"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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"The Bones of Paradise" by Jonis Agee

Jonis Agee packs several types of books into her 2016 novel, The Bones of Paradise. She combines a fairly violent, rough-and-tumble American Frontier piece with a murder mystery, a very subtle romance, and a saga that captures the flow and change of  American history at an epochal moment as it affects the lives of its citizen-actors. The whole is an outstanding effort, succeeding at nearly all genres and historical epochs.

At the novel’s outset, J. B. Bennett has made a monentous decision and is in a grim, pensive mood as he rides from his ranch to his father’s adjoining spread. Something his estranged wife, Dulcinea, has written has convinced him to try to get closure on a grievous wrong he did her years ago. He pauses in his way when he discovers a young Lakota woman dead and half buried on his land. He dismounts to investigate and is shot and killed by a nearby mystery man with a rifle.

All the principal characters take it upon themselves to establish who did the deed; the one thing they all agree on is that the dentist-undertaker the town has elected sheriff is not equal to the task. And the principal characters are perhaps the main asset of this novel. They include Drum, J. B.’s choleric, embittered, thoroughly unsocial father, who has a past littered with dead bodies. The main protagonist is Dulcinea, who has returned to her (now dead) husband’s ranch with an olive leaf of sorts, to find that it’s a matter of days too late. There are Dulcinea’s two brutish, near-adult sons, who  promise no good, and Rose, a Lakota woman whose sister was the original murder victim.

But even the highly vivid and diverting cast of characters takes a back seat to Agee’s style. Simple, direct to the point of laconicism, it reflects the time and place and characters perfectly. The Sand Hills of Nebraska in 1900 are not the place for  sophisticated speech. The dialogue and indeed, the expository passages, fit perfectly into the social and cultural milieu. People hard-pressed to wring a living out of bad ground, bad weather, and a murderous government (refer to the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee), stick doggedly to the issues at hand. You can always tell where you stand with this cast of characters.

The plotting of this story isn’t as accomplished. Events fit, at least, but I don’t think I’d be alone in my lingering befuddlement over the murders of Star, the Lakota woman, and J. B. (I suspect this is because I’ve always been slow on the uptake of key clues in mysteries, even after all is revealed.) Particularly frightening characters turn out to be innocent, at least of the main crime, but we learn this only after one such character has met a sudden and untimely end himself. Another, whom we are led to suspect though most of the book, has a series of nefarious acts attributed to him, but even when we get partial enlightenment on his motivation, I for one had a hard time accepting it.

On balance I’m recommending this book. It’s a vivid tome, full of human striving and moments of success in the sea of failure, and realistic depictions of Frontier culture and prejudices. The retrospective narrative of the massacre at Wounded Knee, carried on at different times in the book in the points of view of different characters, is exceptional, and in itself constitutes a principal reason to read the novel. Another grand reward: the technical mastery displayed by this ambitious author as she weaves together her multiple motifs, or genres, which all contribute to the highly accomplished whole. They work very nearly seamlessly together, and give the reader a very memorable ride.

 

 


 

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"Heal." Poems by Hana Kopernik

In a touching attempt to help others, poet and artist Hana Kopernik has published Heal, a collection of personal, understanding, and understated, poems. In an email she said, “I felt a strong need to share my journey of healing, for I know how much it could help someone else going through something similar.”

While her poems are never specific about what she went through and recovered from, they do offer an eloquent and highly personal guide to self-acceptance and self-love, a kind of pep talk for those hurting and feeling alone. Consider: “I am uncovering the dust sheets / thrown over the chambers of my heart / I don’t have to wait until the dawn anymore, / I am not afraid anymore / I am ready to collapse into the light / The power of the unknown within is waking up / like an embryo, a second breath / and I breathe in, with a yearning for / this life to be fully lived”

Additionally, certain short poems have an aphoristic feel, in which familiar sayings are given new weight with a change in the lyric: “Is your glass half full / or does every sip of it taste like / the very last?”
 
If it feels like the diction in individual pieces never quite leaves the mundane realm, the overall collection nevertheless achieves a gravitas with its sacred intent to reach out and try to make life easier for someone, anyone, in need. The extension of the poet’s hand and heart to other sufferers comes with an admonition contained in a mantra: “I let go / of the pressure / to have everything / under control / for the sake / of my soul’s / freedom” This short statement concludes with the catchphrase (or maybe it’s the title?), “ - repeat after me.”

This year, I have read more than one poetry collection by an (apparently) young practitioner, but this one is different, better. Kopernik has turned her experiences into a positive, in that she wants to help others because she knows what it is to suffer. Such altruism should be honored. Heal distinguishes its author; it displays the goodness of this artist’s soul. Let it be a help to yours.

 

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"Horse" by Geraldine Brooks

Australian author Geraldine Brooks, who won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for her novel March, leavens the history of the great American Thoroughbred Champion Lexington in 2022’s Horse. She wields the imagination of a brilliant novelist, bringing alive historical figures about some of whom a fair amount is known, and about others, almost nothing.  Given her subject matter, it is entirely appropriate that she deals at such length with the American race issue: her protagonist, Jarrett Lewis, spends the bulk of the novel an enslaved Black man. The chapters illuminating his imagined life succeed better than the 20th- and 21st-Century sections, which in comparison, feel clunky, cobbled a bit hastily.

