Author Archives: Jennifer Bort Yacovissi

New Release: Frieda’s Song

It’s clear that Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s imagination is captured by historic buildings that hold the unique and intriguing stories of the lives indelibly imprinted within them; it’s also clear that she is just the one to tell those stories. Her first novel, The Bowl with Gold Seams, focused on the role of the Bedford Springs Hotel in Pennsylvania as the holding location for a group of high-level Japanese prisoners at the end of World War II.

FRIEDA’S SONG, Ellen Prentiss Campbell, Apprentice House Press

In Campbell’s latest novel, Frieda’s Song, the building is a cottage, designed in the 1930s by and for renowned German psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichman, on the grounds of the Chestnut Lodge Sanatorium in Rockville, Maryland; here, she lived and worked for more than twenty years.

The cottage serves as the anchor point for a parallel narrative in which we follow Frieda’s story and, 70 years later, that of therapist Eliza Kline and her teenage son Nick, who are renting the cottage even as the acreage of the old sanatorium is being given over to high-end suburban housing.

The novel opens with Frieda’s first-person narration, as she is forced to abandon her successful hospital in Heidelberg in 1935 as the Nazi noose tightens, leaving for America with her best friend and fellow therapist Gertrud even as her mother and sisters refuse to leave Germany. We meet her younger, estranged husband Erich (who is destined to become even more famous a therapist than his wife), and learn that Frieda is fated to grow deaf, just as her mother and father had—an impossible handicap for a psychotherapist.

Shifting into the near-present day of 2009, Eliza drives to pick up Nick from summer camp, where he’s been kicked out for starting a fire. A single mother, Eliza is drowning in the deep end of attempting to raise a sullen, isolated teenage boy, her training as a therapist seeming to offer no help to her in her own situation — especially since she has committed the cardinal sin of lying about Nick’s paternity. She finds herself talking to Frieda’s portrait as her own form of therapy, and later discovers a trove of Frieda’s journals, the source of that first-person account. Eliza takes comfort in Frieda’s quiet influence as she attempts to steer a course for both herself and Nick.

Campbell lets us in to Nick’s head, too, which is a jumble of anger, confusion, and inarticulate longing that he tries to assuage with matches and razor blades. For the reader, experiencing the world through Nick’s eyes makes it even clearer how little Eliza is truly seeing and hearing her son.

This concept of close, active listening — of the healing value that it offers, and of the damage caused by its absence — is one of the novel’s continuous threads. Frieda is painfully aware of her encroaching deafness, when her entire practice is based on establishing trust with patients through careful listening.

For her part, Eliza is stymied by the check-the-box, quick-turnover approach to therapy mandated by modern insurance guidelines. There is no time to listen to patients deeply, practically no time to listen at all. With Nick, unfortunately, she is taking shortcuts as a parent that she does not countenance with her own patients, both forgetting how to listen and practicing the age-old parental dodge of willful blindness.

As the title tells us, Frieda’s Song is steeped in music as well — both listening and playing, and the healing properties of both. Her song, by the way, is Mendelssohn’s “Lost Happiness,” part of his Songs without Words. Frieda is able to recapture some of her lost happiness in the success she has with her Chestnut Lodge practice.

For Eliza and Nick, recapturing the equilibrium in their relationship demands hard truths and a very literal trial by fire.

Campbell delivers a compelling story filled with captivating, humane, and thoroughly human characters. It’s intriguing to realize that Campbell was herself a psychotherapist practicing in Rockville, who lived close enough to the grounds of the sanatorium to be awakened by sirens and the smell of smoke the night it burned down in 2009.

And, not only had she studied Fromm-Reichman’s Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy early in her career, she later realized that Frieda died in her Rockville cottage the same day that Campbell, her parents, and her brother moved into their new Rockville home in 1957. It’s as though Frieda were making sure that Campbell would be the one to tell her story, knowing that she would be in very capable hands.

New Release: YELLOW WIFE

Leave a reply

In her first outing in historical fiction, a veteran author brings a little-known piece of history into stark, unflinching relief.

Yellow Wife

Sadeqa Johnson

Simon & Schuster

288 pp.

Readers often wonder where authors initially find the germ of the idea for their books, curious to know what caused the spark. Sadeqa Johnson has won acclaim for her three contemporary novels that highlight the challenges of modern-day relationships, but it is Yellow Wife, Johnson’s highly anticipated first historical novel, that offers an exceptional origin story.

