Mrs Smith Reads

Before Testimony, the only other Anita Shreve novel I had read was The Pilot’s Wife, which I liked, but didn’t really love. Testimony, on the other hand, left me feeling disgusted with it’s tale of sexual misadventure at a New England boarding school, the tragic events that set the story in motion and the fallout for all those involved. 

The narrative begins with Mike Bordwin, Headmaster of Avery Academy, who has received a videotape which shows three male students and a 14-year-old Freshman girl, involved in graphic sex in an Avery dorm room. The unfolding events are told through myriad narrators, each of whom offer their remembrances of and involvement in the scandal, which eventually leads to suspensions, arrests, firings, divorces, and death, within the school itself and in the surrounding community.

I should probably offer a *Trigger Warning* at this point because I feel the need to discuss some of the awkward contrivances Shreve places in the story, all of which made me cringe inwardly as she attempted to make readers feel sorry for the “boys” involved and to place all the blame on the jezebel. 

Shreve’s entire construct is set to lead us to believe that four upperclassmen—who should be viewed merely as typical horny teenagers—when presented with an opportunity to have a four-way orgy with a provocative, obviously sexually-experienced though inebriated, underage girl did only what we would expect them to do. They go for it. 

The three boys, all basketball players with promising careers, are used to being admired by the younger students, something they are willing to take advantage of. J. Dot, is a PG, which means he is taking a post-senior year to get his grades up and play a final year of HS basketball. James is a senior hoping for a basketball scholarship to college. Silas, who is offered up as the protagonist of the story, is a local boy who’s been offered the chance of a lifetime—to attend Avery Academy on scholarship—both to study and to boost the team to championship potential. I felt manipulated to feel sorry for them because they made one bad decision. Instead, I felt revulsion.

Shreve gives us the convenient excuse that “Sienna,” the girl on the videotape, is a lying vixen who decides to “cry rape” once she has been exposed. In the two chapters in which she speaks, she is written as manipulative and vain, both wise beyond her years and absurdly immature. Fine, it could happen, but why write the character as the exception, not the rule. Experienced or not, she was underage, which legally, makes her unable to consent. 

I was flabbergasted at the positive reviews for this book and even more gobsmacked by the vitriol expressed for the character of “Sienna,” who leaves Avery for a new school in Texas, changes her name and seems to experience no residual emotional or psychological damage from the scandal. I really have to question Shreve’s premise here when the reality for a victim of these situations, (as evidenced by Stubenville and more recently Nova Scotia) is non-consensual sex with multiple rapists, followed by weak prosecution by law enforcement, shaming, victim-blaming and serious psychological anguish. It seems incredibly callus and willfully ignorant of Shreve to have crafted her depiction from this dangerous point of view and I question the wisdom of her publisher too.

I can not strongly enough recommend that no one should read Testimony. Ever. If only because it perpetrates the lie that there is a difference between “legitimate rape” and a guilty conscience.

In The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton, Elizabeth Speller attempts to bring back the English manor house mystery. Unfortunately, she tried, and failed. In 400 pages, Speller tries to bring three or four plot lines together into one long, confusing and yet somehow still blasé novel.

Laurence Bartram, whom Speller introduced in her first novel The Return of Captain John Emmet, is a wounded WWI vet who’s wife died in childbirth while he was stationed in France. After the war, he returns to his former profession as an architectural historian. At the opening of the story, Bartram has arrived in Wiltshire, at Easton Deadall to assist the Easton family in restoring their estate to it’s former glory, in particular the ancient church on the grounds, which has fallen into disuse and disrepair. The current head of the Easton family, Lydia Easton, has also decided to install a new stained glass window in the church to commemorate her dead husband and to build a maze on the estate grounds in honor of the many fallen soldiers of the community. 

Laurence learns that thirteen years before, Lydia’s 5-year-old daughter Kitty had vanished one night and was never seen again. Lydia is the only person who still clings to the hope that Kitty is alive and Laurence is intrigued by the mysterious disappearance.

Speller insists on introducing a confusing cast of characters, both in and around the Easton estate and I frankly had a hard time keeping them all straight in my head. Half way through the book, Maggie, a young nanny, mysteriously disappears from a fair during a family outing in London. This is supposed to evoke Kitty’s disappearance, but since Maggie is a teenager, and not an Easton family member it seems a fairly tenuous stretch to make them feel similar. 

During his exploration of the church Laurence finds the dead body of a grown woman in the crypt, then he and one of the Easton brothers find and get lost in an enormous underground labyrinth. It’s purpose or meaning is never fully explored or explained. 

