Tag: USA

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.

ALL FOURS by Miranda July

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book about the menopause before, but here we are.  Enjoy this, the protagonist on her age, which is in many ways the central problem of the book:

“I was no closer to being sixty-five than twenty-five, but since time moved forward, not backward, sixty-five was tomorrow and twenty-five was moot.  I didn’t think a lot about death, but I was getting ready to.  I understood that death was coming and that all my current preoccupations were kind of naïve; I still operated as if I could win somehow.  Not the vast and total winning I had hoped for in the previous decade, but a last chance to get it together before winter came, my final season” 

‘The vast and total winning,’ we’ve all been there, LOL. 

She decides to go on a roadtrip from California to New York, which her husband thinks will be a good challenge for her.  About a half hour in, she checks into a motel and just impulsively decides to hang out and decorate the room.  She doesn’t tell her husband.  This part I loved.  The protagonist feels no need to explain or pathologize why she is doing it: she just follows her impulse. I found this wonderfully fun and free-ing.  She then SPOILER ALERT falls for a young guy who works at the local Hertz.  At this point, things get a bit more predictable, as we get into how she navigates having an open relationship.  I found this part a bit slow, maybe because it’s a story I feel I’ve heard a few too many times before.  Poly people are much like vegans in being overly willing to tell you all about it.   But even this was enlivened by the intense amount of menopause and more general midlife panic she weaves in.  It shows how few women have really been allowed to write across history, that this experience should be so rarely described.  I love the idea that it might be an opportunity to be more free, possibly even wildly more free.  Though I’m not sure I’m signing up for an affair with the car rental guy. 

SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW by William Maxwell

A few pages into this book, I started to wonder if I’d read something by this author before. And indeed I had, THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS, a memoir about the author’s mother dying of the Spanish Flu. What tipped me off was first the style, and second the fact that the narrator’s mother had just died of Spanish Flu.

Bizarrely, what the child narrator is narrating to us is a real-life murder from his home town. A man’s wife falls in love with his best friend, and leaves him in an ugly and very public divorce. He murders his friend, cuts off the corpse’s ear (?) and then drowns himself. The perspective changes from the child’s, to various of the adult’s, to a dog’s. The dog’s part is by far the saddest.

I admired this book greatly, but at the same time didn’t enjoy it. It was just kind of sad and I wasn’t sure what I gained from it.

SMALL FRY by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

To say this is a memoir by the daughter of Steve Jobs does the book a disservice. It certainly is that, and you do learn some scuttle-butt about Steve Jobs (who does seem to be a really weird guy), but what is mostly interesting is the very real, detailed effort to re-create a specific childhood.

It is a real mystery of the memoir form how any life – no matter how foreign – told with enough specificity, becomes relatable. This specific child was born to a pair of hig school sweethearts. The mother decides to keep her, and is a loving parent, but also struggles very much with what she has given up in doing so. The father eventually accepts paternity after a DNA test, and agrees child support amounts just days before a little computer company he founded goes public, making him a multi-millionaire.

This makes it sound like a bitter book, but it’s not really. I enjoyed it.

FUNNY STORY by Emily Henry

This is fun genre romance. I have never been much of a reader of genre fiction, but I like this lady Emily Henry. She writes quick, funny novels that make a vacation fly by. She is an enormous best seller, and I was interested to read how she thinks about the ‘romance genre’ tag. See below, from CBC. It is continually weird that somehow Stephen King (genre: thriller) is so much more respectable than any female genre writer I can think of

For Henry, it’s important to call herself a romance writer because she’s tired of people looking down on the genre and dismissing its value. 

“There is still a lot of snobbery around the genre and I find it really bizarre because it’s one of the very few genres that is so centered on women,” she says. “Obviously, it’s not just for or about women, but the authorship is dominated by women, the readership is dominated by women and I just don’t think it’s really a coincidence that it’s the genre that gets dismissed so readily…. Romance is so significant because it values women’s stories.”

A YEAR ON EARTH WITH MR HELL by Young Kim

The review I first read about this book was illustrated with a photo of a young Asian woman holding the hand of a much older European man.  The review spent much time discussing whether or not the book is revenge porn, and to my surprise the pornographer is in fact the young woman.

Basically, the guy was married, and had an affair with this lady, and this is the story of that affair.  This is all sounds very salacious but in fact for a book with really a lot of sex in it, it is remarkably straightforward.  There’s a lot of chat about what she wore, and when he did or not text her back.  It was drafted in real-time, as the relationship was happening, which gives it an interesting kind of immediacy.

What I found especially interesting was what this lady did for a living, which, as far as I can tell, was nothing too much.  She had previously been with another much older man, Malcolm McLaren, who she met when she was a student at Yale, and after his death (about which she is clearly heart-broken) she mostly curates his artistic legacy.  She spends her year going between New York and various European capitals, having dinners, going to openings, and wearing designer shoes. I tried not to think the word ‘parasite,’ as of course that is uncharitable.  I guess I like my artists starving.

HELP WANTED by Adelle Waldman

It is striking how few novels there are about the world of work. I wonder why that is? Work is the place where most people spend most of their adult lives, and yet somehow it doesn’t seem to qualify as literary content. Maybe it’s because jobs are too specific? Or maybe on some level we are don’t feel that they are our ‘real’ lives, and so don’t deserve real consideration? In any case, here is one. It’s about the team that unloads boxes at a lowbrow department store. It’s enjoyably about the mechanics of the work (not easy) and about their efforts to get rid of their noxious boss by getting her promoted away from them. It’s unavoidably also about how stressful and precarious it is to work a minimum wage job in the US. This aspect of it veered a little awkwardly close to education/lecture/etc, but Waldman is a good enough writer that the book survives all the same.

As side note on the author. Waldman’s first and only other book was the magnificent THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P, a brilliant evocation of a literary Brooklyn, which I have read multiple times. That was however overa decade ago; apparently the author did not write another because (to her own surprise) she did not have any other ideas. It’s funny how minds work.