Literary fiction

Review: James

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Cover image of "James" by Percival Everett

James, Percival Everett. Doubleday (ISBN: 9780385550369), 2024.

Summary: A retelling of a Mark Twain classic in which the slave, James, rather than Huckleberry Finn, is narrator.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain was an American classic for many generations, only to come under a cloud of suspicion because of its use of the “N” word. Huck, to escape beatings from a drunken father joins Jim, a slave fleeing sale on Jackson’s Island.. Subsequently, they have numerous adventures on a raft floating down the Mississippi, hoping to get to a place where Jim can go free. The steal a boat from thieves looting a steamboat and plotting murder. They survive floods and getting between a family feud only to fall in with hucksters passing themselves off as a King and a Duke. We hear the story from Huck’s perspective. And it is one of growing realization of Jim’s humanity as well as a coming of age story.

In Percival Everett’s retelling of the story, the plot elements above are present, although the story takes a turn after the King (or Dauphin) and the Duke. I won’t discuss these plot elements. What is distinctive in the re-telling is that Jim, or rather James, is the narrator. James assertion of his given name rather than slave name is an assertion of his personhood.

Slowly, Huck discovers James is far more complicated than Huck suspects. James and other slaves codeswitch. There is “Massa” talk, what slaveowners expect slaves to talk like and the way slaves speak to each other. James knows how to read, and steals some of Judge Thatcher’s books. James reads John Locke and Voltaire, among others. He also can write. He persuades a slave to steal a pencil for him. Then he learns that the slave who stole the pencil was lynched for his deed. Writing become all the more vital to him, to redeem that death.

James awakens to the anger within him, anger long buried in subservience. He discovers the fearsome things of which he is capable to avenge wrongs like a rape and to elude capture. Anger and love come together in a determined effort to free his wife Sadie and daughter, sold to a slave breeder.

James devotion to Huck, given Huck’s status as a white, is something of an enigma through most of the book. Neither Huck’s support of James’ aspirations nor his growing but still limited grasp of James’ world warrant this. Even Huck seems to intuit this when he asks why James saves him and not a fellow slave after a riverboat explodes.

James, juxtaposed with Twain’s work, reminds those of us who are white of the truth that we often “don’t know what we don’t know” in matters of race. Everett portrays a James far more intelligent, one probing for significance, awakening to his anger against injustice, and capable of resourceful action. As important as Twain’s work was in exposing the immorality of slavery, this goes far deeper. It plumbs greater depths of the evils in both acts and societal structures. And it plumbs the deep scars on the human psyche when one human holds another in bondage.

Review: Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage?

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Cover image of "Flannery O'Connor's Why Do The Heathen Rage" by Jessica Hooten Wilson

Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do The Heathen Rage, Jessica Hooten Wilson with illustrations by Steve Prince. Brazos Press (ISBN: 9781587436185), 2024.

Summary: The text of O’Connor’s unfinished work with commentary on her literary process and the tensions she wrestled with in writing.

Flannery O’Connor died in 1964 from lupus at the young age of 39. Despite her illness she penned a number of short stories and two novels. She also wrote numerous letters, essays, and reviews. She was working on a third novel at the time of her death, a fact known mostly among O’Connor scholars. But none dared put the fragments of this novel into print until now. Jessica Hooten Wilson describes how she was a fan of O’Connor since her teen years. During her doctoral research on O’Connor and Dostoevsky, a friend encouraged her to look at the unpublished novel as the most Dostoevskian of O’Connor’s works. This began research that culminated in this work.

In this work, Wilson has arranged the fragments of the novel into something of a coherent narrative. Between fragments she offers her commentary on the work, O’Connor’s process, and the literary influences on the text, and her struggle to complete it. Portions of the novel are introduced by woodcut illustrations by Steve Prince of One Fish Studios. He provides an afterword describing his work with the O’Connor text.

The principle characters of the story are Walter Grandstaff Tilman, a scholar who spends his days writing letters to all and sundry between bouts of illness (shades of O’Connor’s own life?). His father, T.C. Tilman, is nominal head of the family but has suffered a stroke, and is tended by Roosevelt. His mother keeps up the slowly fading farm, directing the efforts of the farm help. She is frustrated but has come to accept Walter’s lack of interest in the farm.

