American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson

"Why do they hate us?" was the question on Americans' minds after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001. Why indeed? Those of us who know our country's history don't need to ask. Others may not want to know, yet there are thousands of books, fiction and non, that tell the tale. "American Spy" by debut author Lauren Wilkinson is one of them. https://lauren-wilkinson.com/

Set in the late '80's and early '90's, Wilkinson's novel poses as a long biographical letter that former FBI intelligence officer Marie Mitchell is writing to her five-year-old twin boys. It is her attempt to explain why she must leave them with her mother in Martinique, a mother who also abandoned her when she was young, to persue a man who has the potential to harm her and her family.

The action toggles between New York City where Marie is first approached and hired by the feds, and the tiny African country of Burkina Faso that sits

landlocked in the western part of the continent bordering Ghana, Niger, and Mali. Marie is extremely frustrated by her work. It's the '80's after all and an ambitious woman is not considered an asset. Her career seems stalled, bogged down by paperwork, tied to a desk, when she craves action.

So when what seems like a chance meeting with a CIA operative who notices her potential - she's black, beautiful, and multi-lingual - opens up an opportunity to travel to Burkina and get close to the charismatic leader, Thomas Sankara, she briefly questions her country's motives and just as quickly puts misgivings aside for the chance to prove her value.

And here's where it gets interesting and complicated. You see, Sankara was actually the elected leader of Burkina Faso for 1983 to 1987. He was adored for his policies that turned his country's fortunes around, building schools, medical facilities, planting thousands of trees, and trying to nationalize industry and agriculture. So why, you might wonder, would the United States be interested in infiltrating an opposition political party and backing Sankara's friend and betrayer, Blaise Compaore? Why does the United States fear free and independent African nations?

Wilkinson tries to address these questions through Marie who falls under Sankara's spell and comes to question her own loyalties and her role in Sankara's downfall. This novel is being sold as an espionage novel but don't be disappointed if that's all you're looking for. Wilkinson also explores questions of parenthood and abandonment, about trust and friendship, and about geo-political intervention around the world. It is not so much a page-turner as it is a thoughtful meditation. 

This is a smart, convoluted novel in which the lines between good and bad veer often toward the gray. Wilkinson leaves many loose ends - whatever happened to her older sister Helene, supposedly killed in an automobile accident - that some may find upsetting. The good news is that I suspect she's leaving herself open to a sequel. At least, I hope so. 

The Old Drift

How do I explain this large, luscious, multi-generational, historical novel? I scarcely know where to begin, though I admit that Salman Rushdie's glowing review on the cover of the New York Times Book Review last month certainly was the catalyst that attracted me. I simply did not want it to end!

Zambian writer Namwali Serpell's (https://www.namwaliserpell.com/) remarkable debut novel is one of those books that you can revel in, lost within the language, the characters, and never want to put down. Set in Rhodesia at the time of the infamous Stanley and Livingstone, based upon the building of the first railroad over the great Zambezi River at Victoria Falls, the narrative ranges from the late 1800's to 2024.

Through the lives of three families - and yes, you will need to continually refer to the genealogy tree in the front of the book - one black, one white, and one mixed-race, Serpell illuminates the good, the bad, and the ugly involved in the development of her native land which is now Zambia.

Readers will have to suspend disbelief in order to accept the Greek chorus of malarial mosquitos that comments and explains throughout. Then there are the phantasmagorical characters like Sibilla, who was born enshrouded in fast-growing hair that covers her entire body, or Matha, whose lover leaves her crying a river of tears that continues for thirty years. I loved Agnes, the British aristocrat, daughter of an MP, whose tennis career was brought to a halt by blindness. Rebelling against the coddling of her parents, she  falls for her father's mentee, a Rhodesian student named Ronald, with whom she makes her escape to Africa, unaware of their color difference.

In mellifluous language Ms. Serpell creates a world based on facts and fantasy in which there is much humor, some pathos, political skullduggery, love and jealousy, abandonment and cruelty. Readers will hear about Afronauts, the creation of the world's first drones, and the birth of studies into the AIDS virus. They will witness the cruelty of colonialism mingled with the scourge of tribalism.

It's practically unbelievable that this could be a first novel. Reviewers have called it Dickensian in scope, bold and sweeping. For me it's novels like this that fill that chasm I've always felt where my deeper knowledge of history should be. Sometimes our teachers are less than inspiring. If only they could add great fiction to their syllabi. What better way to fill in the gaps?

There Will Be No Miracles Here

It's happened again. Just when I was musing about how wonderful it was that we'd gone a few weeks without a story about police abusing a black body, as if that was something to feel triumphant about in our new reality that is the United States. https://wapo.st/2V24Sct When I read this article in this morning's Washington Post I knew that I had to write about Casey Gerald now, even though I haven't finished his memoir.

Unlike Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose righteous anger is red hot, Casey Gerald keeps his on simmer, but don't doubt for a second that it isn't bubbling under the surface. I had the pleasure of hearing Casey speak about his memoir last summer at Book Expo in New York City and I appreciated the manner in which he opened my eyes to the plight of black men in the Ivy League. I knew it, of course, I've heard Don's grandchildren speak in often harrowing terms about their experiences, one at Stanford, the other at Harvard. They taught me that no matter how high the achievement or how low the fall, people of color will never be fully appreciated or accepted in the halls of academe. Casey Gerald makes this fact visceral.

