The Everlasting
Another of my birthday present books is Alix E. Harrow’s newest novel The Everlasting. It turns out to be something of a fictional meditation on nationalism and a meta-textual examination of the many ways necromancy never pays.
The nationalism is exaggerated and ridiculous, with the inhabitants of “Dominion” despising the people from the “Hinterlands” and fighting wars with them, inspired by a legend from Dominion that “a young girl pulled a sword from a tree” and “a queen rose to power and sent her champion out to bring peace and prosperity to the land.” Owen Mallory, the first-person narrator (with a surname reminiscent of one of the famous authors of Arthurian legend in our own world) is a historian who is caught up in fighting one of the many wars under the command of a Colonel Drayton, who gives speeches that “grew longer and more florid” the longer the war goes on. He calls it “the Last Crusade” and urges them to fight “for crown and country,” Owen says there is betting on how often the Colonel will say certain phrases, so that after each speech “a beat or two would pass while everyone ran the numbers, followed by perfunctory applause and furtive shuffling, as a great deal of cigarettes and pornography changed hands.” In civilian life, Owen writes that “a nation is not a boundary on a map or a flag on a pole, but only a story we tell about ourselves.”
In the first story he tells, Owen discovers a book he has looked for, he thinks, all his adult life—the legend of Una Everlasting, the virgin knight who pulls a sword named Valiance from a tree and fights for her queen, Yvanne, slaying dragons, finding the grail, and conquering enemies to establish a fictional Camelot, which is called Cavallon Keep in his world. Owen begins to translate the book (from “Middle Mothertongue”) but when it disappears, he finds himself called to meet Minister Vivian Rolfe, who returns the book to him except that it’s blank—and then she sends him into the past to write it. (The name Vivian has to be chosen deliberately, one of the names of the sorceress whose machinations cause the fall of Camelot.)
Owen tells the story of Una Everlasting in her quest to kill the last dragon of Dominion and find the grail, and he makes his readers love her, as he does. He sees the human side but writes about the champion. At one point he asks her “was it so terrible? The dragon?” and she replies “no…it was a wild creature, and old—older than anything that ever was, I think, but it was not terrible. None of them ever were. They were—the cool voice cracked, and I heard the grief running beneath it—beautiful.”
At the end of his story, Owen meets Vivian, who drinks from the grail and assumes Yvanne’s throne. She tells him a story about how Yvanne died and she took her place, and when Owen expresses disappointment that the grail didn’t actually heal anyone, Vivian says “the cup is real enough. I’m sure it’s the very same grail that Galawin carried three hundred years ago. But no one can cheat death, Mallory.” (Here’s another form of an Arthurian name—Galawin rather than Gawain.)
Owen’s story over, we get a new section of the novel entitled “The Second Death of Una Everlasting,” and Una is now the first-person narrator. We get the same story from her point of view and with some additional information, like Yvanne’s decree about dragons:
“It had been one of Yvanne’s very first decrees as queen, that Dominion should be rid of dragons. They were the devil’s own creatures, she said, for they lived on and on, undying, and only the Savior was deathless.” We learn that “a drop of dragon’s blood could heal any wound or cure any sickness; that a dragon’s heart might be planted, like a seed, and the tree that grew from it would live forever.”
When we get to the end of Una’s story, there’s the same ending with some additional revelations from Vivian and a directive from Una to Owen: “you’ll have to tell the rest of it.” He continues to tell more of the story, drawing back the curtain further, and we see him start to wonder “if I had been to war more than once, then when did this story start? How far back did the circle go? I felt like a man holding a snarl of thread, unable to find either the beginning or the end of it.” When Vivian again demands that Owen tell the story of Una Everlasting, “she talked for a while about the war and the nation and the glory that was within our grasp. I had the sense that it had once been a very good speech, but that it had been delivered too many times, and gone stale.”
The story keeps being retold and readers keep learning more about what has happened and what might happen because of it. Owen comes to see how Vivian is using Una’s story “to teach us who to hate and who to obey, what god to worship and what flag to fight for and what color eyes are the most beautiful. It’s a story that made a continent into a kingdom into an empire, that put a woman on the throne—more than once, I suspected—and was about to do so again.” As he writes Una’s story, Owen begins putting in a cipher consisting of punctuation errors so he can tell something about the version when he sees it being used later. He is trying to change things so that Vivian, who claims that “if it weren’t me, it would be someone else,” never rises to a position of power.
At the end of The Everlasting we find out that Vivian’s whole scheme has been powered by necromancy, all along. She says “I didn’t know, when I buried you, whether I would ever see you again. But one day, when the yew was full grown, there you were among the roots. Just the same as you’d been when I buried you—except you were alive.” It’s a wonderfully detailed plot in which every single thing comes together at last, and we realize, along with Owen and Una, how ”nothing that lives lasts forever.”
The Once and Future Queen
I received a hardback copy of The Once and Future Queen, by Paula Lafferty, as a present on my birthday, and it’s a beautiful book. I’m not usually a person who cares much what a book looks like, but I find this one a pleasure to see and to pick up.
