Categories
Nonfiction

BEGINNING ANYWHERE: VIEWS FROM THE TREEHOUSE By James P. Blaylock

In his new essay collection, BEGINNING ANYWHERE, James P. Blaylock takes exception to the adage “youth is wasted on the young.” In fact, he claims, the young tend to find perfectly appropriate and worthwhile things to do with their less regimented years–like, for instance, collecting a pocket full of pill bugs.

He could as easily have defended the complementary position, that age confers the possibility (though not the inevitability) of wisdom.

James Ellroy has sneered at the “kid wisdom” of Donna Tart’s The Secret History, thereby making two valuable points: First, that true wisdom is not the province of the young, and second, that any two people may differ wildly in what they believe wisdom to be.

Blaylock’s wisdom, maturing over decades, is rooted in compassion, curiosity, and openness. He is not, however, overly impressed with himself, quoting Oscar Wilde: “I prefer the folly of enthusiasm to the wisdom of indifference.”

These essays tend to a particular form: the memory of one or more related incidents from the past, viewed from the perspective of the present (most of them written between 2018 and 2024), not sepia-toned with nostalgia, but observed through the sharpened focus of experience, where meaning is a fourth dimension, and acts as small as cleaning up after a picnic or as profound as saving a child from drowning echo down through the years.

One story in particular, “Leaves,” embodies all the virtues of this remarkable collection. Father/son relationships are always fraught, even when they are sustained by deep and abiding love. Blaylock’s father “had spent much of his life figuring out how to make things work when his body failed him.” Blaylock’s efforts to save his father’s house from its inevitable collapse are allegorical but never obvious, as understated and as wrenching as Raymond Carver at his best.

Fans of Blaylock’s fiction will find that same wit, intelligence, and self-deprecating humor in his essays–along with a generous helping of wisdom.

Categories
Contemporary Novels

I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU by Rebecca Makkai

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Bodie Kane, the first-person narrator of Rebecca Makkai’s brilliant and addictive new novel, I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU, is a producer of true-crime podcasts. One of the running motifs (I’m reluctant to call it a joke) in the book is how easy it is to be confused by the sheer number of acts of violence against women and girls that have come to light in these amateur investigations, from sexual assault to rape to murder, always perpetrated by men, who all too often get away with it.

From the first page:

“Wasn’t that the one where the guy kept her in the basement?

“No! No. It was not.

“Wasn’t it the one where she was stabbed in—no. The one where she got in cab with—different girl. The one where she went to the frat party, the one where he used a stick, the one where he used a hammer, the one where she picked him up from rehab and he…”

Bodie is also a film professor, so it’s no surprise when Granby, the boarding school where she attended grades 9-12, invites her to teach a  “mini-mester” class in January of 2018, some twenty years after her graduation. Bodie volunteers to teach a class on podcasting as well, and one of the topics she suggests to her students is the murder of her classmate, Thalia, who was killed a few weeks before graduation.

For twenty years, Bodie had managed not to think too much about Thalia. They’d been roommates junior year, but were never close. Thalia was beautiful and popular and Bodie was an outsider. The one thing they had in common was Drama Club, where Bodie ran lights for Camelot and Thalia played Guinevere. An athletic trainer named Omar had been quickly identified as Thalia’s killer and was still in prison for it.

Then, in 2016, a video starts to make the rounds of the internet. There’s a shot of the Camelot curtain call, with time stamp, and an elaborate argument claiming that Omar could not have killed Thalia. Bodie, though disturbed by the idea that Omar might be innocent,  manages to avoid worrying about it until one of her podcasting students decides to use Thalia’s murder for her class assignment. Bodie’s secrets, and those of many others, start getting dragged into the light.

QUESTIONS, on the most basic level, is a whodunnit, but that’s just the starting point. It’s a classic coming-of-age campus novel that ranks with Donna Tartt’s SECRET HISTORY. It is up to the minute in its concern with male sexual predators, even as it shows how cancel culture can turn into vigilante injustice. It deals with the racism at the heart of the criminal justice system, and how ordinary, well-meaning citizens can become part of the problem.

