no smells? Russia assaults you in your nostrils: milk always on the verge of turning sour, the wet wool of winter coats we wear everyday for five months, rubber phone booth tiles buckled with urine. . . .”

In the first third of Russian Tattoo, which describes her first year in the U.S. and the full extent of her unhappy first marriage, nearly every page sings with sharp, intelligent, often witty observations about her new, confusing life in America.

But in a way, this section of the memoir is merely the brilliant surface of a more profound exploration of her split identity, of what leaving her Motherland and making a life in her new homeland has meant for Gorokhova: What does she carry? What does she leave behind?

Gorokhova accomplishes this through a moving exposition of her difficult relationships with her mother and her American-born daughter, Sasha. Readers of Gorokhova’s wonderful first memoir, A Mountain of Crumbs, know that Elena herself was a lively, rebellious daughter. Here she writes that her mother was “a mirror image of my Motherland—overbearing, protective, controlling, and nurturing.”

When Gorokhova’s own daughter is born, her mother arrives from the Soviet Union to live with them in New Jersey permanently. It’s a complicated set of relationships, but as the years pass, Gorokhova sees that her daughter has become “just as ruthless and honest as I used to be.” And she herself has seemingly become more like her mother. With these sorts of divides there are never clean resolutions, but as the illuminating final section of the memoir indicates, there are soulful accommodations. Some of us actually do get wiser as we get older.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If Elena Gorokhova’s splendid second memoir merely conveyed to readers a vivid, almost visceral understanding of the sometimes paralyzing sense of dislocation she experienced arriving in the United States in 1980 from the Soviet Union, that alone would be reason enough to read it. On her first day in the U.S., for instance, she visits the air-conditioned Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum with the American husband she barely knows, and wonders, “Why are there no smells? Russia assaults you in your nostrils: milk always on the verge of turning sour, the wet wool of winter coats we wear everyday for five months, rubber phone booth tiles buckled with urine. . . .”
NonfictionPop CultureHistory

America’s feminist superhero

Review by Alden Mudge

A harried reader could get the gist of The Secret History of Wonder Woman by opening it just past dead center and reading through the 16-page comic-book version of the story.

There you would learn, in brief, that William Moulton Marston, inventor of the lie detector test, came up with the idea for Wonder Woman in 1941. Also, that the Wonder Woman character drew on the feminism of Marston’s wife, Elizabeth Holloway, and of Olive Byrne, who joined the Marston household as a “housekeeper” and just happened to be the daughter of Ethel Byrne and niece of Margaret Sanger, two early, firebrand birth control activists. That under Marston, Wonder Woman enjoyed astonishing popular success, surpassed only by Superman and Batman. And that after his death, with the end of World War II and the dawn of the 1950s, Wonder Woman lost her superpowers and, like so many women who had worked in the war effort, was returned to domestic life.

But this barely scratches the surface of the personal and social history that Jill Lepore, a professor of American history at Harvard and staff writer at the New Yorker, relates so well and so playfully. Her fascinating, often brilliant new book is profusely illustrated with photographs and cartoon panels. Marston turns out to be a brilliant, bombastic self-promoter, a terrible businessman but a wonderful father to the children he has with both Elizabeth and Olive (though their true parentage remains a secret to Olive’s children until later in their lives). Marston is a complicated personality whose marital relationships would seem to make him a very unlikely feminist. And yet he was—in ways that will lead readers to ponder political orthodoxies.

Through assiduous research (the endnotes comprise almost a third of the book and are often very interesting reading), Lepore unravels a hidden history, and in so doing links her subjects’ lives to some of the most important social movements of the era. It’s a remarkable, thought-provoking achievement.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A harried reader could get the gist of The Secret History of Wonder Woman by opening it just past dead center and reading through the 16-page comic-book version of the story.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A magical portrait of an exile community

Review by Alden Mudge

Gina B. Nahai’s fifth novel, The Luminous Heart of Jonah S., is a book full of enchantments and mysteries. The mystery that launches her tale is a contemporary murder: On a morning in June 2013, Neda Raiis, the wife of a Iranian-Jewish exile named Raphael’s Son, reports finding her husband with his throat slit in an idling car at the gate of their Los Angeles mansion. By the time the police arrive, his body has disappeared.

Raphael’s Son, we quickly learn, has cheated almost everyone in the L.A. Iranian-Jewish community in an elaborate Ponzi scheme, with a vengeance beyond anything Bernie Madoff could have conceived. In fact, “he reveled in the harm he had inflicted upon everyone else.” Is he really dead, members of the community wonder, while readers will wonder about the source of his implacable anger.