Once picked up, the tale is a reliably enjoyable addition to the tradition of Arthurian romance, this one from Guinevere’s point of view. It starts out with time travel, courtesy of Merlin, who explains to a modern-day woman named Vera who was brought up near Glastonbury that she is Guinevere and he brought her through time after Vivian had killed her. Vera is skeptical; she thinks
“Glastonbury was reputed to be the ancient Isle of Avalon, and the thirteenth-century monks at the abbey had claimed they unearthed Arthur and Guinevere’s tombs. Even with her aversion to Arthurian legends, she could hardly go about town without hearing some reference to it. She was an imaginative child. She could have come up with some King Arthur story. That proved nothing.”
Vera’s aversion to reading the tales of King Arthur is convenient for the novelist, who wouldn’t want her to know too much about what will happen once Merlin takes her back to meet Arthur and Lancelot.
Lancelot, in fact, is the first to greet Vera and take her into the castle at Camelot. They become fast friends and she eventually finds out that this Lancelot is a closeted homosexual, which doesn’t mean that the common folk are not suspicious of their friendship. I really like Lancelot, not least because his philosophy about swimming is the same as mine:
“I have a rule that I follow fastidiously: when you come upon a beautiful body of water, always go swimming.” (As I’ve gotten older, I’ve sometimes had to modify my own rule to “at least get your feet wet.”)
It’s harder to like Arthur, at first, but when we find out more about him as Vera does, we end up loving him, as you have to in order to really enjoy an Arthurian tale. One of my favorite parts about how Vera rediscovers Guinevere’s love for Arthur is when she has been singing songs from home in a chapel and he overhears her, and then when he is teaching her dance and they need a slow song, Arthur asks “what about the song with the bird in the Sycamore tree?” I thought this was going to be some kind of traditional folk song but “then Arthur, the ancient King of Britain, began to hum the unmistakable tune of ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me.’”
Vera discovers that magic works in the past she’s been brought back to, and various mages, including Merlin, have magical “gifts.” When she asks what the gifts are, Lancelot tells her that only the mages know but they’re rumored to be
“the powers that have been in myths and stories all across the world. One tells of the power to bring the dead back to life, another invincibility, and there are many different versions of the gift of immortality, the fountain of youth. In the Greek stories, it’s ambrosia—”
Vera perked up as the threads connected. ‘The Holy Grail?’”
This is not the only time that something Vera says fleshes out part of the Arthurian legends; she also mentions that poker is best played at a round table, and some of the knights seize on that idea. It may sound a bit cheesy, but I found it enjoyable, as the novelist employs this technique sparingly.
Same with King Arthur’s idealism—we don’t hear about it too often, so when the narrator tells us that “his ultimate aim was for the power that came with lordship to not be based on riches and instead on merit” the reaction might be, as mine was, to sigh and think of our own system of government. And such sighs, I believe, are part of the reason we still read Arthurian legends.
The only flaw in this book, as far as I’m concerned, is that it’s the first of a planned trilogy, so it doesn’t have a final ending. An overarching plot for the three novels is set up in this one, with a mage named Ratamun as the ultimate villain, a man “who believes in the great gifts. Immortality and invincibility are the two most sought-after. He, and others for that matter, would want nothing more than the ability to sense and track those gifts. And take them, no matter the cost: enemy, friend, family…” Of course it’s someone who wants immortality, a longing that often veers too close to necromancy.
Keep Walking and Niagara Falls
I have two poems in the summer issue of Calliope.
“Keep Walking” is a political poem, written right after the election of 2024.
“Niagara Falls” is one of my newer postcard poems, written after one of our annual trips to the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake. We always have to stop at Niagara Falls on the way, because we can’t just pass it by!
I Cheerfully Refuse
I Cheerfully Refuse, by Leif Enger, is a near-future dystopian novel that I came across because of a friend’s recommendation, and it’s worth reading, if for nothing but the juxtaposition of the bleak with the heartening.
The plot of the novel centers on a journey across Lake Superior in search of some hope of necromancy. The main character, Rainy, knows intellectually that there is no hope of seeing the woman he loves again, after she has been killed, but he is determined to sail to a place where he thinks someone might have seen a person who has died:
“’She may arrive when I do….Or a little before or sometime later. She might take days to get there. The truth is I don’t know how long to wait.’ And then—hearing this aloud, O God, my words thudding down between us like baby birds who jumped too soon—I hastily added, raising my glass ‘and then there’s this scenario, the likeliest one of all, which is that Lark is lost to me, and dead is dead, and I’m the most entire fool who ever came to visit.’”