But all of that makes QUESTIONS sound like a particularly well contrived genre novel rather than the serious work of literature that it is. Makkai’s previous novel, THE GREAT BELIEVERS, had the same kind of scope and ambition, dealing with the AIDS epidemic of the 80s at the same time that it talked about art and integrity and ambition. Both novels feature instantly memorable characters and clean, beautiful, hardworking prose.

Consider p. 354: “I said, ‘Look who drank the Flavor Aid.’” This is so perfectly Bodie—she knows that the followers at Jonestown drank Flavor Aid, not Kool-Aid, and she uses the correct name not to show off, but because she cares about getting things right. She tells us early on that she is a detail-oriented person, and Makkai, time after time, proves it without ever calling attention to it.

Makkai is not above a few literary games: Thalia’s name suggests Thanatos; Kane alludes to Bodie’s questioning whether she is her sister’s (roommate’s) keeper. The predatory music teacher who may also be a killer shares a last name with Robert Bloch, author of PSYCHO. I never found it distracting—as in Dickens, there are a lot of characters and I was glad for the appropriate names. And though there are a lot of characters in QUESTIONS, I felt Makkai trying, if not to love them all, to at least walk a mile or two in their shoes. This is most obvious in the chapters where Bodie tries to picture each of the suspects as they might have committed the murder.

One of the telltale indicators of literature vs. genre may be that very compassion that the author feels for her characters. In classic pulp, the villain is so purely evil that the hero doesn’t have to bother with compunctions about killing him, or worry about nightmares afterward. The situation in QUESTIONS is far more complicated, and gets more so as the story goes on. It’s a master class in the way character can drive plot even as plot reveals character.

Don’t miss I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU. The questions it asks are ones we should be shouting from the rooftops.

Categories
Classic Novels

THE CHOSEN by Chaim Potok

I haven’t met a lot of out-and-out unrepentant villains in my life. Some people I know started out with good intentions and got bitter. Some grew up hungry and never got over it. Yet popular fiction (including films) tends to favor the elemental, black-and-white, good-versus-evil conflict, winding the audience up until they’re ready to kill the bad guys with their own hands and teeth, building to a loud and bloody climax.

Nothing could be farther from the plot of THE CHOSEN. Potok gives us two fathers and two sons, each of whom is trying with all his heart to be the best person he can be, not just for himself or his family, but for the world. And all of them inflict terrible pain on each other.

Reuven, the narrator, is the son of a prominent Modern Orthodox rabbi in Brooklyn, where he attends high school in the early days of World War II. In the course of a baseball game (fast pitch softball, to be precise), Reuven’s life intersects that of Danny Saunders, the son of a revered Hasidic rabbi. Both boys are gifted Talmudic scholars, Reuven by choice, Danny because his father’s position is hereditary, and he has no alternative.

Reb Saunders, Danny’s father, is physically intimidating, emotionally distant, brilliant, and demanding. His belief in his own correctness is as unswerving as his faith in ”the Master of the Universe.” Danny, equally stubborn, is drawn to psychology, a subject considered irrelevant at best to the Hasidim. He is reduced to keeping his studies secret from his father, and he’s helped by an unexpected ally.

In the course of the novel, we see through these characters’ eyes as the Holocaust is revealed, as the Zionist movement takes off, as the State of Israel is established. Danny and Reuven end up on opposite sides of the struggle between supporters of a religious versus secular state, a struggle that turns heated and finally violent. Because we are so invested in the characters, the political becomes personal for the reader as well, not least when the last revelations come out in the final pages.

Potok writes cleanly, vividly, and informatively, though at times he overuses oral formula, as when repeatedly describing the Hasidic traditional dress: “the dark suit, the dark skullcap, the white shirt open at the collar, and the fringes showing below the jacket.” The effect may be less than Homeric, but it does add a certain epic weight to the narrative.

Speaking of those final pages—bring Kleenex. Bring lots of Kleenex.