Oona Gibbs is the one other character who plays a significant part. She is a civil rights activist. She lives with a domineering mother and one gets the sense that her correspondence and activism is part of her liberation. Walter begins corresponding with her. He tells her about his life but portrays himself as lack. Too late he realizes the consequence of his deception. Her interest awakened, she wants to visit. To avert the visit, he writes asking her not to come, trying to end the relationship. Too late. She is on her way.

Wilson takes liberty with what O’Connor wrote in the final part, fashioning a crisis and conclusion of sorts from a cross-burning scene on a neighbor’s farm. Wilson borrows scenes from other stories and acknowledges this as presumptuous. To me, it seemed an effort to offer some kind of closure to what was plainly unfinished and unsatisfying. While it would have busied up the text, I wish she would have annotated this chapter: what was from Why Do the Heathen Rage, what came from other works, and what was Wilson.

Wilson interleaves commentary with the fragments of O’Connor’s work. She traces the different iterations of the story, including the name changes Asbury/Walter and his different backstories. Speaking of backstories, Wilson introduces us to the friendship of O’Connor with Maryat Lee, a New York playwright. Lee, a polar opposite to O’Connor, is the likely inspiration for Oona Gibbs, with shades of Ivan Karamazov.

Wilson’s commentary also explores O’Connor’s wrestling with race. She contends that this, as much as illness, helps account for O’Connor’s inability, despite three years of work, to fashion and finish a coherent novel. She notes the plot elements of Roosevelt, Walter’s conflicted choice to write as a Black, and Oona’s activism, as well as the closing scene as part of O’Connor’s struggle. Wilson discusses O’Connor’s segregated life, her blind spots of experience, and a bifurcated spirituality that relegated civil rights to an “earthly and political position.” Yet she sees the novel as an attempt to address the racism of the South.

For Wilson, the unfinished novel represents the unfinished racial awakening in O’Connor’s life. But how ought we evaluate this unfinished story? On one hand, O’Connor fans will revel in new material to read. On the other hand, despite Wilson’s efforts, O’Connor’s text is fragmentary and lacks cohesion. Given all this, the book is one for O’Connor scholars and devotees. For me, as one who has read O’Connor on and off since college, it added to my appreciation of this complicated Southern Catholic writer. And I grieved afresh that she died so young.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher via LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers Program for review.

Review: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

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Cover image of James McBride's "The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store."

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride. Riverhead Books (ISBN: 9780593422946), 2023.

Summary: A story centered around a grocery store in the midst of Pottstown’s Chicken Hill district, inhabited by immigrant Jews and the local Black community.

In 1972, a body is found at the bottom of a well, but swept away by Hurricane Agnes. In one sense the rest of this novel answers the question of how that body got there (and so I won’t). But this is a rich story about so much more, that all centers around a Jewish grocery, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. Jewish immigrants with a daughter Chona owned the store. She married a struggling theatre owner, Moshe Ludlow. Eventually Moshe figured out that the money was in Black acts, that the Black residents of Chicken Hill as well as surrounding areas would attend.

Chicken Hill was where those living on the margins, trying to get a toehold, lived–Blacks, immigrant Jews, and later, Latinos. Moshe and Chona lived above the store. While his theatres profited, the store lost money, mostly because Chona was generous with extending credit and slow to ask repayment. As more Jews moved away, Moshe wanted to join them but Chona refused. Today, we would call her a community activist. She was greatly loved, whether by the Jewish immigrants or Black residents, many of whom McBride introduces us.

Nate Timblin worked for Moshe, doing repairs. He had a dark past, according to rumors, but Moshe knows nothing of this. So when he asks Moshe and Chona to help a bright child deafened by a stove explosion to hide from white authorities who want to institutionalize him at Pennhurst, they agree. Dodo quickly becomes beloved by Chona, and a great help as she was weakened by periods of illness. This was not a child who needed institutionalization. They succeed until the town’s white doctor visits the store. Dodo defends her against an assault by the doctor, who flees only to return with the police, who take Dodo to Pennhurst, which is as horrible as all the rumors.

