"Natural History," Stories by Andrea Barrett

Andrea Barrett demonstrates yet again how life tells its stories through aspiration, work, dreams, and disillusion of everyday people. She expertly listens and illuminates for us the inner journeys of a wide variety of sympathetic characters in her collection of stories, Natural History. It is a bravura performance from a well-loved and multi-awarded author.

The stories feature a principal group of characters; Henrietta Atkins, born before the Civil War in what might be the Finger Lakes district of New York, provides the focus for 150 years of storytelling. You wouldn’t, however, call this a multigenerational saga, because the short pieces here bring dramatic moments in people’s lives into clear focus, leaving other broad dramas and events out of the scheme.

Barrett introduces her characters and we come to know them very, very well. Henrietta is an accomplished amateur natural historian, a type with a long, illustrious history. She teaches high school science, and guides extra-curricular science activities. She eschews one potential proposal through an odd, self-conscious reaction, but does not go loveless through life.

Strong relationships between strong women abound in this collection, and provide some of the most gratifying reading. We witness the great and the tragic events of the times—the Civil War and the First World War both occur during Henrietta’s life, along with the 1918 influenza epidemic, the sensational early days of flying by celebrated pilots, and the Volstead Act, inaugurating Prohibition. Throughout, women reinforce each other during strife-torn times, write ground-breaking scientific papers, defy death in flying machines, and pass learning on the the next generation through wisdom and compassion.

Andrea Barrett’s power of observation, her kindness toward her readers, and her uncanny felicity with the language lead us to hours of delight and wonder. I recommend this very, very highly.
 

 

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"What You Can't Give Me" by RC Binstock

 

I feel like the china shop in the aftermath of a visit from a reckless bull. RC Binstock’s collection of short stories What You Can’t Give Me contains a series of punches to the gut, delivered to its characters and readers alike. Its current-day setting requires that it at least takes into account the unprecedented, polarizing convulsion of the COVID pandemic, which tends to plow people’s lives under, whether or not they fall ill.

There is a sharp edge in the language in these pieces; they display the author’s  enviable handle on 21st Century patter; this skill colors dialogue and exposition alike. Surprising, arresting reactions erupt to the surface in Binstock’s characters here, driving the action in this stunning collection to its memorable, sometimes heart-wrenching conclusion. This collection is a direct broadside hit, among the author’s finest work.

You will find yourself in fascinating settings here, whether it’s a funeral home trying to cope with the deluge of unexpected deaths during the pandemic’s first weeks; a grocery store where tension and aggression show a young employee’s surprising insight into the world around him; or a restaurant whose owner has had to fire almost all his employees after the dropoff of business. But it’s the vivid cast of characters which really carries this collection.

A young worldly-wise waitress feigns amusement at her boss’s lewd innuendo because she feels sure he’d never assault her; the wife whose husband suddenly and cruelly estranges himself from her and the children, but who won’t leave because of the lockdown; the grocery store bagger with Down syndrome, whose thought process shows the author’s bravura skill; and, a personal favorite, the South Asian immigrant pharmacist who administers vaccines at an assisted living home, only to have her life changed when she meets a sympathetic resident in her 90s.

What You Can’t Give Me treats interracial marriage, the #Me Too movement, and the cultural divide in a variety of settings. But in its essence, this collection explores the human need for intimate partnership. In a wide variety of settings, felt by widely divergent characters at various points in their relationships, this very human need is met, thwarted, pursued, or frustrated in the stories, but always, in Binstock’s hands, perceptively, brilliantly.

Intimate and immediate, topical and unpredictable, I can’t recommend What You Can’t Give Me enough.

 

 

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"Reading in the Brain" by Stanislas Dehaene

Subtitle: The New Science of How We Read

 In 2009, French cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene proposed in his book Reading in the Brain a hypothesis to describe brain activity in humans when they read. He calls it neuronal recycling, and it’s based on a few elementary facts.

Writing systems and reading have been around for only about 5,000 years, much too short a timeframe for humans to evolve brain structures tailored specifically to reading. So, obviously, humans did not evolve reading as a skill. Dehaene’s thesis is based on MRIs of peoples’ brains while they read, and research into the anatomy of primate brains. In chimpanzee and macaque brain structures, neurologists have learned that synapses within the occipital and inferior temporal areas fire when the subject is shown certain shapes.

Dehaene has also found the analagous areas in human brains in use while a person is reading. In simple terms, the author’s hypothesis states that reading “hijacks” these brain structures evolved to recognize certain critical shapes and directed their use to recognizing letters and words. From there, writing systems have adapted to take advantage of some apparently pre-programmed, or evolved, primate brain functions. The result is a literate population who can communicate in great detail with the dead, and can leave communications for future generations after they themselves are dead. It’s obviously a superpower.

A survey of writing systems through the last few thousand years revealed some intriguing parallels. For instance, most characters are composed of roughly three strokes that can be traced without ever lifting or stopping the pen or stylus. Dehaene proposes that this formula corresponds to the way the neurons’ react to increasing complexity of the symbols. In all writing systems across the world, characters appear to have evolved to an almost optimal combination that can easily be grasped the multi-tiered way the brain works as we read. At lower levels of our visual comprehending system, the strokes themselves consist of two, three or four line segments. At one level up, in our alphabetical systems, multiletter units such as word roots, prefixes, suffixes, and grammatical endings are almost invariably two, three, or four letters long. In Chinese, most characters consist in a combination of two, three, or four semantic and phonetic subunits. Visually speaking, all writing systems seem to rely on a pyramid of shapes whose golden section is the number 3 plus or minus 1.