The way Rainy follows his heart even though his head tells him there’s no hope is much like the way former forced laborers, known as “squelettes” keep living and trying to escape in a world which seems to offer few alternatives. One of the squelettes, named Kellan, is introduced, early on, and we learn that
“The term, French for skeleton, was popularized a decade earlier when a dozen Michigan laborers seemed to vanish. It happened at a factory like many others, manufacturing drone rotors and home-security mines on the west Huron shore—night shift, dirty weather, they stepped out for a smoke and never came back. Ordinary American citizens, filling six-year terms for bread and a bunk under the Employers are Heroes Act. No one imagined a dozen gaunt ingrates fleeing by water that violent night, bolting an outboard to a patched pontoon and piloting through fifty miles of mountainous waves to the obscurity of Manitoulin, then mainland Ontario where they were discovered by a grandfather with a beret and a crooked walking stick like a wizard’s. Their haunted forms rising out of the grass so startled the old Quebecois that he hobbled into the fog shouting “Squelettes! Squelettes!” Since then thousands of such laborers had made similar desperate breaks.”
Kellan believed that “the way to prosper was to work for the astronauts,” which is what this novel’s characters call the rich. Their way of life is so unimaginable for the other 99 percent of the population that the rich people might as well be living in outer space.
One of the reasons we sympathize with Rainy is that he’s a reader. He says
“I loved the crazy fight where Beowulf goes hammer and tongs with Grendel in the longhouse, gripping the monster’s arm like the world’s first clamp and finally tearing it off, hairy shoulder included, and hanging it in the rafters to drip. Holy smokes! I was taken in too by the long boat ride of Odysseus with its thousand interruptions, Circe with her ominous pig yard, what had to be an invigorating layover with Calypso, and the startling wit of the cyclops announcing a nice surprise for Odysseus but then guess what it was: You shall be eaten last….I banged and barged though dozens and hundreds of books…not just adventures but also poetry, sweet Jesus, by Greeks and Brits and Japanese whose silky names I never can remember. Did I understand it? Not by half, but when it thunders you know your chest is shaking….I read about vanished glaciers in books of scorned science, then a monograph by the raging climatologist Holloway who predicted Lake Superior would shortly warm enough to yield bodies that had lain on the seafloor for centuries—’the navigators, cooks and ancient braves, the unlucky swimmers of antiquity.’ And sure enough Holloway hadn’t been gone a decade before these dead began coming ashore, washing up in the shallows, waxy and gaping in their period clothes.”
The dead of Lake Superior keep surfacing throughout the novel, reminders of the buried truths people don’t want to face.
Rainy has read Don Quixote. The purpose of his journey is not merely tilting at windmills, for he observes of Quixote that “Romance was a trapdoor for him and finally gave way, for the old knight lost his bold lunacy and belief in giants—without which who would’ve read his thousand pages?—and used his last moments to denounce all tales and frivolity, and died like any fretful pensioner, his concluding mission in this world ensuring his stupid will got notarized. In the end it was all churchmen and attorneys, even for Quixote.”
There were no children in Rainy’s marriage, even though he says “Lark and I had worn ourselves thin over the risks of introducing another life into generalized decay. She was the optimist, pointing at the bookshelf she’d already stocked with Pooh and Piglet, Sinbad, Despereaux, Charlotte, the Wild Things, Ratty and Mole.” When Rainy comes across a little girl named Sol in need of a protector, he does the only thing he can do; he protects her.
The many descriptions of the voyage across the great lake are chilling and beautiful: “we pounded along as the wind strengthened shifting to the north. No more boggy sun or tepid warmth. The horizon was dirty and the waves were back to horses. Sometimes a gust knocked one’s mane clean off and scattered it abroad. The wind remembered ice.”
Near the end of the novel, when Rainy and Sol have found a safe harbor, they bid goodbye to a person rescued from one of the bad circumstances they’ve escaped and Sol isn’t sorry to see him go because she saw one of the bad things he did. Rainy, however, is sorry, saying “I couldn’t despise Burke; I could’ve been Burke. That’s what I believe. Maybe I still could. What scares me is the notion we are all one rotten moment, one crushed hope or hollow stomach from stuffing someone blameless in a cage.”
I think many of us are, unless we can summon the strength to cheerfully refuse.
Natural Disaster
Natural Disaster, by Lisa Owens, is a book about what it’s like to take care of small children on your own for one day. As someone who is currently spending a minimum of four hours a day taking care of an almost 18-month-old, I found it accurate, although since it’s only one day, more happens than often happens in a typical day.