For insight into Raphael’s Son’s vengeful nature, Nahai carries us to Tehran in 1952, and into the heart of a powerful, wealthy Iranian-Jewish family, the Soleymans. We follow their fates through the reign of the Shah of Iran, the tumultuous Iranian revolution and then into exile.

Nahai populates her story of old Tehran with elements of magical realism. Raphael Soleyman has a heart that glows through his skin after dark, attracting a following of fireflies, nocturnal birds and restless ghosts on the nights he sleepwalks through the city. Elizabeth Soleyman radiates the smell of the sea, which inspires nostalgia and confusion among those around her.

This is irresistible storytelling. No surprise there. Nahai’s second novel, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, was a finalist for the Orange Prize, and her third, Caspian Rain, was an L.A. Times Best Book of the Year. But what really sets The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. apart is how Nahai uses her estimable gifts to offer a nuanced, sometimes satirical portrait of the tight-knit Iranian-Jewish exile community in Los Angeles and to illuminate the historic disruptions to life in Iran that brought them here. It’s a fascinating read.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Gina B. Nahai’s fifth novel, The Luminous Heart of Jonah S., is a book full of enchantments and mysteries. The mystery that launches her tale is a contemporary murder: On a morning in June 2013, Neda Raiis, the wife of a Iranian Jewish exile named Raphael’s Son, reports finding her husband with his throat slit in an idling car at the gate of their Los Angeles mansion. By the time the police arrive, his body has disappeared.
Nonfiction

A biologist’s captivating call to action

Review by Alden Mudge

At the age of 85, Edward O. Wilson, one of our foremost evolutionary biologists (and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner), has written a provocative book that is so fascinating it nearly lives up to the stunning ambition of its title.

Wilson’s project is partly to inspire “a new Enlightenment” through a closer collaboration between science and the humanities. The need for such a collaboration is urgent, Wilson argues, because “we are entering an era of volitional evolution,” a time when advances in biotechnology mean we are no longer subject to the processes of natural selection, while at the same time our species is running roughshod over the intricate web of interrelationships among life forms on Earth, with unknown consequences to the survival of life on Earth. “Exalted we are,” Wilson writes, “but we are still part of Earth’s flora and fauna, bound to it by emotion, physiology and, not least, deep history.” A union of science and the humanities, he suggests, will put “pride and humility in better balance.”

Wilson is always a beguiling writer, illustrating his points with captivating examples from his field work and his broad knowledge of biodiversity and evolutionary history. For example, he devotes a wide-ranging, joyously detailed section of this book to comparing our species to other life forms on Earth, “to demonstrate how bizarre we are as a species, and why.”

The point for Wilson is that the history we need to understand for our survival is biological and cultural. “We are not predestined to reach any goal,” he writes. “Only wisdom based on self-understanding, not piety, will save us.”

 

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

At the age of 85, Edward O. Wilson, one of our foremost evolutionary biologists (and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner), has written a provocative book that is so fascinating it nearly lives up to the stunning ambition of its title.
NonfictionMemoir

Inside a North Korean classroom

Review by Alden Mudge

Suki Kim, author of the highly regarded novel The Interpreter, went to North Korea to teach English under doubly false pretenses. Her fellow instructors at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST) were evangelical Christians pretending to be nonreligious teachers. (“North Korea was the evangelical Christian Holy Grail, the hardest place to crack in the whole world,” she writes.) To be accepted into the program, Kim pretended to be an evangelical pretending to be a nonreligious teacher. She feared exposure on all sides.

Maybe that fear explains the sharpness of her observations in Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea’s Elite. Her nuanced account is loosely chronological, covering the two semesters she taught at PUST between July and December 2011, based on secret journals she kept with great care, and informed by the heartrending stories of her family members split asunder by the Korean War. Readers will find her experiences and reactions surprising in many ways.

Kim’s 19- and 20-year-old students, all male, came from the elite families of North Korea, one of the most opaque societies on earth. Sharing three meals a day, classes and endless, if sometimes awkward, conversations with her students, Kim developed a strong affection for them, and they for her. At the same time, she was “struck by their astounding lack of general knowledge about the world.” Her subtle attempts to expand their awareness often backfired, her students withdrawing into a rote formulation of their nation’s superiority. Kim’s book illuminates “the inherent contradiction of a country backed into a corner, not wanting to open up, but needing to move toward engagement to survive.”

