At the outset of John Gardner’s Nickel Mountain, Henry Soames owns and runs a diner by the side of a Catskills highway. He does a better job of that than of controlling his own giving heart; because of his charitable nature, he ends up not only married to a young woman who is pregnant with someone else’s baby, but also opens his home to a Jehovah’s Witness no one likes or trusts, and who may be an arsonist. The novel’s events swirl around Henry, its enigmatically passive-active agent at the center, and through it all the locals for better or for ill, prove that in Gardner’s hands, human nature is endlessly fascinating.
Also as fascinating are the apparent machinations of the gods, or impersonal forces with which humans must contend. A young would-be car designer and racer throws his dreams away and attends Cornell Ag school, as coerced by his businessman father. Henry’s bride finds him impossible to live with part of the time, but also unalterably admires his good acts. Other regulars come to Henry’s roadside diner and complain or shake their heads about nature, or the follies of their fellow characters, and nothing apparently changes over time. The town’s doctor, who doubles as its justice of the peace, carries around and expresses the anger and confusion for everyone’s benefit.
The tides of fortune and folly pursue all; no one is immune. Some suffer more than others, as usual, but through all the health challenges and commercial difficulties Henry wrestles with, his surprising wife and child turn out to be improbable blessings, even to the point of a comprehensive upgrade of his business. Gardner prepares us for certain confrontations which end up occurring outside the narrative, and it’s hard to find the purpose in some of the conflict on offer.
But the direct, persuasive, effective passage is always within the author’s repertoire: early on (at p. 66 of 454), as Henry emphatically blubbers on on some subject or other:
“But was he saying anything at all? he wondered. All so hopelessly confused. And yet he knew. He couldn’t do it and maybe never could have, but he knew. He was a fat, blubbering Holy Jesus, or anyway one half of him was, loving hell out of truckers and drunks and Willards and Callies—ready to be nailed for them. Eager. More heart than he knew how to spend.”
A constitutional inarticulateness afflicts the hero Henry: his compelling ideas, in the midst of his trying to express them, become amorphous as he loses his way. In spite of the mental and emotional challenges, he blunders ahead anyway, and comes out somehow ahead of the game. This, and the plain, direct, and vivid descriptions the author gives the other characters and their misadventures, drive the narrative, and attract and reward the reader. It’s all a mystery, and the Henry Soameses of the world, for all their difficulty in expressing it, know it better than the rest of us.
At a climactic moment in Paul Harding’s This Other Eden a naked, skin-and-bones old man walks off Apple Island and wades out into the Atlantic Ocean carrying a few motley belongings over his head. He struggles against the outgoing tide, just as all the characters in this brilliant, haunting book struggle against the bitter, inexorable tide of American racism. In this spare economical work, Harding reaffirms his penchant for yoking highly effective, beautiful language to serve his lofty goals. This is truly astonishing and gut-wrenching work; after his Tinkers won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, his current offering has been shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize.
Harding sets his tale in 1911 and 1912, to coincide with the real-life Maine legislation to evict a small group of settlers from Apple Island, a small, hardscrabble bit off the state’s coast. First settled in 1792 by a former slave and an Irish woman, Apple Island has been home for more than a century to abjectly poor people, some directly descended from Benjamin Honey, the original slave, and others whose forebears immigrated and stayed. Collectively they display an uncertain racial heritage; most are undernourished and only rudimentally educated, and barely eke out an existence.
The retired missionary Reverend Diamond tries to tend to their souls and to educate their young; this well-meaning soul doubts himself even to the very moment he brings destruction and diaspora. The only exception to the eviction plan is Ethan, a young and highly talented artist, who rates the consideration not only by virtue of his gift, but also his light-skinned, red-haired appearance. The preacher arranges for him to be sent the the home of his distinguished friend in Massachusetts. The boy Ethan,15-ish years old, meets Bridget, a lovely maidservant in the old gentleman’s mansion, and in a bright, golden chapter, they fall in love in their own Edenic time.