Nate and Addie, the woman he has been seeing, figure out what happened to Chona. And an amazing thing happens. Two communities touched by this evil act come together to rescue Dodo, honor Chona, and to get back at the city councilman, Gus Plitzka, who controls their water supply. And this underscores the larger context of this story. Pottstown is controlled by its white establishment. In these incidents, two ethnic communities, each in many ways self-contained, except by the generosity of Chona, come together to shrewdly resist the white establishment in plots with many moving parts. As kind of a dark counterpart to Chona, Nate chooses to risk all to deliver Dodo from the horrors of Pennhurst.

It’s not hard to see why this book has won numerous recognitions. McBride paints a rich portrait of these two communities that stand against white power and venality. We see two communities galvanized by attacks on an innocent boy and a generous and righteous woman. But all this was sown through years of care and generosity where heaven and earth met at a grocery store.

Review: Prophet Song

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Prophet Song, Paul Lynch. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2023.

Summary: A mother tries to hold her family and life together as Ireland descends into authoritarian rule.

Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, winner of the 2023 Booker Prize is a tough read in two respects. One is seeing the unraveling of a democratic society through the disbelieving eyes of Eilish stack, an educated, middle class mother who works for a biotech company. It is disturbing becausew of how close to home it strikes.

The other respect is the text, written without paragraphs with dialogue without quotation marks. Yet this running text reflects increasingly unsettled and anxious perceptions of Eilish, fusing dialogue, emotions, and interior thought. We sense her movement back and forth from disbelief to concern, from hollow assurances that even her children don’t believe to rising fear, from clinging to the hope that her “disappeared” will come home to the realization that no one taken by the government comes home, from the illusion that she can preserve her home and way of life and that their only hope is flight. It’s the increasingly frantic and instinctive thought of one who loses husband, two sons, her job, her respect as “traiter” is spray-painted on her car and home, as her neighborhood becomes a battleground between the regime and the resistance, and finally her flight with her daughter and infant son, having to pay “fees” at numerous checkpoints as she they try to flee. The running text takes us inside her mind and we live the growing terror with Eilish.

It all begins when the National Alliance Party takes over the Republic of Ireland, declares emergency powers and suspends the constitution including writs of habeas corpus. The reality comes home when her husband Larry, a leader in a teacher’s union, goes out to a protest–and never returns. Her eldest son Mark has to go into hiding to avoid the drafting of 17 year-olds. He joins the resistance. After infrequent communications on burner phones, Eilish hears no more, but persists in hoping he will come home. Then, after a list of draft-dodgers, including her son, is published, she learns her services are no longer required. Meanwhile, her father, across town, is descending into dementia. Yet, in his occasional lucid moments, he tells her she must take the children and leave.

Subsequently, her neighborhood becomes front lines in the battle between the Party and the resistance. Power and water are intermittent and the gone. Buildings around suffer bombardment. Yet she uses all her resources, including money from her sister for her to get out of the country to survive. She can’t let go of hope that her husband and son will come home. Only when another son goes missing does she realize that she must save the two who remain–if she can.

The story takes us into the powerful disbelief that democracy really can’t unravel and how rapidly a society can consume itself when it does. We also see how powerful the urge is to try to hold onto home, onto some shred of normalcy. We glimpse how bad things must get for someone to flee from home and become a refugee. When Eilish’s neighborhood becomes a warzone, her running narrative gives the reader of what lived reality must be like in Gaza and other warzones.

Paul Lynch takes us to a place those of us in the West resist going. We join Eilish in denial that it can happen here–that our institutions, the rule of law, our education, jobs, and suburbs will protect us. He forces us to look into the dark abyss through the eyes of Eilish to recognize the vulnerability of all of this when we embrace unfettered power rather than the less “efficient” processes of the rule of law and democratic legislative processes. His book reminds us that the possibility of effective resistance after the fact is far more perilous than resisting beforehand, as inconvenient as that may be. Is this book a “Prophet Song” for us?