 

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Suki Kim, author of the highly regarded novel The Interpreter, went to North Korea to teach English under doubly false pretenses. Her fellow instructors at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST) were evangelical Christians pretending to be nonreligious teachers. (“North Korea was the evangelical Christian Holy Grail, the hardest place to crack in the whole world,” she writes.) To be accepted into the program, Kim pretended to be an evangelical pretending to be a nonreligious teacher. She feared exposure on all sides.
NonfictionMemoir

Looking death straight in the eye

Review by Alden Mudge

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, September 2014

“So, really, what’s a nice girl like me doing working at a ghastly ol’ crematory like Westwind?” Caitlin Doughty asks near the beginning of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory, her by turns shockingly gruesome, mordantly funny and, ultimately, richly thought-provoking memoir about working in an Oakland, California, mortuary and crematorium.

It’s an excellent question. Part of the answer, we learn, lies in the death obsession Doughty developed as an 8-year-old after witnessing a child’s plunge from an escalator in a shopping mall in Hawaii where she grew up. One flowering of that obsession was a plan to create a slick, modern, hip—fun, even—mortuary she would call La Belle Mort.

But, Doughty soon discovers that “the day-to-day realities of working at Westwind were more savage than I had anticipated.” And she proceeds to write graphically—and wittily—about those realities: the transportation, embalming and cremation of all shapes, sizes and ages of dead bodies and body parts. Here is one of the less graphic passages: “For those of you who have not had the privilege of smelling Eau de Decomposition, the first note of a putrefying human body is of licorice with a strong citrus undertone. Not a fresh, summer citrus mind you—more like a can of orange-scented industrial bathroom spray shot directly up your nose.”

Doughty’s very unsentimental education at Westwind and, later, in mortuary school has turned her into a forceful and eloquent advocate for confronting the reality of death, as readers will discover in the final chapters of this memoir. “I went from thinking it was a little bizarre that we don’t see dead bodies anymore to believing their absence was a root cause of major problems in the modern world,” she writes. “Death should be known. Known as a difficult mental, physical and emotional process, respected and feared for what it is.” Smoke Gets in Your Eyes offers a path toward that knowledge.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Doughty for Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“So, really, what’s a nice girl like me doing working at a ghastly ol’ crematory like Westwind?” Caitlin Doughty asks near the beginning of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory, her by turns shockingly gruesome, mordantly funny and, ultimately, richly thought-provoking memoir about working in an Oakland, California, mortuary and crematorium.
FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

A highly anticipated Irish-American family saga

Review by Alden Mudge

We Are Not Ourselves, Matthew Thomas’ epic first novel, was 10 years in the making and, upon completion, the subject of a vigorous publishers’ bidding war.  Readers will understand why.

Thomas’ novel is a 600-page Irish-American family saga that empathetically presents day-to-day life in the outer boroughs and suburbs of New York City during the late 20th century. At the story’s center is Eileen Leary, née Tumulty. Born in 1941 in Queens, Eileen is the daughter of recent Irish immigrants. As the novel cannily dramatizes, her fierce, upwardly mobile aspirations are formed in reaction to the difficult, working-class lives of her hard-working mother and her charismatic, hard-drinking father. Eileen, who, pragmatically, trains as a nurse, wants a different life. And Edward Leary, the young scientist she marries, seems to offer a path to that life.

But Ed is a sort of abstemious idealist. He turns down lucrative job offers because he believes the students he teaches at Bronx Community College deserve as good an education as students at NYU. He sees no need to move from their Queens home as the complexion of the neighborhood changes. And then, as their only child Connell becomes a teenager, Ed gives Eileen her biggest challenge yet.

Eileen is dedicated, responsible, loving, but also frustrated, sometimes angry and emotionally distant. Readers will no doubt differ on whether Eileen is noble or obtuse—or maybe both in the same moment. The possibility that all or none of these opinions about Eileen is correct is what makes We Are Not Ourselves such an interesting read.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

We Are Not Ourselves, Matthew Thomas’ epic first novel, was 10 years in the making and, upon completion, the subject of a vigorous publishers’ bidding war. Readers will understand why.
NonfictionBiography

A portrait of the Miss Havisham of the Upper East Side

Review by Alden Mudge

In the middle of her otherwise fascinating story about reclusive heiress Huguette Clark, Meryl Gordon’s narrative suddenly flattens. The daily details of Clark’s life during this long period of seclusion are assembled from wan notes to almost-lost relatives, bank statements and legal correspondence, and the memories of the few close friends who received cards and phone calls—but never visits—from Mrs. Clark.