The state takes it upon itself to catalog the evils of the other residents, observed and checked off on a list, to be “epileptic, feeble-minded, insane, interbred…paralysis, migraine, neurotic, criminalistic, sexually immoral, self-abusive…” etc. etc., and proceeds to arrest and assign some of the squatters to state institutions for the insane. They consign the rest to the four winds. Thus is this other Eden cleansed.
There are levels of prejudice, levels of narrative nuance, reverberant images, and thought-provoking language here, enough to satisfy, and indeed to surfeit, the most demanding palette. Here is Esther Honey, direct descendant of the island’s original patriarch, musing over her offspring as they return from digging up clams about 33% through the book:
Esther followed their progress and as they got closer she found herself overjoyed by them, each her own little modest person, each unself-consciously taking care of one another, even as they teased and screeched and laughed and complained.
There is the careful and minute observation of Ethan’s artist’s perception of color: how his sister’s skin changes color as daylight and evening proceed. The staggering sights and sounds of busy, crowded Massachusetts as Ethan tries to process it all after his arrival there:
Shock and aftershock struck and echoed and shaped the vastness of the world across the inside of his skull, or so it felt. It was no more than seeing his first automobile idling at a train stop, and so also seeing his first driver, in a mud-spattered long coat with a pair of goggles strapped to his face…It was no more than seeing brick mills that appeared to be larger than the whole island he came from, with smokestacks that appeared not just to reach the clouds but actually to be making them or possibly venting them from the insides of the earth…”
Such vivid passages draw the reader’s sight and capture the reader’s heart in this novel which pierces to the bone. Take this up and compare it to Harding’s prior triumphs, Tinkers and Enon. It has the same mastery of image and plot, and hits as deeply as either of these masterpieces on the higher thematic plane of faith and prejudice, and the higher artistic plane of language and image, rhythm, mood, and reflection. From Harding, another for the ages.
This novel completes—and adds a great deal of depth to—Andrew Krivak’s stunning and award-winning Dardan Trilogy. Covering the life of Jozef Vinich and his two grandsons, Bo and Sam Konar, these three books—The Sojourn (2011), The Signal Flame (2017), and Like the Appearance of Horses (2023)—state their themes with frankness and power, cover their very memorable characters with charity and clarity both, and exhibit a rare, an ineffable, art, worth every moment you would devote to them. Andrew Krivak deserves the awards which have greeted his marvelous writing.
Like the Appearance of Horses takes its title from the second chapter of the Book of Joel, in a passage describing the unstoppable rush of an army that lays waste to the land. This quote enunciates the principal theme of the three books supremely well. War unites this family in heroism, devastating loss, and in tempering the character of all whom it touches.
This novel belongs chiefly to Sam Konar, Jozef Vinich’s second grandson, who, after a series of misadventures (chiefly, engaging in one too many drag races in his hemi head hot rod) is directed by the authorities that his only alternative is to enlist (in the mid-60s) in the Armed Forces.
What follows fills much of the book. Sam does two tours in Vietnam from ‘66 to ’72, near the end of which he is captured and winds up in the notorious North Vietnamese prison dubbed the Hanoi Hilton. There he is forcibly turned into a heroin addict by a creepy NVA prison guard, and must live by his wits—and extemporize from heroin fix to heroin fix—as he gains his freedom and returns Stateside. Throughout this ordeal, Sam retains his principles, even with their altered focus, and eventually reunites with his battalion commander from when he was in country.
In some ways Sam hoes the most difficult row of any of Krivak’s characters. Within the narrative, his experience wraps up the soldiering history of the Vinich and Konar men. Krivak treats Sam’s heroic re-emergence from addiction and imprisonment with blunt realism and steady sympathy. It is a harrowing, but rewarding, element of the novel, perhaps the book’s most important.
The Dardan trilogy will stay with me forever. Its beautiful prose, its comprehensive insider’s treatment of the natural world, and its oh-so-compelling characters make it a unique achievement. Take these books up and let yourself be carried along by a master.