I had a day like that recently—one where more happens than is typical. My grandson had gotten a cold and so I was taking care of him for eight hours that day. I picked him up at 9 am and he was crying, which is not typical at all, but his mom said he hadn’t slept well and he’d been up since 3 am. He dozed while I held him upright that morning, talking to my houseguests, who had come partly to see my grandson but also expected some more adult entertainment. Around 11 I thought the baby’s breathing sounded labored and then we started hearing him wheezing and thought he was running a temperature, so I texted his parents and they called his pediatrician and were told to take him to the Emergency room of our rural hospital. My husband went and got the baby’s mother and took her and the baby to the ER, and I left to take our houseguests to the airport an hour away, in Columbus. When I got back from Columbus, grandfather and mom and baby were still at the ER, so I went and brought them lunch and some books and toy cars. The baby was feeling better after some nebulizer treatments, antibiotics for what they said was an ear infection, and fever-reducing medicine. Although he badly wanted to leave the exam room, he settled for exploring it, running the cars over all the parts of the exam table and floor, and reading the books over and over. There was no pediatrician in the ER and the doctors there didn’t want to take a chance with a baby of my grandson’s age, so they insisted he go by ambulance (a pricy proposition) to Columbus to Children’s Hospital. They called the ambulance around 4 pm and it finally showed up at 8 pm. Mom was allowed to ride in the ambulance and dad followed with the car, so once they were off, we grandparents went home. The baby was admitted to the hospital and spent that night and the next day there, getting nebulizer treatments for his breathing. It turned out that the rural hospital had misdiagnosed the ear infection; the pediatricians at Children’s said there wasn’t one. By the time he was discharged, the baby had a bit of runny nose and an occasional cough. The parents got a prescription for a nebulizer and gave one home treatment, but he didn’t need any more after that. Babies bounce back fast.
One of the children in Natural Disaster also gets sick during the day the novel takes place, which I think underlines what a challenging job it can be, watching little ones. A lot of it is trivial, moments of play interspersed with long stretches of scrambling to get the child what he needs, from snacks to diaper changes, and figuring out the logistics of taking a little person anywhere. But when things turn serious, they can turn very serious very fast—think of a ball rolling towards a street (which is not what happens in this novel).
The novel also made me remember days with my two preschoolers and how relentless their needs could feel by the end of the day. Here’s a great description of how a mom who has been at home with two preschoolers all day can feel by bath time in the evening:
“if he has said he will be home for bath time, and is late even by a matter of minutes, she has been known to ‘go ballistic.’ She can deal with almost anything day to day as long as she knows the parameters, but if she is expecting to clock out and then cannot—that is when she finds herself at her most volatile and desperate. ‘I’m only fifteen minutes late’—her husband says this, or some variation of, every time it happens, wide-eyed, his manner, she always feels, theatrically mild, perfectly baffled that running the bath and putting the children into it as she does most days is suddenly such an onerous trial; he behaves on these occasions as though she’s just revealed that she secretly hates bathing and caring for their children, and furthermore despises him for making her perform this precious ritual that he, personally, finds very sweet and magical. He is the one who should be upset, his being late means he is, yet again, missing out on this treat that she is usually lucky enough to get to do—the very thing he hurried home from work as fast as he could for!”
Another thought the mother admits to made me realize that I still feel a bit like this, even all these years later–especially while watching my grandchild:
“She knows, objectively, that tragedies don’t generally happen because one individual person hasn’t worried omnisciently enough. And she does want to raise resilient children, even holds a cherished, though increasingly fading notion of herself as a resilient, relaxed person deep down, if only someone else could carry the psychic load once in a while. But equally, there’s no denying her vigilance has got her this far—a marriage, a home, two healthy, wonderful kids. Why on earth would she take her eye off the ball now, at the very moment she has the most to lose?”
There’s a particularly poignant moment when the older child in the novel, Felix, wants a particular kind of packaged snack, while the younger one, Rudy, is contentedly eating slices of cucumber and carrot. The mother, who is trying to give both kids a good day because it’s her last day of maternity leave, tells Felix he can have a packet if he can keep Rudy from seeing it. Felix keeps saying things like “no, Mama, you don’t understand….I need to have them out so I can—” and finally the mother loses her temper, dumping all the packaged snacks onto a picnic table and seeing Rudy drop the veggies and reach for a packet. Only then does Felix say, ‘I only wanted to show you I learned how to do ‘Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Mo’.” Oh dear. What mother hasn’t had moments like that?
In the end we find out that the mother in this novel “pours so much effort into appearing proficient that she’ll often lean into inconvenient scenarios just to prove she can.” Because we don’t always give a parent much of the credit they deserve. I still remember fondly the grocery store clerk who used to compliment me on how happy and well-behaved my kids were in the store and say “I know that took some work.” It did.
They’re wonderful years, but hard ones, the first few years with preschoolers. Reading Natural Disaster will open your eyes to how and why, or remind you of what it was like.
Theo of Golden
Various friends and a few book bloggers urged me to seek out a copy of Allen Levi’s novel Theo of Golden, saying it was a book about kindness and would be an anodyne to our current culture of cruelty. Well friends, I read it and it was a considerable relief that the main character turns out to be much the same as the old man artist in Fredrik Backman’s My Friends, rather than entirely allegorical. But oh, the drivel! The platitudes! The execrable writing! These have to be seen to be believed.
I didn’t even like the premise, which is that an old man sees hand-drawn portraits of local residents in a small-town coffee shop and begins buying them so he can give them to the subjects. If my portrait were in a public place, I rather think I’d resent someone’s attempt to take it down. But whatever; a lot of readers find this charming.