The last two chapters are spent furiously explaining all the mysteries, murders and mistakes that the previous 9/10ths of the book have set up. It was not a satisfying or even terribly thoughtful or interesting way of tying up the plot lines because basically two people just tell Bartram what they know. Voila! Mysteries solved! There were some obvious red herrings, but that’s about as close to Agatha Christie as this story ever got. Let’s just say that the blurb on the back of the book is the most sinister and misleading part of the entire package.

Strangely, I wanted to read Going Clear, not because it’s about the crazytown that is Scientology, but because it was written by Lawrence Wright. I loved The Looming Tower and Wright’s ability to define and explain the birth and history of Al Qaeda had been clear and relatively free of prejudice. I was impressed with his ability to create a roadmap of the terrorist network from it’s fundamentalist beginnings to the massive 9/11 attack and was impressed with his informative and yet accessible writing style. I knew an examination of Scientology and its founder L. Ron Hubbard made a perfect undertaking for Wright’s investigative journalism skills and I was not disappointed.

Going Clear is really a story in two parts. The first, examines the life and work of L. Ron Hubbard, the inventor of Dianetics and subsequently, The Church of Scientology. The Church is notoriously protective of it’s founder’s image, yet Wright seems to have dexterously separated the facts from the fiction—mostly propagated by Hubbard himself. I found this section to be the most fascinating. It’s a deep-dive into the psyche of a seemingly self-loathing sociopath who managed to turn himself from a charismatic prevaricator into a messiah; a man who used his own self-defeating tactics to create a never-ending series of humiliating tests that would keep his followers on an unobtainable quest to become “clear.” Since Hubbard himself began his career as a science fiction writer, it will surprise no one that ultimately his new religion would include aliens and a quadrillion-year back story that generally serves to confuse even the most committed acolytes. I had heard jokes about Xenu and Thetans, but upon reading the full explanation, I was laughing out loud.

As Scientology grew, Hubbard became more of a recluse, continuing to add to the church cannon, promoting newer and ever more bizarre levels of auditing, as well as instituting cult-like processes for curing mental illness and curbing potential detractors and defectors, labeling them Potential Trouble Sources (PTS) or Suppressive Persons (SP) guilty of enturbulating. To avoid criminal prosecution, he took to international waters on a series of ships, staffed by the Sea Organization (SeaOrg) who signed billion-year contracts which basically allowed them to be ritually humiliated, punished, starved and abused by Hubbard and his increasingly paranoid whims.

The second part of Going Clear focuses on the rise of David Miscavige, the current leader, who filled the vacuum created by Hubbard’s death in 1986. (Though is it not admitted that Hubbard actually died—just that he left his body for a higher plane.) Miscavige is Hubbard on steroids. A second generation member, he has doubled down on the secrecy and paranoia, the intense separation, punishments and slave labor of the SeaOrg and the cultivation of the wealthy to support the upper echelons of the church. In a situation much like Hubbard’s disappeared third wife, Miscavige’s wife, Shelley, hasn’t been seen since 2007.

On its surface, Scientology appeals to a certain type of person—someone looking for positive reinforcement and the promise of improved thought and concentration. It is and has always been highly supported by the Hollywood crowd. I was quite surprised to find out how many of today’s celebs are second generation disciples. Most Scientologists never make it to OTIII level where the craziness starts in earnest (that’s where you learn about that wacky Xenu) but most will spend upwards of six figures for the privilege of trying to get there. 

There is plenty of juicy gossip about the public Scientologists we all know about, Tom Cruise and John Travolta, as well as anecdotes about Anne Archer, (who’s son, Tommy Davis also rose to high ranks in the church) Kirsty Alley, Jenna Elfman and Giovanni Ribisi. Wright documents the increasingly devastating cult-like environment of the SeaOrg at the headquarters in Florida, the Hollywood Celebrity Center and the Hemet, California compound where Miscavage currently resides.

Wright’s sources are mostly ex-members—long-timers who grew up in the church or joined as young adults. The screenwriter/director Paul Haggis is Wright’s central source. He joined Scientology in the early 70s, raised and enrolled his children in Scientology schools and only separated himself from the church over its intensely strident and negative positions on homosexuality (two of his children are lesbian). Throughout his career, he was supported in his work and ensuing success by other Scientologists who were in positions of power to help him, never realizing the depth and breadth of their influence in Hollywood. The more rich and famous a Scientologist becomes, the more privilege he enjoys within the organization. Anyone who questions the system can be excluded and separated from family and friends forever by being labeled as an PTS or SP.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading Going Clear. I was by turns amused, concerned, outraged, surprised and downright confused by the entire conceit of Hubbard and his creation. It’s well worth a read and will not disappoint any reader.

Before Where the Bodies Are Buried, I had never read anything by Christopher Brookmyer but it seems I latched on in a good starting place, as this Glasgow-based murder mystery is the first in a new series for him. As a long time fan of both Val McDermid and Ian Rankin, I was very pleasantly surprised to discover another author who could indulge my affection for all things Scottish and murder-y.