This flattening of narrative occurs because the subject of The Phantom of Fifth Avenue—the youngest daughter from the scandalous second marriage of robber baron William Andrews Clark—had almost succeeded in her desire to disappear. The last published photo of her was taken in 1928 during the honeymoon of her brief, ill-fated marriage. Some longtime members of the household staff in her 42-room apartment on New York’s Fifth Avenue had rarely if ever seen her.

A clearer picture of Clark emerges after she was admitted to Doctor’s Hospital for treatment of advanced skin cancer in 1991, when she was 84 years old. After multiple surgeries, she was successfully treated, but the eccentric Clark negotiated to stay in the hospital and hire private nurses for around-the-clock care and companionship. This set off an unseemly “cash crusade” at the hospital. Over the next 20 years, one of those nurses, who worked 12-hour shifts 365 days a year, would receive from the always generous Clark roughly $31 million, in addition to houses, cars and jewelry. The nurse, who had a genuine if manipulative relationship with her patient, stood to inherit even more when Clark, who resisted acknowledging her own mortality, was finally convinced to update her 75-year-old will.

After Clark’s death, a nasty battle over her $300 million fortune was launched by descendants of her half-brothers and half-sisters, the side of the family she felt had grievously mistreated her mother. This very public dispute led to a cartoonish portrayal of Clark in the media. Extreme wealth and extreme eccentricity do sell, after all.

Through her assiduous research—she conducted more than 100 interviews and plowed through boxes of documents seized during the court battle—and canny analysis, Gordon gives us, yes, Clark’s perplexing eccentricities and the ins and outs of the fight between family members and loyal-but-incompetent friends and helpers. But The Phantom of Fifth Avenue also offers a believable, sympathetic portrait of a vulnerable perfectionist with an artistic temperament, who, as one of Clark’s young helpers would say, was “a very special person from a different epoch.”

 

This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In the middle of her otherwise fascinating story about reclusive heiress Huguette Clark, Meryl Gordon’s narrative suddenly flattens. The daily details of Clark’s life during this long period of seclusion are assembled from wan notes to almost-lost relatives, bank statements and legal correspondence, and the memories of the few close friends who received cards and phone calls—but never visits—from Mrs. Clark.

Nonfiction

A striking salute to the balance of nature

Review by Alden Mudge

If you want a gut-level understanding of why preservation of the Earth’s biodiversity is vital to the survival of our own species, Edward O. Wilson’s new book, A Window on Eternity, is an excellent place to start.

Wilson, a pre-eminent evolutionary biologist and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, writes eloquently in this extended essay—beautifully illustrated with photographs by Piotr Naskrecki—about his experiences in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park. The park lies in the Rift Valley where the human species first evolved. It is, writes Wilson, “one of the most ecologically interesting and least explored . . . part[s] of Mozambique.” 

Shortly after Mozambique gained independence from and was left bankrupt by its Portuguese colonial rulers, a protracted civil war broke out. During that war most of the large mammals in this wilderness preserve—elephants, hippopotamuses, wildebeests—were slaughtered to provide food for the vying armies, then by poachers and professional hunters. “Between 1972 and 2001,” Wilson notes in one example, “the number of Cape buffalo counted in the park fell from 13,000 to 15.” The few elephant matriarchs that survived remain traumatized and hostile to humans. In a fascinating section called “The Elephant Whisperer,” Wilson writes about attempts to calm these elders “through what experts on animal behavior call habituation.”

The loss of all these large mammals altered the habitats in ways that affected animal and plant life —including humans—throughout the region. Wilson’s swift summary of these impacts in the section “Dung and Blood” is a vivid and succinct explanation of the interrelatedness of an ecosystem. 

In 2004, the government of Mozambique and a foundation established by Gregory C. Carr, co-founder of the firm Boston Technology, agreed on a 20-year public-private partnership to restore large animals, known as “megafauna,” to the park. Carr eventually enlisted Wilson in the project. 

Part of A Window on Eternity recounts the successes of this restoration project. But Wilson, who is now 84, allows his eyes to fall on many aspects of life in the park and writes knowledgeably and charmingly about what he observes. A section called “The House of Spiders,” in which he admits to a mild case of arachnophobia, is a wonderful meditation on fears and phobias and survival behavior. A section called the “The Clash of Insect Civilizations” is an epic account of the wars between ants and termites—both highly organized societies—that goes on beneath our notice (Wilson’s area of expertise, by the way, is the study of ants, though the subjects of his other books have ranged far and wide on topics related to science and environmentalism). Other sections—a logbook and an account of a “bioblitz” (in which adults and children try to discover as many species as possible on Mount Gorongosa during a two-hour period)—give a sense of both the joys and methodology of scientific observation.

