Harvey Freedenberg

NonfictionMemoir

What Just Happened

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

When it became clear in March 2020 that the coronavirus was more than an annoying temporary disruption, some writers took to keeping COVID diaries. We’re fortunate that one as gifted and insightful as Los Angeles-based novelist and critic Charles Finch chose to preserve his recollections in the eloquent, fierce What Just Happened: Notes on a Long Year.

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic and fresh from a 13-city book tour, Finch began chatting on Slack with four friends. One of them was an emergency room physician from New York City, the virus’s first epicenter, who quickly impressed on Finch the gravity of the crisis. But even faced with this dire news, Finch obsessed over the availability of pasta, toilet paper and hand sanitizer and became a “candle guy.” As the months ground on, he grew more troubled by his increasing consumption of marijuana. Through it all he watched, with growing anger and dismay, as the human toll mounted, each round number of deaths rolling into the next, exposing our collective naiveté about how truly terrible our losses would be.

Finch is a keen political observer whose takedowns of the Trump administration’s almost willfully incompetent leadership are both savage and, at times, savagely funny. He also reflects on how the pandemic both exacerbated and exposed economic inequality in the United States, excoriating billionaires Jeff Bezos and Michael Bloomberg and confessing to “the joy I would take in shaking a little sand in the gears of capitalism.” Following the murder of George Floyd, he devotes considerable attention to the massive protests, wondering whether they are the harbinger of an overdue reckoning with racism in the United States.

Occasionally Finch departs from his contemporary narrative to share some moving bits of personal history, including an evocative scene of a snowy Central Park when he lived in New York in his 20s. He reminisces about the uncle who introduced him to blues and folk music (Finch’s affection for country singer Kacey Musgraves is a recurring theme) and about his grandmother, the artist Anne Truitt. A transplant from the East Coast, he also paints memorable pictures of his adopted hometown of LA, “the only sad city I’ve ever lived in,” as he remarks on how its “cool sunniness, its low-slung tatterdemalion endlessness, give the city a tranquil, dreamlike quality.”

With the election of Joe Biden and the arrival of vaccines, Finch emerged from an ordeal that hadn’t quite ended with the mien of a battle-weary combat veteran. Years from now, historians will comb through primary sources looking for evidence of how we thought and felt during these plague days. They would do well to turn first to What Just Happened.

Years from now, historians will search for evidence of how we felt during the COVID-19 plague days. They would do well to turn first to What Just Happened.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The Days of Afrekete

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Taking on questions of race, sexual identity or class in a work of barely 200 pages would be an ambitious project for any writer. Asali Solomon’s second novel, The Days of Afrekete, tackles all three with insight, wit and grace—a tribute to her considerable talent.

At the core of the novel, whose title refers to a character in Audre Lorde’s Zami, is the story of Liselle Belmont and Selena Octave, two Black women who meet at Bryn Mawr College in the 1990s and enter into a brief, intense relationship; each ascribes the fault for its end to the other. Even at a distance of some 20 years, it’s clear that neither woman has been able to shed the memory of their four months as lovers, scenes of which Solomon sketches in vivid, economical flashbacks.

As their college years recede, Liselle’s and Selena’s lives proceed in opposite directions. Selena undergoes a series of psychiatric hospitalizations and moves through a succession of downwardly mobile jobs. Liselle, in contrast, marries Winn Anderson, a white lawyer from a wealthy Connecticut family whose primary campaign against an incumbent Black state representative has ended in defeat, a disappointment compounded by Winn’s entanglement with an unscrupulous real estate developer that has made him the subject of an FBI investigation.

Most of the novel’s present-day action unfolds at a dinner party hosted by Liselle and Winn at their 150-year-old home in an upscale neighborhood in northwest Philadelphia. The racially mixed gathering, intended to thank Winn’s core supporters, subtly dissects Liselle’s profound unease over the state of her marriage alongside her almost comical discomfort in the presence of Xochitl, the highly educated daughter of Liselle’s Latina cleaning woman.

Solomon doesn’t offer a tidy resolution to the story, but her novel doesn’t demand one. The Days of Afrekete’s strength lies in its well-drawn characters and its realistic portrait of how old desires sometimes refuse to remain buried.

With insight, wit and grace, Asali Solomon’s second novel offers a realistic portrait of how old desires sometimes refuse to remain buried.
Fiction

Take a journey around the world in stories

Feature by Harvey Freedenberg

From Mexico, to the former Soviet Union, to England, Japan and the United States, the reach of the short story spans the globe. These five collections, some by established authors and others by writers just beginning to make their mark, offer a generous introduction to the richness of modern short fiction.

Chilly slices of modern life
Ali Smith, author of the critically praised novel The Accidental, has observed, "Stories can change lives if we're not careful." In The First Person and Other Stories, her fourth collection, she offers her unsettling take on contemporary life.

Smith's book is most notable for its air of experimentation. The story that opens the collection, "True Short Story," begins with a writer in a café, observing two men and imagining the story of their relationship before halting the exercise. ("I stopped making them up. It felt a bit wrong to.") It concludes with a series of pithy observations on the nature of the short form from writers as diverse as Ernest Hemingway and Alice Munro.

Smith's style is terse and edgy, almost daring the reader to settle in. In most of these stories, the characters are nameless, and it's only possible to know their setting because of a passing allusion to London or some feature of British life.

