Tag: USA

LITTLE BASTARDS by Mildred Kadish

Here is a book about growing up on an Iowa farm in the Great Depression.  The New York Times put this on its notable books list of 2007 (I’m going in order from 2000 through those lists, truly I am desperate for something to read), but myself I had to quit half way through.  Essentially the author tells us about all the cooking and cleaning and farming stuff that happened on a farm in the 1930s. You’d think it would be interesting: but no.  Though I will include this snippet:

“When one of us kids received a scratch, cut, or puncture, we didn’t run to the house to be taken care of.  Nobody would have been interested.  We just went to the barn or the corncrib, found a spiderweb, and wrapped the stretchy filament around the wound.”

Yikes.  There’s given children independence and then there is germs.

TOWELHEAD by Alicia Erian

I was really impressed by this one.  It’s a coming-of-age story which, despite the title, is far more about sex than about race.  A woman decides her boyfriend is too interested in her 13 year old daughter.  Rather than dump the boyfriend, she sends the girl to live across the country with her ex-husband.  There, she gets very into masturbating and then SPOILER ALERT is raped by the 37 year old man next door.

What makes it successful is that nothing here is black-and-white.  For example, the father, despite he sometimes hits the girl, is somehow not portrayed as a monster.  The girl thinks she has a crush on the man next door, even after the assault.  It sounds bleak, and it is, but it is also not. You’d think this girl is a victim (because she is), but somehow, triumphantly, despite these very bad things that happen to her, she retains agency and energy.  I don’t quite know how to describe it, somehow it was a fundamentally hopeful book. I guess you’d have to read it. 

PRAIRIE FIRES: THE AMERICAN DREAMS OF LAURA INGALLS WILDER by Caroline Fraser

Here is a life of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE.  First thing I’m going to say is, there’s a lot of encouragement here for late bloomers.  She wrote that book, and the six others, all in her 60s, with little previous writing experience.  What I found particularly interesting was that they are all – to some extent, and the extent is quite contested – auto-biographical stories, covering her life up to about age 20.   She wrote the books in part to make money, and in part because she was driven to. 

She had a real yearning to keep her parents and her childhood alive.  It was so bad that at night she often could not sleep, because the memories were coming back to her so thick and fast.  I guess it makes sense, as you get older, this desire to make it all mean something.  I find it quite touching, that apparently today you can go to various museums and see things like ‘Pa’s fiddle,’ and ‘Carrie’s sampler.’  How incredible: this low income, rural woman of the early 1900s has managed to immortalize her ordinary family. 

I think one reason she felt such a need to hold onto the past was down to how quickly it was changing in her own lifetime.  Her father was one of those who went out to ‘settle’ the West, so she had a front row seat to what that meant for the native Americans, and lived to see the prairies ploughed under and highways built.  I knew that frontier life was hard, and that very few settlers managed to stay on the land for the five years needed to ‘claim’ it.  But what astounded me was to learn that even in the early 1900s the government meterologists warned repeatedly that the prairies were too dry for small scale farming, and that only cattle would really work.  But the railways still pushed this dream on people.   It is just wild to think of the myth of the noble frontiersman and include in that the fact that he was basically being snookered by big business.  Wilder’s family had a terrible time. If it was not droughts, it was locusts (as many as a trillion individuals in one particular swam).  And once they had ploughed up the prairie, and taken the top soil that took thousands of years to develop, then there came the dust.   Apparently carts would go past with ‘In god we trusted in Kansas we busted,’ on the side, and ‘shack-whacky’ was a well known term for the mental health crises that were common in this difficult environment.   The only real solution was co-operative irrigation and government bailouts, which is yet another layer to the myth of the frontier. 

I can’t even get into her daughter, who was another whole topic, an early journalist who travelled the world, a depressive, and eventually a anti-Semitic libertarian.  A great book, it made me think about a ton of different topics.

AN HONEST WOMAN: A MEMOIR OF LOVE AND SEX WORK by Charlotte Shane

Here is some non-fiction about being a sex worker.  What I really can’t get is the cover: it’s a sexy pair of female lips.  What?  Who agreed to this image, which to me at least is both cheesy and reductive?

For a book all about the author’s experience, I felt I learnt curiously little about the author.  For example, it’s not clear why she gets into ‘full service,’  For a relatively well-off, well-educated person, it’s an unusual career choice, being simultaneously high-risk and repetitive, but we don’t hear too much about it.  Mostly, she seems to have enjoyed the validation of being sexually desired by so many.   

