The contemporary West: It's not John Wayne country

We are in eastern Montana: "As the neighbor girl's SUV disappeared down the road, Wendell watched the tire-kicked dust bloom and sift through shades of gold, ochre, and high in the evening sky a pearling blue. Harvest light, late-August light—thin, slanted, granular. At his back the mountains already bruised and dark."

A social worker has dropped seven-year-old Rowdy Burns on twenty-one-year-old Wendell, the boy's only relative. Wendell is living in a trailer on what's left of the family's ranch land (the house remains, but it's unlivable), an orphan after his mother died a year earlier. Rowdy is "developmentally delayed," "variously involved," and, "hadn't said so much as a word since they'd found him" locked alone in an apartment on the south side of Billings for more than a week. His mother is Wendell's cousin on her way into prison for a drug bust.

Joe Wilkin's first novel, Fall Back Down When I Die, is told from three points of view: Wendell's; Gillian's, a forty-nine assistant school principal, single mother, whose ranger husband had been murdered ten years earlier; and Verl's, who writes a writing a fragmentary diary/letter to his son as he evades federal marshals while he hides out in the Bull Mountains.

This is Cliven Bundy country rather than John Wayne's, where this land is my land; it's not your land; and it's sure as heck not the government's land, which can go stuff itself. A land where a pickup truck will proudly wear a "Global Warming: Another Liberal Tax Scam" bumper sticker. This is Bureau of Land Management land "that had once belonged to the Crow, to the grizzly bears and buffalo. A land homesteaded less than a hundred years ago and abandoned not long after, a wilderness now of collapsed coal mines and yawing shacks, ghost towns not even old-timers could recall the names of, where the dry arteries of forsaken train lines bled into cactus and grass. A land leased and grazed and logged every so often but in large part empty, home to elk and antelope and mule deer, bobcat and cougar and coyote, and, for the past dozen years, a seldom-seen pack of wolves."

This is a novel rich in description, character, and incident. We learn how to prepare traps and set them. We see Gillian doing her best to bring education (civilization?) to her public school, one with so few students that to lose one is to threaten its existence. Both Wendell, as his guardian, and Gillian, as his teacher, want the best for Rowdy. But what is the best? What is the best for the land? To cut all the BLM fence wire and let cattle roam where they will? To exterminate the wolves before they can kill any lambs?

Wilkins was born and raised north of the Bull Mountains, out on the Big Dry of eastern Montana. His The Mountain and the Fathers, "captures the lives of boys and men in that desolate country, a place that shapes the people who live there and rarely lets them go." He is also the author of three poetry collections, most recently When We Were Birds, winner of the 2017 Oregon Book Award in Poetry. His work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Harvard Review, Orion, TriQuarterly, Ecotone, The Sun, and High Country News.

According to his website, Wilkins spent two years teaching ninth grade pre-algebra in the Mississippi Delta with Teach For America after graduating from Gonzaga University with a degree in computer engineering, an experience on which he draws in Fall Back Down When I Die. He then went on to earn his MFA in creative writing from the University of Idaho. He now lives with his family in the foothills of the Coast Range of western Oregon, where he directs the creative program at Linfield College.

With his background as a teacher, memoirist, and poet, Wilkins has written an exceptional first novel. It deserves to be read by anyone who is interested in the modern West, outstanding writing, and other lives.

How do you survive pain?

Ten years before Zeruna Shalev's novel Pain begins, Iris, the book's central character, was driving around stopped a bus in Jerusalem when a suicide bomber inside the bus set himself off. The blast literally blew Iris out of her car, and she spent months in hospital being stitched back together.

Today, inexplicably, pain has returned, first knocking her to the floor of the family apartment, then sending her to a pain clinic where a specialist alleviates her agony.

Iris is astounded to realize the specialist is Eitan, the boy—now a bearded man—who unceremoniously dumped her almost thirty years earlier when they were both seventeen. Does he recognize her as well? He makes no sign, but he must recall the two beauty marks on the left side of her navel. One kind of pain has been replaced by another.

I suspect many of us never recover entirely from our first love, the one we didn't marry. What would life had been like if we hadn't broken up? If she hadn't married someone else? If he hadn't been killed? Iris was devastated when Eitan dropped her; she spent two months in bed, virtually catatonic. Now forty-five, long recovered from the break-up trauma and the terrorist bomb, the wife of stolid, reliable Mickey, the mother of 21-year-old Alma and 17-year-old Omer, Iris is a school principal and a solid citizen. Or is until the brief meeting with Eitan in the pain clinic.

Eitan has retained his dead mother's apartment, a sanctuary in which to live after his second divorce. Because it was his mother's, Iris is able to track him to it. He is unencumbered; she is susceptible. Despite working exhaustively to rebuild her life and create a fulfilling and successful career, Iris's existence has been devoid of joy or passion since Eitan left her. Despite her guilt, they begin an affair.

One of Pain's many pleasures is Shalev's ability to convey Iris's physical ecstasy and her emotional joy in rediscovering Eitan's lovemaking. "There is no end to the words she yearns to say to him, and each word yearns to be said endlessly in a single sentence that is as long as her life. To her surprise he suddenly answers her, brings to speak as his body intertwines with hers, telling her of the first years after their parting, his voice growing hoarse, and she listens intently, devouring every whispered word until he can no longer speak."

It begins to appear that Iris will leave good old unexciting Mickey (who's more interested in playing computer chess than his wife anyway) for Eitan when she learns that Alma, who is living in Tel Aviv, has become a questionable guru's disciple. As Alma explains one of the man's teachings: "sex is a tool and you have to practice using it just like you practice using any tool, with no connection to love or physical need. For instance, last week, my exercise was to sleep with a different man every night in order to reach me." More pain for Iris.

That Shalev herself was wounded ten years ago in a terrorist bombing and is a talented writer gives Pain, her fifth novel, a certain authority. Shalev says about the apolitical themes she explores in the contemporary Israeli setting, "All the stories told in my books could have happened in other places too. They deal with universal themes of relations between parents and children, husbands and wives. My challenge is precisely to maintain sensitivity in a rough place, to depict nuance within an extroverted, aggressive situation, to describe the shadows rather than the glaring sunlight."

Because I do not read Hebrew, I cannot judge Sondra Silverston's translation other to say that it is smooth and convincing. I would not title a novel Pain for fear of putting off potential readers. The title is apt, however, and one can only hope that readers who are interested in a complex family tale of love, redemption, and disillusion are able to not put off. They will find pleasure in Pain.

Where is home when no one understands you?

Chia-Chia Lin, a graduate of Harvard College, has an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where she received the Henfield Prize, an annual award of $10,000 to a graduate fiction writing student. Her short stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Glimmer Train, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. 

Her novel, The Unpassing, published in May 2019, is up for a First Novel Prize at the Center for Fiction in New York City. It is so superior it raises in my mind an impossible question: How will she be able to write a second novel of equal—or higher—quality? Rather than fret over the unanswerable, however, we can take pleasure in The Unpassing we have in hand.

Lin's first-person narrator is ten-year-old Gavin, the child of immigrant parents from Taiwan who speak Chinese and Taiwanese at home. He has an older sister Pei-Pei, a younger sister Ruby, and a younger brother Natty. They live thirty miles outside Anchorage, Alaska, in a decaying house that stands by itself at the end of a gravel drive. "We had lived briefly in Michigan," says Gavin, "but my father had lost his job as a wastewater engineer. He mistimed our move to Southcentral Alaska; we could prove only five months of residence instead of six, and so we missed the first and largest payout from the Permanent Fund . . . which would have meant five thousand dollars." 

The mistimed move is just one of their father's problematic decisions. The five thousand dollars would have been manna to the family which, in the course of the novel, is evicted from their house. (Two weeks later they return to squat in it). When the book begins, Gavin and his classmates have been following the goings-on of Christa McAuliffe. The Challenger launch would be broadcast in class, but the day before Gavin comes home from school feeling sick. At home he roughhouses with Ruby and Natty . . . and falls asleep. He wakes up a week later. He has recovered from meningitis; Ruby has not.