One of the more startling tales is "The Child," in which a woman discovers a baby abandoned in her grocery store shopping cart. When she takes the child with her, it begins spouting conservative political dogma, soon laced with racist and sexist jokes. The First Person and Other Stories won't appeal to everyone's taste, but those who like their stories provocative and enigmatic are likely to find it a satisfying work.

Weird, wonderful and wild
Although he's unknown to the American audience, Yasutaka Tsutsui has captured awards in his native Japan for his science fiction. His collection, Salmonella Men on Planet Porno, translated by Andrew Driver, contains several examples in that genre, but it also sparkles with biting pieces of social and political satire that reveal a formidable talent.

Tsutsui excels at creating protagonists living in worlds uncomfortably recognizable as our own and yet decidedly dystopian. In "Rumours of Me," a young man suddenly begins to hear and read news stories about the most mundane aspects of his daily life. "Anything can become big news if the media report it," a newspaper editor tells him, bringing to mind the short-lived obsession with "Joe the Plumber" in last fall's presidential campaign. "Commuter Army" is a brilliant satire on the insanity of war, imagining platoons of soldiers who board the train each morning like office workers, the fortunate survivors returning home the same evening. "Hello, Hello, Hello" features a meddlesome "Household Economy Consultant" whose bizarre counsel sheds a revealing light on modern capitalism and our consumer culture.

The title story, the longest in the collection, is a complex exploration of human sexuality and evolutionary biology that plays out in the context of a space adventure. Throughout this wildly varied assortment of tales, Tsutsui's voice is witty and quirky, seducing us to suspend our disbelief for even the most fanciful narrative.

Riding the waves
Whether as a force for life or one of destruction, water in all its forms is the unifying theme in writer and artist Peter Selgin's powerful collection, Drowning Lessons. Selgin is never heavy-handed in his use of metaphor, and it's rewarding to trace the skill with which he employs it in many of these 13 stories.

In the opening tale, "Swimming," an elderly man disgruntled with the state of his marriage offers swimming lessons to an attractive younger woman. "Our Cups Are Bottomless" features a man in a coffee shop in a dying mill town, contemplating the suicide notes he's written as the town's two rivers rise in a raging downpour.

The most dramatic story in Drowning Lessons is "The Sea Cure." In it, two brothers take a trip to Mexico. Lewis becomes ill after drinking the local water, and Clarke meets a mysterious woman he believes will help secure medical treatment for Lewis, whose condition becomes more desperate with each page, until the story reaches its haunting climax. The collection concludes with the alternately hilarious and touching "My Search for Red and Gray Wide-Striped Pajamas." Its narrator suffers from mysterious fainting spells while wandering New York City seeking a pair of pajamas like the ones worn by his late father, his search a metaphor for the attempt to find his way in the world.

Coming to America
When a young writer's first two stories are published in the New Yorker and the Atlantic, it's a safe bet she's on the fast track to recognition in the world of literary fiction. In One More Year, Sana Krasikov, born in Ukraine and now living in New York, demonstrates why the early notice she's achieved is well-deserved.

Krasikov's fiction focuses on her fellow immigrants. Unlike the affluent Bengalis depicted in the stories of another young star of contemporary short fiction, Jhumpa Lahiri, however, her characters are struggling to plant their feet firmly on the first rung of the ladder of success in America. Most of the stories are set in Westchester County, New York, but it's hardly the country club and cocktail party world of John Cheever.

In stories like "Companion," "Asal" and "Maia in Yonkers," women from the former Soviet Union find themselves in low-end personal care jobs. Maia's son sums up her plight when he berates her, "Every year you say 'It's one more year, one more year!' " and his blunt indictment sums up the predicament of most of Krasikov's characters. Representative is Anya, the protagonist of "Better Half," 22 years old, married for a few months and working as a waitress, who observes that "trying to escape your tedious fate only led you back to it."

Their task won't be easy, but at the end of this consistently strong collection we're left with a feeling that the determination by Krasikov's characters to establish themselves in a new land will be rewarded.

Living and loving in Mexico
Carlos Fuentes, perhaps Mexico's most distinguished living writer, offers a rich collection of stories in Happy Families. Taking his ironic title from Tolstoy's legendary observation, Fuentes exposes the dark corners of his characters' emotional lives with a piercing light.

Fuentes' prose is lush, almost poetic, as presented in this translation by the distinguished translator Edith Grossman. Indeed, after each story there is a free verse "chorus," many of them illuminating some troubling aspect of modern Mexican life.

In its 16 stories, Happy Families covers the subject of love in all its complexity. We meet a long-married couple raking over the dying coals of their relationship ("Conjugal Ties (1)"), a priest who's fathered an illegitimate daughter and lives with her in an isolated mountain village at the base of a volcano ("The Father's Servant") and a mother desperate to rescue her son from a life of street crime ("The Mariachi's Mother"). Fuentes is a keen student of human behavior, and if his Mexican historic and cultural references occasionally may be puzzling to non-Mexican readers, the emotions on display are universal. In "The Discomfiting Brother," the story of an impoverished man who returns to the home of his prosperous brother after more than 30 years, the former notes, "Life consists in our getting used to the fact that everything will be badly for us." That solemn observation serves as a fitting benediction to this collection by an acknowledged literary master.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. 