Another example is her relationship with her main client, who was about half her income.  She tells us a lot about him, including that she would not have spent time with him for free ‘either platonically or sexually,’ but still, she is greatly upset by his death.  

Of most interest to me was her time in high school.  She becomes enamoured of a group of kids at  neighbouring school, and especially of the boys:

“My objective as a teenagers was to find the boys, to link up with them because they were the party, they were the event. Years passed, and the objective stayed the same, with the focus shifted to sanction my own creativity: find boys to make a band, find boys to make a movie – find boys because they’d supply the verbs that would propel my life.  It wasn’t just that they were necessary for sex or romance, though they were for me.  More than that, they were the only means of getting at all that life has to offer.  . . . A woman’s life is fundamentally inert, no matter how busy or accomplished a woman might be because that the nature of an object, even important or well travelled objects like the Hope Diamond or the Olympic Torch . . . I could fling myself into a situation like a skydiver jumping from a plane, but in my mind, I couldn’t forment the situation on my own . . .”

Unpleasantly, I sort of recognize this problem from my own adolescence, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it described so clearly before.

NEVER SAW ME COMING by Tanya Smith

I read this book in a single day on the beach.  It’s my favourite kind of reading, when your own life stays at a respectful distance.  This is the jaw-dropping true story of a young black woman in 1970s Minnesota who figures out how to defraud banks, stealing multiple millions of dollars before she is finally caught. 

This is pretty much all SPOILER ALERT.  Get this: she is in HIGH SCHOOL when she figures out how to move money between banks using the phone.  Then, even more impressively, she manages to con a bank into giving her a computer terminal, convinces their IT department to set it up, and then is able to move money around in the bank’s own systems.  Reminder: it is the 1970s! She is 17!  She is running a sophisticated electronic fraud from her parents’ attic!

Then she starts to do things that are more like what a 17 year old would do, that is, fall for the wrong guy, and give him all the money, so he can ‘invest for their future.’  She hardly sees a penny of her own crime.  She moves to LA, and then to Atlanta, repeating this pattern with two other men.  In her late 20s she is caught, but the police in Minneapolis tell her they don’t believe a ‘Negro’ could possibly be running a scheme of this complexity.  Eventually they are able to see past their own prejudice far enough to get a conviction, and she is given a 13 year sentence, which is far in excess of guidance for white collar crimes. 

She escapes jail twice, once returning to one of these men who chains her up and beats her, forcing her to carry on the scams.  She gives birth in jail twice, only seeing these children on the day of their birth (I had no idea the prison system was this cruel).  She then manages to argue her own legal case for a reduction of sentence, finally getting out.   And this all before she is 40! 

ENEMY WOMEN by Paulette Jiles

I’m really at a loss on what to read next so I am going back through the New York Times Notable Books of the last twenty years. Right now I’m in 2003, which brings me this story of the American civil war, ENEMY WOMEN.

I feel like I know a lot about the combatant experience of the civil war (in this blog alone in the last couple of years THE MARCH by EL Doctorow, and MARCH by Geraldine Brooks). This though tells the civilian story, and in particular a female civilian. It is pretty hair-raising stuff, as the protagonist Adair struggles to walk across Missouri accompanied only by her incurable TB.

Bit of a side bar, but I had often heard of the huge flocks of passenger pigeons that used to exist in America, and this book contains a lovely imagining of them, perhaps the first I have ever read (If you have never heard of this, get googling, it is really bad. Flocks were so large it would take them three DAYS to fly past a single spot, with as many as 300 MILLION each hour. It is mind-blowing we managed to exterminate them in under 50 years). Anyway, here it is:

All around her their droppings cracked on the leaves on the ground, and once she heard a limb breaking from the weight of a hundred doves who had fluttered down to crowd onto it. It was a storm of doves, the sunlight became dim was it would dim in an eclipse and she rode hard to get away from them. She rode ten miles at a trot before they were clear of them. She and the horses both walked into a wide pool of water in a stream and washed themselves clean.

THE WIDE WIDE SEA by Hampton Sides

I’m apparently really into nautical non-fiction at the moment.  THE WAGER, THE MOOR’S ACCOUNT, and now THE WIDE WIDE SEA.  It’s the story of Captain Cook’s third and final (fatal) journey of exploration.  He was all set to retire too, and no one really understands why he decided to go ‘one last voyage,’ given he was already famous and rich.  How could he not see that there was virtually no way, narratively, this wasn’t going to go either tragic or disappointing?