But Wilson is at his most eloquent in the final sections of this book, where he builds an argument for preserving large parts of the planet for wildlife habitat. “Despite all our fantasies and pretensions,” he writes, “we always have been and will remain a biological species tied to this biological world.” So preserving the biodiversity of that biological world is vital to our own survival, our own hopes for eternity, he argues. “While our species continues to manufacture its radically different and untested all-human world, the rest of life should be allowed to endure, for our own safety. . . . By thus maintaining two parallel worlds on the planet, humanity will ensure the survival and continued advance of the rest of life, and of ourselves.”

The practicalities of such an effort are challenging of course, but it will be hard for readers of A Window on Eternity to believe the effort shouldn’t be made.

If you want a gut-level understanding of why preservation of the Earth’s biodiversity is vital to the survival of our own species, Edward O. Wilson’s new book, A Window on Eternity, is an excellent place to start.

NonfictionLiterature

The San Francisco literary revolution

Review by Alden Mudge

As 19th-century San Francisco evolved from a rowdy Gold Rush boomtown into the financial center of the American West, its rambunctious poets and writers—especially the self-styled Bohemians—sought to bring a skeptical, caustic, humorous Western voice to American writing that had been long dominated by the relatively staid literary eminences of Boston and New York.

This not-so-quiet literary revolution is the story San Francisco-born writer Ben Tarnoff tells in his well-researched, well-told The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature. Tarnoff focuses on four writers—Charles Warren Stoddard, Ina Coolbrith, Bret Harte and Mark Twain—whose lives converged in San Francisco in 1863.

As Tarnoff’s narrative begins, Harte, “a shy, soft-spoken dandy” and a talented editor, was the most famous Western storyteller in the country. The young Twain, recently arrived from Nevada, was best known for a few callow journalistic stunts and was unsure enough of his talents that he would soon consider giving up writing altogether and returning to life on the river in Missouri. The forever-boyish Stoddard, a “dreamy and frail” poet, struggled with his sexuality and only found himself as a person and as a writer when he ventured to the South Seas. Coolbrith, perhaps the most tragic figure in this story, was a poet with some talent, but she was increasingly shackled by financial responsibilities, first for her ailing mother and then for her orphaned nieces and nephews. She could never fully develop her gifts but, as an Oakland librarian, influenced writers like Jack London, and was named California’s first poet laureate near the end of her life.

Tarnoff alternates his narrative among these four aspiring writers struggling to achieve something new. He vividly describes a vibrant 10-year period when San Francisco was adjusting to the impacts of the Civil War and the arrival of the transcontinental railroad. But the strongest and most fascinating strand of Tarnoff’s story focuses on the friendship and rivalry between Harte and Twain. This sad drama offers important insights into how young Twain—by turns helped and hindered by an increasingly irrational and vainglorious Harte—became the great American writer he was.

As 19th-century San Francisco evolved from a rowdy Gold Rush boomtown into the financial center of the American West, its rambunctious poets and writers—especially the self-styled Bohemians—sought to bring a skeptical, caustic, humorous Western voice to American writing that had been long dominated by the relatively staid literary eminences of Boston and New York.

Literary Fiction

Two intertwined paths from Winesburg, Ohio

Review by Alden Mudge

One of the more piquant pleasures of Porter Shreve’s The End of the Book—a novel that offers the attentive reader a surfeit of pleasure—are the contrasting sensory details of Chicago near the turn of two centuries.

There is the stench of the city’s “hog butcher to the world” stockyards and the aspirational buzz of amateur actors and musicians at Jane Addam’s progressive Hull House that George Willard, recently arrived from Winesburg, Ohio, experiences in the early 20th century. And there is the sleek, high-tech cool of the iconic Harbor City towers where Adam Clary and his wife Dhara Patel settle at the beginning of the 21st century.