From Mexico, to the former Soviet Union, to England, Japan and the United States, the reach of the short story spans the globe. These five collections, some by established authors and others by writers just beginning to make their mark, offer a generous introduction to the richness of modern short fiction. Chilly slices of modern […]
Fiction

Spotlight: Short stories

Feature by Harvey Freedenberg

It’s an embarrassment of riches to have new collections by short story masters Nathan Englander and Dan Chaon released on the same day (Feb. 7). After publishing novels in 2007 and 2009, respectively, they’ve returned to a form that showcases their talents at fashioning sturdily constructed, memorable tales.

Englander caused a stir in 1999 with his first collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, which offered unorthodox glimpses into the world of Orthodox Judaism. He stays close to his roots here, echoing the art of Jewish short fiction masters from Isaac Bashevis Singer to Philip Roth in tales that are both contemporary and timeless.

Most of the Jewish characters that populate the stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank are survivors (literally so, for the several who endured the Holocaust). Nowhere is that more dramatically demonstrated than in the novelistic “Sister Hills,” set in the northern portion of the territory captured by Israel in 1967. The story spans decades, and focuses on Rena and Yehudit, settlers who occupy two desolate settlements on “empty mountains that God had long ago given Israel but that Israel had long ago forgotten.” With its mythic overtones, it’s a stunning narrative achievement.

Englander is intrigued by the difficulty of moral choices, as displayed in stories like “Camp Sundown,” when a group of Holocaust survivors at an elderhostel camp decide to take revenge on a man they believe was a Nazi guard at a concentration camp. And the title story, evoking a classic Raymond Carver tale, follows two couples—one, assimilated South Floridians; the other, friends who have abandoned America for an ultra-Orthodox life in Israel—as they debate which of them would shelter the other in a new Holocaust.

As serious as some of Englander’s themes may be, he displays an equally potent gift for comedy, most notably in “How We Avenged the Blums,” recounting the fumbling efforts of a group of Long Island Jewish boys and their dubious Russian martial arts teacher to retaliate against an iconic bully, “the Anti-Semite.”

Several of the stories in Dan ­Chaon’s Stay Awake have the same enigmatic aura as his 2009 novel, Await Your Reply, an intricate exploration of identity in the cyber-age. From the opener, “The Bees,” in which a recovering alcoholic is haunted by his decision to abandon his wife and young son, a chill descends on Chaon’s world.

The mostly male protagonists  are stunted, both economically and emotionally. The employed ones work as supermarket clerks or UPS drivers, and the most accomplished, a former college professor in the story “Long Delayed, Always Expected,” has been brain damaged in an automobile accident.

Death is another thread that unites Chaon’s stories. Two moving examples are the title story, in which a child is born with a “parasitic” twin head with an underdeveloped body attached to hers, and “Thinking of You in Your Time of Sorrow,” where a teenager and his “former future wife” struggle after their newborn’s death.

Though their subject matter could not differ more dramatically, in their moral seriousness and literary craftsmanship Nathan Englander and Dan Chaon deliver some of the best of what contemporary short fiction has to offer.

It’s an embarrassment of riches to have new collections by short story masters Nathan Englander and Dan Chaon released on the same day (Feb. 7). After publishing novels in 2007 and 2009, respectively, they’ve returned to a form that showcases their talents at fashioning sturdily constructed, memorable tales. Englander caused a stir in 1999 with […]
Fiction

Good things, small packages

Feature by Harvey Freedenberg

Three short-story stalwarts showcase their acclaimed skills with their first collections in several years, while a newcomer who’s made his name in television and movies demonstrates that his talents aren’t limited to the screen.

For readers who lack an adventuresome streak, Lydia Davis’ distinctive short fiction can be an acquired taste. Can’t and Won’t: Stories won’t dispel that reputation, but admirers of Davis’ work will find much in this, her fifth collection, to reinforce their appreciation for her singular style.

A sizable number of the stories are based on excerpts from the letters of Gustave Flaubert (Davis translated Madame Bovary in 2010), while others are little more than fragments from Davis’ dreams and those of her family and friends. Despite these and other formal experiments like the story “Ph.D.,” which consists of a single sentence, or “Local Obits,” nine pages of life fragments of the sort that appear in each day’s paper, Davis is capable of expressing deep feeling. One example is “The Seals,” where the narrator describes her struggle to come to terms with the deaths of her sister and father three weeks apart seven years earlier, as she recognizes “the quieter and simpler fact of missing them.”

“Life is too serious for me to go on writing,” says the narrator of the story “Writing.” After reading a collection that’s as varied, vibrant and unsettling as this one, one can only hope Davis isn’t speaking for herself.

A LEGEND RETURNS
Lorrie Moore hasn’t produced a short story collection since 1998’s Birds of America, which included the classic “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk.”

In Bark: Stories, she returns with eight stories that blend her often wicked humor with keen insight into our struggles to cope with contemporary life.

Those characteristics are best illustrated in “Debarking,” where Ira Milkins, employed at the State Historical Society in Minneapolis, dips his toe into the “world of middle-aged dating” six months after divorce ends his 15-year marriage. He connects with Zora, a pediatrician whose emotional stability is as tenuous as her relationship with her sullen teenage son is strange. While Ira “had always thought he was a modern man,” he discovers that he “has his limitations.” “Paper Losses” is the heartbreaking story of Kit and Rafe, who embark on a long-planned, if ill-advised, Caribbean vacation with their children, even as they’re about to end their marriage of two decades.

The stories in Bark are liberally seasoned with Moore’s lightning-quick one-liners. Ira seeks “the geometric halfway point between stalker and Rip van Winkle,” and Kit muses that it was “good to date a nudist: things moved right along.”