After moving to Richmond, Virginia, the author spent a day with friends and family walking the three-mile Slave Trail that follows the James River. Along the path from the ship docks to Lumpkin’s slave jail, the trail markers offered tantalizing bits of the story of notorious slave trader and jailer Robert Lumpkin and his wife, a former slave named Mary. Johnson felt an urgency to know more, and her research brought forth the story of Pheby Delores Brown, the first-person narrator of Yellow Wife.

Pheby is the daughter of Ruth, the Bell Plantation’s seamstress and medicine woman, and Master Jacob, the owner of the Virginia plantation—and of Pheby and Ruth. Jacob’s late sister Sally doted on Pheby and taught her to read and play piano, and Jacob has promised Ruth to free Pheby on her eighteenth birthday and send her to school in the north.

Unfortunately, Jacob’s young wife sees these women as a personal affront, and her fury is the catalyst for the horrors that befall Pheby, from putting Pheby’s sweetheart Essex into mortal danger, to allowing Ruth to die from neglect after an accident, to finally selling Pheby to a slave trader who marches her and other shackled captives down to The Devil’s Half Acre, the Lapier Jail. When she refuses to cooperate during her auction, Pheby is pulled from the block by the jailer himself, Rubin Lapier, which starts her on the path to becoming his “yellow wife”.

Johnson’s research unearthed Richmond’s small community of slave jailers, men who, as rich as they were, nonetheless had trouble convincing respectable society women to marry them. Thus, they selected light-complexioned women from among those who passed through the prison gates to serve as their concubines; over time, these women often helped to run their husbands’ businesses and were the mothers of their children.

The author does not flinch from depicting the violence and depravity of the universe that Pheby and her fellow slaves inhabit, but she also ensures that her characters are not one-dimensional heroes or villains. Lapier—the Jailer, as Pheby thinks of him—is savagely sadistic in meting out punishment, but also willing to woo her, taking an almost courtly approach in his attempts to win her over.

When it becomes obvious that she is pregnant—a result of her lone assignation with Essex before she engineered his escape from Bell’s Plantation—the Jailer moves her into her own room in his house. Once her son Monroe is born, she understands that she must do whatever is necessary to protect him. Having learned the story of another Richmond slave jailer’s “yellow wife,” Pheby negotiates the terms of her acquiescence to the Jailer’s desire: she alone will serve as the prison’s mistress, and he will never separate her from her son.

Seeing through Pheby’s eyes and hearing her thoughts, we are able to grasp her blind spots and understand the things she either cannot or will not allow herself to consider.

Her role at the jail is to prepare attractive young girls to be sold as “fancy girls,” purchased to be hired out as prostitutes or to serve as their buyers’ own personal sexual attendants. Pheby outfits a room on the prison property with dresses and accessories to ready the girls, and takes pride in doing this job well. She feels that she is doing all she can for them by praying with them and capturing their stories in her hidden diary. The day that one of the cannier girls spits in her face and tells her she’s lost her soul, Pheby feels a passing twinge of guilt and shame, but is unwilling to take a hard look at her own culpability. She feels more lasting concern over a jar of rouge the girl ruins.

Pheby has made this bargain for the sake of her son, but the children she bears the Jailer—four girls and a boy who doesn’t survive—pull her ever farther away from Monroe, who understands better than Pheby his place in the world. The Jailer dotes on his daughters while putting Monroe to work in the stables. When Pheby tries to correct his speech, saying, “People will judge you on the way that you speak,” Monroe knows that is only too true. He reminds her that a Black boy who talks like whites is asking for trouble. “Silver-head man did not like me speaking like white folk. Showed me a man with his cheek gone and told me to watch my uppity ways.”

It is only when she learns that Essex—who has made a name for himself in Boston among abolitionists as one who escaped slavery—has been kidnapped under the Fugitive Slave Act and is to be brought to the Lapier prison, that Pheby finally finds the courage to take action.

In her afterward, Johnson describes how closely her story mirrors the one she was able to piece together from the historical record, down to the famous escaped slave who is kidnapped and brought to Richmond to serve as a warning to other would-be escapees.

The coda to this story is that Mary Lumpkin, the model for Pheby, eventually leased the prison land left to her by Robert to a seminary school for freed slaves that later became Virginia Union University, a historically Black college.

Yellow Wife is the product of the serendipitous alchemy of a talented storyteller uncovering a story that longs to be told. It is a story worth hearing.

2020: Reviewing a Year in Reviews

Leave a reply

This column originally appeared in Late Last Night Books on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2021.

