​Trethewey, Natasha. Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir. New York: HarperCollins, 2020.

​The author’s mother was African-American, and her father was a white Canadian. When they divorce, Natasha’s mother marries a black man, who does all he can to diminish Natasha and her mother. The author not only relies on her memories, which she hides from herself for a long time, but also court case documents and audiotapes, as well as the testimony of others, to write a moving and affecting memoir of her mother’s murder by Trethewey’s stepfather. A true poet in action because every sentence is as lyrical as a line from poetry.

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​Millhauser, Steven. The Knife Thrower and Other Stories. New York: Vintage, 1998. 
 
This is a collection of stories in which an image from the title story—the knife—appears in nearly all the other stories, varied though they may be in character. In “Sisterhood of Night,” a gang of teenage girls leave their homes each night and meet in a wood: “Rumor has it that the girls are instructed to carry weapons: scissors, jackknives, needles, kitchen knives” (38). A character named “Mary Warren displayed a bone-handled kitchen knife” (39). This rather gothic story is marked by the use of first person plural, as if the narrator is one of the girls not a citizen of the town. The girls, after all, are only after silence and invisibility, not mischief. 
 
In “The New Automaton Theater,” Millhauser again employs the first person plural to great effect, as well as the heavy use of passive voice, creating an objectified distance between the material and the reader. He also brings into use another knife, though this time metaphorical in nature: “That long-awaited performance was like a knife flashed in the face of our art” (107). 
 
The story, “Clair de Lune,” is an ode to the moon a fifteen-year-old would write if he could write this well at fifteen. A male teen prowls through his town on a moonlit night and lauds its shadowed “blueness” multiple times. Haunting.
 
In “The Dream of the Consortium,” a large, multi-storied department store is repurposed. Again, a knife plays a part in the author’s imagery: “One window showed a six-foot scale model of a thirty-four-story hotel, in which each of its more than two hundred rooms was lit up in turn, revealing in each instance an exquisitely detailed scene performed by miniature automated figures: a little man was murdering a little woman with repeated stabbings of a little bloody knife” (138). Again the first person plural creates a certain air, expressing perhaps the thoughts of an entire culture. The story may ultimately be a cautionary tale about the excesses of capitalism. Millhauser creates a dry, biting satire by way of a playful tone.
 
“Balloon Flight, 1870” is a lovely combination of history, travel, war, peace of being on a four-and-a-half hour balloon ride—escaping from one place to another. Plenty of time to daydream. One of Millhauser’s strength seems to be creating a unique point of view; this one: watching the world from thousands of feet in the air at a time when humans can only view the earth from a tall tree or a two-story dwelling.
 
The longest story, “Paradise Park,” is about the history of a Coney Island amusement park, in which one man, having become wealthy from other business interests, desires to fund the rebuilding of this park. The park, a multi-leveled sprawl, is a character that takes the first eight of fifty pages to be described in its entirety; one wonders if a human will appear. Then Sarabee, the owner-manager, does build more and more elaborate parks, sometimes on top of one another, until he, at one point, goes “dark.” 
 
If one wishes to enjoy both reading and being challenged by short stories, Millhauser is your author, and this is the book!

[Note: In an earlier version of this post RJ discussed Millhauser's use of "third person" plural when he intended "first person" plural. The errors have been corrected]

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Natasha Trethewey's Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir

​Obama, Barack. A Promised Land. New York: Crown, 2020.
 
Having read President Obama’s 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father a number of years ago, I pre-ordered this book and anxiously awaited its arrival from Amazon on November 17, 2020. Dreams had revealed to me a skilled and sensitive writer. The scene in which Mr. Obama kneels at his father’s grave in Kenya is deeply moving and serves as the striking climax. It remains fresh in my memory.
 
A Promised Land is a title that resonates in a global way. However, Mr. Obama transforms it a bit to reveal how the United States of America has functioned as a promised land for him, for his life. The book seems to possess a unique structure. The former president limns in this the first volume of his long-awaited memoir his political life. Yet he does not hesitate to return readers by way of carefully selected flashbacks to his humble beginnings: we learn things about his family that we perhaps did not know before, the boldly liberal nature of his Kansas-born grandparents who flee to Hawaii to live a freer life; their daughter who marries a Kenyan man and gives birth to Barack Hussein Obama. 
 