"What happens when young children grieve a sibling?" writes Ruth Lefave in a Rumpus blog. "How do bereaved parents nurture their surviving children? Where is home when no one understands you? Even as Lin’s book explores these devastating questions, her magnificent prose builds an unflinching and ultimately endearing portrait of each character."

Lin does it by showing the characters interacting with each other and with outsiders and with the landscape. It is clear from the first page Gavin is writing as an adult: "During an uneventful part of my childhood, my mother walked into the room with a plate of loose, washed grapes. She collapsed." Gavin and his sister Pei-Pei who watch the grapes roll across the floor do nothing. When a minute later their mother sits up, she says angrily, "I was testing you. Why were you just sitting there? Why didn't you call for the ambulance? What kind of children have I raised? Tell me, do you want to be orphans?" It sets a tone for the entire book.

Gavin is trying to make sense of the world. Adults do things he does not understand although readers do. He makes the mistakes a ten-year-old would make. He loves his mother and father, Pei-Pei, Ruby, and Natty, even when he can be oblivious and when, to me at least, they are not lovable. The Unpassing's story at heart is simple: Ruby dies, the family struggles to stay afloat economically, the parents separate,  Gavin, Pei-Pei, Natty, and their mother leave Alaska. Lin, however, somehow manages to make this story engaging, dramatic, and compelling. 

She does this, of course, is through incident. detail, and language: "Ruby never stayed in her own bed; there was movement in these deep nigh hours. She drifted between our bed like a vagrant, favoring my parents' and Natty's. But once in a while she crawled under the covers with me. In the dark, she rooted in the folds of fabric; her fingers whittled upward. We held hands under my pillow, and within seconds we were out."

Here is Gavin holding Natty, "His fingers would not curl around mine, but he allowed me to hold his fist. For a long time I clutched it, the end of a livelier, the last tangible evidence I was not alone. I wiped my palms one at a time, transferring his fits between my hands. I felt like I was cradling a peeled egg. In the dark the stairs seemed steep, a tremendous way to fall."

When the Rumpus interviewer asked Lin what she's working on now, she said, "I can tell you what it’s not: narrated by a child, set in or near wilderness, a story about immigrants. I hope it will be funny. I’m also thinking about plot, for once. Basically, I want it to be as different from this book as possible." I look forward to it.

An actress in love and in trouble

Lucinda Yates is 28 years old, single, and a renowned Canadian actress at the beginning of The Indulgence, Leslie Hall Pinder's new novel. Cast as Hamlet, Lucinda is interviewed by Eva Ryder, a freelance journalist who happens to be lovely and seductive. They begin a passionate, obsessive affair. Lucinda would like Eva to leave her husband so they could revel in a less secret, less stressful liaison. Eva, however, is unwilling to  divorce Lance; the affair with Lucinda ends; and Lucinda begins a relationship with—and eventually marries—Jack, a therapist.

Thirteen years later, Lucinda, now even more renowned, remains childless and her marriage to Jack has hit a rough patch. Eva is now a world-traveling, successful writer and has a 13-year-old daughter Norma back in Vancouver, and is divorced. Norma, suffering from her mother's indifference and her father's emotional abuse, runs away repeatedly, ultimately hiding out for five days with Lucinda. Norma is reported kidnapped and when the police find her with Lucinda, Lucinda is accused of kidnapping and sexual abuse of a minor (she is, after all, immoral). The Crown prosecutor has a cause, and the press has fresh meat. The last section of the book covers Lucinda's trial for these crimes..

Pinder studied English at the University of Saskatchewan and Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. She received her law degree from the University of British Columbia and began practiced law in Vancouver in 1977. She was a courtroom litigator for 28 years. In her first job at a large firm, she was told she had to enter the firm's exclusive men's club by way of the servants' entrance because she was a woman. She went through the front door. Her employment ended.

The Indulgence is Pinder's fourth novel, joining Under the House, On Double Tracks, and Bring Me One of Everything. Margaret Atwood no less said an earlier book was a "haunting . . . novel by a writer of great talent and sensitivity. It treats a difficult theme with humanity and admirable complexity." If Atwood hadn't said it first (and better) I would have sad the same about The Indulgence. Here's an example of the author's writing: "A law firm on a Saturday had the feeling of a place where something counterfeit was being produced to send into the market first thing Monday morning."

My two paragraphs at the beginning of this piece do the author and the novel a disservice. They do tell you the story, but they do not begin to suggest the richness and complexity of the characters and their emotional lives. Nor have I mentioned a major character, Judge Terrance Semple who presides over Lucinda's trial. "Maybe he hadn't always been portly. He had the thin legs and barrel chest of a man past middle-age who had gradually become top heavy. He'd be tough to push over, so long as he was expecting it; but if he were taken unaware, or was especially tired, even a slight nudge would topple him. He often wondered how would he get up again."

Here's an example from several possible that evokes Lucinda's existence as an actress: "Shedding herself for a new life each night on stage was thrilling and Lucinda flourished. The problem was the ordinary. The theater was so intense, having to notice everything, respond to what another was doing, whether scripted or not; it took all her power. At home, she didn't want to be in charge of anything; blindness set in, even before the cocktail hour. Part of Lucinda' myopia was she didn't see that Jack had become a bit flat and predictable, in service to the exhilaration and exhaustion required of Lucinda's high wire profession."

Presumably because Pinder is writing from the inside, her evocation of the judge's thoughts and her report of the trial are persuasive. The text jumps forward and back in time and from Lucinda's to the judge's to Eva's point of view but the reader (this reader, anyway) never becomes lost. I thought Pinder was writing herself into a corner, into a situation where a last minute witness would have to appear to set everything to rights. But no. The Indulgence ends plausibly and satisfactorily and without a surprise witness.

What would you do if you lost all your memories?

Although I've now read Burhan Sönmez's Labyrinth twice, I'm afraid I'm going to have to rely heavier than I would like on the press material that accompanied the review copy (and, like the book, forgo quotation marks), mostly because the publisher's description says clearly what the novel is about and does not get lost in the maze as I might well have.

Turkish blues singer Boratin has attempted suicide by jumping off Istanbul's Bosphorus Bridge, which, crossing the Bosphorus Strait, links Asia to Europe. He has suffered a broken rib and almost complete loss of memory. The novel, translated by Ümit Hussein, is a stream-of-consciousness look inside a mind that doesn't know itself. Sönmez uses amnesia as a literary device to explore memory and identity, and what happens to a life when everything that makes up a person—his memories, opinions, thoughts—are stripped away.

The text switches between first- and third-person point-of-view as if Boratin is sometimes regarding himself as a figure independent of himself. As he does so he tries to reconcile who he might be (devoted son, responsible brother, popular musician, feckless lover) with the person people have known for years. In trying to rediscover himself—from how he likes his coffee to whose heart he's broken—he must rely on others to fill in the blank spaces. Trying to rebuild his life from the roots is more than difficult when his friends and family know much more about him than he does. Hearing snippets of his past, with no context or sense of how they fit into his life, is more frustrating that having nothing.

Wandering Istanbul's streets and exploring the crevices of a new (to him) home, Boratin wonders if it would be better to leave his past behind. He is afraid that if he were to recover old memories they will come with the feelings—knowledge? despair? anguish?—that led him to try to end his life. But without memories, what is he? Even as friends declare he was lucky—managing to escape whatever pain he'd been in, yet alive to create a new life and new memories—Boratin struggles to move forward in an unfamiliar life in a stranger's body.

The author, Burhan Sönmez, has written four novels; two others, Istanbul, Istanbul and Sins and Innocents have also been translated into clear English by Ümit Hussein (although I do not envy her chore in following Sönmez's Turkish). Sönmez was born in Turkey and grew up speaking Turkish and Kurdish. He worked as a lawyer in Istanbul before moving to England as a political exile. His Labyrinth explores the value of memories in how they form our identities, challenging whether it's our past or our future potential that forms its base.