In a year like no other in living memory, many of us turned to the comfort that books can offer when the world is too much. Unlike many of my friends and social network connections, I continued to go into an office every workday throughout the year, so I never found myself with the kind of enforced leisure time that so many encountered during 2020, but I still found myself burrowed in books—either reading them or listening to them—whenever possible, and I will own up to using them as an escape mechanism. Most I read to review, either in my bimonthly column for Late Last Night Books or for my regular reviewing gig for the Washington Independent Review of Books.

In the hotly contested election year that was, my reviewing skewed heavily political, starting with Unmaking the Presidency, which was released on the first day of the January 2020 impeachment trial—and before virtually any of us had heard of the other issue that would consume our year, namely covid—and ending with What Were We Thinking, my review of which came out on election day. For the Independent’s “Best Book I Read in 2020,” I made a hard choice and said mine was OMG WTF Does the Constitution Actually Say?, “because America needs to re-learn its civics, and this is a great place to start.”

In a bit of serendipity, I read three books in row that fit neatly together in a feminist trio of echoed themes: Recollections of My Non-Existence, Too Much, and Why Fish Don’t Exist. In other parallels, The Doctor of Aleppo reminded me of earlier Elliot Ackerman novels, while Ackerman’s latest novel, Red Dress in Black and White, had stunningly eerie parallels to the moment into which it was released, at the start of this summer’s protests for racial justice.

So not even the fiction I read this year was exactly escapist. Let us hope that 2021 doesn’t need as much of an escape, that we can emerge from our protective crouch and rejoin the world around us as vaccines take hold and help us to beat back the darkness. And, as this column is posted on Inauguration Day, I also send out thanks for a speedy return to empathy, understanding, and competence. And may your 2021 reading bring you joy just for itself, just as it should be.

Books I read to review, with links to the reviews:

What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era, Carlos Lozada

Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi

The Boy in the Field, Margot Livesey

OMG WTF Does the Constitution Actually Say? A Non-Boring Guide to How Our Democracy is Supposed to Work, Ben Sheehan

It Was All A Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, Stuart Stevens

Nothing is Wrong and Here is Why: Essays, Alexandra Petri

Humankind: A Hopeful History, Rutger Bregman

Red Dress in Black and White: A Novel, Elliot Ackerman

Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings, Valerie Trouet

Galileo and the Science Deniers, Mario Livio

Why Fish Don’t Exist, Lulu Miller

Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today, Rachel Vorona Cote

Recollections of My Non-Existence, Rebecca Solnit

Little Constructions: A Novel, Anna Burns

Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump’s War on the World’s Most Powerful Office, Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes

Coventry: Essays, Rachel Cusk

Ordinary Girls: A Memoir, Jaquira Diaz

The Doctor of Aleppo, Dan Mayland

The Ghost in the House, Sara O’Leary

Known By Heart, Ellen Prentiss Campbell

Books reviewed together in my column Brief but Indelible

Midnight at the Organporium, Tara Campbell
How to Sit, Tyrese Coleman

Books Reviewed together in my column 2020 Summer & Fall Reading Round-up

Mad and Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency, Bea Koch
The Brief and True Report of Temperance Flowerdew, Denise Heinze
When We Were Young and Brave, Hazel Gaynor
Blacktop Wasteland, S. A. Cosby
The Vultures, Mark Hannon
They’re Gone, E. A. Barres

Books I read to prepare for my interview with Louis Bayard at the virtual 2020 Gaithersburg Book Festival:

Courting Mr. Lincoln
Roosevelt’s Beast
Lucky Strikes
Mr. Timothy

Books I read or listened to for sheer pleasure:

Salt the Snow, Carrie Callaghan
The Weird Sisters, Eleanor Brown
Milkman, Anna Burns
Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong
The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel

Books I read and chose not to review:

Butch Cassidy, Charles Leerhsen
A Woman Alone, Nina Laurin

Books still in progress at the end of the year:

Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow
Blood Dark Track: A Family History, Joseph O’Neill
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison

Book Review: What Were We Thinking

Leave a reply

This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on Election Day, November 3, 2020.

What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era

Carlos Lozada

Simon & Schuster

272 pp.

In July 2015, early in Donald Trump’s campaign for president, Carlos Lozada — himself early in his role as nonfiction book critic at the Washington Post — proposed a project in which he would “binge-read a selection of the candidate’s books published since the 1980s.” (Apparently, 12 books bear the president’s name as author. Who knew?)

As it turned out, Lozada has ended up reading around 150 books written about Trump and the Trump era, which he notes is “just a fraction of the Trump canon.”

The resulting collection of critiques forms What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era. Since so many of these books were banged out quickly in order to capture the immediate zeitgeist — and to cash in on the outrage felt by the portion of the population that would actually read books — Lozada notes that a good percentage of them lack solid analysis or a longer view of the lasting effects on our American experiment.