Review: Renaissance

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Renaissance, Susan Fish. Brewster, MA: Raven | Paraclete Press, 2023.

Summary: Approaching fifty, Elizabeth Fane suddenly leaves work she loves as an executive director of a non-profit and a family that has been her life, to work in the gardens of a convent in Florence, Italy.

Elizabeth Fane came across these words in a book of Dante, found in a church rummage sale:

“Midway on life’s journey I found myself alone in a dark wood where the right way was lost.”

Little did Liz realize that within a few months, she would be living these words. She was approaching fifty with a husband she loved and three grown up sons leaving home. She served as executive director of a non-profit, a job she loved and was good at. Then came the day an associate mentions something about her family that rocks her world because it was something she didn’t know.

She steps away from her work and makes plans to go to Italy, leaving family behind. She goes, not as a tourist but a garden volunteer at a convent in Florence, Italy. Florence, the heart of the Renaissance. Dante’s house. The Accademia and the Uffizi. The works of Caravaggio, da Vinci, and Michelangelo. Ancient churches, bustling markets, a glorious countryside.

Yet her life seems a dark wood. But she slowly opens up to the good food, the prayers in a grotto, conversations with Honey and Cecy and a painting of Mary, alone, that Cecy nicknames Our Lady of Perpetual Constipation. She works with the convent gardener who teaches her the work of pruning olive trees. He begins each day drinking a cup of olive oil, giving thanks both to God and the olive grove. Mornings are spent pruning, afternoons by gathering pruned branches. But what is being pruned in Liz?

Through most of the story, she keeps her secret to herself, only sharing it late in the story with Honey, who sees things differently than she. A subsequent betrayal by an old high school friend she encountered on a tour forces her to example how the secret kept from her by her husband and son affected her–not only how they saw her, but also the identity that she had constructed.

There is that painting of Mary, that hangs in her room. Not Mary with child. Not the Pieta, Mary holding her dead son. Mary alone. Mary who has said “let it be unto me…” and Mary whose own heart has been pierced with a sword. Was Mary still saying “let it be unto me”? Could Liz? What would that mean for how she saw her husband? Her son? Herself?

Susan Fish tells the story of a woman seeking her own renaissance, trying to find her way through a dark would where all the familiar trail blazes are missing. Liz’s search is juxtaposed with the beauties of Florence and it’s countryside. Yet her healing comes not from the beauties of the place but as she comes to a place of vulnerable, raw honesty, facing her anger that kept her from going to the English church, and the false self she projected to family and even herself. A profound story of a mid-life renaissance.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: A Gun for Sale

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A Gun for Sale, Graham Greene. New York: Open Road Media, 2018 (originally published in 1936).

Summary: A paid assassin murders a foreign minister of war, creating an international crisis that could lead to war but is betrayed by the middleman who paid him, who he pursues even as the police pursue him.

Raven is a paid assassin whose life represents a series of betrayals from being born with a hare lip to finding his mother dead by suicide as a child. Taking lives for hire does not trouble him. And so being hired to kill the Minister for War of Czechoslovakia is just another. He cleans up, killing the overly diligent secretary as well.

Back in England, he discovers that the payment from Mr. Cholmondeley (pronounced “Chumley”) is in stolen notes and police, in the person of detective Jimmy Mather is on his tale. He’s betrayed again by a doctor he asks to operate on the telltale hare lip. His picture is in the papers and serial numbers in the possession of shopkeepers. Betrayed. He has to flee and wants to find Cholmondeley. He spots him on a train to Nottwich, to visit a theatre he supports under the name Davis, using his patronage to pick up women actresses. Anne Crowder, Jimmy Mather’s girl is on the same train, to try out for a part at the theatre.

In short order, Anne escapes attempts of both Raven and Cholmondeley to kill her only to be taken hostage again by Raven as the police, including Mathers, converge on a coal shack where the two are sheltering. A “Stockholm syndrome” type of situation arises as Raven trusts Anne and Anne learns of the plot behind the assassination, to create an international crisis leading to a war that will profit a steel company Cholmondeley/Davis works for. But will Anne survive to tell the story and Raven to exact revenge?