The first dead body to turn up in Bodies, is that of Jai McDairmid, a not very likeable drug dealer, who is involved with an even less likeable group of Glasga crime bosses. When Detective Superintendent Catherine McLeod is assigned the case, she has very little to go on and even less support from within her own department.

In alternating chapters, Brookmyer introduces us to Jasmine Sharp, a would-be actress honing her craft by helping out at her Uncle Jim’s private investigations firm. Young and naive, she’s also fairly self-aware and knows it takes a lot more to succeed at the business than just having an ability to blend in during stakeouts and to think on her feet when questioning suspected fraudsters, but she’s committed to learning, and Jim has taken her under his wing as her mother has just passed away and she needs the job to support herself.

When her uncle goes missing, it falls to Jasmine to figure out what happened to him. His former police buddies seem reticent to help out, so Jasmine starts digging into the cases Jim was working on when he disappeared. She discovers two missing person cold cases and dives in, only to find she’s in a bit over her head. 

There are plenty of car chases, stakeouts, guns and fist fights. Jasmine accidentally finds a missing assassin and Catherine manages to hold her own against the old boys network in her division. As you might expect, Catherine and Jasmine eventually team up after realizing their cases are entwined. They work together to a pretty satisfying conclusion that readers probably won’t suss out until the last pages.

Brookmyer has done a nice job of introducing his new characters and these two very different women come across as both believable and strong, each in her own ways. I enjoyed getting to know them both and look forward to new plots in which they will be involved. Glasgow itself becomes almost the third main actor and it’s obvious that Brookmyer loves the city, despite it’s reputation as a sometimes dark and dangerous urban patch for those living outside the tourist areas. He brings a wicked, decidedly Scottish sense of humor to his prose and it serves as a special bonus for an already superior storyline.

Image: Glasgow toile by Timorous Beasties

Remember TARP? The Auto Bailouts? Neil Barofsky has written an enlightening book about his time as a presidentially-appointed and congressionally-approved Special Inspector General for the TARP program. Told that he was to work “independently” within the Treasury Department to root out potential for fraud and malfeasance within the TARP program and the receiving banks, Barofsky received a veritable baptism of fire in the first weeks of his appointment as he quickly ascertained that no one in Washington is truly an independent investigator and the only way to keep a job in DC is to keep quiet, not ruffle any feathers and by no means ever actually produce any documented work that is openly critical of anyone. Ever. 

Luckily for us, Barofsky decided his next job wasn’t as important as the one he had just been assigned to do and his account of the 19 months he toiled as head of SIGTARP gives readers an insightful narrative into the incredible machinations, contrivances and outright duplicity the Treasury Department—lead first by Hank Paulson, then Timothy Geithner—got up to in their efforts to convince American taxpayers that giving massive bailout funds to the banks with almost no oversight as to how those funds would be used, was the best, most honest way to improve the economy.

“The further we dug into the way TARP was being administered, the more obvious it became that Treasury applied a consistent double standard. In the late fall of 2009, as I began receiving the results of two of our most important audits, the contradiction couldn’t have been more glaring. When providing the largest financial institutions with bailout money, Treasury made almost no effort to hold them accountable, and the bounteous terms delivered by the government seemed to border on being corrupt. For those institutions, no effort was spared, with government officials often defending their generosity by kneeling at the altar of the “sanctity of contracts.” Meanwhile, an entirely different set of rules applied for home-owners and businesses that were most assuredly small enough to fail.”—Neil Barofsky in Bailout

Barofsky manages to bring a light, easy tone to his writing, which is a good thing, since he is probably describing the most deplorable chicanery ever perpetrated on the American public. He takes great pains to paint an exceedingly clear picture of what it’s like to work inside the Washington bubble. Neither Republicans or Democrats are spared in his scathing descriptions of the pointless meetings, back room gossip, intentional misdirection and bald-faces lies he encounters during his tenure. It’s like high school girls on crack. (“That Elizabeth Warren chick, she hates you, and she’s gonna steal your boyfriend.”)