Of the various categories, he notes, “The resistance lit can be among the least inspiring subgenres of this era.” Still, he has found a number of books to have gained a bit of gravitas as time goes on, and to have proven worthy of further thought and consideration. In fact, “The most essential books of the Trump era are scarcely about Trump at all.”

Lozada’s focus in pulling this book together is to “preserve a snapshot of how we grappled with the Trump era in real time. I want to remember what I thought about it, too.” So the title isn’t a form of asking, “How stupid could we be?” Instead, the author is genuinely trying to capture what we, collectively, were thinking as these events unfolded over four years.

He uses his chapters to organize books by theme, such as “Heartlandia” (a romp through earnest and lengthy dissections of “the Trump voter,” native to “Trump country” — wherein a single Trump voter, Ed Harry, is featured in three books), “True Enough,” and “Russian Lit.”

In the chapters, Lozada weaves together discussions of the books grouped under that particular heading, comparing and contrasting, playing them off each other, or seeing how they coalesce to form a larger argument. Most helpfully, at the end of each chapter, he lists the bibliography of all the titles he’s been discussing.

That Lozada is an immigrant adds an extra dimension to his critique of these Trump-era works. He describes himself as having “the zeal of a new American” and notes:

“The 2016 presidential election was my first as a U.S. citizen and voter, and Trump’s rise in national politics has coincided almost exactly with my time as a book critic. The demands of both literature and citizenship will forever shape the way I view this presidency.”

Fans of Lozada’s critiques in the Post can look forward to a longform version of his cogent, thoughtful, and comfortably familiar tone, as though he is exploring his thoughts on these books over a leisurely lunch with friends. He doesn’t give a pass to lazy, self-indulgent writing or poorly supported arguments from either side of the partisan divide. Authors need to bring their A-game for their efforts to get Lozada’s approving nod.

One that does is Yuval Levin’s A Time to Build, which Lozada calls “that rare work of the Trump era — the book I didn’t realize I was hoping to read.” Levin argues that we should be rebuilding institutions for the value of the normative behavior they impose on their members.

That might seem a counterintuitively restrictive argument, but the overarching question Levin feels those members should ask is, “Given my role here, how should I act?” It’s a question we might beg our attorney general or senate majority leader to ask himself, as much as we would the president.

Another book Lozada points to is A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy by Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, whose antidote to what ails us is similar to Levin’s: Get back to the basics of how our public processes are supposed to work:

“This is the Trump presidency as a teachable moment for a democracy that has forgotten its civics lessons or, remembering them still, has decided they don’t matter.”

In “The Conservative Pivot,” Lozada voices my exact thoughts in considering the flood of books from Never Trumpers. He notes that “it took the nomination, election, and presidency of Donald Trump” for them to “think to interrogate the conservative dogma they’d long defended. Only with Trump did they begin to reconsider their roles in feeding a frenzied base.”

Indeed, I have often imagined that if we had dodged the Trump bullet in 2016 and were currently in election season for Hillary Clinton’s second term — an alternate reality in which we would now be down to six SCOTUS justices given Mitch McConnell’s pledge never to bring a Clinton nominee to a vote, and faced with a U.S. covid-19 death toll of, say, 3,000 — these same folks would still be employing the scorched-earth tactics against Democrats they’ve used for years and telling themselves it’s for the greater good.

I’ve read only a tiny minority of the books Lozada cites, including two I reviewed for the Independent: Katy Tur’s Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History and Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes’ Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump’s War on the World’s Most Powerful Office. The latter finds its way into Lozada’s epilogue, in which he lists the dozen books he finds most illuminating of their subject, the “works that have best helped me make sense if this time, the ones I suspect I’ll revisit long after the Trump era has become a subject for works of history.”

Here’s hoping that period starts at 12:01 p.m. on January 20, 2021.

Book Review: Transcendent Kingdom

Leave a reply

This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on October 21, 2020.

Transcendent Kingdom

Yaa Gyasi

Knopf

288 pp.

I first read Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing, when I served as a judge for the 2016 National Book Critics’ Circle John Leonard Prize. The candidates that year were uniformly exceptional, but Gyasi’s was a book apart. At the time, I wrote that it was “stunning in its scope and complexity.”

If there was a complaint to be made, it was that we never got to spend enough time with each beautifully drawn character as the book moved chapter by chapter through generations on either side of the Atlantic. Though that struck me as Gyasi’s point — how so much of these people’s humanity was lost to posterity through the barbarism of slavery and its aftermath — it remained that readers longed to spend more time with her pointedly rendered characters.

