Nathan Harris's The Sweetness of Water, An Astounding Debut

What a joy it is when a reader discovers a book like this incredible debut novel from Nathan Harris, a novel of such quiet beauty that the writing takes your breath away. Even the book jacket, designed by Lucy Kim, entices. The location, a farm in rural Georgia. The time, shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation freed young Black men like brothers Prentiss and Landry from enslavement, yet sent them forth with little but the clothes on their backs and their wits.

George and Isabelle Walker, a long-married couple whose relationship Harris examines in delicate, subtle detail, have lived on their land, handed down through generations, planning for their son Caleb to relieve them of the burden as they age. But George now knows that his son will not be returning from the battlefield, and unable to yet share the horrific news with his wife, which would make it real, has gone tramping in his woods without food or water, to mourn in private.

By the time George’s path crosses with the brothers,’ we aren’t sure who needs whom more. In an act of both kindness and necessity, George invites the freedmen home with an offer of a barn to sleep in and paid work for as long as they need it, bringing the wrath of the small, hidebound Georgia town of Old Ox down on his shoulders and setting in motion a catastrophic chain of events.

I stared and stared at Nathan Harris’s author photo trying to discern, from his eyes, what life experiences this young man had that afforded him the ability to delve into such an abundance of relationship issues with such maturity and then transform them on to the page. George and Isabelle, such disparate souls joined for life, share a son Caleb, a mystery to each of them, so loved yet so misunderstood. And Caleb, a diffident boy, a loner, with little enthusiasm for the land he will inherit, has only one passion, a forbidden love for Arthur, an unworthy and unattainable childhood friend.

Harris portrays the unfathomable depths of grief nestled in the bones of Prentiss and Landry. Enslaved since birth on a nearby farm, they watched as their mother was auctioned away to the highest bidder. Prentiss witnessed Landry’s constant whippings and beatings, probably brought about by his learning disabilities. The care and tenderness that Prentiss takes with his brother is breathtaking in its loveliness. The fact that they are now free to earn money to afford their move north, a tenuous dream.

If the movie rights are ever sold, the role of Isabelle, the subversive strength behind all the other characters, must be played by Frances McDormand. She represents the epitome of hope in a world gone mad in the aftermath of a war that indelibly divided neighbors and friends. This glorious novel made Obama’s top ten list this year, not to mention kudos from the Booker Prize committee among others, and it will absolutely be on mine. Race out to your library or bookstore now!

Notes from a Writer in a Funk

I have a confession to make. For a while now I have not wanted to write. In fact, putting my thoughts out there about what I’ve been reading feels like a burden so that, when I finish a review and hit “post,” I am overwhelmed with relief. This is not good. And ironically 2021 has been a stellar year for gorgeous fiction and some remarkable debuts, books that I fear I won’t do justice to.

Take for instance the National Book Award winner “Hell of a Book” by Jason Mott. How can a lowly blogger add to the glowing adjectives that follow when the NBA stamp of approval is affixed to the cover of a book, except to tell you that, while listening to this novel on my morning walks, I often had to stop and sit, stomach clenched, as the inevitable horror of another police shooting of an innocent Black man played out in my ear.

Mott’s cri de Coeur is so original, laced with humor (if dark), magical realism (a boy who appears and disappears as if he were wearing an invisibility cloak), a lampooning of the publishing industry, and a loving thank you to Black parents everywhere who expend an inordinate amount of energy trying to help their Black children reach adulthood in America. Exquisite and devastating.

Another phenomenal listen is Dr. Leana Wen’s compelling memoir and passionate plea for funding of public health initiatives. Unless you are in the D.C. area or an ardent listener of NPR you may not be familiar with Dr. Wen but she was our “go to” voice of reason during the last eighteen months of Covid confusion and misinformation. An emergency room physician, professor, CNN commentator, Washington Post columnist, and former Baltimore County health commissioner, Leana Wen has accomplished more in a couple of decades than most do in a lifetime.

“Lifelines” is the story of a Chinese immigrant raised on food stamps and public assistance, who begged for money outside grocery stores to help her parents who were already working two and three jobs to make ends meet. A Rhodes scholar who entered college at thirteen, Dr. Wen has traveled the world specializing in women’s health care and the opioid crisis, becoming one of the first physicians to call out systemic racism as a public health crisis.

Dr. Wen’s story and the telling of it is an eye-opening wake up call to all who still think that the richest country in the world provides the best health care in the world. What gets in the way? Politics.

