America, Endlessly Repeating Itself

Ethan Canin's new novel America America explores the complicated dance between character and power in American politics. It is the story of three idealistic men whose lives intertwine in the presidential campaign of 1972. New York Senator Henry Bonwiller, proven champion of the working man and passionate foe of the War in Vietnam, seeks the Democratic nomination. We know from the first scene, his funeral three decades later, that he did not succeed, and we sense that some great tragedy unfolded. As the story of 1972 unfolds, we watch the progress of the campaign from its strategic center, the estate of Liam Metarey, heir to an industrial empire and a legacy of responsibility for the people who fill its homes and factories. Once Bonwiller decides to run for President, the gifted and honorable Metarey throws everything he has into running the campaign.

The third figure is narrator Corey Sifter, who recounts the thirty-year-old story to a young intern at the small-town newspaper he owns. The son of hard-working, uneducated parents, he grew up learning integrity, discipline, and respect for the Metareys. At sixteen he was hired to do odd jobs on their estate, where he was treated like a son. His work involved him peripherally in the Bonwiller campaign, but was never privy to the motivations and manipulations of the powerful men he served. Even at fifty, he can only guess at the answers to the questions both men left behind. His innocent, veiled viewpoint, coupled with his impeccable honesty, makes him the perfect narrator of a story that is all about the difficulty of finding truth, both factual and moral.

As Corey unravels the story of the campaign, we move back and forth in his life, seeing the boy awakening to the ways of the world, the sadder-but-wiser young man out on his own, and the mature adult pondering the fates of his own parents and children. Corey's steady voice and unwavering integrity provide the anchor that makes the complicated narrative work. We learn the truth--or what might be the truth--about Metarey and Bonwiller in bits and pieces, as Corey did, and Canin's timing in revealing crucial details while moving back and forth across decades is remarkable. The final revelation of what doomed the campaign was, for me at least, surprising, heart-breaking, and perfect.

America America is an ambitious title for a story so grounded in a few individual lives, but the more I think about it, the more apt it is. The America of 1972 was not so different from America today, with opposition to the war enervating the administration and passionate liberals pushing for change. Then and now, power corrupts, cherished heroes inevitably reveal their dark sides, and the public must decide which sins are necessary and which are unforgiveable. Canin seems to be suggesting that it is only by staying out of politics that a person can keep his integrity. I hope he's wrong about that.

Read this novel for its artful story-telling, its complex characters, its insight, and its reminder that hard work and humility, not power, are the tools we need in pursuit of happiness.

Online Reading: Better than the Book?

Does the growing preference for reading from a screen rather than paper threaten our nation's intellectual health? That's the question discussed in a thought-provoking article by Motoko Rich in today's New York Times (link below). After considering the questions the piece raises about the effects of online reading, particularly on young people, I wondered what it meant that I, a Boomer addicted to the feel of a book in my hands and uninterrupted time to lose myself in it, had read it not in the paper but online?

As a teacher and librarian who watched the changes technology brought to the reading practices of high school students, I have both welcomed and worried about the monumental shift in the ways kids seek knowledge and entertainment. I reveled in the new, often free accessibility of more knowledge than any library full of books could provide, even while I extolled the primacy of books, believing that reading online encourages quantity over quality, superficiality over depth, immediacy over truth with all its time-sapping subtleties. I may have spoken with enthusiasm when I taught kids how to use library databases, but it was only when I gave book talks that passion, even a sense of the sacred, gave music to my voice. The superiority of the printed page, I thought, would always win out.

Now I'm not so sure. Whether I like it or not, the days of the printed page are numbered. But I'm not as saddened or alarmed by that as I once was. Does onscreen reading have its dangers? Yes. Will much be lost as paper books become mere antiques? Yes, just as much was lost when horses were replaced by cars and torches by electric lights. But whatever the consequences, this ship has sailed, and nothing short of an apocolypse will abort the journey we're on. Future generations will, I'm convinced, look back at the age of the personal computer as the start of a whole new epoch of human progress, with ramifications as significant as the changes in the beak of the finch.