A queer, black boy growing up in a rough section of Dallas, Casey became a football star as well as a star student. Yale came calling and off he went to a

surreal place for a young man who'd never been east of the Mississippi. And why football when all he ever wanted was to be a writer, a poet? Well, because his dad, Roderick Gerald had been "the man" back at Ohio State in 1977, the one who cinched the Orange Bowl win for the Buckeyes. Soon all we hear about Roderick is that he became a drug addict, was in and out of jail, so people feel justified in opining, "see, these black me can't compete, they can't take it."

What you won't discover in Roderick's wiki page is that he had broken his spine during a previous Ohio State game but his coach salivated over that Orange Bowl win. He would do anything to get it. He plied Roderick with cocaine to keep him on fire and pretty soon, sure, he was addicted. So, when Casey breaks his hand in a game prior to the big Yale/Harvard matchup, the surgeon says operate now or you'll never write, but the coach says just tape him up, he'll make it, Casey follows in his dad's footsteps. Readers, you will cringe.

I listened to the audio of this memoir which is read by Casey himself. He's the perfect messenger, his voice as smooth and mellow as a glass of cognac. He never feels sorry for himself even though there's plenty that would have brought a lesser man down. If it weren't for his sister Tashia, he might not be where he is today. Casey is especially poignant when speaking of his first love affair, a long distance romance with a young man who always kept Casey at a distance until the power structure of the relationship changed with Casey off to the Ivies, and the mysterious Red back at home in Texas.

Gerald is beautifully introspective, his self-awareness is extraordinary. He references the literature of the Bible, James Baldwin, and W.E.B. duBois throughout, not to show off but because his natural erudition cannot be contained. When he describes the "American dream" each sentence drips sarcasm, or maybe it's irony. Reviewers have said that he turns the idea on its head. Does its attainment result in happiness, contentment? Or is it the white American dream that's been driven into the psyche of these impressionable black minds. We know that young men like Casey Gerald have all the tools necessary to reach the mountaintop. That MBA from Harvard says it all. The question is, do they really want to be there?

The Life and Writings of Philip Roth

I'm reveling in the welcoming warm air of southwest Florida, arriving back home just in time to attend the season's final lecture by distinguished Canadian literature professor and critic, Elaine Newton. http://annewainscott.com/the-art-of-the-book-review-a-conversation-with-elaine-newton/ Her in-depth book analyses have been holding readers in thrall for twenty years now and remind me how much I loved being in school and still enjoy auditing college classes at Florida Gulf Coast University.

Ms. Newton adores writers, never examining a title that she can't find something wondrous in. But her final presentation of the season was a retrospective of the works of Philip Roth and she may have finally lost all objectivity in her worshipful take on his lifetime of achievement. True confessions, I've often felt the same way about Roth, "American Pastoral" still one of the most powerful books I've probably ever read, but I've not been afraid to say so when I think a work doesn't live up to his standards. I'm thinking of some of his later work like "Exit Ghost," or "The Humbling."

At twenty-six years old, Philip Roth was the youngest writer to earn a National Book Award for "Goodbye Columbus." (another title I need to revisit) Where does one go from there? Well, to the National Book Critics Circle awards, the Pen-Faulkners, the Pulitzer. He wasn't one to rest on his laurels and he actually worked at writing, every day, eight hours a day, standing up at an architects' table because of an enduring back injury that had him in perpetual pain.

Before racial and gender identity became the in vogue subject of a new generation of writers, Roth was examining the identity of the Jewish-American male in the United States. The post World War II immigrants may have looked different than the immigrants of today but certainly they have more in common than not. Assimilation, acceptance, self-loathing, these were all part of the equation and they still are. Perhaps that's why Roth's work will never grow old.

Newton's favorite Roth book, she told us, is "Patrimony," a paean to Roth's father Herman. But the book that received the most publicity and the fewest number of rave reviews was the prescient "The Plot Against America," a novel written soon after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 sent Americans into a kind of collective madness. Always politically left of center, Roth decried the government crackdown on citizens' privacy rights and the vilification of "the other." He wrote of a fictional America where the Nazi sympathizer and renowned pilot Charles Lindbergh soundly defeated Roosevelt for the presidency and introduced Fascism to the United States. Is it any wonder that, after the 2018 election, a renewed interest in this novel resulted in a huge uptick in sales fourteen years after its original publication?

With this presentation, Newton ended the 2018-2019 season of her perennially sold-out book talks, having come full circle. She began the season with Lisa Halliday's phenomenal "Asymmetry," https://bit.ly/2LFkgVd, a fictional account of Ms. Halliday's May-December love affair with the man himself. Roth acted as mentor and friend to Halliday who was an editor at the Wylie Agency and her novel brings a touch of humanity and warmth to this very intimidating and towering man of letters.

I'll let you know some of the gems that Newton has on her famous summer reading list, from which next year's lectures will be chosen. More soon!