Greene crafts a story at a personal level around trust and betrayal. Raven, as noted, has crafted his life story around betrayal. Anne, the hostage, is in the midst of it. She’s torn between betraying Jimmy and betraying Raven, all to save her life. The story is also about betrayal at a larger level–powerful companies manipulating foreign policy at the cost of many young lives in war (and the expendability of their assassin). Greene includes several scenes showing the vapid social relations among the elite who indulge themselves while preparing to sacrifice young lives. He reminds me of Dwight Eisenhower’s famous and prescient warning about the military-industrial complex.

This was one of Greene’s earlier novels, and in my opinion, not one of his best. Anne’s ability to get into and out of trouble stretches credulity as does the setup that she just happens to be Jimmy Mathers girl. Still, the relationship that forms between Anne and Raven, and the dialogue in the coal shack signals to me what Greene would become as a writer.

Review: The Covenant of Water

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The Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese. New York: The Grove Press, 2023.

Summary: The story of three generations of the family of Big Ammachi of Parambil, the ever present reality of “the Condition” resulting in a drowning in every generation, a story both of love and the hope in advances in medicine.

Twelve year old Mariamma has been engaged in a brokered marriage to a forty year old widow, the owner of a 500 acre estate near the town of Parambil. Her mother tells her, “The saddest day of a girl’s life is the day of her wedding….After that, God willing, it gets better.” I began reading with a sense of foreboding of what would happen to this girl in the house of this man. And I was surprised. At the wedding, he runs away, mortified that she is a mere child. But they wed. And he leaves her to her own room, and lets her learn the management of the household, lets her mature, lets her bond with his son, JoJo, and lets her realize that he has loved her by providing her time to come to love him. And so begins this incredible story spanning three generations within the Mar Thoma Christian community of South India.

When JoJo falls into what is little more than a puddle and drowns, she learns of “The Condition.” It explains the distance of the house from the river, the fact that her husband will not travel on the water. She is shown a genealogy. Every generation has a death from drowning. And JoJo’s name is added. Eventually Mariamma, who has become Big Ammachi, a capable manager of her household, bears another child, a girl with a developmental difficulty leaving her a perpetual child. Baby Mol brings perpetual love and an uncanny prescience about events. Fifteen years pass, and at a point of giving up hope, Big Ammachi has a son, named Philipose.

Philipose has the condition. Sent to college in Madras, he soon quits due to deafness that impedes his ability to follow the lectures. On the carriage home, he meets Elsie Chandy, an artist, and is smitten. They’d had a brief encounter when Philipose risked his life carrying a dying child on a river barge during floods to the nearest hospital, and was given a ride home by Elsie and her father. He strives to educate himself and becomes a writer, producing a column, “The Ordinary Man” widely followed throughout the country. Eventually, through a broker, Elsie’s family agrees to the marriage. It seems like a beautiful love affair, that sadly ends with the tragic death of their child Ninan. They blame each other and Philipose, injured trying to rescue Ninan, falls into opium addiction. Elsie leaves but returns when she learns Baby Mol is pining for her, and in failing health. Philipose and Elsie are intimate once and it is soon evident that Elsie is pregnant. As she approaches delivery, she has a seizure. Big Ammachi assists in a difficult breech birth, nearly costing the mother her life.

The baby is named Mariamma, after her grandmother. Soon after her recovery, Elsie disappears after going to the river to bathe, her body never found. Philipose sorts out his life, becomes an exemplary father, and continues his writing work, turning over his estate to Shamuel, and eventually, Shamuel’s son Joppan, to operate. Big Ammachi has dreamed of both a hospital in Parambil, and that her grand-daughter would become a doctor and find the cause of “The Condition” that plagues her family.