Next up, thanks to a recommendation from one of my most trusted reading friends, “The Sweetness of Water,” a first novel from the incredible Nathan Harris.

Murder is the Lesser of the Evils in Penny's The Madness of Crowds

I just love Louise Penny. There it is. So, I cannot be objective about her fabulous books in the Armand Gamache series even though I understand that some of her readers found number seventeen, “The Madness of Crowds,” just too dark. Gamache’s latest outing is set once again in the village of Three Pines, an idyllic spot where my college roommate and I have decided we would love to retire to if the winters weren’t quite so long. There is a pub and a bookstore. Does one need anything else?

Penny was in Covid lockdown with her brother and theorizing about what the world would look like after the virus begins to dissipate, when we can hug, kiss, and gather again. For Armand and his wife, the librarian Reine-Marie, it was looking fabulous. Both of their children, their spouses, and kids were back in town for the holidays. In episode sixteen Armand and his long-estranged son Daniel found a path back to each other while Armand’s daughter Annie, married to his second in command Jean Guy Beauvoir, had given birth to a daughter whose Down syndrome did little to tarnish their unmitigated joy.

When Armand is asked to provide security for a lecture at the local university he wonders why, he is after all the head of the homicide department for the Surete du Quebec but decides it will be a quick in and out and won’t upset the family’s holiday plans too much. Until, that is, he reads about the speaker, Dr. Abigail Robinson, and the controversial plan she intends to present to the Canadian government based upon her statistical analysis of the numbers of elderly deaths put down to Covid. If you remember the Texas politician who proclaimed that older folks should willingly die so that the economy would not have to be shut down, then you know where Ms. Penny is going here. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dan-patrick-sacrifice-grandparents_n_5e796dd8c5b6f5b7c549df25

Naturally, the crowded hall is standing room only, pro and con verbally assaulting each other, until the gunshots shatter the podium and Armand finds himself shielding a woman whose beliefs are anathema to him. In the ensuing chaos the shooter escapes and soon the full force of the Surete descends on Three Pines just as the villagers are preparing to host a Sudanese refugee and potential Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Haniya Daoud. And before the new year a second attempt at murder in the idyllic village will succeed.

Louise Penny loves the denizens of Three Pines, but she never portrays them as saints. She knows their dark places and understands how close to the edge of good and evil most human beings teeter. She has taken Jean Guy to the depths of drug and alcohol use and brought him back to life with love. She has allowed Gamache’s honor and bravery and goodness to be questioned and derided and brought him back with love.

In this book Penny almost overwhelms readers with the horrors of war, government sponsored torture, eugenics, and the survival of the fittest. Through Jean Guy and Gamache she lays bare the depths of paternal love and she wonders how much good a person must do in their life to amend a past wrong. But most timely is her deep dive into the issue of free speech and the potential censoring and censuring of those who philosophies might be too repugnant to propagate. Though many of her readers feel that this novel is too political I’ve always thought that Penny steers remarkably clear of moral absolutes. She simply asks the questions. We are the ones left to find the answers.

Crossroads is a Career High for Jonathan Franzen

The writer Jonathan Franzen is one of the most controversial white male American authors of the past twenty years. Accused of literary snobbery (the Oprah scandal), https://www.vox.com/culture/22691692/jonathan-franzen-controversy-crossroads-oprah-franzenfreude remarkably tone-deaf misogyny, and known as a difficult interview, nevertheless Franzen continues to create amazing novels peopled with unforgettable characters. His latest, the first in a trilogy thank goodness, is simply wonderful.

“Crossroads” is the name of the youth group at First Reformed church from which pastor Russ Hildebrandt has been relieved of his duties. Ostensibly his sin is that he’s too “preachy,” alienating the high school kids who prefer the younger, hipper assistant, Rick Ambrose. But, in fact, we learn that Russ indiscreetly, in a moment of extreme oversharing, necessary for Crossroads members, has confessed to an impressionable teenage girl, that he no longer sexually desires his wife, Marion.

Marion is proof positive that Franzen is working to dispel his sexist tendencies. She is such a complex, fascinating work in progress. A victim of sexual abuse whose affair with a married man and her subsequent breakdown at its demise landed her in an institution, Marion is a woman who survived by recognizing what she needed to do to live a simpler, safer life and went after it with intention.

In 1971 she and Russ are living outside Chicago in the First Reformed community and raising their four extremely different children, kids battered by the politics of the times, the drawdown of the war in Vietnam, the proliferation of easy access to drugs, the sexual revolution, and the subtle feeling that all is not right between their parents. How these pressures affect each of the children, Clem, Becky, Perry, and Judson, is at the crux of the story.

