New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent **July 31, 2017, Kirstin Valdez Quade, “Christina the Astonishing (1150-1224)”: In this first-person account of a true story the eldest sister of three recalls the narrative of her troubled sister, Christina. Quade’s collection, Night of the Fiestas, came out in 2016.
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My Book World Frank, Barney. Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same- SexMarriage. New York: Farrar, 2015. In this tersely written memoir (yet verbose in places), Frank memorializes his forty years of public service. Though I find the word “service” can have a false ring with people in the US Congress who, over time, increase their wealth considerably, such a word rings strong and true with regard to Barney Frank. For four decades he serves, in one capacity or another, the people of Boston, Massachusetts—but also many citizens from coast to coast. During his tenure as congress member, he evolves into an ace legislator who is instrumental in getting landmark legislation through Congress: undoing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, strengthening laws that govern Wall Street (Dodd-Frank) after 2008, and any number of LGBTQ issues. He has a way of stating the truth that only stings if you are the guilty party: “If every issue is always on the active agenda, if an issue that was already disposed of by a majority can be reopened whenever the side that lost regains an advantage, instability infects not just the body that made that decision but also the society that it is governed by. It is the explicit rejection of that principle by the Tea Party Republicans that contributes heavily to political gridlock. A representative or senator’s effectiveness thus is based on his or her ability to deal with a very wide range of issues, with never enough time, and with little guidance from others” (73). Frank is able to articulate the why and wherefores of legislation and government, as in this statement justifying taxation: “In a civilized society that needs a profit-driven private sector and a tax-funded public sector, it is all the people’s money. The task facing sensible people is to distinguish between the personal or family needs and wants best fulfilled by individual spending choices and those societal goals that can be achieved only if we pool our resources to buy collective goods” (171-2). Frank speaks to how our country can dovetail capitalism with democracy: “Representative government in a capitalist society involves the coexistence of two systems—an economic one, in which a person’s influence necessarily increases with his or her wealth, and a political one, in which every citizen is supposed to have an equal say. If the mechanisms of the free market are going to work, that is, if they are going to increase productivity through incentives and allocate resources efficiently, money must drive decisions. For democracy to fulfill its moral promise, everyone’s vote should have the same weight in making the rules by which we govern ourselves” (183). Hallelujah, he should be teaching civics in high school! Frank is blunt about the issues that Democrats face: “Democrats will regain a fighting chance to win majority support among working- and middle-class white men only when we demonstrate the will—and capacity—to respond to the economic distress inflicted on them” (187). One only hopes that new Democrats now filling slots in Congress are half as dedicated, knowledgeable, honest, and generous as Barney Frank. In the coming months and years we’re going to need such people to face the issues that plague citizens across this country.
NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent  Jon Lowenstein ***July 24, 2017, Cristina Henriquez, “Everything Is Far from Here”: A woman crossing over the border from Mexico into Texas is separated from her five-year-old son by the coyotes responsible. ¶ Fiction or not, this account is the most realistic, it would seem, that I have ever read: mothers waiting for children in the American detention center and not always being reunited, sickening food and water, other disenfranchised who are even more callous than the attendants, more abuse: “To throw up is to disobey orders” (54). Hope, like new skin, regenerates itself each day, yet it can be dashed abruptly: “And then one day there are leaves on the trees, and wild magnolia blossoms on the branches, bobbing gently in the breeze. She will stay in this place, she tells herself, until he comes. Through the window in the dayroom, she watches the white petals tremble, and, in a gust, a single blossom is torn off a branch. The petals blow apart, swirling, and drift to the ground” (55) Every American should have to spend a day in the protagonist’s shoes if for no other reason than to see what some must undergo to seek the privileges others more than likely take for granted. “It’s easy to let that happen, so much easier to give in, to be who they want you to be: a thing that flares apart in the tumult, a thing that surrenders to the wind” (55). A sad truth. The author’s latest novel, The Book of the Unknown Americans, came out in 2014.
Jon Lowenstein, photographer. NEXT TIME: My Book World
My Book WorldEach weekend I try to view selected portions of C-SPAN’s Book-TV, forty-eight straight hours of recorded author readings of nonfiction now hitting the shelves, and sometimes six-hour segments covering book festivals around the U.S. C-SPAN, by the way, is supported by most all cable and satellite TV providers, so check your listings. You can also view at any time any reading at Book-TV’s Web site. And if you do wish to tune in, you can view, download, and print a copy of the weekend’s schedule off the Web site. Below I list a presentation I recently found very compelling. In a C-SPAN Book-TV presentation about his book, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, editor Paul Hawken talks about how the book’s contributors have outlined sometimes simple ways of working with the earth, instead of against its natural processes, to clean it up. The goal is to accomplish this task by 2050. By the date of this April 2017 presentation, the book had already gone into two printings. I plan to get my copy soon.