Having gone through some personal financial stresses myself in the last few years, I was particularly appalled by the practices implemented in the administration of HAMP (Home Affordable Modification Program). In 2009, Treasury set aside billions to assist the then estimated 3–4 million homeowners facing foreclosure but of course the banks were handed the funds in a bassackwards attempt to continue to shovel money through to the mortgage lenders who had aided and abetted in the sub-prime crisis in the first place. Barofsky was reminded over and over again by Geither, et. al., that lenders would not risk their good standing with customers, and therefore would be helpful, honest and ethical in administering mortgage modifications for financially strapped homeowners. Because, of course they would. Instead, the lenders received and held on to the billions in funds, then simply offered homeowners trial modifications with lowered payments already in place until the paperwork could be completed and modifications finalized. Hundreds of thousands of homeowners paid the lower, modified payments for up to two years, only to be told they were not qualified for the program and now owed all the back payments in full, in addition to taxes and late fees, sometimes amounting to tens of thousands of dollars, that had to be paid immediately or foreclosure processing (by these same financial institutions) would begin anew. In reality, only about 1.1 million families have received modifications through the program, though the banks and lenders still received a majority of the $75 billion allotted for HAMP. It’s estimated there are still about 2 million families facing foreclosure in 2013. Recently, a new version of this scam, courtesy of Bank of Amercia, has been brought to light.

Barofsky is obviously the hero of this story, as he deserves to be. Though he readily admits that his victories for the American taxpayers were few and far between, we can at least be happy that he tried. Readers will not come away feeling cheered or content, but in terms of clarity it’s well worth reading Bailout to have a better understanding of the way Washington works on the whole, and who truly holds the reins when it comes to our economy. It’s not a pretty picture, but we can’t afford to turn away.

Depression-era North Carolina was a hard place. In the Western part of the state most people worked hard from cradle to grave for very little reward or luxury, regardless of the economic climate. Most families relied on the land passed on to them from previous generations and survived with the bare necessities. The Depression made men more willing to take on dangerous, even deadly work, and logging the verdant timber forests of the Appalachian region was probably one of the deadliest professions of the time.

George Pemberton, is a well-educated, patrician Northerner with wealth to spare. He owns vast tracts of forest in the Great Smokey Mountains, and his goal is to strip the land bare, then move on to the next promising valley and it’s resources. Unlike many of the timber executives working in the Mid-atlantic and South, he chooses to live amongst the loggers in the temporary camps built to shelter, feed and sometimes bury those who work for him. Even the managers whom Pemberton employs, leave their wives back home, because a logging town is no place for a lady. Pemberton satisfies his needs with a young, local girl, Rachel Harmon, who works in the kitchens and delivers meals to his house. Rachel soon finds herself pregnant and is abandoned by Pemberton when he leaves to go back to Boston to bury his father and settle his estate. While back home, Pemberton meets, courts, and marries Serena, a woman with a sketchy past, an impenetrable will and a wild, untamable temperament that makes her pretty much unstoppable, whether she is fighting early environmentalists working to establish National Park lands, or devising plans to separate uncooperative partners from company interests and investments.

The novel opens as Serena and Pemberton travel back to North Carolina, each basking in their respective dreams and ambitions to become the golden couple of the timber logging industry. Pemberton is eyeing new tracts in North Carolina and Tennessee; Serena has her cold, impassive heart set on Brazil.

A visibly pregnant Rachel and her father are waiting at the station, but they are not there to welcome the Pembertons. Spurred by his rage at Pemberton for taking advantage of his 17-year-old daughter, Harmon challenges him to a knife fight. Serena quietly incites Pemberton to engage in the fight and he easily guts the drunken Harmon, killing him almost instantly. Serena then congratulates him for dispatching the problem so efficiently and informs Rachel that she will not receive anything from them. Ever. We know from the first chapter, that Serena will have no problem surviving rough life in a logging camp.

The entire story is Shakespearean in scope. The locals—the ever changing tide of loggers and lumberjacks who live and die on the side of the mountain—act as a sort of chorus, relating the news of the day, pitching folksy humor and advice and providing a running commentary on the knotty machinations of the Pembertons, which have an increasingly lethal impact on those mired in their livelihood.

Neither Serena or Pemberton are nice. They are the bad guys. This is why Serena is such a delicious read. In each chapter Serena ups the ante in an ongoing battle of wills against her husband, his business partners and investors, the local sheriff and of course Rachel, who has one thing that Serena can never have. Serena is resolute, tenacious and unfaltering. She will stop at nothing to achieve her dream of South American timber domination. 

There is never a lull in the action in Serena. There are eagles and rattlesnakes, a bear and a Komodo Dragon; impalements, amputations and drownings; murders, fights and fires. The local people are the heros—they are witty, canny and visionary as well as kind-hearted, self-reliant and good. And there is Serena Pemberton—wicked, wanton, wild, and oh, so easy to abhor. Take her out for a read. You won’t be disappointed.

I’m not sure there is much more I can say about Gone Girl that hasn’t already been put into other reviews. I really enjoyed reading about Amy and Nick Dunne and their crazy, mixed-up marriage.

Gillian Flynn writes to a quick pace and kept me entertained through to the last chapter. I did manage to suss out the situation about half-way through the first section, but it didn’t diminish my enthusiasm to find out what happens to the hapless couple.