Given the challenge Sönmez has set himself—to create a consciousness that is struggling to create a reality on a tabula rasa—the writing itself is clear and interesting. "Within the mute walls [of my apartment]. I wonder which of us has become forgetful, have I forgotten my house, or has my house forgotten me?"

A couple more examples: ". . . I regard even my own face in the mirror as a stranger. I'm like a blank sheet of paper. I have no inside and no outside. My east and west are hazy, as are my north and south. No matter where I step, I feel as though I am about to tumble into a void. I spend my days waiting for night to fall . . ."

". . . He remembers this taste, even though it's the first time he's eating simit [a small loaf of ring-shaped bread]. The brain works in strange ways. It's got me in the palm of its hand, without saying a single word to me. Who belongs to whom, do I own my brain, or does my brain own me?" (To that question I would ask: Who wants to know?)

Labyrinth raises more questions than it answers, which is not a criticism. It is worth, I believe, more than one reading. As a meditation on the meaning of life and the inevitable and cruel passing of time, it will not be to every reader's taste. But then, what is?

After this I want to read more Alice McDermott

The fall issue of the Paris Review has an interesting interview with Alice McDermott, a writer I'd never heard of, this despite the fact that she won the National Book Award for Charming Billy (l998), and her novel That Night (1987) was a finalist for another National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Her At Weddings and Wakes (1992) was also a Pulitzer finalist.

My ignorance would not, perhaps, surprise McDermott. Reportedly when she won the National Book Award, she settled her class of fiction-writing students by offering a hundred dollars to anyone who could name the previous year's winner. Not one of her M.F.A. fiction students could recall the book or the author. Such, such is fame.

Among the points that I found interesting is McDermott's remark that she always has two novels in progress, "in one stage or another. It's a terrible thing to do, don't do it. It just means it takes me twice as long to get one finished." She also remarks about sentence-making: "As soon as a sentence calls attention to itself, demonstrates how clever the author is, how astute, how talented, I know something's gone wrong." This is one of my complaints about much MFA writing; the sentences seek to dazzle rather than serve the story.

Now introduced to McDermott, I found her 2006 novel After This. It follows the ups and downs of John and Mary Keane, a Catholic working-class couple, from before they are married after WWII to the 1970s. They have four children, move to Long Island, John works, Mary has children and remains friends with a woman she'd known when she worked in an office in New York. During the course of the novel, the  family visits a Long Island beach. Mary and her daughter Annie go to the New York World's Fair. Jacob, the younger son, is drafted into the Army for the Vietnam war, and more, and more. It's a family saga in less than 300 pages.

Ordinarily I don't care for family sagas, so I'm trying to decide why I think I got sucked into After This and to explain why I think it's so excellent and certainly worth your time, especially if you are interested in writing yourself.

Ordinarily, I don't care for constant shifts in point of view, but McDermott does it and it did not bother me, but it added depth and diversity to the novel ( probably her point). She could not have told the story she tells without using multiple points of view, which is another way to say that the novel as it stands feels as if this is the only possible way it could have been told.

McDermott is able to use language to describe the world and the people in it in a way I find masterly. Here's the first paragraph in the book: "Leaving the church, she felt the wind rise, felt the pinprick of pebble and grit against her stockings and her cheeks--the slivered shards of mad sunlight in her eyes She paused, still on the granite steps, touched the brim of her hat and the flying hem of her skirt—and felt the wind rush up her cuffs and rattle her sleeves."

The."pinprick of pebble and grit . . ." The "slivered shards of mad sunlight . . ." The "rush up her cuffs and rattle her sleeves." It's not showy writing, sentences that say "Look at me! Look at me!" but tells us we are reading something special. And she's able to sustain it. Here's another sample paragraph I've taken from a random page toward the back of the book:

"In the vestibule after she left, there was the lingering scent of her perfume, a whiff of mothballs from her fur, and something else—the good wool of her skirt warmed by her hour on the upholstered dining-room chair? Annie, on her way upstairs to read Faulkner, said to herself 'the odor of aging female flesh,' and found some recompense in the phrase for the long, annoying dinner."

After This was a nominee for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, which Cormac McCarthy's The Road won. It had to be a a difficult choice for the committee. Me? I would have gone with the family saga over dystopia almost any day. McDermott's novel closes on a positive—although entirely earned and justified—note. I'm embarrassed it's taken me this long to find her, and I'll now read more of her work.

Trying to make sense of one's life (and a parent's)

Honor Moore has published three books of poetry: Red Shoes (2005), Darling (2001), and Memoir (1988). She is the editor of Amy Lowell: Selected Poems, of The New Women's Theater: Ten Plays by Contemporary American Women, and co-editor of The Stray Dog Cabaret, A Book of Russian Poems, translated by Paul Schmidt. She teaches in the graduate writing programs at The New School and Columbia University's School of the Arts. She's also written a singular memoir, The Bishop's Daughter (2008).

Honor was born in October 1945, the first child (of nine) of Paul and Jenny Moore. Paul (1919 - 2003) was "the beneficiary of vast wealth." His grandfather had made a fortune in corporate mergers at the beginning of the twentieth century, was a founder of Bankers Trust and US Steel. Paul grew up on an estate with horses and golf and tennis. He was sent to private schools, including St. Paul's in New Hampshire where a visiting priest was instrumental in encouraging young Paul to become an Episcopal minister—High Church Episcopal ("Bells and Smells Episcopal") a form of the church that would be Catholic except for the Pope.

Paul became a Marine captain in WWII, was wounded on Guadalcanal, and met and married Jenny while still in the service. Once he was mustered out, he enrolled in General Theological Seminary and in time became a Father and a father. The family moved to Jersey City where Paul became the pastor of an inner city church that they lived beside. They did not live in voluntary poverty, however. Honor writes that "the life they made in Jersey City was modest compared to how they could have lived, and they made a commitment to try to share the lives of those they ministered to."

Paul was so successful in building the Jersey City parish, he was invited to become the dean of the cathedral in Indianapolis and eventually became the bishop of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. At St. John's, as The New York Times obituary writer reported, "Bishop Moore spoke out against corporate greed, racism, military spending and for more assistance to the nation's poor, pursuing his political and social agenda in both the city and within the national Episcopal denomination. He was an early advocate of women's ordination and, in 1977, was the first Episcopal bishop to ordain a gay woman as an Episcopal priest."

Honor has a sure hand leading the reader through her family history so that we are never bored by the births, deaths, crises, and tensions within the family. It's an extraordinary story not simply because Paul Moore became an Episcopal priest rather than, as his family planned, a Wall Street banker or lawyer or because he had nine children. It's exceptional because he was gay. Or, if not gay, bisexual.

In The Bishop's Daughter, one senses Honor attempting to make sense of her father and her mother and herself as she writes. She is fairly candid about her own sex life: She was first sexually active with boys and men, then for twenty years with women, then she returned to men. As a child and girl she struggled, without saying as much, to obtain her mother's attention, but her mother had eight other children who also wanted their mother's attention, plus the usual responsibilities of being the minister's wife. Honor says in the memoir she spent years in weekly sessions on a psychiatrist's couch.

She write about her own discovery of Paul's homosexual desires and that her mother "became certain my father had lovers outside of marriage, and that the lovers were men. She made the discovery, I was told by a friend in whom she confided, not as the result of a single event, but from putting things together—a series of suspicions suddenly becoming in her mind enough of a certainty for her to consider leaving my father . . . " She did not, however, leave him; she died in 1973 and Paul remarried two years later.

For most of Paul's life, being gay was a stigma. The unanswerable question: How would his life had been different if he had not had to live much of it (a major part? an insignificant part) in the closet? Would Honor Moore and her siblings even exist? Unanswerable, and thankfully she does live on through her poetry and this remarkable memoir.