In the contemporary story line, Clary works for a Google-like tech company in a unit responsible for digitizing books. Adam, an aspiring novelist with a moldering MFA in his background, cannot really disguise the fact that he despises the job. This creates a kind of bad-vibe, not-a-team-player judgment about him that his wife, a rising star in the same company and the daughter of hard-working Indian immigrant motel operators in Dayton, Ohio, tries to shield him from. But this is not actually the beginning of Adam’s problems. He has also become responsible for his erratic, estranged, ailing father, a thrice-married former English professor once considered the leading authority on the writer Sherwood Anderson, author of Winesburg, Ohio, one of the great works of American fiction. Adam’s life is further complicated by the appearance of a former girlfriend seeking to reconnect.

In the novel’s early-20th-century story line, George Willard steps out of the pages of Winesburg, Ohio, and off a train in Chicago and moves forward with his life, pursuing his dream of becoming a writer. It is soon apparent that dream is not to be realized. In an episode that brings to mind the rags-to-riches novels of Horatio Alger, George is struck by an automobile owned by a wealthy advertising magnate who ends up employing George in his firm. George eventually marries the boss’ daughter. Like Clary, he must take in his feckless father who has lost his hotel to bankruptcy. He reconnects with the girl he loved as a teenager back in Winesburg, who has also come to Chicago to follow her ideals.

In other words, parallels between these two storylines abound. Each story develops enough tension and velocity to make it compelling in its own right. But in the end the trajectories of George and Adam also diverge, especially when it comes to love. In the widening gap between the stories, a reader is encouraged, yes, to think of the parallels, but also to consider the differences: cultural differences between this century and the last; shifting American business mythologies; changes in our notions about filial piety, romantic love and the romance—and financial dependency—of being a starving writer.

Shreve’s first novel was the highly acclaimed The Obituary Writer. Until he and his wife, the novelist Bich Minh Nguyen, moved with their children to the San Francisco Bay area last summer, he headed the creative writing program at Purdue University. He is clearly a fan and a student of Winesburg, Ohio.

But The End of the Book is not merely a tribute to Sherwood Anderson and his best book. The novel leads readers to suspect that Adam Clary might just be the author of George Willard’s continuing story. Thus Shreve’s novel becomes—in addition to everything else—a playful and intelligent exploration of how a writer takes experiences from life and spins them into a work of fiction.

The End of the Book is a wonderful read, and Shreve has written it with an economy and grace of style in which Sherwood Anderson would surely recognize a kindred spirit.

One of the more piquant pleasures of Porter Shreve’s The End of the Book—a novel that offers the attentive reader a surfeit of pleasure—are the contrasting sensory details of Chicago near the turn of two centuries.
NonfictionEnvironment

A terrifying glimpse of the future

Review by Alden Mudge

Few writers engage readers in thinking about the meaning of scientific discoveries as well as Elizabeth Kolbert, a staff writer at The New Yorker. Kolbert’s enviable talents, her wit and intelligence, the clarity of her prose, are on full display in The Sixth Extinction, a fascinating and alarming book that examines mass extinctions of life forms, past and present.

The very idea of species extinction is relatively recent. It “finally emerged as a concept, probably not coincidentally, in revolutionary France,” Kolbert writes in an early chapter about the discovery of bones of the American mastodon. Since then, naturalists and scientists have debated the mechanism of mass extinction—do species evolve, so to speak, into extinction, or do they disappear rapidly, catastrophically? (The answer, Kolbert writes with customary wit, is that “as in Tolstoy, every extinction event appears to be unhappy—and fatally so—in its own way.”)

In the first half of her book, Kolbert explores these scientific debates by looking at five previous mass extinctions, times when “conditions change so drastically or so suddenly (or so drastically and so suddenly) that evolutionary history counts for little.” Her strategy here and throughout the book is to focus on an emblematic species—the great auk, for example—and build a layered narrative about each mass extinction event.

In the second half of the book, Kolbert focuses on threatened but not-yet-extinct species to make her most telling point: that humans have become a—perhaps the—force of nature, capable of changing the world “faster than species can adapt.” 

What our massively disruptive power means, we cannot fully know. But, as Kolbert writes at the end of the book, “Among the many lessons that emerge from the geologic record, perhaps the most sobering is that in life, as in mutual funds, past performance is no guarantee of future results.”

The Sixth Extinction is a must-read for anyone concerned in any way, shape or form about the future of life on planet Earth.

Few writers engage readers in thinking about the meaning of scientific discoveries as well as Elizabeth Kolbert, a staff writer at The New Yorker. Kolbert’s enviable talents, her wit and intelligence, the clarity of her prose, are on full display in The Sixth Extinction, a fascinating and alarming book that examines mass extinctions of life forms, past and present.

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