The portrait artist, we are told, uses “2B and 2H pencils, a stick of charcoal, a well-worn tortillon, and a kneaded eraser. With these simple tools, that arsenal, he waged daily war against mediocrity and was rewarded with masterpiece after masterpiece.” This is typical of some of the writing in this novel—first we’re given a plethora of details about the materials required to make a certain kind of art, and then we’re told what to think about the resulting art.
Readers are often told what to think, or even how to read–at one point a city promenade is described and the narrator, perhaps fearful that it’s too big a word, uses an entire short paragraph to specify: “Last syllable, ‘nod.’”
At another point a man walks with another man down a few steps and we’re told explicitly that it is “an act of respect and affection.”
The coffee shop, called the “Chalice,” in case you weren’t already getting the overtly Christian overtones, is described, at one point, as the old man, called Theo, and a friend “stood in the line, breathing in the scent of coffee and bread, absorbing through their pores the good chemistry of the room. People mingled. Greetings and chatter were plentiful.” The lack of detail requires readers to overlay their own positive picture of a place onto these generalities.
Theo meets the portrait subjects outside, beside a public fountain, and has long conversations with them about their lives. The narrator describes him as a good listener but he’s also a flatterer, listing their virtues and calling them “saints.” The narrator is also a flatterer, saying Theo has “gray-white hair, receding but full” which “was combed back but not fussed over, giving him an aura worth of the description ‘distinguished.’” There you are—you don’t have to think, just accept.
The moment I knew I wasn’t going to like this book was when Theo begins to talk to the first portrait subject and “the fountain exhaled a silver mist, like fairy dust, as the first bestowal began.”
We’re supposed to wonder who Theo is. During his first “bestowal” of a portrait he tells a woman that he is “good, one of the very best, at keeping secrets” and the narrator adds, in parentheses, “He might have added ‘at living a secret.’” With all his talk about heaven and church readers will see him as a Christ figure, despite this not being the specific reveal at the end.
There’s a self-serving description of what comprises “good art” on pp 118-119:
“It’s hard enough to define what art is, much less ‘good art.’ I wonder if there is such a thing. Maybe there are just good responses. But I guess if a work of art makes us see something familiar in a new way or makes us feel something we ought to have felt all along or shows us our place in the world more clearly, maybe then it qualifies as ‘good.’ If it makes us better somehow, maybe that’s what gives it value….That means, of course, that ‘good art’ varies from one person to another, doesn’t it? And that good art can come from a child or a master. I don’t think the critics, especially the moderns, appreciate that idea very much. I think they like telling us what’s legitimate as art, what has worth and what doesn’t.”
It’s wearying to see yet another defense of the lowbrow in this novel, as in so many novels that tell their readers what to think.
What’s most wearying about this novel, though, is the unrelenting parade of generalities. When women cook together they “talked the talk of women who were privy to each other’s secrets and free to speak in absolute confidence. Their long, sprawling discussions, which occurred while their hands were busy with casserole prep, careened from family issues to health issues to friend news to frustrations and challenges.”
The main characters are also described in general terms, giving us the feel of a small town where there’s apparently only one homeless woman and everyone knows the self-important businessman who stands in for a villain, as he “snorted with impatience and disdain” and “when he finally spoke, the words reeked of condescension.”
At times, the writing is ludicrously bad, like when Theo flies home to NYC and he “waded through a bouillabaisse of humanity.” Maybe something smelled fishy about it to him, after his months in a small town.
Even the sentences are overly simple and stilted, badly in need of some sentence combining to establish which details are most important: “She enjoyed using native plants for her garden. Glissen House is full of things she dug up in the woods or down by the river. Plant nurseries would go broke if everybody was like her. The likelihood of these surviving would be a lot better if she were here. Spring planting always brings her back to life for me somehow. I wish she could be here with us right now.”
If you come upon a copy of Theo of Golden in a library or bookstore, I urge you to do yourself the favor of passing it by.
The Land and Its People
A new book of essays by David Sedaris, The Land and Its People, is a bit like getting an unusually good letter from a friend, detailing what’s been happening in his life since the last time you caught up. David’s husband Hugh has had a hip replacement. They went on safari in the Maasai Mara. David was invited, along with a bunch of other funny people, to meet the Pope. There are sheep out back of his house in Sussex (“my home, well one of my homes”).
In fact, the one about the sheep is one of my particular favorites. Entitled “The Violence of the Rams,” it starts out by describing the field where the rams live as “like a playground at the junior high they might have in Hell,” and quickly moves to
“I know you can’t hold animals to human standards. Cats don’t kill songbirds because they’re innately cruel; they do it because it’s in their nature, just as it’s in a wolf’s to rip the throat out of a calf, and a rabbit’s to chew through the cord you’re using to charge your laptop. That said, rams are assholes….Light a bonfire in their pasture, and they’ll likely headbutt the flames, just to show them who’s who.”