Trying to make sense among the surrealists

Courtney Maum has written three novels. Because I heard her speak at the Wesleyan Writer's Conference this summer, I looked up her second novel Touch, which was published in 2017. It's a fairly conventional story set in the near future; the self-driving car which ferries the narrator around New York City is virtually sentient. It's wonderfully well-written and in places made me laugh out loud. And while the surface is slick the underlying theme (message?) is serious: We are in danger of losing our humanity to our devices. Put down that damn cell phone and look at me! Touch me!

Maum's first novel, I'm Having So Much Fun Here Without You, was published by Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, so she started with a major publisher. G.P. Putnam's Sons, an imprint of Penguin published Touch, suggesting (to me at least) that Fun did not meet Touchstone's sales expectations. And although Touch was one of NPR's "Best Books of 2017"; a New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice; one of Glamour's "The 6 Juiciest Summer Reads”; one of the New York Post's “The 29 Best Books of the Summer”; and one Huffington Post's “24 Incredible Books You Should Read This Summer” I suspect it was not the breakout best seller Putnam had hoped it would be. Which brings us to Maum's third novel, Costalegre, published in July this year by Tin House Books, the publishing arm of the now defunct Tin House literary magazine, and hardly a giant publishing company.

Costalegre is so different from Touch in setting, mood, tone, situation, and story that one could make a case that they were written by different people who happen to share the same name. I suspect this means that some of the readers who loved Maum's first two novels are going to feel betrayed by Costalegre.

According to Wikipedia, "Costalegre is a series of different beaches, capes and bays of all sizes and extensions distributed along the Pacific Ocean on the western coastline of the Mexican state of Jalisco, in an area located between two other major and very well-known tourist centers, Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco and Manzanillo, Colima. In recent years, the Jalisco state government has promoted this zone as a tourist attraction, grouping all these beaches under the common name of 'Costalegre,' which literally translates as 'Coast of Joy,' but the area has been known as 'The Virgin Coast' of Mexico for a long time."

Costalegre is set in 1937. Leonora Calaway, a wealthy, thrice-married American art collector, has brought a group of surrealists to a Mexican resort to save them from a Nazi regime that certain artists, writers, and thinkers as "cultural degenerate." The book is a series of diary entries of various lengths by Lenora's neglected fifteen-year-old daughter Lara.

Lara is lonely, bored, and observant. There are no other children her age, and her mother forgot to engage another tutor for her. She fills her days as best she can: "I changed for lunch. Who cares. Sometimes it feels as if my beauty is this expected thing I must show up with, so I try not to, but I guess I'm vain, as well. I didn't want my mother to whine about how she would have preferred the white dress to the pink one, how my hair shouldn't be banned. Even Baldomero puts his word in: says when my hair's down, that it's striking. Legrand reaches for it, runs it through his stubby fingers. A treasure, he says. An international one."

Costalegre was inspired by the actual relationship between Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter Pegeen. I didn't know that when I read the book because I do not usually read the flap copy. Too often  it either tells me enough to spoil the story or is badly inaccurate. At the end of the book, however, in the note from the author Maum writes,"I researched maniacally for this project, until some of the experiences I read about became part of my own makeup. It is a testament to the personality of the American art collector Peggy Guggenheim and the artists she supported that so many of them felt moved to document their time creating—and promoting—art under her protection . . . ."

Because you've read this, you cannot not know that Lara Calaway is Maum's idea (notion? conception?) of Pegeen Guggenheim, and I don't know whether that makes Costalegre more or less satisfying to read. I do know that for all Maum's research, the novel does not read like a research project. It reads like the diary of a fifteen-year-old girl trying to make sense of a world drifting into a senseless war among a group of ex-pat artists and writers for whom "sense" is concept to be subverted. Without knocking the pleasure I found in reading Touch, I found Costalegre more thought-provoking and ultimately more rewarding.

Stories from the carnage

Alex Kotlowitz is an American journalist, author, and filmmaker, a writer-in-residence at Northwestern University. His book There Are No Children Here was a national bestseller and was named one of the 150 most important books of the twentieth century by The New York Public Library. It is the true story of brothers Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers, ages 11 and 9 trying to make it in a violence-ridden public housing project. The boys live in a gang-plagued war zone on Chicago's West Side. "If I grow up, I'd like to be a bus driver," says Lafeyette at one point. That's if, not when. The book's title comes from a comment made by the brothers' mother: "There are no children here. They've seen too much to be children."

Kotlowitz has now published An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago. In the introduction he writes, "Since the publication of [There Are No Children Here] in 1991, four of the kids I befriended have been murdered . . . The numbers are staggering. In Chicago, in the twenty years between 1990 and 2010, 14,033 people were killed, another roughly 60,000 wounded by gunfire. And the vast majority of these shootings took place in a very concentrated part of the city."

He decided to report on events in that very concentrated part of the city—the black and Hispanic part—over the course of a single summer, 2013. He wanted to write "a set of dispatches, sketches of those left standing, of those emerging from the rubble, of those trying to make sense of what they've left behind." There was nothing special about the summer of 2013 (and to provide context and conclusion to some of the stories, he occasionally has to go back and forward in time).  During those three months, "172 people were killed, another 793 wounded by gunfire. By Chicago standards it was a tamer season than most."

The stories are horrific, depressing, inspiring. We meet a man who as a teenager killed a rival gang member and who, twenty years later, is still trying to come to terms with what he did. We travel with a devoted school social worker who struggles with her favorite student who refuses to give evidence in the shooting death of his best friend. We spend time with a witness to a wrongful police shooting who cannot stop thinking about
what he has seen. We visit an aging former gang leader who has built a place of refuge for himself and his friends.

Kotlowitz evokes a society in which it is all against all. The most depressing story is that of Ramaine Hill who had been the victim of a shooting by a fifteen-year-old on a bicycle. Ramaine identified the shooter who was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Then for two years the shooter's friends tried to get Ramaine to recant, threatening him, offering money, even attempting to kidnap him. Then "a man in a red hoodie and red jogging pants, with a distinctive limp" shot and killed Ramaine. It happened at 1:30 in the afternoon on a Saturday in a public park. The police identified four witnesses. The police identified the shooter, but without witness testimony the prosecution had no case. Not one would testify. And given Ramaine's experience who would?

An American Summer is a description, not a prescription. "It's not a policy map or a critique," he writes. "It's not about what works and doesn't work. Anyone who tells you they know is lying . . . Antiviolence gurus insist they have the answers. I've seen one—the founder of a local program—take credit for the reduction of shootings in the years before his organization even existed. What works? After twenty years of funerals and hospital visits, I don't feel like I'm much closer to knowing."

So what you have in An American Summer in an incredibly well-reported and powerfully-written account of certain American lives in a certain American place at a certain time. It's an unforgettable account.

Why keep a daily journal

One of the people interviewed for the book, A Better World Starts Here by Stacy Russo, was Carol J. Adams who is identified as a writer who has a Master of Divinity degree from Yale Divinity School. One of the topics she talked about is the practice of keeping a daily journal.

Adams says that although she had made sporadic journal entries in the 1970s she was inspired to begin keeping a daily journal after she read Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way in 1996. Cameron suggests writing "morning pages," which actually came from Depression-era book Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande.

The idea, says Adams, is "you write when you first wake up in the morning. Now I know a lot of people do not handwrite any more, and that people are very busy in the morning; but this is often when the subconscious is closest to us, including remembering our dreams."

Within a month of beginning her daily journal, Adams read Morton Kelsey's Adventure Inward, and she quotes him: "It is important to remember that journal-keeping is a living process, like exercise. One does the same thing over and over to develop and maintain skill. Healthy living in body and soul and mind requires the constant repetition of certain practices." Adams says that when she gets up in the morning now she writes three or more pages in a dedicated journal.