Anyone who likes a good thriller will like Gone Girl—there’s plenty of action, and the characters are solidly written. Personally, I would have liked the ending to exact a bit more revenge on the guilty party, but the conclusion was solid and satisfying.

Performance art as book.

“Fascinating.

                              book,”                  I did

liken it”

                                            Quickly red, jumping around words,”

      “Pretty cuts and stitches.”

                                                    “Apt story. “Just turned 50. Falling apart

                                “. “

Le Déjeuner des Canotiers by Pierre-August Renoir (Charles Ephrussi is the gentleman in the background wearing a top hat, with his back to the viewer.)

Another Half Cannonball… Just under the wire!

Author Edmund de Waal is a London-based ceramicist descended from the Ephrussi family, a dynasty of secular Jews who dominated the grain and banking markets in Odessa, Paris and Vienna in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When his great-uncle Iggie Ephrussi passed away, de Waal inherited a collection of Japanese Netsuke that had been passed down for five generations. In The Hare with the Amber Eyes, de Waal takes readers on a journey with these 264 immaculately carved miniature artworks, originally purchased as a group lot by Charles Ephrussi in Paris, in the 1870s.

As both an artist and an author, de Waal spent a great deal of time researching his subject matter, both the Eprhussi family and the artworks they bought. His descriptions of fin de siècle Vienna and Paris are delightful and he brings great detail to the lifestyles of these wealthy patrons and shows how their connoisseurship of the artists of the day established artistic, architectural and literary tastes even into the 21st century.

The story takes a tragic turn as the Nazis rise to power and the Ephrussi clan are stripped of their status and prosperity. When de Waal inherits the Netsuke collection, it is the final, remaining evidence of the family’s phenomenal wealth and influence. I was entranced by the story and I loved de Waals obvious love for his subject. He writes with the flare of a gifted art historian, and while some might find his intense investment in minute descriptions of living arrangements, architectural details and social customs tiresome, I was satisfied beyond measure.

Nordic Mystery, Icelandic edition.

Silence of the Grave is Arnaldur Indridason’s second novel in the Inspector Erlander Reykjavik Murder Series. I definitely plan on reading more. 

The story opens at a child’s birthday party and that is about the only cheerful thing that happens in the entire novel. A bone has been found by some partygoers and when one of the adults identifies it as human, this detective story gets as dark as an Icelandic winter night. Inspector Erlander and his team are brought in to do the detective work as archeologists slowly excavate a burial site in the middle of a new housing development. It is immediately apparent that the grave is not new, so the team must dive into the past of this remote area outside Reykjavik, that during the WWII-era was home to little more than scattered vacation cottages and military barracks for English and American troops. 

The details are slow in coming as the chapters move back and forth through time to tell a story of domestic violence that will unlock the secret of the newly discovered burial place. In addition to his work, Erlander is pressed into a present-day domestic crisis which involves his adult daughter, a pregnant drug addict who calls out, too late, for help from her estranged father. The parallels, drawn between the two families, each overwhelmed by violence and self-doubt, are chillingly played.

Indridason handles the action with deliberation and calm, leading us slowly and carefully to a sad, but somewhat inevitable conclusion, while still investing the reader with a tiny speck of hope for a better day tomorrow. I enjoyed every minute of Silence.

Image: Solemn Silence by AmandaRaeK at Etsy

“There is more than one kind of freedom. In the days of anarchy, it was ‘freedom to.’ Now, you’re being given ‘freedom from.’ Don’t underrate it.”
—The Handmaid’s Tale

The first time I read The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, it was just after it was published in the mid-1980s. Thinking back, I remember the book being a quick read, with an interesting take on a dystopian future scenario which depicted a fundamentalist Christian political resurgence born out of the decadent, free-wheeling sexual and economic liberation of the late 20th century. In the story, women are reduced to chattel and are forced into marriage, servitude or sexual slavery by the Commanders of the Republic of Gilead, formerly the United States of America. Education and reading are forbidden, heretics are executed and hung on a wall for all to see, women have no rights and can’t own property and the all-seeing eye of the government is based on fundamentalist, old testament “values” that preserve male superiority and control. I was in my early 20s and proud to have been an active participant in a decade of progress in women’s rights, the firm cementing of women’s choice in health care decisions, growing women’s employment and financial independence (even though it was the middle of the Reagan-era). I thought the allegory made for a good read, but seemed a bit far-fetched.