The book also involves a parallel plot line in which a young Scottish doctor, Digby Kilgour, goes to India to acquire surgical experience. Working for an incompetent superior, he has an affair with the superior’s wife, ending in a tragic fire that only he survives, with his right hand badly burned. A couple, grateful for an earlier medical intervention on his part, shelter him and connect him with a doctor working with lepers, who operates on his hand. He is helped by a young girl who helps him recover fine movements in the hand through drawing. Through much of the novel, we wonder what the what the connection of this plotline is with the main plotline of Big Ammachi and her family. Hang in there. There is one.

The story spans the period from 1900 to 1977. India goes through huge transformations through this time that serve as a backdrop for the novel, from a British colony par excellence to an independent country, seeking to modernize amid political ferment, with the electrification of the countryside and advances in medicine and modern technology. We get some sense in the novel of how this presses against traditional caste divisions, particularly in the relations between the family of Big Ammachi and Shamuel and his son Joppan.

I found the writing particularly engaging. It felt to me that Abraham Verghese writes with the same reverence for his characters that he has for his patients (he is a Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Medicine at Stanford). One senses a deep sympathy for his characters, even as they struggle with tragedy, estrangement, and the vicissitudes of life and death. He portrays a community shaped by faith, love, and purpose. And he conveys the noble possibilities of the medical profession, evident in Rune Orquist, the doctor of a leper mission who operates on Kilgour’s hand, and in Mariamma, and the professors who train her. To read Verghese is to read a consummate story weaver who has thought deeply about the human condition in its frailty and fallibility, in the powerful bonds upon which our lives and loves depend, and in the hopes and holy aspirations that represent the best in human striving.

Review: A Quiet Life

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A Quiet Life, Kenzaburo Oe (Translators: Kunioki Yanagishita, William Wetherall). New York: Grove Press, 1998.

Summary: Ma-chan, a quiet, college age woman is left to care for her older brother who has a neurological disorder and younger, college-bound brother while her father, a famous writer, sorts out his life and faith in California on a writer’s residency.

All Ma-Chan wants is to live a quiet life, writing her thesis on Celine, a French novelist, while caring for her brother, nicknamed Eeyore, who suffers from epileptic fits that have caused brain damage, yet left him with an unusual musical talent. She has been more or less marginalized, an orphan even before her parents left Japan for California. Her parents tended to focus on the afflictions of the older brother and the promise of the younger brother, O-Chan, preparing for his college entrance exams while his parents are in America, Her father, a famous writer, has left for a writer’s residency in California. In reality, he is suffering from a “pinch” of the spirit, having suffered a loss of faith that causes him to wonder “how is a faithless person to cope with life?”

Ma-Chan is left to cope at a more practical level. She has to help her older brother deal with his sexual urges in socially appropriate ways while seeing that he gets to his sheltered workshop each day. She has to help others understand her brother’s seizures and resist their mockery of him, often in internal cries of “Hell no! Hell no!” She also takes him to the Shigetos, who help Eeyore discover and develop his unique gift for musical composition. One of these is titled “Sutego” or orphan. Both brother and sister are orphans together.

Eventually, it is recommended that Eeyore take swim lessons to channel some of his physical energies. It is here that they meet Mr. Arai, a shady character who agrees to teach Eeyore to swim. And he is very good at it and a bond develops between them, even as everything in us screams “predator!” Mr Shigeto starts watching out for them until a confrontation with Arai in which Mr. Shigeto is severely beaten, opening the way for Mr. Arai to pursue his designs.

The “quiet life” Ma-Chan wants comes at the cost of submerging her own selfhood. She describes herself as “robotizing.” She sees herself as a skinny thing with stick legs, oblivious of her own sexuality and that others might notice her. Yet there are her “Hell Nos” and her “Diary of Life,” written that “her papa might remember he has a family.” One comes to the end of this novel wondering whether Ma-Chan will find her voice and her self in more than a diary and her internal monologue. Will she heed the self that says “Hell No!” or let her father treat her as an orphan while he pursues an esoteric spiritual search? Will she emerge as the scholar in her own right?

Many of us want a quiet life. Life doesn’t always permit this, and more than that, at what price do we secure such a life? Is it at the price of our selves? Must we robotize? It seems these are the questions Oe’s novel asks of us. Meanwhile, he seems to take a swipe at the pretensions of literary figures who think their existential “pinches” more important than the real pinches they make those around them endure.