She also rereads old journal entries. "I can go back to the journals from the time when I was caring for my mom, and there she is. If I miss her, I can go to my journal and find the sort of repartee that I had recorded just because I was recalling the day."

She says she writes the entries on one side of the page. "When I go back, I write the date at which I'm rereading it. And then I'll put comments on the other side of the page, so that the journal becomes something with which I'm interacting. I find a lot of serendipity related to which journal I decide to read at what time and how that intersects with what I'm experiencing as I read it. I think keeping a journal is one of the greatest gifts I've given myself."

I agree that keeping a daily journal is an invaluable exercise for anyone who wants to write. It's a way to capture observations, ideas, stories, experiences, snatches of dialogue. And while I do not return to my journal often, I have reread enough entries to realize what is most likely to interest my future self and improve tomorrow's entry. A journal is a gift you can give yourself—cheap, legal, and non-fattening.

A Better World: A great idea fumbled

A Better World Starts Here: Activists and Their Work sounds like a great idea for a book. The author, Stacy Russo, a community college librarian and professor at Santa Ana College, describes herself as a writer, poet, and artist. Her books include Love Activism, We Were Going to Change the World, Life as Activism, and The Library as Place in California.

Her idea: interview 25 activists in different areas about their backgrounds, ask them what set them on their activist path, and describe their organizations (or activism if they have no organization). A receptive reader may be inspired to become active, even to start her/his own organization. It's great idea for a book that could have been much better than it is.

Russo asks one soft-ball, bold-face question after another and apparently transcribes with light editing whatever she was told. These are questions like, "How do you continue to stay positive in your activism?" "Do you have any final thoughts on your work that you would like to share?" "Did you notice any differences with the treatment of women versus men in your field?" (The answer—surprise!—is yes.) The technique means that the interviews all follow a certain pattern and a certain blandness. A 300-page book of transcriptions by its very nature tends to be boring as opposed to a single page Q&A with an author, an expert, or a celebrity in a magazine.

I had another problem with the book: It's sometimes difficult to see how the interviewee is actually making the world better. The first interview is with a "trans activist/certified holistic life coach." This woman says that in 2017 she and a friend formed TranSpectrum, "a social and support group for people who do not identify as cisgender, the gender/sex they are assigned medically at birth, and those who are questioning their gender." But she's no longer leading the group, and I'd like to know what the group actually accomplished (is accomplishing). How does it support? How is it making the world better?

One interviewee is a feminist who had to abandon Orthodox Judaism to become one. But her story implies the world would be better if Orthodox Jewish women renounced Orthodox Judaism for feminism. It might be better for certain women—it apparently was for the woman Russo interviewed—but would it be better in general? It might be possible to make that case, just as it might be possible to make a general case for veganism, caring for elderly dogs, or publishing books like A Better World Starts Here (Russo interviews her publisher), but the book often assume the case need not be made. The goodness is self-evident. A skeptical reader, however, will on occasion want the case made.

The most rewarding interviews are with activists who have started an organization for which a need is apparent. Michelle Carrera began Chilies on Wheels on Thanksgiving, 2014 when she prepared fifteen vegan meals in her New York City apartment and gave them to homeless people on the street. The response was so strong, she realized the need was greater than she thought. "We have expanded to other cities and the amount of meals we have been able to provide keeps growing. Right now, we prepare about 100 to 200 meals each week in New York."

Steve Bell served nearly 17 years of an indeterminate life sentence in the California prison system. He had a BA when he was sentenced but realized in prison that a frightening number of the inmates are illiterate and that led to the Prison Library Project. Once Bell was released and discovered the organization volunteered with it. It has now grown to the point where, "we send out abut 30,000 free books to prisoners every year."

Sara Vander Zanden is now the executive director of Facing Homelessness in Seattle, whose mission is to "invite the community to be part of the solution to homelessness." And while this involves a number of activities, the most extraordinary (to me) is to actually build a small house for a homeless person in the back yard. of a host family (flipping NIBY on its head). "We think that someday it will be just as normal to think about your backyard as a platform for social justice as it is to think about your spare room as a potential income generator through AirBnB."

Inspiring as several of the book's examples are, I'd have preferred fewer and deeper stories. Over and over I wondered, where does the money come from? From grants? From foundations? What foundations? What are the major challenges you have to deal with? If you were starting again, what would you do differently? How do you find board members? Volunteers? How do you measure success? What are your results?

A Better World Starts Here is a great idea that is disappointing because it could have been so much richer, deeper . . . better.

You got a book inside you? Get it out

Ann Marie Sabath believes everybody has a book inside of them; all they need are forty-nine targeted tips to get it out. With that as a premise, she's written Everybody Has a Book Inside of Them: How to Bring It Out.

What Self-Made Millionaires Do That Most People Don't: 52 Ways to Create Your Own Success . . .  The Wealthy Gardener: Life Lessons on Prosperity between Father and Son . . . Business Etiquette in Brief: The Competitive Edge for Today's Professional . . .  and One Minute Manners: Quick Solutions to the Most Awkward Situations You'll Ever Face at Work.

Sabath is writing from the inside. Although she's the founder of At Ease Inc. a 32 year-old business courtesy training firm, she's written nine other books including most recently,

Everybody Has a Book Inside of Them, a 177-page paperback, has forty-nine very short chapters, many answering a question: Are you ever too young or too old to write a book? (No.) Why write a book in the first place? (Nine reasons, including sharing your expertise, the book acts as your legacy, it will help you brand yourself, it can help generate additional income, and more.) How long does it take to write a book? (Sabath's answer: writing an hour a day for thirty-two weeks will give you a 180-page book.) How soon is too soon to write your second book after writing your first?

Most of the chapters, however, are common sense advice: How to identify the book inside. The value of a sounding board advisory group. Know your reader. Ways to stay motivated. Six things NOT to do with your manuscript. (Keep the only draft within reach of the dog. Give the only copy to an angry spouse. Give family members easy access to your manuscript. Store your only copy in a spot subject to flooding. Give your only copy to someone for review. Forget where you put the only copy. To which one should add: Don't back up routinely.)

Sabath has heard all the excuses why someone doesn't write her book: "I have no idea where to start." If you're reading her book, she points out, you've started. "I don't have the time to dedicate to writing a book." That's just a way to say writing your book is not a priority. "English was not my favorite subject." So what? "I would feel vulnerable writing a book." Then think twice about your topic. "I don't have the discipline to write a book." Do you the discipline to do other things, like getting to work on time? Paying your bills? Give yourself some credit.

One of Sabath's more interesting chapters (for me) itemizes the contents of her grab-and-go tote: two iPads, earbuds, iPhone, two power cords, a charging base, two pens, a small notebooks, snacks, a bottle of water, and business cards.

One of the few quibbles I have with her book is her chapter on titles. She encourages readers to trademark their catchy title to protect it and the licensing rights, recommending a trademark attorney. She does not point out that trademarking a title—if you can do it at all—is both time-consuming and expensive. She also does not note that you cannot copyright a title, so because there is no ® indicating that she's registered her title you're free to call your book Everybody Has a Book Inside of Them: How to Bring It Out (although why you would so when there's a perfectly good one available is another question).

Also, Sabath says nothing getting your book published. That's her next book: How to Get Your Book Published and Sell It as Though Your Life Depends On It. No kidding. She has a two-page chapter titled "Why the 'How to Get Published' Section Is Not Being Addressed in This Book."

With those caveats, I recommend Sabath's How To to anyone who believes she has a book inside her and simply needs a nudge—or two—to just do it. (Hey, that's not a bad title: Just Do It: How to Free the Book Within You.)

A memoir, a history, a meditation all in one

Debra Gwartney's I Am a Stranger Here Myself is a memoir, a history, and a meditation. It is extraordinary and in the month between reading it and writing this, I've recommended it to a dozen people. One of my fears, in fact, is that I will praise it so fulsomely that readers who pick it up will inevitably be disappointed.