In “Wings,” the collection’s longest story, KC, a musician in a failing relationship with her boyfriend, befriends an elderly widower and finds herself drawn ever deeper into his sad life. Reflecting on dying, KC imagines it would be “full of rue: like flipping through the pages of a clearance catalog, seeing the drastic markdowns on stuff you’d paid full price for and not gotten that much use from, when all was said and done.”

Certain writers excel in keeping their finger on the pulse of the era in which they write. Lorrie Moore unquestionably is one of them, and this book offers further proof of her deftness in doing so.

CELEBRITY LITERATURE
If you are tempted to dismiss former star of “The Office” B.J. Novak’s collection One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories as a celebrity vanity project, think again. Novak, a Harvard graduate with a degree in English and Spanish literature, is the real thing. With his brand of sharp, absurdist, observational humor, it’s easy to see him taking his place in The New Yorker’s “Shouts & Murmurs” column alongside stalwarts like Woody Allen and newcomers like his fellow actor Jesse Eisenberg.

Novak’s collection comprises 64 pieces, ranging from the two lines of “Kindness Among Cakes” to 20 pages, so if you encounter one offering that isn’t appealing, you generally don’t have to wait long before he delivers one that scores. Immersed as he is in pop culture, Novak finds it a ready-made source of material, as in “Walking on Eggshells (or: When I Loved Tony Robbins),” where the narrator turns her pursuit of the self-help guru into a self-help project. Celebrities like Kate Moss, Neil Patrick Harris, Johnny Depp and Elvis Presley also have their moments onstage.

But Novak fully displays his considerable skill in stories like “J.C. Audetat, Translator of Don Quixote,” in which a poet gains fame producing a string of increasingly improbable translations of great works, or in “The Ghost of Mark Twain,” where a middle school English teacher confronts an editor at Bantam Scholastic Classics with a surprising complaint about a certain deplorable word in Huckleberry Finn.

While it may not be as lucrative as his work in film and television, if Novak can continue to produce writing this fresh, funny and emotionally astute, he’ll have established himself firmly in a successful complementary career.

TALES FROM THE SOUTH
After the edgier short fiction of Davis, Moore and Novak, the Southern-based stories of Ellen Gilchrist’s Acts of God are likely to go down for many readers as smoothly as a cool mint julep on a steamy summer afternoon.

The characters in several of these 11 stories teeter on the edge of annihilation, and natural disaster, in particular, is never far away. “Miracle in Adkins, Arkansas” follows five teens from Fayetteville, Arkansas, who become instant celebrities when one of their number rescues a baby following a tornado in a nearby small town. Hurricane Katrina forms the backdrop for the two of the stories. In “Collateral,” Carly Dixon, a widow and mother of a 13-year-old son, finds herself making helicopter rescues in New Orleans as a member of the National Guard. Dean and Dave, two gay paramedics from Los Angeles attending a convention in New Orleans as the hurricane bears down on the city, decide to ride out the storm with a colorful new friend in a Jackson Square apartment in “High Water.”

Carly Dixon’s new lover dismisses his ex-wife with the comment that “she’s from up north and she doesn’t understand the South.” If you weren’t raised below the Mason-Dixon line, you’ll finish this collection with a better understanding of the lives and values of the people who live there.

Three short-story stalwarts showcase their acclaimed skills with their first collections in several years, while a newcomer who’s made his name in television and movies demonstrates that his talents aren’t limited to the screen.

NonfictionMemoir

Wise and witty books for dad

Feature by Harvey Freedenberg

If you’re searching for a gift for dear ol’ dad, two celebrity memoirs and two accounts of unusual personal quests are among our recommendations for a Father’s Day reading list.

It’s especially poignant to read Stuart Scott’s memoir, Every Day I Fight, knowing that not long after the book was finished, the ESPN anchor succumbed to appendiceal cancer at age 49. Writing in a conversational tone, his prose sprinkled with colloquialisms like “dude” and “brotha,” Scott never wavers in his candid account of the struggle with disease that dogged the final seven years of his life, describing how he “refused to curl up and just be a cancer patient,” when he’d head straight from chemotherapy treatments to the gym for a mixed martial arts workout. 

Famous for trademark phrases like “boo-yah” and for bringing hip-hop culture to ESPN in the age of the “raplete,” Scott recounts the highlights of a career that saw him make his meteoric rise from a reporting job in Florence, South Carolina, to ESPN in a mere six years. In the two decades he spent at the network, he shed the perception that he was nothing more than a “catchphrase guy” and established himself as a dedicated, hard-working professional. What makes this memoir most appropriate for Father’s Day is Scott’s account of his fierce love for his two daughters. Even when he was honored with the Jimmy V Perseverance Award in 2014, Scott steadfastly avoided referring to his seven-year fight against cancer as “brave.” But after reading this revealing and courageous memoir, we can.

MOCKING MIDDLE AGE 
If you’re offended by explicit language or jokes from a comedian who admits he’s “not very politically correct, nor do I have a very useful filter,” you may want to pass on Brad Garrett’s When the Balls Drop: How I Learned to Get Real and Embrace Life’s Second Half. But the many fans who enjoyed Garrett’s Emmy Award-winning nine-year role as the big brother on the hit series “Everybody Loves Raymond” will relish a book that blends memoir with pointed and often hilarious musings on the perilous passage through the shoals of middle age.