The Signal Flame is Andrew Krivak’s 2017 second entry in the Dardan Trilogy, after a fictional town in Pennsylvania, the stories’ home setting. Signal Flame shares the last events of the multigenerational saga with the third book, Like the Appearance of Horses (2023). The overarching story traces the remarkable life of Jozef Vinich, who fought for the Austro-Hungarians in the Great War, and through hard work, guts, and brains, eventually came into ownership of a sawmill in Dardan, one of the town’s main employers. Please note, the events of this family’s lives, while vivid and dramatic, do not in themselves make the story remarkable. It is the character, abilities, honesty, and strength of the main characters, and in particular the men, which do so.
The second book, The Signal Flame, features Bo Konar, the elder of Jozef Vinich’s two grandsons. After his father dies, Bo spends his childhood at his grandfather’s side and he learns not only the practical lessons of working a farm and tracking game, but also the wisdom and strength of character only available from someone like Jozef. Bo leaves college after only one semester; the shock of the accidental death of a fellow student with whom he was falling in love, moors him to home. At home in Dardan he begins his career at the sawmill, an operation he will eventually own. Events swirl around him and his family: his father is accidentally killed in a hunting accident in 1949 (when Bo is 8 years old); in the 1960s a flood crashes through the town and Bo acts in a superhuman way, jumping from a bridge into a raging, overflowing river, to save the woman who is pregnant with his niece.
Through it all, the stalwart virtues of honesty, level-headedness, receptiveness, fairness, and worldly wisdom carry the main characters, Jozef and Bo particularly, but also the Catholic priest who provides practical help and succor to the family, and Hannah, Bo’s mother, who grieves the loss of her husband. As a follow-up to 2011’s The Sojourn, The Signal Flame fits supremely well, which is a grand recommendation on its own. It continues the clarity and sturdiness of the prose, the gratifying virtuousness of the main characters, and even the non-essential characters have their full human traits, foibles, beliefs, and skills.
This second book in the trilogy is a worthy entry; it stands on its own if you want to immerse yourself in this part of the story, but my recommendation is to start with the memorable and inspiring (and award-winning) The Sojourn. It’s just a book you should not neglect. And neither is The Signal Flame.
If you have any awareness of current science events, technological advances, social or public conversations, or media editorials, then you have read something about Artificial Intelligence, or AI. The discussion is highly public, held at a high level, and freighted with far-reaching dicta by all involved. These statements all too often—and very unfortunately—feature sweeping gloom-and-doom pronouncements. Additionally they are catnip to media outlets which crave them for the clicks they can get, but do very little to illuminate a very important emerging technology.
Cutting through this thicket is well worth it. This is where Kenneth Wenger comes in. He’s the director of research and innovation at CoreAVI and chief technology officer at Squint AI. His book, Is the Algorithm Plotting Against Us?, is a tonic. It’s a very useful and well-laid-out primer on the nuts and bolts of AI, and a convincing agenda for informing the discussion of many of the concerns being expressed.
He makes the logical assumption that his audience knows nothing about computer science, the structure of microchips, or the architecture of neural networks. And yes, he will lead you step by step to a good grounding in the science and technology of it all. Concise, highly readable, and logical, he takes his readers from Square One to a good basic understanding of the pitfalls and the potential of this technology. That is the main reason he sat down to his word processor, and the chief virtue of the book. He is eminently successful at the task he set for himself.
Without digging too deeply into the normative social issues—you should read the book!—Wenger gives the reader a crystal-clear perspective on current problems, and thereby establishes where the current debate should be. While acknowledging the sometimes rash and far-fetched statements made by scientists and “thought leaders,” Wenger would have us focus on current problems besetting this technology, which is in its infancy. His finishing touch is polemical, in fact, since he has observed, and has grave doubts about, some of the applications to which AI has been put.
I could go on, because I enjoyed and value this book very much, but I would make a hash of it: I would never be able in a review of this length to present the flow and logic as elegantly as he does. There is a fair amount of math in it, but don’t let that put you off! Wenger always explains it, and always in terms that an 8th-Grade math student could follow.
If you want to follow the public debate, or if you want to participate in discussions with friends and family, this book is a superb place to start. It’s a straightforward, basic guide not only to the brand-new technology, but to the social issues surrounding it. Wonderful! Take it up!
