Sandra dies

So you want to know what a novel can do? How's this . . . .

Sandra tells her half of the story in the first person with barely a hiccough after she dies in a freak accident and is cremated in Nepal.

The author narrator tells the other half, the story of Trip, Sandra's 15-year-old autistic son. He does not talk much. 

Sandra and her ex-husband have dumped Trip in a therapeutic school in what sounds like the Arizona desert.  Trip wanders away from the school and is picked up by Anthony, a decent if feckless guy who is driving to Florida to  board up some Airbnbs before a hurricane hits. In other words, as best his parents know, Trip has vanished.

Sandra is in Nepal to scout out a conference, "Death and Denouement." for a PBS documentary, a conference "for people who study death." Many of the attendees assume one's consciousness—spirit, soul—lives on after the body dies or have an open an open mind. After Sandra' dies, she lives on in the bardo (we're in Buddhist country after all) or in a form a purgatory, one in which she can see what the living are doing.

Anthony with Trip in tow visits a lavish party on the coast of what sounds like South Carolina, steals a large, lavish sailing yacht, and heads to sea. Unfortunately for Trip, Anthony is (was) a recovering alcoholic and he became drunk at the party. Once the drunken adult and autistic teen are at sea, events run down hill. Will Sandra's spirit save Trip? How can it? Will Anthony sink the boat? What can Trip do—if anything?

I do not believe in a life after death, but I was willing to stay with Amie Barrodale's novel Trip to see how she writes herself out of the hole in which she put herself. Trip requires a larger than usual suspension of disbelief, but I've decided it's worth reading. With the giant exception of Sandra's death and subsequent adventures, Trip's experiences with Anthony are, for me, plausible and convincing. It's an interesting combination; almost as interesting as a story told in both the third and first person.  

A soap opera with a pedestrian mystery

Domenica de Rosa writes mysteries as Elly Griffiths, fifteen in the Ruth Galloway series. An interviewer pointed out that readers love her characters—maybe more than the mystery—and asked if that is a key to her appeal. 

Griffiths agreed. “Character—definitely. Funnily enough I’ve been writing about Wilkie Collins. He said character and humor are the most important things in writing. I think that’s right. I do think that character is plot. I mean you can have the cleverest plot but if you don’t have characters that people relate to then there’s no tension and suspense. It matters because tension and suspense come from caring about what’s going to happen to those characters. I think fiction is great at relationships between people’s chosen families, not blood family.” 

The Last Remains is reportedly the last in the Ruth Galloway series. (Griffiths has another mystery series set in Brighton, plus three stand-alone books and four children's books.) It is, I think, more family drama than mystery although there is a body and Ruth and her young daughter are put in danger by the villain, so that makes it a mystery.

Ruth, in addition to being an archeology professor, helps the police as forensic archeologist. She's called when a builder discovers a twenty-year-old skeleton behind a wall in a shop he is renovating (the skeleton has a modern metal plate in an ankle). The police are able to identify the skeleton fairy quickly as a young archeology student who vanished twenty years earlier. What happened to her and who hid her inside the wall? One twist: had her body been hidden immediately after her death the decaying stench would have given her away; the skeleton had been moved from somewhere else.

Complications on top of complications. Ruth's university is eliminating the archeology department and her job. The estranged wife of Ruth's long-time lover, Nelson, wants to return to the couples' home with their 5-year-old-son. Nelson is father of Ruth's 15-year-old daughter and is head of the local police,  A good friend of theirs, Michael Malone aka Cathbad, was somehow involved with the dead student. Late in the book Cathbad disappears and although he's been helpful in earlier books and lives with a police officer the circumstances are suspicious.

While I found the mystery thin and the personal stories pedestrian, I admire Griffiths's ability to keep in motion all the plates she's set spinning without dropping one. She gives us access to the internal states and thoughts of different characters without drawing attention to what she's doing. I'm not so sure about referring to earlier books (cases), although it may give series readers a shock of pleasure, but it is clever to have a child character show up in The Last Remains as an exceptionally helpful adult. Griffiths fans will enjoy The Last Remains. Newbies should start earlier in the series.

A ripping good international spy adventure from 1903

The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of the Secret Service Recently Achieved by Erskine Childers is a classic. Ken Follett, the author of The Eye of the Needle and other thrillers and historical fiction, calls it "The first modern thriller." 

First published in 1903, the novel is in some ways a boy's adventure story as two friends from Cambridge work to uncover German plans to invade England from its North Sea islands, a coastal string that stretches from Holland to Denmark.

What raises the book from the routine and helped it become a classic—aside from being a ripping good story—is the author's belief at the beginning of the 20th century that in fact England did face the danger of a German invasion from across the North Sea, a danger for which the country was entirely unprepared. The Riddle of the Sands makes Childers's case for the danger using  fiction set in real places.

"Immensely popular in the years leading up to World War 1," writes the publisher of the 2018 reprint I read, "The Riddle of the Sands is a precisely drawn and geographically accurate adventure that . . . was perceived as so accurate, in fact, that it actually influenced the placement of multiple naval bases by Winston Churchill after its publication."