Then David tells the story of a five-month-old ram lamb who was released into the field of rams one evening and spent all night calling for his mother. After pages of stories about people crying for their mothers, David describes all the stages of pity and then frustration and anger that a person goes through between midnight and 3:30 am when being kept awake by someone crying. The last line perfectly encapsulates the thoughts many American women have while trying to get to sleep at night after another day of Republican cruelty: “Goddamn children crying for their mothers. It’s the kind of thing that keeps you up at night.”
As in a letter to a friend, David feels free to express his personal irritations, like about how “the phrase punching down has become ubiquitous. It’s the worst crime a comic or humor writer can commit, at least according to the people who now decide such things, meaning people on X who determine—based, I suppose, on your photo and a wild guess at your net worth—who you can and cannot make jokes about.”
If David were actually a friend, I’d be tempted to compare notes about traveling with someone who often has a “short temper for however long it takes to get from point A to point B,” as he says his husband does. I’d want to come up with more odd things he could say to the Duolingo Max character, who didn’t have a reply when he shared his “idea for a new production of Romeo and Juliet. ‘In it, she will be thirteen and he will be seventy-eight….In the Shakespeare version, he kills himself with a poison drink, but in mine he will die of natural causes.’” I’d compare notes on how unreasonable dog owners can get about their dogs biting people, as David does in “And Your Little Dog, Too” (in which he says “even as a child I’d watch Uncle Henry force Toto into the basket, Dorothy sobbing in the background, and think, It’s only fair. I mean, he did bite the woman.”)
And I’d delight even more than I do in fellow feeling for others who pick up words and phrases and use them forever after, something that David’s family and mine have in common and that he describes in “Forget Me Not.” My favorite is “dramastic” which is, as he says, “a lovely combination of drastic and dramatic.”
Especially if you’re anywhere near the same age as the essayist, a baby boomer, you’ll react sympathetically, as if to a friend, about the difficulties of, for instance, responding to a store clerk who says “welcome in!” And even if your sympathies would lie more naturally with the poor store clerk, who has to say something, David will turn you back to his perspective with a well-timed admission like “I’m in the hard part of getting old—the part where everything irritates you. The easy part comes a little later, when my short-term memory disappears and I forget I’ve heard perfect two hundred times already that day.”
If you already have favorite Sedaris essays, as I do (“Six to Eight Black Men” and “Laugh, Kookaburra”) this collection might offer another, as it did for me. I never think his essay collections are particularly well-titled, though, and The Land and Its People is no exception.
Be Disarming
Be Disarming, by Daniel Waters, is a novel that imagines what would happen if we took ideas about gun violence and the privilege of wealth in the U.S. to their logical extreme.
After being introduced to the main character, a female artist and a “non-participant civilian” named Maudlin (later we find out her name is Maude Lynne), readers get some of the history of the “Restructuring” of the US. “following so closely on the heels of a pandemic, the destruction of New York and the other cities referred to as the Fallen Five, and near daily mass shootings.” Part of how this happened is that “the schools went virtual, replaced by Edunet (where all the content was created and delivered by corporate interests) and then they were closed, and then they were only offered to Citizens.” In addition, npcs were “forbidden to own Smarts” (smart phones) so “their only exposure to Enternet was on the trains to and from their shifts and in their compulsory classrooms, so whatever ‘news’ and media they received was proscribed for them, with certain messages reinforced constantly.”
The citizens of this hypothetical future society celebrate Restructuring Day in January, “celebrating those who owned property for their right to Citizenship.” Anyone who didn’t own property had become a npc (non-participant civilian) on Restructuring Day:
“it didn’t matter how much shiftwork you’d had, it didn’t matter if you worked three jobs to pay the landlord and put food on the table for your family; if you did not own property, you were unemployed. The shift felt like a dramatic, almost overnight change, and one enforced by Citizen as well as military guns, but…the bricks were being laid covertly for the foundations of the Restructured world for several years. It was worst in the cities, where the landlords and the owners of “condos” and “townhouses” were elevated in all ways over those who rented. These landlords received handsome compensations as the government began the steady transfer of all renters into the Tower complexes constructed with rapid efficiency in city-adjacent zones.”
Maudlin lives in a tower in Cold City, “a relatively small Northeastern city, when compared to the Fallen Five” which “had a total of eight towers arranged in two quads” for the NPCs and nicer Neighborhoods for Citizens, who “were empowered to carry Personal Defense Armaments and enjoyed a wide latitude in their use.” When an NPC enters a Neighborhood as part of a work detail, each one must have their “identatoo” scanned by a Foreman using a “Smart.” Urban NPCs are called “grays” and “those who worked in the big industrial farms in the nation’s heartland and along the undamaged coastal states” are called “greens.” Surveillance drones called “eyes” are “constantly patrolling the city, recording all they saw and heard” because “since the federal and state governments began accepting corporate sponsorships, a practice that began before Restructuring but became normalized after, most police forces in America were heavily subsidized by arms manufacturers.”