If they get nothing else, readers of Vivian Hodges’s When Your Marriage Ends: The First Months After Divorce will come away with healthy advice and practical insights for a more realistic way of looking at life in general, and an unblinking assessments of oneself. But what a shame that would be. Hodges’s book is so much more than simple prescriptive checklists. Throughout it, I could feel the support, the empathy, and the desire to help that only a woman who has been through the wringer of divorce can feel.
Written primarily for women, this book does provide a practical and comprehensive guide to getting through a wrenching, maybe devastating, time. It’s complete, with practical, no-nonsense exercises that require the reader (or sufferer) to honestly assess everything from changes in finances to changes in our own self-image. The language is down-to-earth, satisfyingly direct, and sprinkled not only with hard-won wisdom but with enough humor to remind the reader that this author knows her readers will come all the way back. And wants like crazy to be part of that process.
I envy this: I envy the actualizing effect this book had on its author. Her good will, generosity, and love come through on every page, and I exult in the satisfaction this gave her. Her hope that she helps others through a crappy experience shines through every section, every page. I admire the flow, the organization, and the combination of logic and sympathy this author shows.
I hope I speak in plain enough terms. For the person in need, this book is a treasure trove.
In Samsara, her new volume of poetry, Shirani Rajapakse demonstrates intriguing new perspectives with a deft and heartfelt diction. The poet generally chooses to illustrate a finite set of themes, and this allows her to deal with them a number of times, in a stunning variety of ways. For instance, she brings us a much wider range of visual images than in prior work, and they’re a delight: rich, vivid, and sometimes quirky. Another tool this award-winning poet uses: she anthropomorphizes certain ordinary natural phenomena, like the waving branches of a tree, the dancing of its leaves, or the simple activities of animals.
But the salient feature in Rajapakse’s poetry remains her magisterial stance regarding her themes. She treats reincarnation, love, Buddhist and Hindu faith, human relationships and spirituality, and the nature of reality, with a sure hand, and delivers her usual unflinching judgments on all. This is a very accomplished work, mature in its perspectives and starkly clear in its verdicts.
Besides these attractions, this volume has what struck me as a thesis statement. This is quite unusual in her work. In “Musing,” she writes, “I lift my eyes to the goings on in the garden; / the noisy chatter, yet / my eyes see through this all to what hides / behind, inside spaces no one can see.” This deep peering into the known but unseen, into the hidden sense of things, recurs throughout the poems, and always illuminates a facet of a larger idea.
These pieces are a delight for those who trust contemplation and deep thinking, and in the efficacies of the written word. I liked these offerings quite a bit, as you can tell.
The title of the collection is a Sanskrit word meaning the suffering-laden cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, wherein the Earthly plane is seen as illusory, appealing overmuch to the senses, and encouraging the empty pursuit of things. The poems explore these facets a number of times; in some pieces she decries the emptiness of life, but sometimes she arrives at an elegant moment where the deeper truths are hinted at, or yearned for. And there is quite a bit here about loneliness, about humans who have become separated and now must adjust to life by themselves. Samsara indeed.
I honor Shirani—for her gift with felicitous phrases and her clear insight into the spiritual realm, among all the other features of her growing oeuvre. Among her poetical work, this is clearly her finest to date.
Marianne Wiggins has such stalwart and brilliant artists as Ruth Ozeki and Colum McCann in awe and envy with this utterly surpassing novel.
In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, an idealistic Interior Department lawyer named Schiff is tasked with constructing and administering in California’s Owens Valley an “internment camp”—a prison—for Americans of Japanese descent. This assignment affronts every principle Schiff holds dear; he struggles with this duty, little better than a seeming bit of flotsam amid all that swirls about him. Characters orbit around him strutting and fretting:
Rocky, the patriarch settled in the mountainside mansion for nearly twenty years, who bitterly fought with LA Water and lost; his cultured, sardonic twin sister Cas; and his dazzling gourmet cook daughter, named Sunny; they all encounter Schiff at the most trying, challenging moment in his life. (And Sunny is the reason I wrote a sentence in French. To find out why, you must read the book.)