Review: Bastille Day

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Bastille Day, Greg Garrett. Brewster, MA: Raven/Paraclete Press, 2023.

Summary: A brief love affair with a beautiful Muslim woman who he rescues from a suicide leads Cal Jones to come to terms with losses and traumatic memories and to discover that he is not alone.

Brave. And broken. Like James Bond. That is how Calvin Jones describes himself. Jones had been a war correspondent in Iraq where both his father and driver Khalid died in bomb attacks. He blamed himself for Khalid. He fled to the security of working at a local news station. For ten years. Life was good. He was in a serious relationship with Kelly McNair, an interior designer. They looked good together. Sex was pretty good. Then, before his eyes at a Black Lives Matter rally five police die including the officer he was riding with, who he watches bleed out before his eyes. The man had protected him with his life. And all the dreams, never distant, came back.

Rob, a fellow correspondent, sensing the troubled state of a former colleague invites him to join Rob’s news agency in Paris to cover terror attacks in Europe. He arrives the Monday before Bastille Day (July 14) in 2016. While waiting to meet Rob in Harry’s New York Bar he meets a beautiful Muslim woman, Nadia, highly educated but unhappy. In days she will be married to a Saudi millionaire, an arranged marriage that will greatly benefit her family. Except she doesn’t want this marriage and has contemplated suicide, jumping off a bridge into the Seine. As they part, he gives her his business card. Call, if she needs to talk. He doesn’t expect to hear from her. The marriage is in five days.

Out on a run, he receives a text. She is at the bridge, ready to jump. By providence, he is near, and when she jumps, he goes after her, rescues her, and takes her back to his apartment to dry off. And so begins an improbable love affair. He realizes that he never loved Kelly and that he does love this woman and doesn’t want her to marry the millionaire, even as she grapples with the implications for her family, herself, and even other Saudi women, if she refuses to take the burqah.

Amid all this, the Nice truck attack occurs, in which a Muslim, shouting Allahu-akbar (“God is greater”), drove a truck for a mile down a boulevard crowded with Bastille Day celebrants, killing or injuring 500. Cal is sent along with cameraman Ahmed, to cover the attack. It surfaces all the memories, the trauma, the anger. And he takes it out on Nadia, forgetting all he has learned of her and other honorable Muslim friends. Too late, he realizes how he has wronged the woman he loved and desperately tries to communicate. Silence.

He is a wreck. Drinking too much. Barely holding it together. Yet loved. By his Uncle Jack in Texas who would hop on a plane in a moment, talks straight sense. He and his wife pray like crazy. By Rob and his wife, going through a rough patch in their own marriage. By a former military chaplain and by Clarice, the dean of the American cathedral. And by Allison, an attractive lesbian and good friend. They have faith when Cal has lost his. No cliches. Presence. Honesty. Love.

Cal will need it. To face the complicated relationship with his deceased father. His guilt over Khalid. Over the police officer. Over Kelly who he does not love. He is broken and needs to find “brave” within it. Especially with Nadia who he can’t bear to lose despite the obligations she faces.

This is an adult novel from a Christian publisher. There is sex outside of marriage, though not graphically portrayed. There is violence that is graphically described. There is also a quietly compelling Episcopal community (as well as Uncle Jack) who make space to include Cal in their journey as far as he will go. He is both skittish from a fundamentalist youth, and broken from the horrors he has seen, including the horror he sees in himself. We wait to see how brave will he be.

Greg Garrett offers a finely drawn story occuring in the space of a week, peopled with characters we come to love, including Frederick the bartender at Harry’s New York Bar. We consider Christian-Muslim relations, in ways integral to, but never overshadowing, the plot. The dialogue is never trite, but reflects people who care about their lives and those of others, wrestling with fraught choice, life’s ambiguities, and the unanswered questions of suffering and loss. I will be thinking about Cal, Nadia and their friends for awhile…

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: The Last Chairlift

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The Last Chairlift, John Irving. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022.