And then there’s Russ, a mass of contradiction, a man torn between his passion for social justice, his work with the Navajo nation is renowned, and his lust for the natural urges of a middle-aged man enthralled with a newly widowed parish member. His struggles to be a good person, to find solace in prayer to a god who is not listening, to be a good father, come up short when weighed against his vanity and childishness.

Franzen’s superpower is the way he writes interiority. As each of his characters acts out in shocking ways – though not terribly surprising to any reader raised in the white bread ‘70’s suburbs – Franzen allows us deep into their thinking processes, where each grapples with the hypocrisies inherent in the subconscious self, the desire to be other than what appears on the surface. Motivations that might seem inexplicable become clearer when seen in relation to past experiences of cruelty, resentment, humiliation, or deprivation. Reading Franzen is like taking a full semester course of study in Psychology 101.

The humor is wry and biting, just the way I like it. The characters are infuriating and embraceable, so absolutely human. Franzen has taken the myth of the ideal American family and turned it on its head, and I can’t wait to see where he takes them next.

Damnation Spring is a Brilliant Debut by Ash Davidson

Ash Davidson says she spent ten years writing her very first novel “Damnation Spring.” The love and care she put into it shines on every page. This is one of the finest books I have read this year and I am a bit surprised that it seems to be flying under the radar. With so many authors addressing the climate change crises in their fiction, creating not so distant calamitous worlds, (think big Pulitzer Prize-winning names like Anthony Doerr’s “Cloud Cuckoo Land” and Richard Powers’ bewildering “Bewilderment”), few have returned to the roots of the problem or addressed the real and understandable schism that our country finds itself in now between the believers and the deniers.

Informed by her upbringing in Arcata, California, amid the redwood forests which fueled a logging industry that fed, clothed, and housed generations of blue-collar workers, Ms. Davidson breathes real life into the characters she creates and the land they live and work on. She ably elucidates the deeply complicated efforts of those futurists who, with the best of intentions, wish to save people by destroying them.

Rich Gunderson is a fourth-generation logger, skilled and sought after as a climber, a good man, a wonderful husband and father to Colleen and their little boy Chubb. But he has a blind side regarding his profession. He recognizes the fear in Colleen’s eyes every morning when she hands him his lunch sack and sends him off. He’s seen the wounds his co-workers have sustained. His own father died in the woods, and he wants more for Chubb. He also wants to own the land he works rather than enrich someone else.

Colleen’s dreams are simpler. All she wants is a large brood of kids underfoot every day. A born nurturer, Colleen has been plagued with miscarriages, has just buried her still born daughter, and serves as a de-facto midwife in the isolated mountains where it is difficult for women to get to a city doctor. She has born witness to so much sorrow, so many babies deformed or slow to develop. The native women say it’s just their lot in life. Until…

Daniel is a biologist, a brilliant student from the reviled Yurok tribe, once enchanted with Colleen, he left town the second he could, earned his degree, and would never have returned except that his mother is ill with cancer, and he’s been awarded a grant to study the water in the clear mountain rivers that run through the forests. Daniel remembers a time when the waters were pink and thick with salmon during their seasonal spawning before the logging companies began spraying defoliant to make way for trucking roads and access to the biggest trees.

The set up for conflict may seem obvious but the nuanced portrayal of the many actors in this tragedy is perfection. Each character has depth and substance even when behaving abominably. Colleen’s brother-in-law, Eugene, who betrays Rich fueled by greed and jealousy, and Lark, Rich’s seemingly down and out godfather, a widower who scratches out a living in junk after having been injured by falling limbs, have doppelgangers in every small town in America.

“Damnation Spring” is a quintessential portrayal of white working-class angst, the despair of native American tribes who daily lose their habitat to industry, and the frustration of the educated class who may be good at pointing out problems but lack the empathy to follow up with solutions. This wonderful read should be on every book group’s radar this season!

Joy Begets Joy in Ross Gay's Book of Delights

I have always believed that joy begets joy. I have also been accused of seeing the world through rose colored glasses. That’s fine by me. Now that I’ve read poet, professor, and essayist Ross Gay’s “The Book of Delights,” I sense that I’m in the presence of another soulmate. What a perfectly prescient choice for the One Maryland, One Book program and our local library’s video and discussion series.