Garrett shares entertaining stories of his early days in comedy, as he moved from small-town clubs to opening in Las Vegas for performers like Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. He frankly acknowledges his debt to comedian Don Rickles, something that’s evident in the book’s blunt humor.

When it comes to what might loosely be called the self-help portion of the book, Garrett takes dead aim at targets that include vegetarianism, plastic surgery and exercise. He confesses his aversion to monogamy, though at 55 he’s quite content with his 31-year-old girlfriend. “Ultimately, you have to live right for you,” is Garrett’s theme, and from the evidence he presents here, he seems to have done quite well in that regard. 

REACHING FOR THE TOP
Austin newspaper reporter Asher Price’s decision, on the eve of his 34th birthday, to spend a year endeavoring to propel his 6-foot-2-inch, 203-pound frame high enough to dunk a basketball might seem to some a trivial pursuit. But in Price’s capable hands, Year of the Dunk: A Modest Defiance of Gravity, an exploration of what he calls the “limits of human talent,” is an informative, inspiring and often moving story of how life’s tough challenges can motivate us.

Price’s project takes him from a Texas gym, where he’s tutored by 1996 Olympic high jump gold medalist Charles Austin, to the Performance Lab of the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York to the office of British zoologist Malcolm Burrows, an expert on the jumping characteristics of an insect known as the froghopper. While crisply explicating arcana like the difference between fast- and slow-twitch muscles, he documents a punishing exercise regimen that helped him shed pounds and gain vertical lift as he strained to reach his goal. He also describes unobtrusively his experience with an aggressive form of testicular cancer six years earlier.

Readers eager to learn whether Price’s project succeeded will have to look to the book for the answer. As is always the case, the outcome is far less interesting than the journey he recounts in this warmhearted story.

TRAVEL FOR THE DARING
Albert Podell’s Around the World in 50 Years: My Adventure to Every Country on Earth is the extraordinary account of a much different personal journey, or rather a series of them: his successful quest to visit each of the world’s 196 countries (plus seven that no longer exist). Podell, who achieved his goal in December 2012, is an engaging and colorful storyteller, and the momentum of this memoir rarely flags.

If you’re looking for a guide to the best all-inclusive resorts of the Caribbean or Europe’s finest five-star restaurants, look elsewhere. Instead, Podell offers tips for eating monkey brains, advice on how to bribe your way past corrupt government officials and a system for comfort-ranking countries based on the quality of their toilet tissue. At heart, this is an adventure story, one that nearly came to a premature end at the hands of a lynch mob on his visit to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in the middle of the 1965 war between India and Pakistan. That’s only one of the brushes with death or serious injury that enlivened Podell’s travels.

Through all these occasionally nightmarish experiences and the daunting logistical challenges he surmounted, Podell never loses his sense of wonder or his dry, punning wit. What’s most impressive is that he logged nearly one-third of his country visits after reaching age 70, including perilous trips to countries like Somalia and North Korea. 

Even if your desire for exotic travel never takes you out of your reading chair, you’ll find Podell a fascinating companion. 

 

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

If you’re searching for a gift for dear ol’ dad, two celebrity memoirs and two accounts of unusual personal quests are among our recommendations for a Father’s Day reading list.
NonfictionReligion & Spirituality

For the spiritually curious

Feature by Harvey Freedenberg

Rich in material for spiritual seekers, this diverse selection of titles invites Christians, Jews and Muslims to explore aspects of their own faiths, while allowing them—and curious students of religion in general—to look outward at the beliefs of other traditions.

Rooted in her own Christianity, Anne Lamott’s Almost Everything: Notes on Hope can be read through the lens of any, or no, faith community. Inspired by the wish that her late father had “written down everything he had learned here, whose truths he was pretty sure of,” Lamott boldly sets out to share “almost everything I know.” In the 14 essays that compose the book, she veers from the intensely personal to the philosophical, highlighting some of the ways joy and pain are close companions in life.

Lamott is nothing if not ecumenical, drawing on sources that include the medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart, a Coptic minister in Cairo and the Dalai Lama. Her breezy, self-deprecating style, as when she refers to her “nice Jesusy beliefs,” makes her insights simultaneously memorable and easy to appreciate. But don’t mistake Lamott’s casual tone for a lack of seriousness. She’s not afraid to grapple with some of life’s most tragic aspects and profound mysteries, as she does in the moving essay “Jah,” the story of her friend Kelly’s lifelong battle with alcoholism. Anyone reading with an open mind and heart will come away with more than a few nuggets of useful wisdom.

A SURVIVOR’S MORAL LEGACY
Before his death in 2016, Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel produced a large body of work exploring themes of faith and doubt, much of it shadowed by his experience as a Holocaust survivor, which he chronicled in his memoir Night. Rabbi and scholar Ariel Burger had the privilege of a close personal and professional relationship with Wiesel spanning 25 years, including time as his teaching assistant. Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom is the account of their relationship and the changes it wrought in Burger’s life. In chapters organized around memory and activism, Burger describes his experience observing Wiesel’s classroom discussions, in which he drew on classic works of literature from writers like Dostoevsky, Kafka and Camus to challenge and gently shape his students’ thinking.

Wiesel the literary scholar, as portrayed in these pages, is both wise and compassionate, but Burger is quick to point out that his mentor’s mild demeanor should not be mistaken for passivity. Time and again, Wiesel returns to the importance of “reading literature through an ethical lens,” intending, through this process, to awaken his students and inspire in them the moral clarity and courage to speak out against oppression and injustice. “Listening to a witness makes you a witness” becomes almost a mantra in Wiesel’s tutelage. Burger leaves little doubt of his own commitment to transmit Wiesel’s teachings to a new generation of students.