Hearing recently that two local women got 2000+ people to sign a petition to remove The Handmaid’s Tale (and others) from the suggested (not required) Summer reading list for Senior AP English students at my son’s high school, claiming that it “denigrates Christianity” and contains “pornography,” I was a bit surprised. “Wow,” I thought to myself, “I don’t remember anything about that book being even remotely steamy.” I did remember the repressive, puritanical regime and at the time I first read the book, I thought it pushed the envelope of possibility. Thinking about it again, in light of the most recent attempts at reigniting the so-called “culture wars,” in particular this small skirmish here in my own neighborhood, I wondered how I would feel about it today. So, I did what too often isn’t done in these situations: I downloaded a copy from the library to my Kindle and gave it a re-read.

Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum
The “pornography” the local moms objected to relates to a specific scene in which the narrator, The Handmaid Offred, is participating in a once-a-month ceremony in which she is forced to have missionary-position intercourse with her assigned Commander while lying between the legs of the fully-dressed Commander’s wife. A menage a trois, a three-way, two girls, one guy—it’s not even remotely any of those things. It is a humiliating experience for each participant and I’m pretty sure even a sheltered, 17-year-old AP high-school student would get that when read in context with the entire story.

It’s worth nothing that there was an attempt to amp up the sexual content in the movie, (which was rated “R”) partly by expanding a relationship between the main character and a household chauffeur. In the novel, Offred and Nick do have a sexual relationship, but their couplings are never overtly described, and though they do develop kind feelings toward each other, they meet only at the express direction of the Commander’s wife, who desperately wants a baby and believes her husband to be sterile.

The Commander does try to strike up a friendship with Offred and meets her surreptitiously—not for sex—but to talk, play Scrabble and read old magazines, all of which are forbidden. It is the Commander, not Offred, who breaks the rules. One night he entices Offred to dress up in a lewd and immoral costume and takes her to a secret nightclub, where women who can not (failed Handmaids) or will not (lesbians and other deviants) bend to the new rule of feminine absolutism are forced to prostitute themselves for the highest-level Commanders and visiting dignitaries from other countries.

Getting Closer to the Truth
My sense is that the local outrage over perceived pornographic content and portrayal of Christians in a negative light, genuine though it may be, is actually a misguided attempt to root out and shame what these parents see as a desire by liberal-leaning educators and school board members to push a feminist, pro-choice agenda on their unsuspecting children. After all, denying women’s rights, most recently through the battle over abortion rights, has become a uniting issue for many fundamentalist, right-wing Christians. My feeling is that “slut-shaming,” blaming the victim and generalized anti-feminist sentiment are all being made use of here under the guise of protecting the children. 

Our local protestors probably aren’t very keen that Atwood is an avowed agnostic (though not an atheist, a position she sees as equivalent to religion itself). She herself has noted that the kernel for The Handmaid’s Tale came from the unexpected partnership of radical anti-pornography feminists and the religious right in the early 1980s. Each of these groups had its own convoluted reasons for wanting to ban pornographic material and Atwood found the idea of this unholy alliance an interesting jumping-off point for a society that gleams with holy patriarchal light on the surface but is actually more murderous, corrupt and noxious than the government it replaces. She deftly plays out this troublesome partnership through the Aunts, who train and indoctrinate the Handmaids using coercion, bribery, and, if necessary torture, to preserve their own tiny bit of autonomy and control in the new political economy.

Overall, it’s a small but noisy group that are un-ironically advocating censorship while affectionately calling it “educational reform.” In the big picture, it could be the beginning of a disturbing trend of renewed attempts to push any form of critical thinking out of an already diluted local education curriculum. While we do have a lot of homeschooling here, mostly in religious households wanting to protect children from a “secularist” agenda, our largely blue-leaning county school system is actually pretty diverse student-wise and we haven’t seen as much ideological conflict as one might expect in this corner of the South. Though our state hasn’t been caught up in some of the initiatives being debated across American society today, we are vulnerable to loud calls by a few to hew to values of the past that may have never been.

What’s the Real Danger Here?
Dreaming of her life before Gilead, Kate (Offred) often reminisces about her love for her husband and daughter and it is quite clear that she rejects the tenets of the current government, but she is powerless and unable to follow her own moral code. Much like the leaders of the Republic, it appears our petitioners are choosing to define Kate as a selfish, dirty harlot because she has an affair and marries a divorced man, then rebels when she is forced to submit to non-consensual sex to bear children for her rapist. That her honestly told journey to remove herself from this repressive rape culture, which, not surprisingly includes thoughts of suicide, is being deemed inappropriate for college-bound, academically advanced students is disturbing on many levels. Is advocating resistance to control by a male-dominated theocratic power structure anti-Christian? To me this is both a gross misreading of the novel and more broadly worrying as it applies to the educational experience of our children as a whole. There is a difference between “freedom to” and “freedom from” and at it’s heart, that is what this tempest in a teapot seems to really be about.

Artwork by Anna & Elena Balbusso. You can see more illustrations for The Handmaid’s Tale at their awesome site.

