after long winter, books to celebrate spring

After difficult times, spring reminds us that everything is temporary, yes even winter and even spring.  Last spring was temporary.  This spring too - but yet it will return again and again.
There is nothing in the gnarled and blackened bark of a winter cherry tree to indicate that the next phase will be ephemeral delicate blossoms. 

After my son's surgery last week, we turned our thoughts wholeheartedly to the garden - to nourishing new growth and to reading books about gardening.

I was shelving this particular book at the store last week, when I decided to purchase a copy and bring it home.  It's a wonderful resource as we think about our garden - which lost a large silver maple earlier this year and needs a lot of TLC.

Jan Johnsen writes about focal points, points of drama and depth in the garden, about the mystery of a blue garden gate and making steps out of branches and using wood chips to cover them.  Looking though these pages is restorative. So is raking up branches, planting pots of seedlings, mulching and weeding beds.  You lose yourself in a garden and losing yourself is usually the best way to rediscover fulfillment and joy.


Another book that came my way is A Tree In The House by Annabelle Hickson.

 This book is extra special, since the author is my daughter-in-law Katie's sister.  She has an extraordinary eye for style and flower arrangement. She can make clippings from a roadside into a chaotic, exuberant arrangement. It always looks so wild and beautiful.  She and her family live on a pecan farm in New South Wales.  When we visited Australia for Alex and Katie's Australian wedding reception two years back, we took an unforgettable road trip - courtesy of Susanna and Rob - Katie's wonderful parents. For sure one of the most memorable parts of that trip was visiting Annie and Ed's pecan farm.

Katie and her nieces at the pecan farm

A Tree In The House is a feast for the eyes and spirit. It takes me back to that precious family time when I browse through its pages, looking at all the innovative arrangements for all occasions from wedding breakfasts to picnics.

the family in Annie's kitchen

  A Tree In The House is a slice of heaven in book form.


Finally, I just picked up a copy of poet CD Wright's posthumous book Casting Deep Shade.

I've never read anything quite like it. It's a homage to the beech tree -  to its spirit, its root system, its meaning for poets and its meaning for CD Wright.  The book is a beautiful object and a pleasure to hold in your hands. But I love the looseness of form here - poetry crossed with field notes, anecdotes, annotations.  It's funny and it's informative and it's touching.  Who knew the beech was such a complex and controversial tree!  You can browse this book or ponder it. As Ben Lerner says in the introduction "It is both CD's book and a loving tribute to her. To her strength and receptivity. "Beech bark is a tender thing."


#gardenbooks #treeinthehouse #gardentopia #castingdeepshade

books for the hospital waiting room

It's been a difficult week, but reading helped get me through it.   As I sat in a hospital waiting room while a family member went through a complicated surgery, there were hours to fill.  Many kinds of waiting experiences - waiting for a loved one in hospital; waiting for a loved one to be sentenced in a courthouse (ok - read my book I Know Where I Am When I'm Falling),  or even waiting in an airport departure lounge to board a long flight - have in common the odd mixture of boredom and anxiety.

When it comes to books at such times, I want one I can trust, one I can swiftly get into - and if necessary out of quickly.  But I also want something of substance.

So first I finished Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

It's written as a letter to a difficult mother who will probably never read it. It is painful and passionate, a story about identity about survival and loss. It's also about sex and coming out. “Sex can get you close to a boy. But language,” Vuong writes, “gets you deeper.”   Lines like that are plentiful in this exquisite novel. I found myself copying them down,  trying to hold onto them. This is a poet's debut novel and it cuts straight to the bone.

Who are the briefly gorgeous? All of us.  The temporal nature of love, of passion and of beauty makes this book so poignant.  Not only are the main character, Little Dog and his lover Trevor briefly gorgeous - but also Little Dog's mother and grandmother.  Their stories of leaving Vietnam, their emotional damage and vulnerability will break your heart. When his grandmother Lan is dying, she says, "I used to be a girl, Little Dog.  You know?... I used to put a flower in my hair and walk in the sun.  After big rain, I walk in the sun.  The flower I put on my ear.  So wet, so cool."

Later, Little Dog recalls stealing flowers for his grandmother from a field. Vuong writes, "It was beauty, I learned, that we risked ourselves for."

On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous is a knock out novel, elegiac in places, and I predict it will be big big big.  Release date is June, so put it on your list.



The day before my relative went into surgery,  I had the pleasure of hosting Amy Kempel for her new collection of short stories,  Sing To It.  