Yes, the deep trust and loving rapport between the horse Lexington and the slave Jarrett form the heart of this book, and provide nearly all its charm. Jarrett’s father Harry is an exceptional trainer in his own right, and has earned enough through an arrangement with his owner, Dr. Warfield, to purchase his own freedom. Jarrett is present when the colt, originally named Darley, is born, and Harry sees the relationship between it and his son grow and flower, and he knows well enough to leave them to it.

Darley is renamed Lexington in honor of the area of Kentucky from whence he hails, and begins to race in 1855 at five years of age. Jarrett is devoted to the young horse, and he ends up training him into America’s greatest Thoroughbred of all time. His racing career is cut short because of failing eyesight (due to an infection), but his stud history will likely never be matched. I invite you to look him up. Jarrett struggles under the yoke of slavery, in which he controls nothing about his life, but is fortunate to be able to live with and work with the horse who loves and trusts him, through the horse’s entire life.

Brooks captures horses in Horse. She imagines their herd mentality and their personalities quite convincingly. I think it’s brilliant, because I don’t know better. I have, however, spoken extensively to people who have spent a lot of time around horses (and not just after reading this book), and everything in the book on this subject rings true. This book is also part horse advocacy: clearly American Thoroughbreds are raced too young, and abused horribly in the process. The other overarching theme is American race relations: slavery and the onset of the Civil War occupies much of the book; Brooks brings this up to date for the 21st Century with a fatal police shooting of an unarmed Black man.

The narrative of Jarrett and his horse took my heart and made it soar. The contrast between that and Jarrett’s relationships with the slaveholding class strikes me as brutal, and one of the chief points of the story. And Brooks avoids depicting the slave owners as cardboard cutouts; as a group, they are more merciful and generous than was probably the norm. The author spends considerable effort on the histories and provenance of paintings of the great stallion; this was necessary for the design of her book, but as I said above, to me it fits ill with the balance of the story. Overall though, a very worthy read.

 

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"Elsewhere" by Alxis Schaitkin

A new work of fiction out this year takes up the themes of belonging, of motherhood, of temporal and spatial perception, and of the human need to make sense of life. Its tight focus helps it succeed in teaching us about ourselves, but its occasional asides jumble its lessons, or rather, fall short of clarity of what it would instruct.

Vera, the first-person narrator of Alexis Schaitkin’s novel Elsewhere, spends the entire novel elsewhere. We meet her during the last year of her schooling in an unnamed and  remote mountain town where clouds form the everyday atmosphere, and in which the citizens are unusually close-knit. This location strongly evokes a fairy tale: it is a closed, completely insular community in which every citizen has a sort of celebrity, their personal business out in the open for all to see and inspect.

The salient feature of the town results in this closeness, and makes the town unique. Young mothers suffer an “affliction,” in which they disappear, evaporating figuratively into thin air. No one sees them go, and in the aftermath of each “leaving,” the mother’s friends and neighbors compulsively recapitulate how they might have known who would leave, of what the prior indicators were.

I’m spending time on the setting of this novel because of its paramount importance. Through it, the author considers such timeless human themes of parental love, tribal groupthink, shifts in perspective arising from growing older, and setting’s influence on moral character. Vera considers some refined points of her existence: her interactions with her family and what they indicate about her fears of “going;” what does her love mean, and how much of it is actually self-reflective; can she buck the universal expectation of “going,” and thereby disrupt the town’s Otherness?

Frequently fiction answers such questions, but Schaitkin leaves the answers much less certain than usual. Nothing wrong with that, but it felt to me like more certainty would have made the novel better. Her language is perfectly suited to its subject; her pacing variable but very appropriate to the protagonist’s progress. Motherhood is the kernel at the core of this book, and the author holds it up for close inspection: its trials, its effect on the mother and the child, and how absence and the passage of time alter it.

If these themes move you, by all means take up Elsewhere. I found its unusual setting and plot unique and refreshing, but its personal issues of growth and change lacking somewhat in depth.

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"Paris Trout" by Pete Dexter

 

Pete Dexter’s justly renowned Paris Trout traces the inexorable decline of its eponymous character, and the few citizens of Cotton Point, Georgia, whom he takes with him. Dexter delivers his grisly, unfortunate story in robust language, making clear his central characters’ lack of choice, or their delusions, or their destructive impulses. Dexter’s greatest achievement in this book is the inevitability if its climax, and yet he  manages to surprise us anyway. Typical of Dexter, this book boasts plain, strong language, an unflinching gaze at human failing, a pace that never lets up, and the overall impression that we are in the hands of a master. It’s unforgettable.

It’s the 1950s, and Paris Trout is a local businessman who has been active in a small Georgia town for decades. He runs a small general store, deals in used cars, and lends money out at interest, serving the town’s Negro population as well as its white people. He manages his interests in an unorthodox manner, not being one to write anything down, including books of account. He retains all transactions and balances in his head, for he has a powerful, capacious mind.

He also has a deadly, unswerving focus on his own interests, and this focus leads him to nefarious activities, the worst of which results in the fatal shooting of a 14 year-old Negro girl in her home. His trial on this charge constitutes a good portion of the book, and is the central trigger for the acceleration of his downward spiral.

We only get to follow Paris’s reasoning, such as it is, at a remove. We are much closer to the other characters in the book, his wife Hanna, Harry Seagraves, his attorney, and Carl Bonner, a lawyer who arrives halfway through the narrative, and represents Hanna in divorce proceedings against Trout. The mental and emotion journeys these people take in the wake of Paris Trout’s deeds and misdeeds show Dexter’s superior ability with the human mind and heart.

Take this up. It’s an important work of American fiction from the last century, and it showcases the astonishing ability of its celebrated author.

 

 

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