And so even while I'm hoarding my books, I'll be hoping that educators can do a better job of acknowledging and maximizing the techno-human evolution we're in than the test-makers in Mokoto's article who continue to assess only one form of acquiring knowledge while students are happily multi-tasking, or the educator who sees no need to teach online reading because “Nobody has taught a single kid to text message....When they want to do something, schools don’t have to get involved.” Would this English teacher exempt from her class any student who can already read and chooses to do so? If this attitude prevails, and kids aren't taught the critical skills they need to find the truth in the blitz of half-facts zooming past their eyes, then the dangers of online reading may indeed outweigh the benefits.

I started this essay by asking what it meant that I, a lifelong practitioner and teacher of reading in its traditional medium, read the article in its online form? I guess it means that I've gone over to the Dark Side, and found it not so dark after all.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html?ref=books

Another good piece is Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" in The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google. "Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."

Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog

On the long list of Books I Wish I Had Written, Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog has just leapt to Number One. SBBD is not, as it sounds, a pet story; it is a paean to the art of diagramming sentences and the beauty of well-constructed prose.

Kitty Burns Florey learned to diagram in Sister Bernadette's sixth grade classroom many years ago, and she loved it. She describes the process fondly: "You took up a sentence, threw it against the wall, picked up the pieces, and put them together again, slotting each word into its pigeonhole. When you got it right, you made order and sense out of what we used all the time and took for granted: sentences." It's not surprising that she grew up to be a copy editor and a writer whose prose is colorful, elegant, graceful, and funny.

SBBD does not actually teach the reader how to diagram, but it provides enough examples that someone who already knows grammar can figure out the process. (As Florey points out, diagramming doesn't teach grammar; you have to know grammar to do it right.) She does provide an entertaining history of the educational use of the practice sprinkled with humorous stories about her own diagramming days. Her pleasure in the work is described so beautifully that I almost put down the book to try to diagram sentences like these: "I remember loving the look of the sentences, short or long, once they were tidied into diagrams—the curious geometric shapes they made, their maplike tentacles, the way the words settled primly along their horizontals like houses on a road, the way some roads were culs de sac and some were long meandering interstates with many exit ramps and scenic lookouts. And the perfection of it all, the ease with which—once they were laid open, all their secrets exposed—those sentences could be comprehended."

The book is full of gorgeous sentences by other writers too, diagrammed for us in the imperfect printing of a human hand on beautifully uneven lines--a surprising visual pleasure in this era of computerized perfection. Trying to read a sentence from its diagram is an interesting exercise, like re-doing a jigsaw puzzle that was complete until someone walked by and bumped the table.

From the specifics of diagramming Florey moves to broader ideas about language and writing. I appreciated her balanced attitude toward correctness: while extolling clarity, precision, and consistency and working "to keep English accurate and well-scrubbed," she recognizes the ever-changing nature of our language and loves its endless variations and idiosyncrasies. She shows the silliness of many of the rules still championed by certain grammar police. Her own rules, she says, would boil down to these: "Communicate. Communicate elegantly. When elegance is beside the point, fuhgeddaboutit."

In her last chapter Florey takes us to a classroom where, absent any nuns and barking dogs, we find middle schoolers happily diagramming. Though she questions whether the practice actually improves writing--she swears it did hers no good--she points out why it can nonetheless be good for adolescents. Unlike writing itself, diagramming "was a game; it wasn't about you. There was no room for opinion. You weren't being judged on the content of your soul or the quality of your imagination.... Brilliant diagramming, unlike brilliant writing, was something that could be learned."

If you are a survivor of Catholic school in the fifties, you will love the afterword, where we learn what happened to Sister Bernadette after that crucial year of diagramming. But you don't have to be Catholic to appreciate this book. You just have to love writing and the struggle to do it well.

You can learn more about the author and her work at http://kittyburnsflorey.com/.

Amy Bloom Sweeps Us Away

Ever since I read Amy Bloom's heart-changing short story "Even a Blind Man Knows How Much I Love You" a few years ago, I've kept her name in the back of my mind. So when I read a number of good reviews of her new novel Away, and then spotted a virgin copy of it at the library, I grabbed it, hurried home, and sat down to read by the fire, where it grabbed me.

Away is the story of Lillian Leyb, a Russian peasant when we first meet her in 1924. When anti-Semitic neighbors rise up in a night of butchery, her parents and husband are slaughtered in front of her eyes. She manages to slip her daughter Sophie out the window and orders her to hide in the henhouse, then saves herself by feigning death. When the pogrom is over, Sophie has disappeared, and a neighbor tells Lillian that her daughter's hair ribbons were found floating in the river. The child is not seen again.