 In this week's New Yorker, James Wood said he couldn't get the title story out of his mind.  It's a story of less than 100 words, yet it gives us a whole relationship, in metaphors, in a gesture and in a proverb.  Amy Kempel is a master at economy. Like Vuong, she writes like a poet.  Her stories often read like prose poems.  She spoke on Sunday among other things - about paring down, about looking at each story and asking herself what she can leave out, what is necessary.  She also said that when she begins a story (and she often revises in her head), she always has both the first line and final line.

How is that possible, you wonder?

Most interestingly, she said she learned a technique of ending stories from the play 'Night Mother by Marsha Norman.  It's the penultimate line of that play that's the killer -  but the final line, which  looks like a throwaway, actually puts a finer point on the penultimate one.  I taught this play to my literature students many times, so won't spoil it here.  Just go and look it up!  You can rent an incredible film adaptation of the play starring Sissy Spacek and Anne Bancroft.

Oh, and let's not forget Amy Hempel's relationship to dogs.  There was a friend of hers at the store on Sunday, with his dog, and it was just so charming to watch their interaction, and to watch and be in the presence of Amy Hempel herself.  Such a joy to listen to her speak about craft.  We recorded the event at Politics and Prose, so it should be available on our website in a couple of weeks.


And finally  I want to mention another extraordinary novel of the same high quality,  one that also got me through the last few days. It's The Friend by Sigrid Nunez.

 Reading this book is like chatting with your most intelligent friend - touching on every subject of interest, from books, to writing, to teaching, and to love affairs.  And also, once again to dogs! In this book the protagonist adopts a great dane in her tiny Manhattan apartment, after the suicide of a dear friend.

 You can pick this novel up practically on any page and get from it substantive, intelligent, beautifully crafted writing.  Then if need be, you can put it down.  It was perfect for yesterday evening as I waited waited and waited some more, to finally see my beloved post surgery relative.

Books like these are breaths of fresh air and true inspirations. Hopefully they will also be that for you.

#sigridnunez #oceanvuong #amyhempel #singtoit

on making demands, and reading hotel du lac (VIDEO)

 Anita Brookner's beautifully observed novel Hotel Du Lac feels a bit like Thomas Mann crossed with Barbara Pym.  Edith, the protagonist is a romance writer vacationing off season at a "traditional establishment used to welcoming the prudent, the well-to-do, the retired, the self effacing, the respected patrons of an earlier era of tourism."  And although she intends to finish her latest book at the hotel, she finds herself distracted by her fellow guests who are all passing through their own kinds of psychological off seasons.

The most delicious residents are Iris and Jennifer Pusey, a mother and daughter, who in conversation "composed their past as deliberately as they did their present and to both of these one was expected, in some curious way, to pay homage."  Thus Edith becomes audience to their chatter about clothes and money from which she "doesn't withdraw or emerge untainted."

But get a load of this character description: "Iris Pusey was a star, and like many a star she could only function from a position of dominance. She held information at bay, so that Edith was not required to give an account of herself."

It is against this backdrop of virtual anonymity that Edith reassesses her relationship with a married man in London, with whom she's been having an affair. She writes him long letters. You can't imagine him reading them.  She tries to come to terms with her standing in his life.  "Is it because I am so meek that people fail to notice my demands," she wonders. "Or it is, even more simply, that I fail to make them."

Then  Mr Neville, another of the hotel guests, takes Edith out for an afternoon. She becomes quite chatty under his attention.  He alone, of all her new acquaintances, has observed her closely.  But conversation get a little too deep and he says something pointed and cutting.  "Suddenly there was an antagonism between them, as he intended," Brookner writes, "for antagonism blunts despair."

But there is more to come.  For having unmasked Edith's unhappiness and loyalty to the man she loves,  Mr Neville is about to reveal the secret to his own happiness.

"It is simply this," he says.  "Without a huge emotional investment, one can do whatever one pleases.  One can take decisions, change one's mind, alter one's plans. There is none of the anxiety of waiting to see if that one other person has everything she desires, if she is discontented, upset, restless, bored.  One can be as pleased or as ruthless as one wants.  If one is prepared to do the one thing one is drilled out of doing from earliest childhood - simply please oneself- there is no reason why one should ever be unhappy again...You have no idea how promising the world begins to look once you have decided to have it all for yourself," he concludes.

It's not a radical observation. But because of where it's inserted in the narrative,  directly after Edith's assessment of her prospects,  this one strikes a nerve.  Edith has never manipulated others in a selfish way, but prior to her visit to Hotel Du Lac we learn that she took a surprising stand.  It shifted the delicate balance with her lover and put too fine a point on things.