A STORY OF FINDING SOLACE
Elaine Pagels, a distinguished professor of religion at Princeton University, is best known for her scholarship on the Gnostic Gospels, the secret religious texts discovered in Egypt and the Dead Sea region in the 1940s. In Why Religion?: A Personal Story, she brings to bear that scholarship to help narrate the tragic story of losing her young son and husband—one to a chronic illness and the other in a mountain-climbing accident—within the space of barely a year.

Born with a heart defect, Pagels’ son, Mark, developed pulmonary hypertension, an invariably fatal condition at the time, and died at age 6. Some 14 months later, while hiking a familiar trail near the family’s Colorado vacation home, Pagels’ husband, Heinz, an eminent physicist, plunged to his death when the path beneath him gave way. Either one of these tragedies would have been sufficient to upend Pagels’ life, and the doubled nature of these events devastates her. In this memoir, she describes an eclectic and personal religious history that exposed her to everything from evangelical Christianity to Trappist monasticism. In the face of these painful events, Pagels has an extraordinary, dawning realization that the texts to which she has devoted her professional life might also spark a personal exploration. As she notes, it “compelled me to search for healing beyond anything I’d ever imagined.”

All this is summed up in a moving and transcendent final scene, as Pagels receives an honorary doctorate from Harvard, her alma mater, and finds spiritual peace.

AN OUTSIDER ON ISLAM
In books like his Pulitzer Prize-winning God: A Biography, Jack Miles has shown he’s willing to tackle big subjects. God in the Qur’an is the third in a trilogy of books about holy writings. Despite identifying himself as a practicing Episcopalian, Miles, who currently teaches at Boston College, approaches these works “not as a religious believer but only as a literary critic writing quite consciously for an audience crowded with unbelievers.” Above all, he’s determined to puncture the myth that every Muslim is a terrorist-in-waiting simply because they honor the Qur’an as sacred scripture.

In each chapter, Miles engages in a detailed textual comparison of a familiar story from the Qur’an and either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament. One chapter examines Moses and the account of the Exodus. In the biblical version of the well-known Passover narrative, Miles points out the emphasis on the drama of the Israelites’ liberation from Egyptian bondage and the start of their journey to the land promised to them by Yahweh. The Qur’an’s version “mutes the centrality” of that story, stressing instead Allah’s concern for Moses’ role “principally as a prophet of the eternal, unchanging message of Islam.” Miles’ book should inspire curious readers to engage with this sacred Muslim text.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Rich in material for spiritual seekers, this diverse selection of titles invites Christians, Jews and Muslims to explore aspects of their own faiths, while allowing them—and curious students of religion in general—to look outward at the beliefs of other traditions.

FictionFamily Drama

A Calling for Charlie Barnes

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

How does one sum up the arc of a long life? That’s the intriguing question Joshua Ferris poses in A Calling for Charlie Barnes, a poignant, bitingly funny exploration of how a life that’s riddled with defeat may turn out, after all, to be profoundly meaningful.

Inspired by the death of Ferris’ own father in 2014, the novel tells the story of Charlie Barnes, nicknamed “Steady Boy,” an investment adviser struggling in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse whose ambition is matched only by the number and magnitude of his professional and personal debacles. Charlie is a bundle of contradictions—an ethical money manager in a world of charlatans, and someone whose endlessly inventive mind conjures up bizarre moneymaking schemes that are distinctive only for their consistent failures, like a flying toupee called the Original Doolander or the Clown in Your Town, a franchised fleet of party clowns.

But when, at age 68, Charlie is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he’s forced to confront his mortality and come to terms with a chaotic family life that has included five marriages—four of which ended badly—and has caused the bitter estrangement of his two eldest children. His youngest son, Jake, the only Barnes sibling who remains close to his father, is a novelist who takes on the project of chronicling Charlie’s “perfectly failed life.” From moments of rollicking humor to episodes of deep pathos, Jake strives to capture his father’s utterly ordinary, strikingly tumultuous biography with as much fidelity to the facts as he’s able to muster while keeping it “honest, but respectable.”

In addition to its autofictional component, A Calling for Charlie Barnes contains a strong metafictional element, as Jake comments frequently and incisively on the challenges of storytelling, even assuming the mantle of unreliable narrator almost with a sense of pride: “Like reliability exists anywhere anymore,” he writes, “like that’s still a thing,” reminding the reader of “the power you have when you control the narrative.”

Ferris’ control of his own narrative is impeccable, but that doesn’t mean readers shouldn’t be prepared for the frequent wicked curveballs he delivers with evident zest. A Calling for Charlie Barnes has plot twists as manifold as its protagonist’s cruelly dashed dreams, but when Steady Boy’s story reaches its end, it’s a reminder of how little we know about the ones we love and the fact that even the humblest life story encompasses unfathomable depths.

For the audiobook, Nick Offerman delivers a powerful performance as Jake Barnes.

Joshua Ferris’ control of his narrative is impeccable, but that doesn’t mean readers shouldn’t be prepared for frequent wicked curveballs.
FictionShort Stories

Exploring the elemental strangeness of our world

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Perhaps nothing is more characteristic of T.C. Boyle's productive career than its unpredictability, something that’s manifest in Wild Child, his ninth collection of short stories. Choosing as his epigraph Thoreau’s statement, “In wilderness is the preservation of the world,” in these 13 stories and one novella Boyle probes the shadow zone between the apparent order of daily life and the darkness that often lies just over the horizon.