Lillian makes her way to New York to start life over. She is taken in by a cousin and finds work as a seamstress, an actress, and eventually the mistress of a Broadway producer (who also happens to be the father of her husband, who is gay). Adaptable, resourceful, and open to any experience, Lillian quickly assimilates to America’s language and ways. But the memory of her daughter burns in her, and when she learns that Sophie did not die in the pogrom, but was taken by a village family to Siberia, she knows she must go and claim her. With few resources but without second thought she sets out for the steppes of eastern Russia.

Along the way Lillian’s life (and that of the reader) is enriched by dozens of characters whose lives intersect with hers. The Jewish immigrants who struggle in the theatres and tailor shops of lower Manhattan; the producers who have achieved precarious success; the transcontinental train porters who will hide a desperate traveller in a train closet for twenty-two hours; the prostitute and the constable who save Lillian’s life; the grifter named Chinky Chang who gives her joy; the telegraph line builder who loves her—-we meet each for only a few pages, but each is memorable enough to generate another novel. Bloom seems to love them too, often turning off the main path of Lillian’s journey to follow them down their own roads. The John Irving-like previews of their futures are little gifts Bloom gives the reader, as are her playful yet strangely moving chapter titles: “And Lost There, a Golden Feather in a Foreign, Foreign Land,” “I’ve Lost My Youth, Like a Gambler with Bad Cards,” “Ain’t It Fierce to Be So Beautiful, Beautiful?”

Bloom overflows with words, and she often uses parentheses to bring a measure of control to wandering, exuberant sentences. While Lillian is learning English, she pores over a thesaurus, and Bloom frequently treats us parenthetically to the synonyms that parade through Lillian’s mind, rather like Quoyle’s mental headlines in The Shipping News. As she crosses the Yukon wilderness alone trying to get to Siberia, “Lillian tells herself to be calm and to be confident (bold, fearless, having no misgivings, she says to herself, and says next, doubtful, uncertain, dubious, and it is a little reassuring, as she walks down to the gray, windowless house in the middle of a brown valley in a wide white sea, expecting to be killed or raped or left as food for the bears, to know at least three good English words for what she is feeling).”

As Lillian slogs alone across the world, her feet mired in mud and reality, her single-minded hope and determination keep us tethered to her. “Lillian does not believe in anything like God. She’s petitioned particular gods lately (the god of edible red berries, the god of slow-moving streams), but she doesn’t address or hope to be heard by the Creator of the Universe. Lillian believes in luck and hunger (and greed, which is really just the rich man’s hunger—she doesn’t even mind anymore; that people are ruled by their wants seems a reliable truth). She believes in fear as a motivator and she believes in curiosity (hers should have shrunk to nothing by now but feeds on something Lillian cannot make sense of) and she believes in will. It is so frail and delicate at night that she can’t even imagine the next morning, but it is so wide and blinding by the middle of the next day that she cannot even remember the terrible night. It is as if she gives birth every day.”

Like every great literary odyssey, Lillian’s story strengthens us for our own dark journeys.

Kindle: Warm Spark or Destructive Fire?

I’m the kind of person who wanders around a bookstore picking up books just to feel them. I love to open a book that’s never been opened, to run my fingers over the virgin pages. Let’s be honest: I cuddle books. I caress them, I stroke them, I breathe in their inky perfume. Eventually I take them home and make them my pets.

I never feel lonely if there are piles of books in every room. In my comfy chair by the fire, I am perfectly happy just gazing sideways at my bookshelf, admiring the various titles and fonts, the colors of the dustjackets, the publishers’ symbolic logos on the spines. I can wallow for hours in happy anguish over which book to start next. At some point, I choose one. After consuming every word on the dust jacket, examining the front matter and table of contents, and leafing through a few pages, I finally begin to read. And for a short time, all’s right with the world. Or should I say without the world.

So reading for me is an experience of physical comfort as well as intellectual stimulation and emotional contentment--all provided by a handful of compressed wood pulp covered with tiny black symbols. It’s hard to imagine the pleasure of reading without the book itself, or with another kind of “book,” something with a different form and feel—say a small plastic box with a screen. Horrors! part of me thinks. That’s not a book! It doesn’t look like a book, feel like a book, smell like a book, or quack like a book. I can’t read that! What’s the world coming to?