 She wonders if her hold on him rested on the fact that she had been less difficult than his wife.  Maybe she has just been "a rather touching interlude." But Anita Brookner seems to believe that those who behave like Mr Neville and the Puseys are in danger of turning their hearts into stone,  of becoming like Jennifer Pusey "as inexpressive as a blank window."

#anitabrookner #hoteldulac















 

say nothing

In 1972 during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, a group of intruders barged into the West Belfast home of Jean McConville, and abducted her.  She was thirty-eight years old, the mother of ten children, and she was never seen again.  It was not until 2003, several years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, that her remains were discovered on a beach.

Ten years after this, in 2013, Dolours Price, a front line soldier for the IRA, died.  But in a secret oral history endeavor called The Belfast Project, she had confessed to her involvement in the killing of Jean McConville - and - as this book explains, at the heart of the story is Gerry Adams, who ordered the killing. 

Yet it was Gerry Adams who negotiated peace in Northern Ireland.  What a complex figure he turns out to be.  Furthermore, neither Adams nor Patrick Radden Keefe could have predicted something like Brexit when he began writing this book. How ironic that Brexit might become responsible for finally bringing about a united Ireland.   

Last night, I had the immense privilege of introducing Patrick Radden Keefe at Politics and Prose Bookstore. I began following this story with the publication of his article "Where The Bodies Are Buried" in the New Yorker in 2015 and like many who read it, I never forgot it.  This is a stunning new book - and although I have only just cracked it open, I cannot wait to read it.

#saynothing #belfastproject #patrickraddenkeefe

on live in maids, Maid and watching "Roma"

Stephanie Land and her book  Maid

Reading Stephanie Land's book Maid and watching the deeply affecting film Roma has made me think a lot about my own experience with household help.   When my husband Ben and I joined the US Foreign Service, our first overseas assignment was in Caracas Venezuela. It was 1985. We moved from a shabby shoe box of an apartment in Crown Heights to a Venezuelan penthouse with several balconies and three full bathrooms in Santa Eduviges, Caracas.

 Life in Venezuela was good back then, so good in fact, that people regularly imported ice from Miami as well as scotch for their parties, from Edinburgh, Scotland.  If you asked for a cola - it was assumed you meant a whisky cola.

 Oil was flowing back then, and Venezuela had the highest per capita income of all other countries in South America.  Back then, Venezuela was the big success story that the US government cited:  Here is democracy in action, folks. Look how wonderful everything is.

And so, as a junior officer trainee and his pregnant wife, Ben and I moved from New York City to Caracas Venezuela and instantly entered the high life.  Our apartment overlooked the Avila mountains from several different balconies.  We were not just encouraged to, but expected to hire a maid.  At first we had a day maid - Euphemia from Trinidad who lived in the barrios, and came in to clean and iron for us three times a week. But after I had my first child, we hired a live in maid - Nelly, who not only cleaned, but who looked after my two year old daughter during my pregnancy with a second child, and then after when I had my newborn son.

Nelly was a wonderful spirit and a dedicated worker.  But at some point I realized that Nelly was illiterate. She always asked for books, and I was happy to provide them - as well as a typewriter.  But one day I came across a notebook she kept, where she had practiced writing, not just my signature  but also several random notes I'd scrawled. The rest of the pages in her notebook were just row upon row of scribbled loops.  I came to the terrible realization that Nelly could neither read nor write.

After our two year assignment in Caracas, we moved to Argentina, where we found a huge apartment in Plaza San Martin.  Here we had a succession of maids - but most significantly a live in maid called Maida - who arrived with her infant daughter.  The maid's quarters in our apartment were bigger than anything we had ever had in New York.  In fact, we used to joke that we would have paid good money for the small rooms Maida inhabited at the back of our enormous Buenos Aires apartment.

The building had a doorman and the apartment had an elevator running directly to our floor.  It had three huge reception rooms in front, with tall ceilings and French windows onto the balcony in front. There were corridors for those who lived in the apartment, not to be confused with the back corridors for those who worked there.  There was also a button on the floor in the dining room, to call in the maid  from the kitchen when it was time to clear the table during dinner parties.  The apartment had - wow, I'll have to stop and count now - one, two, three, no - four full bathrooms - all with bidets,  as well as a cloakroom - and of course the maid's bathroom in her quarters.