The novel follows Carruthers, a bored British Foreign Office clerk, who accepts an invitation to join his old friend Davies on a sailing trip through the treacherous waters of the Frisian Islands off the German coast. But what begins as a leisurely holiday quickly transforms into a tense investigation. Davies believes that German forces are secretly preparing for an invasion of England—and he needs Carruthers’ help to uncover the truth. Both are Cambridge graduates in their mid-20s. Carruthers speaks fluent German; Davies is a brilliant small boat sailor. As the two navigate shoals, fog, and suspicious naval activity, they stumble into a geopolitical conspiracy that would later echo the real fears and rivalries of pre-World War I Europe.

Childers writes from the inside. He had extensively sailed the waters he writes about and was himself a veteran of British intelligence. If you buy it, make sure the edition includes the five charts charts that support the story. Some readers may be put off by the 1903 British sentences, but they are no more complex than Conan Doyle's or Wilkie Collins's.

According to Wikipedia, Childers was a firm believer in the British Empire and served as a volunteer in the army expeditionary force in the Second Boer War in South Africa. His experiences there began a gradual process of disillusionment with British imperialism. He was adopted as a candidate in British parliamentary elections, standing for the Liberal Party at a time when the party supported a treaty to establish Irish home rule, but he later became an advocate of Irish republicanism and the severance of all ties with Britain.

On behalf of the Irish Volunteers, he smuggled guns into Ireland on his own sailboat that were later used against British soldiers in the Easter Rebellion. He had a significant role in the negotiations between Ireland and Britain that culminated in the Anglo-Irish Treaty, but was elected as an anti-Treaty member of the first Irish parliament. He sought an active role in the Irish Civil War (over the acceptance of the terms of the treaty) that followed, was arrested as a rebel, and was executed in 1922 by the Irish Free State.

You can't help mattering. Now what?

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, like many of us, continues to try to understand both physical reality and other people. She grew up in White Plains, NY, where she graduated from an all-girls high school whose primary concern was to prepare girls for a life of Orthodox Jewish marriage and motherhood. By her senior year she was regularly playing hooky, mostly going to libraries to try to get herself some semblance of an education. She is a professor, the mother of two adult daughters, and an atheist. 

She married at nineteen and, because her husband was pursuing his graduate studies at Caltech, she spent her sophomore year of college at UCLA. After that year, she and her husband returned to New York City, he to continue his graduate studies at Yeshiva University and she to continue her undergraduate studies at Barnard College. She graduated summa cum laude and immediately went on to graduate work at Princeton University, receiving her Ph.D. in philosophy with a concentrate in philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. 

She returned to Barnard, where she taught courses in philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of mathematics. It was during her tenure at Barnard that, to her own surprise, she wrote her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem which became a critical and popular success. She says that writing the novel changed her relationship with academic philosophy. She has now published ten books: novels, nonfiction, and a book of stories.

Her latest book is The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us. She says she had been gestating its ideas ever since The Mind-Body Problem, when she first introduced the idea of the mattering map—a way to illustrate the different modes of mattering—in her effort to understand the sadness of her main character. The Mattering Instinct is influenced by Baruch Spinoza’s own attempt in the Ethics "to firmly ground an objective ethics on secular grounds that we can all accept, no matter our theological beliefs, or lack thereof."

On page 1 of The Mattering Instinct Goldstein writes, "Every living thing is driven by a mandate that ensures it matters to itself—which is to say that it prioritizes its own surviving and thriving." In human beings "self-mattering engenders one of the most persistent forces in human motivation, which has us striving not only to survive and thrive but also striving after an existence that we deem meaningful in our own eyes." I.e., I am significant—important even—not only to myself but to other people.

While there are many ways to matter in one's own eyes, Goldstein identified four mattering types: socializers, transcenders, competitors, and heroic strivers—four islands in the Sea of Longing on the mattering map. The longing to matter, she points out "can bring out the best and the worst of us, while generating bottomless disputes as to what is the best and the worst of us . . .At their worst, these divides can make us regard targeted others as hardly mattering at all."

The Mattering Insinct describes the characteristics, the strengths, and the weaknesses of socializers, transcenders, competitors, and heroic strivers. (Which are you? I'm apparently an heroic striver.) Goldstein illustrates each flavor of mattering with a short bio of someone famous or obscure who exemplifies the characteristic. The book goes a long, and original way to explain why and why not people act the way they do and don't do. It can also help motivated readers minimize the worst in themselves. 

Do towns correspond to internal states? Who knows?

This is why I cannot write for most literary magazines. They—some—print and promote and hold up as admirable and worth emulating writing like this: 

An actual pinwheel

“It was a town caught in the pinwheeling stasis between living and dying, between chrysalis and mortuary. I want to examine why it is I am drawn to places like this, why I always return to this specific feeling of haunt and dislocation, this purveyance of fugue.

“I start by asking: do these places visually and externally correspond to a world within, to zones and aspects of my interior? If extrapolated and perceivable as place, as geography, as topography, would it match the desolate, degenerate, eroded, and scarred? Do these places call to mind or call into being a deep loneliness, a call to lonely places—am I finding my ghosts in the world without?”

Because "stasis" means "a period or state of inactivity or equilibrium" what would a "pinwheeling status" be except a cheap paradox? And what would life in a town caught between chrysalis ("a quiescent insect pupa or a transitional state") and mortuary be like?

One can only feel sympathy for someone drawn to place like that, especially a place that causes the author to return to this purveyance of fugue—which means?

The author asks some good questions (I guess), but I do not care enough to learn whether the person is finding his/her ghosts in a world without. . . ghosts?