I confess there are chapters in this book I did not read. They were very technical, written for other neuroscientists, covering dyslexia and the implications for the teaching of reading. The level of detail here is deep and comprehensive. The style is straightforward and clear, comprehensible to any adult reader. I did get the diverting feeling as I read, as I’m sure Dehaene did while writing, that readers of his book had to engage in this marvelous, unique skill, while learning about the marvelous, unique skill they were using. Quite enjoyable.

 

 
 

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"The Man Without Shelter" by Indrajit Garai

The Man Without Shelter follows the exploits of Arnault, a Frenchman released from wrongful imprisonment after 23 years’ incarceration. Early on, the story focuses on Arnault and his troubles, but as the narrative progresses the point of view shifts over to Lucy, an idealistic attorney who gets involved in Arnault’s legal dealings. She’s a character who wants to do the right and ethical thing, but really learns her high idealism from Arnault’s example.

At story’s outset, Arnault is released from the penitentiary and thrust out onto the Paris streets just before midnight. He’s paid in Euros for his labor while in prison (the only French currency he’s familiar with is Francs), but has nowhere to go, and no valid state ID. He needs both of these things before he can secure employment in a city full to overflowing with refugees who also need work. He could seek a homeless shelter for his permanent address, but with so many homeless people living in Paris, these shelters have waiting lists a mile long.

In this way, author Indrajit Garai steeps his readers in the present-day pitfalls and hardships faced by the homeless refugees crowding Paris. They’re preyed upon by immigrant gangs who deal in drugs, violence, and human traffic; the state has attempted to fashion a bureaucracy to deal with the problems in a humane way, but its shortcomings become the niche that private foundations try to fill.

Garai clearly wants us to witness these social ills in detail. His story is a simple framework to illuminate them. Lucy, the young idealistic lawyer, works at clearing Arnault’s name from prior suspicion; meanwhile Arnault is spectacularly rising above his difficulties in a daring and much-filmed rescue of a child hanging from a balcony four stories above a Paris street. Arnault and Lucy don’t communicate through the months during which he trains and becomes a firefighter and rescue worker while she works doggedly on his behalf in court.

Large sections of The Man Without Shelter read like a social history and critique of conditions facing the homeless and refugees now huddled in Europe. One gets the feeling Garai has encountered the ill effects of these conditions by close, personal observation. Garai, an American citizen born in India, and now living in Paris, wrote the novella in English (there’s no translator’s credit), and his style contains some odd, gentle missteps one might expect from a Francophone writing in English. Many of the nouns are plural, for instance, even when it isn’t needed.

That is a quibble, however. This book is a spare, straightforward narrative using some fairly plain plot devices to frame its larger theme. The distress of these people, beset on all sides by ill fortune, official indifference, and criminal manipulation, must be seen and addressed. This story is a framework for doing it. One admires Garai for his impulse, but this book lacks the soul or the gritty mise en scène of Garai’s touching prior novel, 2019’s The Bridge of Little Jeremy.
 

 

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"Confluence" by Gemma Chilton

 

When the characters become real to us, we understand we’re reading effective fiction. When this realism leads to hoping for the best for this imaginary person, when their hopes become our hopes, the fiction we’re reading is now more than effective, it’s engaging. It bonds us, it recruits us in the service of its cast. The depth of our feeling for Liam, the young man wrestling with his memory—which is perhaps unreliable—of a pivotal traumatic event from his childhood, is the only yardstick you’ll need to measure the solid worth of Gemma Chilton’s Confluence. It’s a remarkably accomplished work for debut fiction; I couldn’t wait to get back to it each time I was forced to put it down.

We meet Liam as he struggles in an uninspiring job in Sydney and an affair he’s not particularly invested in. When his mother calls with bad news about her health, he quits his job, and his sometime partner, to move back into their home near the ocean. It’s where he grew up, and unfortunately the scene of a mysterious and horrifying episode in which his father disappears. Liam was only ten years old at the time. He tries hard to deal with, and to trust, the spotty memories surrounding this incident. He finds it impossible, and must confront not only the ineluctable truth that his dad’s not coming back, but his own inability to move on from it. He’s never stopped searching for his missing dad; it’s a habit he formed early on, and has been in thrall to it for nearly twenty years.

Chilton treads a path through this thicket by alternating time frames between past and present. Her use of this device is perfect, unfolding the story with steady, digestible revelations as we go. All the while we feel sympathy with our young questor, his mother and missing father, and the intriguing young Thai/Aussie woman who shows an interest in him. The author rushes nothing, neither does she dawdle; her pace is exactly what it should be in a taut family drama. One hesitates to label this a coming-of-age story, but Liam’s emotional journey prior to the novel’s events has been stunted, blocked by his father’s disappearance and probable death.

I do not want to paint this as a depressing book. It’s the opposite. Human shortcomings, in the dicey tumult of a lifetime, affect everyone. Some people’s intentions are lacking, or limited, or simply immoral, but the principal characters here shine with friendship, decency, and compassion. Chilton resolves the conundrums and roadblocks and traps people find themselves in, without resorting to facility, or cliché, or hackneyed device. This is honest, strong fiction, and I welcome a new author in the literary fold.

 

 

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