Mr. Gay exudes a pure joy and a benevolent spirit. To hear him recite his poetry or read his essays is reminiscent of watching Amanda Gorman’s startlingly lovely turn at President Biden’s inauguration. They share a physicality, their bodies sway, and their visages express wonderment as they connect with their audiences.

I happened upon this collection at a low time for me, in the beginning of the covid lockdown, a full year and a half ago. Gay’s words lifted me up. I felt such a kinship with his observations, particularly those that involved nature, growing things, and food. When he speaks of entering a bakery in his hometown, Bayonne, New Jersey, and being overwhelmed with delight at the yeasty smell of the wares, I too, felt overwhelmed with emotion.

I would say that there are no words but, of course, a poet finds those words. They can be so simple but so evocative. My heart swelled when he wrote of holding very still with a red flower in his outstretched hand until the nearby hummingbird dove in and out sucking the nectar. And butterflies? Lightning bugs? Oh my! His description of shepherding a fledgling tomato plant through a crowded airport, garnering fans along the way, is hilarious and wondrous.

Algonquin Press says that this book was written during a tumultuous time. You might think it was covid but no, it was published in 2019. The tumult Ross Gay is feeling is actually the fear, anxiety, and trepidation that weighs down Black men in America. Gay was in Umbria attending a writing workshop when he arrived at the idea of penning a short essay of gratitude for each day of his life over the course of a year. What a brilliant way to fight despair.

An interviewer asked if he had always been this optimistic and he laughed joyously. He spoke a universal truth. No, he never considered himself an optimist at all. But he discovered that practicing delight generates more delight. In the face of inexplicable sorrow and loss, the joy he found in the overlooked beauty of each day boosted his endorphins. Reading this book will boost yours too. I guarantee it.

Fanonne Jeffers' Love Songs - Best of 2021

I’ve found my number one book of the year! What a relief to realize that every fabulous review of Honoree Fanonne Jeffers’ debut novel “The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois” was completely deserved. This glorious epic tale, which weighs in at just under eight hundred pages, is one of those books you dream about, one where you can sit for hours lost in another world, a world of horror, heartbreak, loss, and injustice tempered with an abundance of love.

This remarkable feat encompasses four centuries of history brought to fruition by Ailey Pearl Garfield, a Black doctoral student whose dissertation, based upon the lives of her own ancestors, commences with Georgia’s native Creek people who lived on the land long before the arrival of the white Europeans whose ships’ holds carried enslaved men, women, and children from Africa’s Gold Coast.

How these three cultures, the Native, African, and European mingled as they built an agricultural behemoth, and produced, through intermarriage or more often rape, family lines of every hue, is the story of America in its best and worst iteration. Jeffers provides four pages of genealogy trees for readers to reference but you’ll be so wrapped up in the story that I doubt you’ll even need them. Apt quotations from the works of W. E. B. Du Bois preface each section of the novel adding to the solemnity and depth of the historical picture that Jeffers paints.

Ailey’s relationship with her own family is complex. She and her two older sisters, Lydia, and medical student Coco, share a devastating secret of abuse that each keeps from the other and which affects each woman in vastly different ways. A through line and salvation for Ailey is the deep abiding love she holds for her uncle Root, a retired professor, whose home in the tiny town of Chicasetta, Georgia, becomes Ailey’s respite from the pressures of being a strong, vocal Black woman in a world before “me too” or Black Lives Matter.

There’s a strong feminist bent to this book as Jeffers celebrates the strength and smarts of the women who have shepherded their families through the scourge of slavery, the false sense of freedom before Jim Crow took over, and the way the movements led by Dr. King and Malcolm X kept women in subservient roles that they resisted. The theme of colorism is also front and center as Ailey’s family is a mashup of its forbears, deep midnight black, chocolate, and white enough to pass.

But I think it’s the love of the land, the way Jeffers creates a sense of the earth as a place of blessing and peace, that most moved me. Though so many Black Americans moved north during the great migration seeking opportunity, the pull of the south represents a direct connection to the first peoples. Perhaps this is why Jeffers refers to herself during interviews as Afro-Indigenous.

This National Book Award nominee is truly a masterwork that’s difficult to adequately describe. You simply must just dive in and savor the language, the story, and the history of our nation in all its shame and glory.

Missing in Action but Lost in Books

I’ve had a nagging feeling that it’s been too long since I opined on the books that I’m reading but the truth is that I don’t thrive when I feel pressed to write. I’m much more enthusiastic and joyful about reviewing when I’ve finished something that wows me. There are currently six overdue novels sitting directly to my right and I so want to get into them but hey, Library Journal sent me two challenges with short deadlines and then the fabulous Library of Congress Book Festival began, virtual for the second year in a row – damn Covid – and it’s going on for an entire week. So many interviews, so little time.