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My Book World Taibbi, Matt, with illustrations by Molly Crabapple. Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap. New York: Spiegel, 2014. Once again I discover a writer well-known to others by way of C-SPAN’s Book-TV. On June 4, 2017, Matt Taibbi appeared on In Depth, a three-hour interview conducted by Peter Slen, and there Mr. Taibbi discusses his entire oeuvre, eight books written since 2000. When Slen asks Taibbi which of his books he would urge readers to tackle first, he says Divide, and so that is where I begin. Taibbi, contributor to The Rolling Stone, is adept at taking complex concepts and distilling them into words the common person can understand. The Bard College-educated man wants the reader to grasp how justice serves as a divide in this country, how, if you’re poor but especially if you’re poor and a person of color, you are subject to one form of justice, likely to spend a disproportionate time behind bars for a nonviolent crime whereas white-collar criminals (à la 2008 financial fraud cases) spend precisely no time in prison though their crimes harm millions of people and not merely in this country but around the world. Early in the book he breaks it down this way: “We’re creating a dystopia, where the mania of the state isn’t secrecy or censorship but unfairness. Obsessed with success and wealth and despising failure and poverty, our society is systematically dividing the population into winners and losers, using institutions like the courts to speed the process. Winners get rich and get off. Losers go broke and go to jail. It isn’t just that some clever crook on Wall Street can steal a billion dollars and never see the inside of a courtroom; it’s that, plus the fact that some black teenager a few miles away can go to jail just for standing on a street corner, that makes the whole picture complete” (13). Taibbi profiles at least a half a dozen cases on both sides of the divide and presents the details in a manner that is both intellectually honest and exhaustive. Not only that, but he writes in a way that is engaging, well-crafted, yet easy to understand for people unfamiliar with legalese or the argot of the financial world. I am looking forward to reading his most recent book, Insane Clown President.
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New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent **July 10 and 17, 2017, Hye-young Pyun, “Caring for Plants”: A man survives a car accident that his wife does not, and his mother-in-law moves in to care for him in a rather bizarre manner. Pyun’s novel, The Hole, comes out in August.
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My Book World Deitcher, David. Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840 -1918. New York: Abrams, 2001. A number of years ago I bought a box of notecards entitled Dear Friends, featuring fifteen cards of five different subjects: pairs of nineteenth-century men photographed in intimate poses. Recently I became aware that these photographs were featured in a book by the same title. Deitcher, art historian and critic, has put forth a large collection of such photographs and makes speculative commentary about his subjects. He explores if men of the nineteenth century were less concerned about how they were viewed than men in the ensuing centuries seemed to have been. Are these heterosexual men holding hands, with arms around each other, brothers of one brand or another? Indeed, did people even use terms like hetero- and homosexual? They did not, not until Freud and his ilk contrived them. Among many interesting observations the author brings to the reader’s attention is the idea that men’s work was largely artisanal, that a teen would live under the same roof under the direction of an older man for several years, to learn a trade before venturing out on his own. In his town my own grandfather (born 1894) lived with a man old enough to be his grandfather and learned the harness-making trade. With advent of the industrial age this kind of relationship faded away. Men became isolated in their work, and competitive, though ironically they worked elbow-to-elbow in factories. It is lovely to think that men of varying sexualities might have felt comfortable in their skins enough to express physical affection that might or might not have been sexual. After all, I believe prepubescent boys find a certain strength by being physically close to their fathers. I too one day will have a strong body like this one. I too will father children. I too will be strong. On TV the other night the camera panned over a major league baseball game crowd, and an older boy was standing behind one would presume his father, with his arms loosely around the man’s neck. The father, perhaps born in the seventies, was okay with it, kind of like a lion would withstand the affections of a cub. It was a touching sight, one seldom seen when I was that age. Deitcher seems to echo my feelings: “My initial enthusiasm on seeing this photograph was soon tempered by recognizing their mutual resemblance. Could they be father and son? The collector also enclosed a copy of documentation that had accompanied the photograph when he bought it. In part, the documentation read: ‘A piece of paper behind the image has the names Henbraon Van Pelt and Ed Thomas.’ So, I concluded, they are not father and son” (132). I believe Deitcher may be as intrigued with the idea that men in the same family could be close physically, that in that earlier time men of our frontier were not as concerned with appearances as they have become in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Deitcher ends the book with this thought, one I find endemic to his project: “We are left, then, with uncertainty, with that blend of desire and doubt that transports the observer to conduct research that itself leads back to uncertainty. In their elusiveness, their resistance to naming and categorization, such photographs become their own poetic evidence of the fluidity that marked the relations they reveal yet cannot prove” (150) Alas, the bite of it: the observer perceives the truth of a certain reality, feels it in his bones as he views these affectionate men, but in the end the observer cannot bring forth the proofs needed to record it as history.
NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent **July 3, 2017, Italo Calvino, “The Adventure of a Skier”: An Italian boy follows a Swiss girl up a ski slope, climbing past the end of the lift, to a rarified world of white hares and partridges.
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AUTHOR
Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA. See my profile at Author Central:
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