Examples of Boyle’s fascination with this borderland abound. In “La Conchita,” a courier transporting a liver to Santa Barbara for transplant finds himself thrust back into a state of nature as he must choose whether to abandon his task to help rescue a family trapped in a mudslide. Another apocalyptic California threat—fire—broods over “Ash Monday.” There’s an escaped tiger outside Los Angeles and feral cats invading a snowy Wisconsin trailer park in “Question 62,” and in Stephen King-like fashion, “Thirteen Hundred Rats” reveals a man who turns to rodents to fill the void left by his wife’s death.

Though most of the stories are set in Boyle’s home state of California, he leaves that territory for two of his more powerful tales. “Sin Dolor” is the tragic story of a Mexican boy incapable of feeling pain and the doctor who’s moved by his plight, while “Unlucky Mother” tells of the kidnapping of the mother of a Venezuelan baseball star and the lesson it teaches him about the dreadful price of fame.

The subject of truth and lies forms the backdrop of two more of Boyle’s stories. In “Balto,” a father struggles to persuade his underage daughter to cover up his decision to let her drive rather than risk a conviction for driving under the influence. Another tale is entitled simply “The Lie.” In it, a disgruntled employee invents a horrific fiction to explain his chronic absenteeism.

Boyle caps the collection with the title novella, a reimagining of the story of “Victor,” the enfant sauvage whose appearance captivated French society at the turn of the nineteenth century. With surpassing compassion, Boyle recounts the efforts of a sympathetic Paris doctor to civilize the mysterious youngster, while in the process learning bitter truths about the gulf between civilization and nature.

Demonstrating a skill many writing at greater length would envy, in each of the stories in this masterful collection Boyle creates a world filled with vivid characters and captivating plots, rich in nuance and complexity.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Perhaps nothing is more characteristic of T.C. Boyle's productive career than its unpredictability, something that’s manifest in Wild Child, his ninth collection of short stories. Choosing as his epigraph Thoreau’s statement, “In wilderness is the preservation of the world,” in these 13 stories and one novella Boyle probes the shadow zone between the apparent order […]
Fiction

A Roth character considers life’s folly from beyond the grave

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Of how many writers can it be said that they're still producing some of their best work well into their 70s? With this, his 24th novel, Philip Roth proves beyond any dispute that he deserves to be counted in that select group.

Indignation opens in one of Roth's favorite settings: his hometown of Newark, New Jersey. The year is 1950, and 18-year-old Marcus Messner dutifully pursues his high school studies while working in his father's kosher butcher shop, awaiting the day when he can begin his higher education. But after only one year at a local college, he flees Newark to escape his father's obsessive concern for his well-being, transferring to Winesburg College, a small Ohio school he chooses based on a catalog photograph. There, he's driven to excel in his studies, both to earn his way into law school and to avoid the catastrophe of being drafted to serve in Korea, a specter that stalks him daily.

Strikingly, as we learn early in the novel, Marcus is hardly a typical narrator, telling his story after he has died a premature death (the grisly and ironic circumstances of which are disclosed only in the novel's concluding pages). From that vantage point, he's troubled by the banality of his afterlife, where he's apparently destined to "muck over a lifetime's minutiae," including his failed relationship with Olivia Hutton, the troubled girl who's responsible for his sexual initiation, or the bizarre chain of circumstances that lead to his demise.

The novel abounds with grimly funny set pieces, most prominently Marcus' confrontation with Dean Caudwell, who summons the young man to his office when he requests reassignment to a single room after disastrous encounters with two roommates. For some 20 pages, Marcus and the Dean conduct a spirited intellectual joust, until Marcus finally explodes, spouting the atheist creed of Bertrand Russell to give voice to his protest over the college's requirement that he suffer through 40 sessions of compulsory chapel in order to graduate. Another, the conversation in which Marcus' mother exacts a promise that he will abandon Olivia in return for her agreement not to initiate divorce proceedings against his father, is both absurd and painfully realistic.

Indignation reprises many of the themes that have marked Roth's career, among them religion, sexuality and death. Here he's chosen to depart dramatically from the subject matter of his recent novels, Everyman and Exit Ghost, with their focus on aging men in the throes of physical decay. Instead, echoes of his much earlier works, from Goodbye, Columbus to Portnoy's Complaint are threaded throughout the novel, and it's refreshing to see an accomplished author who's able to reimagine elements of those classic works so dynamically.

In the words of the Yiddish proverb, "Man plans, God laughs." Or, as Roth puts it, Marcus Messner's tragic tale educates us about how "the terrible, incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate results." However you choose to view it, Philip Roth is a masterful guide to this rueful fact of life.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

 

Of how many writers can it be said that they're still producing some of their best work well into their 70s? With this, his 24th novel, Philip Roth proves beyond any dispute that he deserves to be counted in that select group. Indignation opens in one of Roth's favorite settings: his hometown of Newark, New […]
Fiction

The mysterious ties of matrimony

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Unlike Joan Didion and Anne Roiphe in their recent memoirs of marital love and loss, Rafael Yglesias has elected to tell his own similar tale in the form of a painfully honest and passionate autobiographical novel. Whatever the reason for that narrative choice, the novel is a moving exploration of the mysterious, often tenuous, bonds that hold men and women together in marriage.