Gwartney (says the publisher's news release) is the author of Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love, a finalist for the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the coeditor of Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape. She teaches in Pacific University's MFA in Writing program and lives in Western Oregon.

She is a fifth generation Idahoan, someone who grew up in a family that embraced certain Western values: "Keep the government out and the guns close by. Remember that the land is your land to use as you want. Tromp into the woods, camp in the wilderness  . . . . Let no strangers in," These are values Gwartney rejects entirely as a late-middle-aged white and left-leaning woman. The tension between her childhood in small-town Idaho and her adult awareness of impact of the white settlers and US Government on the land runs as a thread through the book.

She evokes her childhood. Her father impregnated her sixteen-year-old mother when he was fifteen. They married and apparently the two sets of grandparents loathed each other. Her father managed to move the family out of Salmon (pop. 3,000) to Boise, "so he could become the family's first executive for a corporation; he was the first man in our clan to toss off terms like pension and stock options."

But Gwartney weaves into the memoir the history of Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, "the first Caucasian woman (so say the history books) to cross the Rocky Mountains, the first white woman to give birth to a white baby on the frontier (same history books). A missionary killed by the people she aimed to convert—her death, some say, changing the course of the settling of the West."

In 1836, Narcissa and her husband Marcus set up a mission along the Oregon Trail about eight miles from current day Walla Walla, Washington, in the Columbia River basin. They had come to bring Christianity to the Cayuse Indians and to provide a rest stop for settlers continuing west. Marcus named the mission Waiilatpu, "home of the ryegrass people," to honor the Native people whose traditional grounds he and Narcissa settled on.  Gwartne writes, "Tall grasses and bullrushes--tule sedge that the Cayuse used primarily to cover their long houses—were imperative to the tribe's way of life, a fact that Marcus, in what strikes me as one of his first acts of colonial indifference, ignored." He burned the grass, churned the soil, planted a garden, established an orchard, and sowed acre after acre of wheat to provide for the mission.

To discourage the Cayuse from taking the melons from the garden the Whitman's coated the melons with a drug that made the Indians sick. Worse, Marcus presented himself as a doctor, but he could do nothing to save the Indian children who died from the measles that came with the settlers. After nine years, the Whitman's had not converted a single Indian, and in 1847 a small band of Cayuse attacked the mission, killing Narcissa, Marcus, two girls, and a dozen men and boys.

Aside from relating key events in her life (almost dying on a Salmon River rafting trip; her father's recover after being crushed by a horse) and the inherent interest in Narcissa's history, I Am a Stranger Here Myself is wonderfully well written. Here, taken at random, is an example:

"In her journals and letters home, Narcissa, without a waver, asserts that she and Marcus were doing exactly what was necessary to teach the Cayuse a different way of being. The Cayuse had little interest in such instruction, but Narcissa went on instructing, and she went on insisting, for one thing, on a new notion of boundaries. Narcissa, like my great-grandmother Hazel would some sixty-some years later, stashed a rifle on the porch to warn Native people away front door and vegetable patch, and in the permanent house that Marcus finally did build to replace their first sod dwelling, she made sure an 'Indian room' was tacked on toward the back, the one space the Cayuse (though only those dressed in western clothing and recently bathed) were allowed to enter, to keep their muddy feet and sticky hands, their stinking bodies, from her parlor."

I Am a Stranger Here Myself is a moving and powerful corrective to the heroic story of the dauntless pioneers who Won the West. Gwartney, her Idaho family, Narcissa and Marcus a human beings, strangers in a strange land, as are we all.

"The Magazine" reveals skulduggery at a magazine

Kasia Moreno and her husband Hugo each have a couple decades of experience working at financial magazines such as Forbes and SmartMoney. (I'm quoting their book's biographical note; my fact-checking staff is on vacation this week.) With that background, they apparently thought, why not write a revenge thriller in which virtually all the main characters are connected to a financial magazine that is arrogant enough to call itself The Magazine?

The Morenos' novel, titled The Magazine, begins with a change at the top of the magazine's masthead on June 13, 1997. (The chapters are all dated to help readers keep track of the pell mell activity; the book ends on October 9, 1999.) The editor-in-chief is stepping down and, to select a replacement, he asks each of four candidates on the staff to come up with an outstanding story and may the best reporter win.

Rebecca, one of the candidates, sniffs out a potential blockbuster and works flat out for more than a week, ignoring sleep, ignoring food, barely drinking enough liquid to remain functional, and ignoring her widowed father's phone messages. (He's gregarious; she's focused on her story.)

At the end of the editorial competition she learns the fix was in from the beginning. The outgoing editor had chosen a successor before the contest but used it to spur the four reporters to outdo themselves for the next issue. Rebecca gets more bad news: Her beloved father had been one of many terminated at his long-time employer after Tom Richardson, a billionaire hedge-fund manager bought the company. The father who'd been trying to reach his daughter all week to tell her he'd lost the job he loved terminated himself by jumping off the company's roof. Rebecca. shattered, quits The Magazine to work for its competition.

Tom Richardson is handsome, middle-aged, wealthy, and currently single. Twenty years earlier at Yale he had an affair with an Africa-American fellow student that  resulted in a daughter, Kimmie. Richardson supported Kimmie and her mother but had no contact with the girl who, early in the book, shows up at his Fifth Avenue penthouse apartment. Kimmie, after a stint at Morgan-Stanley, obtains a reporting job at The Magazine. 

The book's fourth main character is Helen who, when she isn't named editor-in-chief, apparently becomes The Magazine's managing editor. She meets Richardson, they fall in love, and he asks her to marry him.

So, the pieces are on the board and the game's underway: Rebecca wants to avenge her father's suicide by destroying the man who inadvertently (indeed, unknowingly) caused it: Tom Richardson. Kimmie wants to punish her father for his years of neglect. Helen wants to protect her finance.

Because the Morenos are writing from the inside, virtually all of the information about financial reporting and life on a national magazine ring true: how you find stories, relationship with sources, editorial idiosyncrasies (I myself had an editor who made changes at the last moment just because he could), and more. And because the book is set at the end of the 1990s, The Magazine's publisher does not yet have to lose sleep over the internet and what it is going to do to advertising and circulation.

The novel does raise a question: What is the point of it all? The Magazine's readers are, presumably, looking for an edge. an insight that a skilled reporter can tease out of SEC filings, analysts' reports, hints, and rumors. With the insight investors can confidently buy more stock, sell what they have, or short it in the expectation the price will drop. But how, the disinterested reader might ask, does this add to the country's wealth? It doesn't add to the country's stock of scientific or technological knowledge. It doesn't build a house, school, hospital, bridge, transportation system, or anything else. But that's a subject for another book.

The Magazine held my interest all the way through and not only because I have a background in magazine publishing myself. By the time I began to be less willing suspend my disbelief in the Morenos' complex plot I was hooked. How do you destroy a billionaire who can (and does) recruit one of the best private detectives in New York City and has an army of lawyers? How does a crack reporter protect her story from another crack reporter? How do you booby trap a loft apartment with nothing more than a screwdriver? Read—and enjoy—The Magazine to find out.

Why writers should listen to Daemon Voices

Philip Pullman, the author most famous for the His Dark Materials trilogy, has collected thirty-two essays, speeches, and introductions in Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling. He wrote the oldest in 1997, the newest in 2014. While there is a certain amount of inevitable repetition, they are all fascinating. Here's a working writer letting you into his head for 436 pages to show you what he's learned about himself as a writer and what he knows about storytelling.

As the editor's introduction points out, Pullman is interested in the discoveries of science, the freedoms of democracy, the evils of authoritarianism, the pitfalls of education, the arguments of religion, and "above all, in human nature, how we live and love and fight and betray and console one another. How we explain ourselves to ourselves." The essays all have a single theme however: storytelling.