Looking at the reviews of The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown, I feel a little out of sync. It seems like everyone who read it, loves it and I most definitely did not love it. I did not like the three sisters, I didn’t like their parents and I most definitely did not like the choral voice of the narrator, since I was constantly trying to figure out which “sister” was doing the narrating when speaking about “our” experience.

Rosalind, Bianca and Cordelia are the three daughters of a Shakespeare scholar who all end up coming home to help their father care for their mother who is undergoing cancer treatment. They don’t like each other very much and each is struggling, in her own self-obsessed way, to get her life back in order. I didn’t like them and I found it very hard to root for them to do the right thing, or make the hard choice, or mostly just pay attention to what was going on around them and get on with things. I did not find anyone in this book to be funny or endearing. 

I will admit that I have a sister, whom I do not see very much, even though she lives less than two miles from my house. We have very different outlooks on life and disagree on just about everything. This is probably why I found The Weird Sisters to be so tiresome. It was nauseatingly close to my personal experience of having a sister I will never be able to relate to or understand. I don’t blame Eleanor Brown, I blame myself, but I really did not like this story.

Three Sisters, Oil on canvas, 2009, by Timothy Joseph Allen

Performance art. It’s a tough gig. Most people don’t get it, even fewer ever see it and it requires pretty dramatic situations for performance events to even get noticed. The Family Fang is all about performance art and the unfortunate consequences that occur when the children of performance artists become part of the experience without their consent and often without prior knowledge that “art” is happening.

Kevin Wilson presents us with Caleb and Camille Fang, a couple of performance artists who make a living taking mundane, daily occurrences to the extreme. One of their early projects is to get fake married with false names in disparate locations, documenting all of the ceremonies on videotape. When Camille finds herself pregnant, she and Caleb marry for real, for the 37th time and Annie, AKA Child A is born, followed by Buster, AKA, Child B a few years later.

The Fangs enjoy quite a bit of success with their art, which they always videotape and exhibit in museums for audiences. They receive grants for their work and have a reasonably comfortable lifestyle. Caleb, however, is concerned that having children will infringe on their creativity, until he decides that including them will amp up the melodrama of their work and Child A and Child B become unwitting accomplices, well-known in art circles, but awkward inhabitants of everyday life.

The chapters alternate between descriptions of Fang family performance works and the present day lives of Annie and Buster. Annie has become an actress, but she is unable to separate her acting self from her real life self, so she constantly makes horrible choices and is a PR nightmare for her agent. Buster has become a writer. He has two books, one well-received, the other, a dud. He has been reduced to writing freelance articles for magazines and finds himself getting shot in the face with a potato gun by a couple of war veterans in a mid-western field. He has no insurance, no money and no way to get home, so he calls his parents who bring him back into their atypical lifestyle. Annie decides to come back to the nest after topless images from an upcoming film are released on the Internet, she loses a big part and she needs to lay low until things settle down. Except things are never settled in the Fang household, and Caleb and Camille are itching to get the kids involved in their ultimate performance event.

Wilson’s premise is predicated on the idea that throwing children into these contrived, theatrical situations leads them to become capricious adults with limited social skills and no personal boundaries but, to be honest, I didn’t really think that any of the situations Annie and Buster were involved in were any more intensely damaging than the typical minor embarrassments most normal parents expose their children to every day. “Kiss your old aunt Agatha.” “Are you practicing or killing something with that oboe?” “You’ll never make the football team with your build.” “Sure, try out for cheerleading, maybe you’ll make some new friends.” “You have to take your sister to the prom—no one else asked her.” On and on, death by a thousand, shame-inducing cuts.

I didn’t dislike The Family Fang, it just didn’t have any teeth. I liked the characters, but personally, I don’t think Wilson went far enough. If you’re gonna write a novel about messed up kids and demented parents, just go for it. 

I wanted so badly to love True Believers. I’ve liked Kurt Andersen since the old Spy days, and I adored Heyday, so my expectations were high. I guess True Believers is a near miss. It has an intriguing premise, but the main characters were weak and I felt the entire narrative was grasping at straws to prove that Boomers are still worthy of our interest and continue to make revolutionary contributions even as they reach their Medicare years. It’s cool to know what LARPing is or to have innovative positions on creating peace in the Middle–East, but the fault in this saga is that staying relevant isn’t heading out on a bus to protest a G20 summit with your granddaughter, it’s owning one’s beliefs and staying true to deep convictions, even as they evolve over a lifetime—being a true believer, not a role-player. 

Karen Hollander acts as the central catalyst in True Believers and is, for me, the essential reason that the story just doesn’t hang together. Karen is writing her memoirs—she tells of growing up in Chicago, a child of the Sixties and blossoming anti-war activist; she graduates from Radcliffe and becomes a lawyer, in the early years as a victim’s advocate and later as a high-powered corporate attorney. After retiring from practice and becoming a law professor in LA she is offered a nomination to the Supreme Court, which she declines. She declines because of a secret in her past—an event that miraculously was never made public—which Karen is now ready to share.