As the story begins, Maudlin is climbing a smokestack in the “Urban Ruins” to send a message, spray-painting an image of a gun with flowers coming out and the words “Be Disarming” in letters she hopes are huge enough to be noticed. Her life is always on the line, as a “gray,” because “Citizens tended to get nervous when they saw grays congregating, and when Citizens got nervous they reached for their PDAs. And when they reached for their PDAs, grays tended to die.” (A PDA is a “Personal Defense Armament,” or gun.) We learn that “one of the primary reasons for the universal arming of the Citizenry just prior to the Restructuring was due to mass shootings by crazed—or methodical, or both—killers occurring on a near daily basis at public gatherings, houses of worship, and especially schools—virtually any place where people worked, shopped, or tried to live.”
Eventually Maudlin encounters others who are working to change her society, including someone who used to work in marketing for that society and tells her about hidden acts of resistance, like the first wife of the head of Cold Armaments, mysteriously dead after writing “history books, books about life before the Restructuring. About schools. She put them on Edunet for free. No one read them, but they were critical of the ways things turned out.”
The armed and entitled Citizenry are like “Karens” turned up to eleven. At one point a woman yells at a gray who made her a coffee drink in a café: “it had too much foam, or not enough foam, or wasn’t filled to the rim.” Other patrons in the café egg her on or yell at her to “stand down so the grays could get the rest of them served.” Finally the overseer for the grays working in the café comes out of his office with “a heavy Pacifier, which had a stopping power far greater than the elegant Slimline Protector the angry Foam Lady sported.” The overseer, called a “First Key,”promptly “threatened the cowering grays at gunpoint with ‘an early clock out’ if they ‘didn’t get up off their asses and make these Citizens their drinks, pronto.’ The grays scrambled, whipping up a replacement for the angry lady and beverages for all in record time. After Foam Lady tasted her beverage and pronounced it adequate, the First Key loudly sent the gray who’d messed up the first order into his office, where, he publicly promised, she would be soundly beaten.”
The climax of the plot comes with the celebration of Restructuring Day. What happens might be the start of another revolution, one fought with art against arms.
Be Disarming was published on July 4, during our muted celebration of the 250th anniversary of American independence, and one of the most patriotic things an American can do today might be to read it.
An Academic Affair
I took a trip with a friend to the Florida Keys in June, to get warm after the long, cold spring of Ohio. The day we drove to the airport in Columbus to fly to Miami the high was 66F. When we got to Miami, it was in the 90s, which was what we wanted but had to get used to.
On our first day we drove to Key Largo, visited a bird sanctuary, and then found our hotel, the Atlantic Bay, which faced the gulf. It was nice but quiet and unassuming, the pool half-full of friendly people who had come down from the north to get some of the Florida heat. One of them told us about a place called Robbie’s on the next island, where people feed the tarpon, so we headed there the next day, after taking a morning tour of the Key Largo coral reef on a glass bottom boat.
At Robbie’s, on Isla Morada, we had lunch and then paid for buckets of little fish to feed the big tarpons and the aggressive pelicans, which was lots of fun and very hot, out on a dock in the sun. We went on to our next hotel, the Amara Cay, and got in the pool. We considered the ocean, this time the Atlantic, but it was full of sargasso and looked dark and uninviting.
The next day we drove on to Marathon, where we went to the dolphin research center. We spent much of the day there, watching the dolphins as they played with the trainers and the people who had paid to get in the water with them. One of our favorites was a young dolphin named Louie whose trainers put sunscreen on his back to keep him from getting sunburned, since his back was out of the water so much, people-watching from his seawater pen. When we got to the Faro Blanco hotel, which was near a white lighthouse, we got in their infinity pool and watched the sun set over the gulf.
After that, we drove to Key West, where we parked at Mallory Square and took a trolley ride around downtown, getting off at the house where Ernest Hemingway lived with his second wife, Pauline, and taking the tour, including some of the 59 polydactyl cats who live on the property. That evening we went on a sunset dinner cruise. I overheard one of the crew saying that he had watched the sunset almost every day for four years and had still never seen a green flash, so I watched the sun set with less hope than I usually have, in the tropics. Although it was pretty, there was no green flash that night.
We spent time at the pool at the Doubletree hotel and then on our last day we got up early to board the ferry to Dry Tortugas National Park. It was a 2-1/2 hour boat ride and then we got to wander around the island from 10:45 to 2:30. We decided it was too hot and I didn’t walk well enough to tour Fort Jefferson so we went right down to the south beach where we finally found some Atlantic ocean that looked good for swimming. It was lovely, green and cool. People were snorkeling and finding live conch and hermit crabs.
When we had to get back on the ferry, we went through the freshwater showers and then dried off on our way back to Key West, where we got in our rental car, bought some aloe vera for our sunburns, and started the 3-1/2 hour drive back to the Miami airport, where we turned in our rental car and stayed at an airport hotel before flying back to Ohio the next morning.
It was a great trip, made even better by one of the books I’d brought for reading by the pool, Jodi McAlister’s An Academic Affair. I laughed out loud at something every time I picked it up. The first time I laughed, it was with rue, at the prologue: “For everyone who’s ever had to navigate the academic jobs market. It’s broken, not you.”