We paid Maida a lordly sum to live in our home and clean our apartment: that is, we paid her $200 a month.  We gave her food, lodging, clothes.  I gave her all my daughter's cast off clothing for her little girl Jimena.  Jimena was raised with my own children - watching television with them, playing games with them, growing up with them side by side.  Jimena even used to greet my husband Ben  when he came in from work with my children "Daddy," she cried!

But $200 a month? It's embarrassing to think about. And yet I was frequently taken to task by my Argentine friends for paying her so much.  We were living in Buenos Aires during the 1980s, during hyperinflation. We had decided to peg her salary to the dollar, for her own security.  At one point when inflation in Argentina was at 2000%,  Maida was making more than a surgeon. She was certainly making  far more than I was making as a university teacher in Buenos Aires!

My Argentine friends in the park would tell me I was spoiling her.   I was paying too much; treating her too well.  I was also taken to task for allowing her to call me by name. She should call you senora they said. It was shocking how permissive I was.

So when I watched the film Roma, I watched with a bittersweet feeling in my heart.  And when I listened to Stephanie Land at Politics and Prose last month, talking about what it was like to be a maid, I felt a pang of guilt about the role I had once played in this two tiered system - albeit in South America.

We pay people to clean up our houses.  To pick up our shit. To sort out our messes.  I have often thought it a bit of a nerve when people refer to their household help as "part of the family." Because part of the family they are certainly not.  Yes, they pick up for you, clean up your bathrooms, scub your floors and put your children to bed - but they are not in any way part of the family. They are not treated as equals. They are hired help. They do the dirty work.

I wonder sometimes what happened to Maida.  She left us when she became pregnant with her second child.  I remember her telling me what a pleasure it had been to work for us. And I will always remember her fondly.  She was patient and poised, efficient, gentle, and a beautiful presence in our home.

Since then I have also had household help when we lived in Moscow, in Brussels and in Rome.  But somehow those stories are less compelling - less resonant when I think about the film Roma.

I wonder what happened to Maida's beautiful little girl, Jimena -who grew up in our home, and was a companion to our son Alex.  Does she even remember us?  Maida named her son Lucas Alex - after my son Alex and his best friend Lucas at the time.   Jimena and Alex would play together every afternoon.  But  I'll probably never know what became of her, or where she is now. How could Itrack her down?  They lived in the barrios and Maida's husband was a little unreliable. Their lives were so precarious.


#roma #maid #stephanieland

stoner - a portrait of noble failure

Stoner by John Williams is one of those novels I've meant to read for years but only just got round to.  It's a quiet, elegantly written and tender portrait of a professor at a mid-western university in the first half of the 20th century.  His colleagues "held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, [and] speak rarely of him now."

William Stoner's life might be construed as a failure. But it's in his acceptance of failure that Stoner is successful. When he is dying,  he asks himself several times what did you expect.  Then he takes an inventory of the high points in his life: his marriage, teaching career, few friendships and brief love affair - the episodes comprising the arc of his story.

Early in the novel, his colleague David Masters describes university life as a "rest home for the infirm... and otherwise incompetent." He assesses Stoner's character like this: "You... are cut out for failure; not that you'd fight the world. You'd let it chew you up and spit you out, and you'd lie there wondering what was wrong.  Because you'd always expect the world to be something it wasn't, something it had no wish to be. The weevil in the cotton, the worm in the beanstalk, the borer in the corn. You couldn't face them, and you couldn't fight them; because you're too weak, and you're too strong. And you have no place to go in the world."

Stoner remains at the same university throughout his career, with only brief success. He has a long marriage, which except for a short (and rather odd) period of passion, is devoid of tenderness, understanding or connection. Then, he allows his wife Edith, a disturbed personality, to freeze him out of their home as well as out of a relationship with their daughter.

Stoner takes refuge from home at the university, but he's frozen out there too, by the department head, Hollis Lomax.  In both situations, Stoner has the moral high ground, but he buckles in to flawed and willful personalities.  He survives these blows, in that he keeps on going, living an ever diminishing role at home, and accepting a humiliating and constrained academic schedule at work.  There is one brief triumph  in his career - but ultimately that success passes into legend, and in the minds of his colleagues and students he becomes "a campus character".

Then there's his love affair with graduate student Katherine Driscoll.  The ardor between them is tenderly described, and the meeting of their minds over her doctoral thesis indicates that the relationship is fully satisfying to them both.  But he relinquishes Katherine for his marriage to Edith, a relationship that began and ultimately endures on superficial footing.