As young teens, Karen and her best friends, Alex and Chuck are huge fans of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Together the begin to act out “missions” in which they role-play characters and plots from the novels. This sets the stage for a dramatic secret mission they will plan together, causing tragic consequences for one of them, but barely inconveniencing the others, who go on to become accomplished, influential and uber-wealthy members of 21st century society. 

The story weaves back and forth between the past and the near future of tomorrow. Karen’s back story is credible, but the present-day Karen seems a bit too much of a chilled-out entertainer. It just doesn’t feel true to me that a woman who is in serious contention for a Supreme Court nomination would be so casual about everything and everyone in her life. Karen’s concern that this hidden bombshell is going to explode in her face once she has exposed herself and her accomplices in her memoirs comes across as pretty farcical. She has managed to evade detection for decades, so telling all now just seems self-serving and publicity-seeking, not to mention highly detrimental to the others. I get that Andersen wants Karen to seem idiosyncratic and distinct from your typical middle-aged grandma, but it’s overplayed to the point where there is no point. 

Strangely, my take-away from the novel was one of affirmation that good breeding and education can provide insulation and protection for those who would plot to do harm to the political system, whether from within it or from without. It’s probably not what Andersen intended, but in today’s political climate it does feel timely and appropriate. The casualness with which Karen Hollander shrugs off her complicity in an illegal plot, simply because she realized the error of her ways before it was too late becomes an apt metaphor for today’s “I was before it, before I was against it” political mindset. That she is able to continue to live her life on her own terms is a testament that terrorists are easy to create and being a true believer is more often a small matter of convenience than a true confidence of conviction.

I’ve decided that Alif the Unseen will be the book that everyone reads next year. I don’t mean that as a back-handed compliment either, I think it’s a great story that’s easy to follow, has very interesting characters, a smidgen of magic and even the Internet-hacker aspect of the narrative is effortlessly accessible, whether you’re 14 or 49.* 

I enjoyed the heck out of Alif the Unseen. G. Willow Wilson has written a magical mystery tour of life, the internet and everything, both seen and unseen. Wilson, best known as a graphic novelist, is an American who converted to Islam while attending Boston University. She deftly handles Islamic sensibilities and culture in a way that feels comfortable, and even familiar to western readers. 

The protagonist, who goes by the handle Alif—the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, and a play on the 1s and 0s of his coding life—is half arab and half Indian. Alif lives in an unnamed Emirate state, a place where his life is invisible to many, not only because of his mixed-race heritage, but also because he works as a grey-hat hacker who helps others evade the Internet security forces who retain tight control of all information flowing into and out of his country. 

Alif is in love with a girl, Intisar, whom he met online, and turns out to be from a very high-born family. They have met and consummated their relationship in secret, but there is little hope of their ever being together. It is Intisar who sets the story in motion when she lets Alif know that a marriage has been arranged between herself and a man highly placed in the government. She insists that, for their own safety, they must never meet again. Alif determines that not meeting should extend to their online lives as well, so he develops a program, Tin Sari, that will identify an individual, not through email or IP addresses, but by analyzing individual indicators, such as language usage, tone of voice, key stroke idiosyncrasies and other highly-individualized online affectations that can’t be disguised. Tin Sari works so well, that the head of the Internet Security Force, know as The Hand of God, picks up on Alif’s work and begins using it against him and his collaborators.

The stakes are raised when Intisar tries to help Alif by sending him a book of unknown provenance—obviously ancient—possibly transcribed by a mystic with connections to the unseen world of the Jinn. The Alf Yeom, or, A Thousand and One Days, becomes Alif’s map for solving the mystery of The Hand, finding his one true love, venturing into the magical world of the Unseen with an unlikely band of allies and supporting an Arab Spring-like uprising in his country.

There was not one chapter of this book I did not enjoy. Wilson writes with confidence and understanding of her characters and their motivations. Her descriptions of the Unseen world were vibrant in my mind’s eye and she elegantly connects the majesty of the written word with computer coding, attesting how each can be one thing on the surface, but reflective of a viewer’s perceptions, providing a unique experience each time one is reexamined. From start to finish, it was a fantastic ride.

*I have to note here, that I was disappointed in the use of some “bad” words, which seemed egregious mostly because they weren’t really necessary, and without them, I would absolutely hand this over to my 11 year old who would adore the story. I just not sure I want her reading an exclamation like “your mother’s c**t,” (twice), since I’m not entirely sure she’s ever heard the “c” word, and I don’t want her asking me what that means just yet.