Summary: The son of a former slalom skier tries to make sense of the ghosts he sees, the father he never knew, and the different ways people love, and fail to love.

John Irving has written a number of novels, at least several of which might be judged among the great American novels: Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and The World According to Garp. All of these were written in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Where does this, which Irving describes as his “last long novel” rank among these others? I’ll get to this by the end of this review.

This is definitely a long novel, 889 pages in my edition. It spans the lifetime of the narrator, Adam Brewster, from his conception in 1941 until 2021–eighty years. His mother, Rachel “Little Ray” Brewster was an off-the-podium slalom skier in the 1941 Olympics in Aspen. She comes away, not with a medal, but a pregnancy, after a brief affair with an attractive young boy hanging around the Jerome Hotel who she never contacts again. She describes Adam as her “one and only,” which has more than one meaning for her.

He’s raised mostly by his grandmother and increasingly demented grandfather, the “Diaper Man.” Little Ray is gone in the winter months, working as a ski instructor and living with Molly, a trail groomer. But she and Adam are close–in fact so close she sleeps with him into adolescence–including one instance with unconsummated sexual overtones.

An English teacher in town eventually becomes a mentor. Elliot Barlow coaches wrestling as well as Adam’s writing aspirations. He’s small, but strong not only physically but in other ways. Adam, who hates skiing, despite his mother, takes to snowshoeing with Elliot. Little Ray meets him and they fall for each other.

Their wedding is a series of bizarre incidents including everyone overhearing niece Nora and her companion, the mute Em as Em climaxes. The wedding is accompanied by a zithermeister. A storm hits and the Diaper Man is electrocuted. And Adam stumbles upon his mother and Molly in bed together. It turns out that the marriage of Little Ray and Elliot is cover for both, even though they really do love each other, but not as man and wife. Elliot wants to be a woman, and eventually transitions and becomes “she.”

Adam learns that there are many ways for people to love each other. And the book depicts many ways people have sex with each other, including Adam in his attic, along with the ghosts, which literally scare the crap out of one girlfriend. In fact, the book seems to describe the varieties of sexual relationship other than a reasonably healthy marital one (Adam’s son is conceived before his marriage). And we hear about it in several chapters set at the Gallows, a New York comedy club where Nora and Em have an act, Two Dykes, One Who Talks. Nora does the talking and Em mimes, off stage as well as on. It is an odd set of relationships and yet they all care deeply for each other, and especially for Adam.

I mentioned ghosts. Adam not only sees the ghost of the Diaper Man, who hangs about the house, but a group that hangs around the Jerome Hotel–miners, Mr. Jerome, a maid, and others including a small, young, early adolescent boy wearing an oversized sweater and girlish ski hat. Unlikely as it seems, he begins to wonder if this might be his father. Then he sees the work of screenwriter and actor Paul Goode, whose resemblance to both the boy and to Adam himself is striking. Adam wonders if his own growing talent as a writer and his screenwriting aspirations come from his father.

There are two climactic scenes at the Jerome, both marked with tragedy. Both are written as screenplays rather than regular text and in them Adam encounters Goode, all too briefly. More significantly, they mark a transition of Adam from a serial lover to a father, even as his own marriage is breaking up and he is transitioning to the most enduring, albeit, unusual relationship that lasts to the end of the book.

The last chairlift. Chairlifts are a place of death throughout this novel, one tragic and others where the last chairlift marks a fitting coda on the lives of those brought down the mountain for the last time. One wonders if Irving sees this story as a coda, a last chairlift in his life. He explores in unconventional ways the themes of love and death so basic to literature, the sexual politics of his (and my) generation including the neglect of the Reagan administration toward AIDs, as well as the search for a missing parent that haunts so many young.

So what do I make of this work? Overall, I felt it undisciplined and overlong. I wonder if it tries to do too much. It seemed at times like a series of short stories (or screenplays) written by the narrator stitched into a book relatively unedited. Yet Irving gives us memorable characters, humorous moments, and a complicated yet coherent plot arc. I don’t consider it among his greatest works yet it bears the marks of his skill and his sensibilities. And for many readers, that is reason enough to engage “this last long novel.”