Enrique Sabas, a precocious young writer, meets Margaret Cohen, an aspiring artist, in Greenwich Village in 1975. In chapters that alternate between those first, fresh days of the couple’s relationship and harrowing scenes of Margaret’s final weeks of life, Yglesias skillfully navigates the road the pair travels in their 29 years together. It’s anything but a smooth path: there are emotional and physical betrayals, the two drifting apart and coming together in an elaborate, complex dance. But by the time Margaret decides to surrender to her battle with cancer, we may grasp, in a way that’s nearly as revealing as our understanding of our own most intimate relationships, the strength of this couple’s connection.

Yglesias demonstrates impressive courage in exposing the raw details of Margaret’s final days with the honesty only a participant could bring to the grim account. He’s equally forthright in chronicling the searing pain experienced by the loving friends and family who surround her and must say goodbye. Most impressive is the way he probes Enrique and Margaret’s relationship, almost clinically and yet with compassion, seeking to “penetrate the mystery of how they had managed to live a life together while they were so different in their natures and in their expectations of one another.”

Who knows, in the end, what makes love flourish and grow? Who but the participants can unknot the tangled strands of compromises, deceptions, generosity and selfishness that nurture or threaten a relationship from day to day? There are as many answers as there are marriages. In its ironically titled candor, A Happy Marriage proposes some intriguing ones for our consideration.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Unlike Joan Didion and Anne Roiphe in their recent memoirs of marital love and loss, Rafael Yglesias has elected to tell his own similar tale in the form of a painfully honest and passionate autobiographical novel. Whatever the reason for that narrative choice, the novel is a moving exploration of the mysterious, often tenuous, bonds […]
FictionFamily Drama

More Than I Love My Life

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Award-winning Israeli writer David Grossman’s More Than I Love My Life is a complex novel about the secrets that scar three generations of women for a lifetime.

Upon her 90th birthday, family matriarch Vera Novak reunites with her daughter, Nina, after five years of separation. Both Vera and Nina have committed the almost unpardonable act of abandoning young daughters—Vera when Nina was 6, and Nina when her own daughter, Gili, was even younger. The circumstances surrounding Vera’s and Nina’s departures are complex, slowly revealed and come to dominate all three women’s emotional lives.

When Nina, who has spent several years on a tiny island between Lapland and the North Pole, announces that she’s in the early stages of dementia, she asks Gili, a writer and filmmaker now approaching her 40s, and Gili’s father, Rafael, formerly a film director himself, to record Vera’s story. The novel reaches its climax when the foursome journeys to the island of Goli Otok, off the coast of Croatia, once home to a notorious labor camp and reeducation center for opponents of the Tito regime in the former Yugoslavia. Vera was sent there after the death of her husband under circumstances she’s withheld from Nina all her life. 

In harrowing passages that alternate with the present action, Vera recalls two months of her nearly three-year imprisonment when she was marched daily to a cliff top and forced to stand in the blazing sun, her only companion a sapling she shaded with her body.

Vera, Nina and Gili are memorable characters, each suffering in different but equally profound ways. Grossman effectively inhabits the consciousnesses of these women and doesn’t spare the reader any of their considerable emotional pain. He’s a sympathetic if unfailingly honest chronicler of their anguish. A reader doesn’t have to identify with the particulars of the women’s stories to appreciate how the consequences of fateful choices can reverberate down through the generations.

David Grossman is a sympathetic if unfailingly honest chronicler of the anguish of three generations of women.
FictionLiterary Fiction

All’s Well

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Miranda Fitch, the protagonist of Mona Awad’s third novel, All’s Well, might best be described—to borrow the title of the 1988 Pedro Almodóvar film—as a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. A professor of theater studies at a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts, she’s laboring mightily to stage a student production of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, which she thinks of as a “problem play,” one that’s “neither a tragedy nor a comedy. Both, always both.”

Apart from a rebellious cast, Miranda’s primary obstacle is unremitting pain from an injury she sustained when she tumbled from a stage during her promising but brief acting career. The resulting hip injury led to serious back problems unrelieved by the ministrations of a string of doctors and physical therapists, transforming Miranda, divorced and not yet 40 years old, into a pill-gobbling automaton who has abandoned all hope of her own happy ending.

All’s Well quickly leaves behind this depressingly naturalistic scenario to veer into the realm of fabulism when Miranda encounters three mysterious men in a local pub. The trio, who inexplicably have intimate knowledge of her life and struggles, grace her with what seems like a miracle cure. But as she discovers, even healing can come at a price.

Awad efficiently portrays both Miranda’s confrontation with chronic pain and the slowly evaporating patience of the people in her orbit (her ex-husband, Paul; colleague and friend Grace; and Mark, the last in a chain of physical therapists) with her lack of improvement. Anyone who’s been similarly afflicted or knows someone who has will recognize this scenario. Awad leaves it to the reader to assess how much of Miranda’s mental turmoil is the product of an inexplicable but desperately welcome truce in her battle with pain, and how much flows from her encounter with supernatural forces. It’s a wild, at times over-the-top ride, but like Shakespeare’s eponymous work, there’s both pathos and humor in this story of how we suffer and the ways in which we’re healed.

Awad's follow up to the acclaimed Bunny is a wild, at times over-the-top ride, but like Shakespeare’s eponymous work, there’s both pathos and humor.

Sign Up

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Trending Features

All Features