There's a lot of freezing out - a lot of winter in this spare and elegant novel.  But winter is connected to Stoner's most deeply felt moments.  Over the days he shares with Katherine, they walk nearly every day in the woods, despite the bitter cold.  Then, at the heart of the novel, there's an important turning point in a moment of crisis when "he found himself wondering if his life were worth living; if it had ever been."

He opens the window beside his desk and breathes in the winter air.  "He felt himself pulled outward toward the whiteness, which spread as far as he could see, and which was a part of the darkness from which it glowed, of the clear and cloudless sky without height of depth.  For an instant he felt himself go out of the body that sat motionless before the window; and as he felt himself slip away; everything - the flat whiteness, the trees, the tall columns, the night, the far stars -- seemed incredibly tiny and far away, as if they were dwindling to a nothingness."

There's a similarly beautiful moment at the end of the novel when "dispassionately, reasonable, he contemplated the failure that his life must appear to be.  He had wanted friendship and the closeness of friendship that might hold him in the race of mankind; he had had two friends... he had wanted the singleness and the still connective passion of marriage; he had had that too, and he had not known what to do with it, and it had died.  He had wanted love; and he had had love, and had relinquished it, had let it go into the chaos of potentiality."

What an extraordinary turn of phrase: the chaos of potentiality.

John McGahern in his introduction to the NYRB edition of this book,  calls William Stoner a "real hero" the importance, in his view, being Stoner's sense of a job.  "You've got to keep the faith. The important thing is to keep the tradition going, because the tradition is civilization."

But think of what he gives up. Stoner lets his influence over and love for his daughter slip away at the hands of his troubled wife.   He lets go of Katherine Driscoll so that she can live by herself and he can remain with Edith.  He continues to work at the university, flattened and demoralized by the department chair.

Yet it's in his passivity and insignificance, in Stoner's lack of consequence, that he is most at peace with himself.  Throughout the novel he remarks that his travails mean nothing.  That they don't really matter.  But he has a life of the mind and, with that, he has his own quiet dignity.


#stonerbyjohnwilliams

emotional risks and blighted lives in Lisa Gornick's Peacock Feast

Every so often you come across a novel whose emotional range and complexity defies summary.  The Peacock Feast is that kind of book.  Yes, the title is confounding because the image of a peacock with its fanned plumage is foreshortened when paired with the word feast. But this hints at important themes which are explored so beautifully in this intelligent and satisfying novel.

The story begins with a vulgar extraveganza of a party, a Peacock Feast given by Louis C Tiffany in 1916. The great men of the day were all invited.  Roasted peacocks were served on silver platters, their plumes used as decoration. Pretty girls and children outfitted as miniature chefs served up all the dishes.

But the repercussions of this party carry across a century, in the lives of Tiffany's daughter Dorothy - who becomes the partner of Anna Freud, and more importantly, in the family of Tiffany's head gardener.  This is a novel about extravagant lives that are emotionally destitute and emotionally complicated lives that are tragically blighted.  It's a story involving twins, servants, decorators, the aspirational and the filthy rich.  It's about lives cut short, families which are torn apart, and the people who end up picking up the slack.

The main character Prudence is 101 years old when her grand niece Grace appears on her doorstep. Her arrival causes Prudence to look back on and reevaluate her life.  Prudence, who in her younger days was an interior designer, decides that Grace is a woman who  "looks as if she shoos away beauty. A person for whom renovation would be possible but who has no desire to undertake it".    Yet Grace is a hospice nurse, accustomed to ushering people through that final transition.  Her work is "nursing in its purest form without hope of cure, with hope only of alleviating suffering."

We feel at once that Grace has an emotional depth Prudence lacks, in spite of  Prudence's physical affluence, and as the story progresses we understand that Prudence has been "a coward of the heart."

The story takes us from the Guided Age to a hippie commune in the 1960s, from San Francisco to Paris and to New York. It gives us bereft parents and grandparents, and dysfunctional kids. It gives us alternative choices followed through to their conclusions, with missteps and collateral damage along  the way.

"I want you to live - I want you to let yourself be touched, I want you to risk everything to find love," Prudence tells Grace at the end of the book.   But it seems to me that almost all the characters have taken their own kinds of risks. It's just that some paid off and others destroyed lives.

Lisa Gornick will be reading from her novel at Politics and Prose on February 10 at 3:00 and I will be introducing her.  I'll try to post something more after the event - but hopefully this has piqued your interest.

#peacockfeast