The novel alternates Jonah’s first-person point of view with Sadie’s; they tell the story of their competitive fighting since undergrad and it’s increasingly obvious that they’re fascinated with each other. This novel is set in Australia, so some of the terms are different but the details about their jobs as what we call adjuncts in the US are exactly the same. The conflict of the novel comes when they both apply for a tenure-track job in the town where Jonah’s sister lives and Sadie gets it, only to offer a marriage of convenience to Jonah so he can move there too and continue working in academia under the terms of a spousal hire.
Of course the marriage is much more than convenience and this becomes obvious to everyone fairly quickly, but part of the fun is watching them figure it out. The other big part of the fun is the footnotes. They start small and conversational but about halfway through there’s a page that’s more than half footnotes, quoting from Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling. (It added to my enjoyment that Sadie and Jonah are in the English department.)
At one point, at an emotional peak, Jonah quotes Shakespeare to Sadie and she says “as far as declarations of love went, it was entirely citational—quite literally someone else’s words—but it was somehow also entirely personal.” Especially as I’ve gotten older, that’s my idea of love. It’s a long conversation you’re always having with someone who has read most of the same things and can quote the right bits at the right time.
One of the fun things about this novel is the way the author uses various characters’ doubt that life can ever be like a romance plot. At times this is done with a footnote, like when Jonah has “a few deeply uncharitable thoughts about how long it had taken and how thin Chess’s reasoning seemed to me” and a footnote comments “I thought I was smothering you, so the only other alternative was completely exiting your life—really? That would get some stern words in the margins about logical leaps and a profound lack of nuance if it were an assignment I was grading.” Jodi McAlister can have her cake and eat it too, by making her characters comment on how unbelievable some parts of the plot of her novel are.
She also gets to comment on the literary study of romance novels by having this be the subject of Sadie’s research. At one point Sadie defends the genre she studies and that she’s in by saying “sincerity, my research had taught me, was often seen as a vulnerability. To earnestly express a feeling was a weakness. It was part of the reason people…liked to hang shit on romance novels. There was something inherently earnest at their heart: a sincere love and hope and joy that readers often reacted to with the same feelings, a delicate flower that provoked some people to want to crush it.”
Reading An Academic Affair was like enjoying the sight of a delicate flower—it was a small and lovely part of the experience of my trip to the Florida Keys.
Obstetrix
Naomi Kritzer’s new novel Obstetrix is about a woman who is kidnapped by a religious cult because they need an obstetrician, and she has to survive until she can escape. It is the stuff of nightmares. When I think about why this book at this time, my guess is that women who look ahead are thinking about what would happen if the men in our current government who are chipping away at women’s rights—the right to vote, the right to get a divorce without proving “fault,” the right to have a say in what happens to her own body—were to get more control over our lives.
The obstetrician is named Liz. She is kidnapped from what she thinks is a job interview, drugged and put into a minivan. When they arrive at a gas station, she tries to get out of the van but
“I flung myself out of the car to try to run. Only, my feet weren’t quite listening to me and instead of running, I found myself falling.
The asphalt was rough against my face and I struggled to push myself to sitting, but my body didn’t seem to know up from down. My voice still worked, at least. ‘Help!’ I yelled. ‘Help! I’m being kidnapped, help!’
There were other people at the gas station; I glimpsed a concerned face, but when Sarah and the man with her laughed apologetically and said ‘Yeah, we’re on our way to rehab for her, again,’ the face smiled in relief and turned away as the man and Sarah lifted me back into the car, buckled me in again, and drove away.”
One of the worst parts is that the cult leader won’t allow any of the members to read. He keeps even the Bible locked up. Liz spends some of her time at the compound remembering her favorite book, “an obscure fantasy novel from 1985 that I’d found at my local library and checked out repeatedly, called The Onyx Dagger which features “a lost princess who narrowly escaped death when her parents were murdered by a necromancer.” Those evil necromancers.
When Liz doesn’t cooperate the way the cult members want her to, they forbid her to come to meals, threaten to beat her with a cane, and finally threaten to kill her, showing her the grave of the obstetrician before her and saying “the doctor we had before, she chose not to save Sister Ginny. Brother Ethan, Sister Ginny’s husband, he shot that doctor when she said she wouldn’t help.”
Among the things Liz witnesses is children who are beaten and denied medical care aside from what she can offer (because it would require them to be able to leave the compound) and adults who are beaten for things like having a hidden phone. There can be no contact with the outside world.
Finally Liz is rescued, just as she is about to be shot for keeping her mouth shut about an escape plan involving a mother who needed a c-section. It’s a short book, and well-written enough to be a page-turner, so you can probably get to the safety of the ending before having to spend more than one night with its nightmares.
I didn’t need more nightmares than I already have about religious nuts and men who want control over women. If you’re interested in reading this book, let me know in the comments and I will send you my copy of Obstetrix–because if you’re not already alarmed, it’s certainly time to spread the word.
Necromancy Never Pays 