To make such a variegated miscellany more accessible, the book includes a Topic Finder (and an index) to group together essays which touch on the themes. Topics include Children's Literature;  Education and Story; His Dark Materials; My Other Books; Reading; The Writer; and The Practice of Writing.

You need not have read Pullman's trilogy—The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass—to enjoy Daemon Voices. (Although if you haven't, I recommend you do for the trilogy's own reward.) Rather, if you write fiction or aspire to write fiction, you can cherry-pick Daemon Voices for the insights it can give you and, ideally, help you become a better writer.

For example, Pullman believes the basic storytelling question is: "Where do you see the scene from? What do you tell the reader about it? What's your stance toward the characters?" One way to avoid the difficulties these problems cause "is to use a first-person and present tense way of telling the story . . . So I'm not surprised when writers choose the present tense, because it helps them to feel neutral, uncommitted, objective, and to avoid making the wrong choice of camera position." But the writer is not neutral, uncommitted, objective. Not ever.

"You privilege this over that by the mere fact of focusing on it," say Pullman. "What you give up when you write in the present tense is a whole wide range of stuff that you could say, and which is available to you through the grammar—the rich field of time itself, continuing time, or intermittent time, or time that was and now is no longer, or time that might come one day."

Pullman uses the metaphor of the wood and the path to talk about stories. The wood—or forest or jungle if you will—is all of reality, the place in which anything can happen. It is everything there is, or might be, or is not but we write stories about anyway: space aliens, ghosts, travel between alternate universes, even (pace Philip) God.

The path is structure. It leads from here to there, and even when it doubles back and crosses itself it has a purpose. "Each novel or story is a path (because it's linear, because it begins on page one and goes on steadily through all the pages in the usual order until it gets to the end) that goes through a wood," he writes. "The wood is the world in which the characters live and have their being; it's the realm of all the things that could possibly happen to them; it's the notional space where their histories exist, and where their future lives are going to continue after the story reaches the last page."

As a writer, I find these ideas (just a snippet from the book) useful. Where does the story start? In what wood does the story take place? To cite examples from my own writing: In Cleveland hotel room? A Japanese town? A New York City housing project? And what does the reader need to know about this particular woodland? How little is not enough and how much is too much?

I have told writing students who didn't know better that there are no rules in writing fiction (or, there are only two rules but no one knows what they are). Pullman argues there are rules, the first is that stories must begin. You can begin anywhere, but if you start with pages describing the weather, or the history of Charles II, or the recipe for beef Wellington without any reference to human involvement, it's probably not the most engaging way to begin.

Another rule concerns consistency. Would "such-and-such a move violate a unity or destroy a mood or contradict a proposition?" If, two chapters from the end of the book, the detective is suddenly able to read minds, you've violated this rule even if it makes it easier to solve the murder. Pullman also argues for consistency of tone. And he says one rule is so important he's written it on a piece of paper and stuck it above  his desk: "Don't be afraid of the obvious." Writers violate this rule when, in an effort to avoid stock situations, stereotyped characters, and second-hand plot devices, they no longer tell a story but instead make it perfectly clear they they're "too exquisite and fastidious to be taken in by any trite common little idea." How often have you read a book where the writing—the sentences, the vocabulary—is more vivid than the story?

You may not agree with every one of Pullman's ideas, but I believe they are all worth considering. I found Daemon Voices so rich, so thought-provoking I plan to read it again.

Is that a rhetorical question I see before me?

Here I've probably been writing polyptotons much of my adult life and never knew it. And would not have known had I not read The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase by Mark Forsyth.

Forsyth is the creator of The Inky Fool, a blog around words, phrases, grammar, rhetoric, and prose. He attended Winchester College in Winchester, Hampshire, England and studied English language and literature at Lincoln College, Oxford University. His earlier books—both worth perusing—are Etymologicon, "the meanings and derivations of well-known words and phrases," and Horologicon, "weird words for familiar situations."

The Elements of Eloquence concerns itself with the figures of rhetoric, "which are the techniques for making a single phrase striking and memorable just by altering the wording." Most chapters are short, an explanation of the rhetorical element with examples.

For example, a polyptoton is "the repeated use of one word as different parts of speech or in different grammatical forms." To demonstrate, Forsyth explicates: "Please Please Me is a classic case of polyptoton. The first please is the interjection, as in 'Please mind the gap.' The second please is a ver meaning to give pleasure, as in 'This pleases me.' Same word: two different parts of speech." Shakespeare did it all the time.

The 39 chapters cover everything from Alliteration to Zeugma with stops along the way at Anaphor, Anthesis, Merism, Synaesthesia, Aposiopesis, Hyperbation, Diacope, Metonymy and Synecdoche, and more. And more. And more. (Which is an example of Epizeuxis.)

I am afraid that by listing these elements by names you're never going to remember (except maybe Alliteration, Rhetorical Questions, Paradox, and Hyperbole), I am misrepresenting the book. Making it sound academic and dull. Au contraire!

Forsyth is clear, informative, engaging, and fun. The examples are apt and useful. It's a book serious writers should look into every year or so to recall just what Isocolon is and how to use it in their own work. And for word lovers, The Elements of Eloquence is a treasure. Not to mention a hoot. Which is an example of something else, but I'm too lazy to look it up.

Bones of the Earth: Corruption in high places

Bones of the Earth is Eliot Pattison's tenth Inspector Shan Tao Yun mystery, the second this blog has reviewed. I reviewed first in the series, Skeleton God about two years ago.

Inspector Shan is Chinese, but he was too diligent and honest for his own good in a Beijing investigation and ended up in a work camp in Tibet where he added Tibetan to his native Mandarin Chinese and English. Over the course of the series, Shan has gained the protection and grudging respect of Colonel Tan, the Chinese Army officer who essentially rules Tibet. As a result, Shan has not only been released from the gulag, but been appointed the constable of a backwater village.

Bones of the Earth gets underway when Shan is required to witness the execution of a corrupt Tibetan   engineer. But was it an execution or was it judicial murder? The dead man had been working on the Five Claws Dam, a huge hydroelectric project in Colonel Tan's territory. When something does not seem right and Shan looks at the case file, it's obvious to an experienced investigator that the dead man was framed. And Tan, concerned that something he does not control is being built in his fief, not to mention a dead man found in a train car carrying military material, appoints Shan Special Inspector  to inspect matters.

It becomes clear almost immediately that the Five Claws project is problematic. The valley the dam's water will flood is sacred to Tibetan Buddhism. An American religious archeologist and her Chinese professor have died in a dodgy car accident. The project is destroying a couple thousand years of Tibetan history--and the site's geology is not ideal for a dam anyway. What's going on?

Shan has to figure that out while dealing with the Five Claws project director and his assistant, with the Public Security Bureau (the police), with the Bureau of Religious Affairs (charged with protecting indigenous religious artifacts), with the People's Liberation Army, with the 404th People's Construction Brigade (Shan's former prison unit and currently his son Ko's), with Tibetan patriots, and more and more. Shan has Colonel Tan's support, but given all the currents and cross currents in his world, that may not be enough to bring villains to justice.

Pattison says he first traveled to China less than a month after relations were normalized between Washington and Beijing. He worked as a lawyer helping companies understand how to invest there. "My work became a platform for me to meet people at all ranks in the government, from ministers on down, as well as a chance to mingle in the streets of cities and towns throughout China and traditional Tibet."

He says Shan became an amalgam of many people he met, "people who have endured, preserving traditions, family, and integrity despite tremendous, sometimes violent, pressures to abandon them. These include professors sent to prison for possessing Western literature, officials whose lives were ruined because they declined to be cowed by the Communist Party, herders who were forced into factory jobs, then eventually, often illegally, found ways to return to their beloved pastures, and, of course, monks who survived incredible adversity to maintain their faith and identity."