Imagine the pressure of coming up with two hundred words that could remotely capture the essence of the first novel in fifty years from Africa’s first Nobel Laureate in Literature, Wole Soyinka. “Chronicles of the Happiest People on Earth” will be released next week and it’s anything but a happy read. That was followed by a strange yet delightful debut novel from a Mombasan author named Khadija Abdalla Bajaber. I have finished “The House of Rust” but have yet to put pen to paper, mainly because I was finally able to pick up Honoree Fannon Jeffers’ “The Love Songs of W. E. B. DuBois” and I can’t bear to put it aside. More on this next week.

I’ve said before and I’ll repeat it again. Zoom may be less than ideal for some forms of communication but for author interviews it is fantastic! If you have a decent sized monitor, you might get the impression that the author you’re listening to is looking right into your eyes. It’s marvelous if disconcerting. And, as often as I’ve praised the Washington Post’s Ron Charles, (he and I have a mind meld when it comes to literature) I must offer kudos once again.

Sunday, I listened to an hour-long conversation he had with the glorious Yaa Gyasi, (“Homegoing” and “Transcendent Kingdom”) and I felt as if I was in the room where it was happening. They laughed and talked like old friends and because they were so comfortable with each other the insights they shared were deeper and more personal than you might expect.

Today Ron was live with Kristen Hannah “The Four Winds,” and Maggie Shipstead whose “Great Circle” was just announced for the Booker Prize shortlist. They spoke to the theme of this year’s National Book Festival, Open a Book, Open the World. Yesterday it was the lovely, unassuming Booker and Nobel winner, Kazuo Ishiguro speaking with former Post Book World editor Marie Arana. Their conversation ran the gamut from sharing their immigrant roots, to music, to the purpose of literature, and then to the purpose of life and the big question, why do we care! “Klara and the Sun” was deftly alluded to but there were no spoilers.

All of these and so many more interviews are archived here: https://www.loc.gov/events/2021-national-book-festival/

Do join the conversation!

Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun

Kazuo Ishiguro. Where does one begin? How do we evaluate a novel like “Klara and the Sun,” or any of his other most widely read novels, except for “The Buried Giant” which had me at my wit’s end? People have described Ishiguro’s latest work as unbearable and unsettling, and it is both. It can be read on so many levels, interpreted as a book about faith, about loneliness, memory, love, sacrifice, or even as an examination of the power of technology along with a fear or distrust of the same. In other words, perfect book discussion material.

In a not-too-distant future, in an unnamed city, an artificial friend, I dare not call her a robot, sits in a store front window waiting to be purchased as a companion for an unknown child. As she bides her time, Klara acutely observes her surroundings, often making logical deductions that are beyond the ken of her cohort. Klara is special, and because she is the narrator, we are privy to her innermost thoughts. Ishiguro has created an artificial being more human than any of the other characters we will meet, and it is this fact that renders his novel so painful to read.

Josie has had her eye on Klara for a long time. No other AF will do. Josie suffers from a mysterious illness that keeps her mother constantly on guard. The mother worries that Klara will not be up to the special care that Josie needs but she needn’t concern herself. Klara is programmed to do what ever is in her power to protect her charge. As a solar powered “device” she is keenly aware of her relationship with the Sun, capitalized because in Ishiguro’s imagining the Sun seems to be a symbol for God or at least a higher power, one that can, perhaps, be bargained with.

Ishiguro is a master at depicting the foibles of human nature and the complicated relationship we humans have with each other and with ourselves. Josie, for instance, like a typical teenage girl can run hot and cold. Loving and generous one moment, dismissive and disdainful the next. We learn through her friendship with her neighbor Rick that there is a hierarchy at work that pits family against family, not unlike what we see today, in which children who are “lifted” (think, cognitively enhanced) have an advantage in terms of college and careers. Families who choose not to lift their children for ethical or monetary reasons find themselves sidelined. And children, Klara notes, can be very fickle.

I found myself dreading the ending of this novel. After all, what do we do with items that have outlived their usefulness? But then I realized that an AF’s “slow fade” is no different from what we humans face. In fact, what can be more human than understanding that, when we are born, we are limited to a finite amount of time. And if we are very fortunate, we will make memories over our years that will sustain us in our own slow fade.