The voyage had two goals, one to find the NorthWest Passage, and the other to return to this young man, Mai, to his home island of Tahiti.  This second part was pretty interesting.  Mai discovered guns at the business end – by being shot at -when the Europeans landed in Tahiti the first time. He was strongly, strongly in favour.  His family had been killed by their enemies on Bora-Bora, and this guy, clearly a total baller, decided to play the long game, i.e., befriend the Europeans, get them to take him to Europe, get European guns, and come back to use them on these bastards from Bora-Bora.  To understand his level of fury, let me tell you that apparently it was not uncommon for Bora-Borans to take the dead body of their enemies and “flatten the eviscerated corpse with clubs, then cut a hole through the abdomen, through which the triumphant warrior would insert his head to ‘wear’ his victim as a sort of macabre serape.”

Mai had been living in the UK for some years, mostly on country estates with the wealthy. He rarely visited towns, but when he did ‘the poverty and hunger he encountered while on brief visits to . . . upset him; he’d seen nothing like it in the land of tropical plenty that was Tahiti.”  He was admired for his quick learning of English, and his freedom with the language; ice was ‘stone water,’ a wasp that stung him was a ‘solider bird.’  One day when offered snuff he politely replied ‘No thank you, the nose not hungry.’    

When Cook finally drops him off, he struggles to reacclimatize of course, and the gun thing doesn’t really work out because the intra-island battles have moved on.  The author, bizarrely, says a bunch of stuff about how sorry he is for Mai, who he feels is ‘doomed . . . to a jumbled, deracinated existence,’  because he has moved around so much and seen so much.  Has this guy never been to London?  About half the population are from elsewhere and I don’t note us all  in despair at our jumbled lives.

I was interested to learn that Cook’s achievements were not just geographical but culinary. I knew scurvy was a bad disease, but did not realize that “ It was generally assumed that scurvy would kill off half the crew members on any lengthy expedition.” The causes of scurvy were not understood till the 1950s, but Cook dreamed up a diet for his sailors which prevented it – his first voyage was three years and they did not lose a single person to the illness, which made him famous and was a huge breakthrough for British imperialism.

Anyway, he ends up being killed by some locals on a beach in Hawaii.  An interesting story. 

BANAL NIGHTMARE by Halle Butler

I liked this author’s last rage-filled book, THE NEW ME, and I like this one too. THE NEW ME was about an angry woman in Chicago who concludes she has wasted her twenties. BANAL NIGHMARE is about a pretty similar woman in her early thirties who has left Chicago to return to her hometown.

The main character is recovering from a break-up, and I guess the book functions as a prism for looking at the particular unhappiness that comes with deciding in early mid-life that you are going to have to start again. Every romantic relationship in the book is a mess, which makes it pretty depressing (and unlikely) reading. But I still enjoyed the miserable, defeated energy of the book.

LONG ISLAND COMPROMISE by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

God I loved this book. It is a family drama about the long term impact of a kidnapping, but who cares what it was about. It was the kind of book that as soon as I open it I know I am going to like it; it basically deletes you out of your life for hours at a time. Enjoy this, about an aggrieved woman about to give the eulogy at her mother’s funeral:

. . . Marjorie, who was normally a seismograph for people’s regard of her, had quickly become drunk on the wide-scale pronouncement of the category of grievances she frequently referred to (in crowds smaller than this, mostly gathered on folding chairs in a circle) as ‘her truth.’

The category of grievances that were her truth. LOL!

I loved the pull of the plot, but almost more I loved the weird freedom of the narrative voice. I’ll end with her describing some McMansions:

. . . And the details were atrocious: curling wrought-iron gates and shutters that couldn’t possibly work and stone-ish siding and my god, the columns: Corinthian, Doric, Ionic, tragic.

Now here is a separate paragraph just for the doors. The doors on these homes were huge. . .

THE FUTURE by Naomi Alderman

This is a fun novel in which the near future is densely imagined. I was not so much sold on the plot, which for me was a bit too close to wishful-thinking. If I was to summarize reductively, it pushed the idea that if we could just get control of Big Tech we could somehow solve the climate crisis.

I am not sure anything can solve the climate crisis at this point. I just hope we can hold on till human population peaks in 2100 and then it somehow heals itself as our species begins to decline back down to more rational numbers. In any case, I admired the density of the imagining, and loved some of the ideas. Try this:

“. . . . the sun will go supernova and boil the seas and we’re just one stinking species and species live and die, that’s what we do. There’ll be no audience and no final judgement and no redeemer is going to liveth and no one will come along at the end of the show and tell us our score and what we could have won.”

I like that idea, that I’ll never find out about the wonderful alternate life I could be living if only I’d made better choices.