Pattison probably cannot return to China—or Tibet—given his descriptions of the Chinese depredations. Here, from Bones of the Earth, is Shan regarding a cache of illegal texts: "Tibetan books were all hand-printed, their carved wooden printing plates carefully guarded and treasured by generations of monks. Religious Affairs had not only destroyed millions of such books but also scores of thousands of printing plates, making bonfires of the often centuries-old carvings, which meant that there were probably books on Tserung's shelves that were the only one of their kind surviving, never to be printed again . . ."

One pleasure of Bones of the Earth is the incidental information the book conveys about Tibet, Tibetan Buddhism, and the texture of daily life. But the main pleasure is to follow Shan as he tries to maintain his own integrity in a broken, corrupt, and dangerous world.

Read "Early Work" for the language, not the story

Andrew Martin's novel Early Work was a New York Times "Notable Book of 2018": "This marvelous debut novel, about a male writer's romantic entanglements, is like a restaurant dish that presents multiple preparations of a vegetable on the same plate—'beets, three ways'—to capture its essence. Early Work is books, three ways."

The narrator, Peter, an MFA graduate in his early 30s, has followed Julia his girlfriend of five years to Charlottesville where she is attending the University of Virginia's medical school. They'd met as undergraduates at Columbia, and Martin's description of her is a nice example of his writing and an illustration of the narrator's perceptions and attitudes:

". . . she was brilliant, the smartest person in the class, the smartest person I'd met at school, the smartest person I'd met. She was five foot nothing but looked taller because of her long neck and excellent posture. Under that neck, she was all breasts and hips—there was no room for anything else. She had long, curly blond hair, colored, I learned later, a few shades lighter than it was naturally, and defiantly puffy cheeks that went from a default rosy pink to bright red when she was even mildly embarrassed or drunk. She sang in an early music group, despite the fact that she was a half-Jewish atheist. She was in it for the tunes."

Peter and Julia have rented a house in Virginia, acquired a dog, and Peter has found a job as an adjunct writing instructor in a community college with an extra gig, teaching a class in a woman's prison. They have a companionable sex life, watch television, go to the movies, live almost like young (childless) marrieds. Julia works six days a week; Peter tries half-heartedly to write.

In Chapter 1 they go to a party at the gigantic house in horse country of a recent acquaintance where on page 4 he meets Leslie: "In that first long look couldn't help but notice that she didn't seem to belong in her delicate flowered sundress, that her strong, tanned arms and shoulders were positively bursting out of it . . . She looked like a wild creature that had been hastily and not entirely consensually bundled into something approximating midsummer southern chic." On page 93 he and Leslie finally have idyllic, romantic sex.

With the casual sex, the drinking, the vaping of pot, the irony, the knowingness, I suspect Early Work is a faithful picture of a certain slice of young America and their attitude toward life: " . . . the gaping maw of the future suddenly [was] before me. I spent so much time on the daily logistics of just staying alive that I often went weeks without remembering that I had no idea what I was doing with my life. I knew, because I'd been told, that passivity was not a quality to aspire to. But I thought it was possible that there was some secret nobility, a logic, in letting the tides of life just knock one around, in keeping the psychic ledger balanced."

I've quoted so much of the text because Martin's sentences, paragraphs, and dialogue (take my word on the dialogue) are so apt—intelligent, astute,  clever. The novel held my interest all the way through and I enthusiastically recommend it for the language and perceptions. The story, not so much: boy cheats on his long-time girlfriend, takes up with a provocative if vexing woman, and follows her to Montana. One could read Early Work as the narrator's 240-page justification for his actions, actions that many readers will find inexcusable anyway.

I was also struck by the fact that Julia is the only character in the novel who seems to have a goal or a direction in life. She wants to be a doctor and, from what we're given, we believe she will become one even if it means graduating with a mountain of debt. Peter, as quoted above, has no idea what to do with his life other than drink, get stoned, have sex. Leslie, like Peter, is an author manqué, although by the end of the book, Martin hints that Leslie in Montana may actually be able to publish something. Conceivably, it's the book we've just read.

Moral lessons in a business book—and not an oxymoron

Jeff Holler is the founder and owner of The Capital Chart Room LTD, an SEC Registered Investment Advisor, which is registered to provide advisory services in Texas and Oklahoma. He says he wrote Bigger Than Business: Real-world Stories of Business Owners Living Their Purposeto help readers understand what it means to have a purpose bigger than business and “how you can fully live that purpose in and through your business.”

The stories include a Texas carpet company, an Australian psychology clinic, a Brazilian agricultural implement manufacturer, a Tennessee crane and rigging company, a Rwandan sewing cooperative, an Indonesian palm oil corporation, a German pressure gauge manufacturer, and the American craft goods retailer Hobby Lobby. 

All are family-owned; most are large: Rasa Floors revenue was $78 million in 2017. Barnhart Crane and Rigging has over 1,100 employee in 47 branches. Hobby Lobby has about 800 stores, 37,000 employees, and revenue of around $4.7 billion in 2017.

Most started modestly, and through hard work, integrity, and customer service they prospered. The ten core values of Brazil’s Jacto Agricola are representative of all eight organizations. These are three “virtueties” (honesty, humility, simplicity); customer satisfaction (the company’s “reason to exist”); hard work; social and environmental responsibility; training and promoting from within (“if you entice someone away from another company, you are coveting; it is a sin”); recognition the larger ecosystem (customers, dealers, suppliers, partners); promote innovation; avoid debt; honor commitments; and “transfer these core values to the next generation of leaders, managers, and workers.”

Several themes run through these stories that every leader of a small business could follow with profit: Treat customers honestly and fairly. Treat employees honestly and fairly; high turnover increases the cost of doing business and reduces customer satisfaction. Cap executive salaries; it is difficult for management to make the case that we’re all in this together when the CEO earns 361 times what the average worker earns. (Hobby Lobby not only capped executive salaries, but raised the company’s minimum wage to $15.24 an hour by 2015.) Avoid debt; with cash in the bank the business can withstand business reverses and afford opportunities. When in trouble, seek outside help; in my experience too many entrepreneurs do not ask for help until it’s too late. Prepare for the future; few family businesses survive past the third generation.

We read that more and more young people want to work for an organization that is purpose-drive when the purpose is more than simply increasing revenue, growth for growth’s sake, and plundering the earth and polluting the planet. What makes Bigger Than Business so interesting is that Holler describes a world in which chance, luck, coincidence do not exist. Everything that happens is part of God’s plan. 

If your new Suburban filled with Christmas gifts catches fire and burns to the frame it is “a strong and clear message from God.” If your company fires you, it’s because “God had other plans” (to bring you back as president sometime in the future). When the company runs into troubles serious enough to threaten its existence, “God also helped me realize that I could not let our problems ruin the organization by overreacting.” When the Green family decided that Hobby Lobby would not pay for federally-mandated employee insurance that covered embryo life-terminating drugs and devices and filed a lawsuit (which they won in the U.S. Supreme Court), they believed the decision “was in God’s hands.” That is, God working through the court has decided that citizens have a constitutional right “to live their faith without the fear of interference or retaliation by the U.S. government.”

It is a world in which God has a plan for your life and through signs and signals you can recognize that plan, the purpose for which God has placed you on earth. (Because you have free will, you can, perversely, ignore that purpose, but you won’t be happy here on earth and probably not after death.)

The eight stories in Bigger Than Businessare not really case histories in the sense that an MBA student would study them for insights into marketing or operations or business succession. 

They are parables, simple stories used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson. The examples Holler gives are inspiring—the Hutu woman who survived the Tutsi genocidal massacre, one of two people to be pulled still alive from a mass grave . . . the young atheist German communist who not only “came to know and accept Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior” but became a through-going capitalist—and affluent as well. 

While I myself do believe in luck, chance, and coincidence, it is difficult for me to identify with everything in the book. Nevertheless, if the morals of these parables inspire leaders to help employees thrive and to be better stewards of the earth, I can only wish that more people study the book for its lessons.