At the same time, this memoir develops a strand of history focused as readers would expect to see through the eyes of the person to whom it happened, the one who witnessed first-hand his several political campaigns, his earthy language in dealing with staff who have displeased him or fallen short of their expected performance. In spite of the subjectivity of such a view, one senses that Mr. Obama is being fair, that not many can argue with his point of view, his memory, his own fact-checking. 
 
But finally, this book is silver-lined with personal and moving vignettes the president experiences throughout his first term: campaign events, public and private; White House anecdotes (he gives an inviting description of the contemporary White House); the relationships he develops with everyday WH employees, the large majority of whom are African-American, one essentially declaring, “You’re one of us.” At the same time, though he avoids making too much of the issue, Mr. Obama sets the record straight on the political evils he must endure: Donald Trump’s birtherism campaign; the media’s daily tearing at his flesh even though he is far more transparent and open than the previous administration’s leader; obstructionist Republicans who wish to thwart the President’s agenda, not because they so much disagree with him ideologically (which they do) but because they object so blatantly to him. Mr. Obama very elegantly portrays their vitriol without saying what I have no problem stating: Republicans regularly respond with a latent but powerful sense of White person’s entitlement, racism, and bigotry that have laced our American life since before its formation. That the man continues to rule with great dignity is a tribute to his stature as an adult who wishes to build on our democracy, not destroy it.
 
Mr. Obama relates the night at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, in which he takes stand-up potshots at a seated and furious Donald Trump. I think Mr. Obama must later realize how much this roasting inspires DT to run for president. Finally, skillfully building toward the narrative arc’s fine climax, Mr. Obama relates the fulsome scenario by which Osama bin Laden is assassinated and buried at sea. Though at times the reading is a slog, because the former prez wishes to be thorough and exact (a quality I appreciate), the book is well worth the time. And that infamous date, May 2, 2011, is where the first half of this memoir ends.

​Brodkey, Harold. First Love and Other Sorrows. New York: Vintage, 1986.

 
This collection first published in 1954 when Brodkey was twenty-four is still a gem, has hardly aged at all. In fact, the stories seem to enlighten readers as to what that period was like, and, at the same time, show how little in human nature has changed. Also … he may be among the first short story writers to have constructed what editors have come adoringly to call “linked” stories (so much more novel-like than, say, fifteen disparate stories).
 
The first two stories are connected by way of St. Louis’s red-brick buildings, its clammy climate, its propensity for lightning bugs. More important, its people, neither eastern sophisticates nor western ruffians, take up the page with their circumspect curiosity about life’s challenges. The next two stories, linking a St. Louisan to his undergraduate years at Harvard University, explore the angst that college people face, one in which two buddies spend a summer traveling in Europe and wind up (like lovers, but not) despising one another. The other story is similar, only the couple are male and female experiencing intercourse for the first time ever and how that plays out over the period of a school year. The final five stories concern a young woman named Laurie/Laura, the stories ranging from a date she is preparing for while a nineteen-year-old at Wellesley College. The remaining follow her through early marriage where she seems to struggle with post-partem depression following the birth of her daughter, Faith. In the next story, Faith is fifteen months old, and Laura must settle for a substitute babysitter, a brusque African-American woman, whose apparent roughness with the child may nevertheless be healthier than Laura’s constant hand-wringing over her decisions. And finally, the last story explores the testy relationship between Laura and her husband Martin, as she is pregnant with their second child. Her depression, her lack of confidence, seem to have increased in intensity, and Brodkey appears to have put his finger on the nuances of a woman’s life in 1950s America before Betty Freidan even identifies the problem. He does so with subtlety so grand readers then may not have been able to recognize them. A superb read for short-story lovers. 

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Scott Berg's biography Max Perkins: Editor of Genius