Add to these dramatis personae the hysterically funny and awe-inspiring GI supply officer who marshals the materials and manages the construction of the camp, and seemingly every Hollywood stock character of the era is represented. In fact, Hollywood companies descend on the town for location shoots, but skip out on their bills. Rocky mentions Tom Mix of early Westerns fame, and later Bogart’s and Katharine Hepburn’s names are dropped.
This cinematic connection intrigues me. The greed, hatred, and jingoism fueling this maelstrom remind strongly of movies back when they actually wrote plots and characters. There are also the vivid visual features, with the rocky Sierra Nevada mountains, the brilliant blue of the sky and its myriad strange effects, and the toxic lakebed, casualty of the LA Water Wars, utterly desiccated and spreading respiratory disease on the air to internee and soldier alike.
These are some of the ills falling out from war and murderous greed. The story carries these weights freely, effortlessly: we are treated to scenes of wide-eyed wonder at the natural world, of heart-melting attraction and love, of rage-inducing neglect and callousness, all to the tune of the never-ceasing delights of Wiggins’s prose. Her eye for detail and her ear for wit, her felicity with phrasemaking and her driving pace—these all shine forth in the reader’s massive payout of joy and wonder. We could cover more, much more, in this bravura offering, but I will cut my excitement and floridity short. Please do yourself the honor of taking up Properties of Thirst.
Celeste Ng imagines a present-day—or near present-day—dystopia in Our Missing Hearts, where a wrenching economic depression in the U.S. has revved up government surveillance of its own citizens to a fever of paranoia. Ng’s portrayal of this America recalls Stalin’s Soviet Union where citizens are rewarded for informing on neighbors. And for good measure she overlays that chilling memory with the contemporaneous and sinister ethnic hatred which infected Nazi Germany. This is the ghastly backdrop for Ng’s powerful novel, in which courage, the power of words, and the importance of memory provide their countervailing force. This book is gritty, hauntingly effective, and beautiful.
As we meet Bird, he’s just entering junior high in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He lives in a high-rise dormitory on the campus of a famous university with his father, Ethan Gardner. Ethan shelves books at the library, but used to be a lecturer in linguistics. He has plummeted in the workplace and in society’s esteem, because an innocuous nature poem published by his wife Margaret Miu becomes the focus of resistance to the government’s institutionalized ethnic hatred.
With strong curiosity and a growing sense of his mother’s soul, Bird runs away to New York to find her, following clues as well as any detective. This quest shows courage and resourcefulness, and is told in fairy tale terms, complete with a beautiful, enchanted queen, and a counterbalancing shocking violence. The climax, with its pervasive and stunning act of resistance, ranks as one of the most powerful fictional episodes in my memory. It is a testament to the power of storytelling and memory, particularly when the story being told carries moral weight. Oh, take up this book for its ultra-worthy and reverberant climax.
Needless to say, you won’t pick up this book for a neat-and-tidy ending; there’s no pretty bow to untie and store away. For this is a book that hits modern society hard, and highlights in bright relief the need, the desperate requirement, for connection and understanding.
And it’s a good thing, too, because when we meet this protagonist, he pines for the woman who has figuratively sent him packing. He takes more than his share of abuse from her; she has spent years in a relationship with him because she’s aware that he has money—how much money she isn’t too clear on, and that’s probably a good thing, too. But Gil is an unusual case: his parents die in a car crash when he’s ten, so before he comes—completely unexpectedly—into his inheritance at 18, he was shunted from relative to uncaring relative. During this period he had nothing. Gil arrives in the desert friendless, without an agenda for his life, and nearly devoid of self-esteem. Without overtly articulating it, he needs to grow, he longs for it.
He sets out to do something after he leaves New York. He volunteers at a home for abused women, takes a benevolent interest in his next-door neighbor’s two children, and stalks the heinous man who illegally hunts raptor birds. Eventually he becomes entangled in a complicated romantic situation, fraught with secrets, during which his motivations and actions center around the interests of the others involved. He remains unselfish to the core.
In this sweet, subtle novel, Gil’s motivation and his growth hold center stage; these features hold, and eventually gratify, our rooting sympathies.
Yet again Millet holds our interest and attention. And especially our hearts. She proves her versatility, her wisdom, and her moral compass yet again to her appreciating audience. This one is definitely recommended.
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