In her sophomore outing, Transcendent Kingdom, Gyasi has countered that complaint with an intimate first-person narrative that pulls us back into the Ghana-U.S. connection — and so much more — through the lens of a single family.

When the story opens, the narrator, Gifty, is nearing the end of her Ph.D. program in neuroscience at Stanford, and her mother — for the second time — has tumbled into a deep and abiding depression. Gifty and her mother have been a family of two since first Gifty’s father left them to go back to Ghana and, later, her beloved brother, Nana, died of a heroin overdose.

In her lab, Gifty works with mice, searching for the physiological switch that causes “issues with reward seeking, like in depression, where there is too much restraint in seeking pleasure, or drug addiction, where there is not enough.”

She wonders if one day her research will truly help people: “Could it get a brother to set down a needle? Could it get a mother out of bed?” The greater focus of her research, however, is to understand what keeps addicts coming back for more, no matter the risk and pain.

Gifty is an outsider in so many ways: She is a woman in a man’s hard-science world, a Black among suburban whites in Alabama — and then extra-privileged whites at Harvard and Stanford — an American daughter of immigrant parents, and a scientist with a fundamentalist Christian background.

Even in her own family, she understands that she is an outsider. Her parents and brother are from Ghana. Nana was the golden child, beloved by all, the reason his mother sought opportunity for him in America, while Gifty was the unwelcome, burdensome surprise born into the struggling family adrift in a cold new country.

Gifty grows up absorbing this otherness, the drumbeat of her own lower status in her family often drowned out in the cacophony of the subtle and unsubtle racism that bombards them all every day — at work and at school, on the street and on the soccer field, in their all-white Pentecostal parish.

Under that hateful glare, her father tries “to shrink to size, his long, proud back hunched as he walked with my mother through the Walmart, where he was accused of stealing three times in four months.” Eventually, when Gifty is 4, he escapes back to Ghana, his assurances of returning a hollow promise.

Gifty’s response is to do everything she can to be good in a way that will appeal to her deeply religious mother. She reads the Bible cover to cover, memorizing scores of chapters that she can still recite decades later. She tries to radiate with the glow of God’s light.

Nana — six years older, the soccer star, the delight of his father — gives up playing once he realizes his father’s absence is permanent. In junior high, his height and pure athleticism put him on the basketball court. A bad injury and a prescription for OxyContin put him on a path to destruction.

Gifty is only 11 when she ends up alone with her mother, whose brutally long hours of low pay as a home healthcare worker have made her absent, tired, and even more emotionally distant than is her natural inclination.

“I only wanted Nana,” her mother tells her as she descends into depression, “and now I only have you.” For her part, Gifty considers, “I understood and I forgave. I only wanted Nana, too, but I only had my mother.” She also notes, “It’s those who stay who are judged the harshest, simply by virtue of being around to be judged.” This is equally true of Gifty’s view of her mother as it is of her mother’s view of her.

We watch as Gifty draws more tightly into herself, shedding her few friendships as an act of will; moving into the world of facts, clear answers, evidence, and control; and practicing isolation, perhaps as a form of penance. Deep in scientific exploration, she does not know how she feels about the God who, with Nana’s death, abandoned her family but never seems far away.

When her favorite laboratory mouse — an inveterate lever-presser that has developed a limp from the shocks he receives as he desperately chases another hit of Ensure — finally, because of her intervention, refuses to press the lever, it is as though she is witnessing a rebirth, the light of salvation that may course through all of us.

Throughout Transcendent Kingdom, Gyasi tackles a complex web of themes, weaving together a story that inches toward a quiet redemption. Along the way, it is a joy simply to delight in the language she uses in her close observation of life, the quotidian details made fresh:

“Most of the boys I knew growing up were shorter than us girls until about fifteen or sixteen, when they rounded some invisible corner in the summertime and returned to school the next year twice our size, with voices that crackled like car radios being tuned, searching for the right, the clearest, sound.”

She has found that right, clearest sound, and it is transcendent.

Noir at the Bar, Virtual Edition

Leave a reply

If you missed the live version, you can watch it on endless repeat here!

I had a total blast last night reading at our Virtual Noir at the Bar, hosted by everyone’s favorite charmingly unhinged host, Ed Aymar. The line-up of exceptional authors dug deep into their dark sides to deliver crowd-pleasing stories, in partnership with local indie East City Books.

I read half of my short story “Sandoval,” which was published last year in Issue 70 of Gargoyle, DC’s long-lived literary journal helmed by Richard Peabody. I could only fit in half in order to stick to the eight-minute time limit, and still had to edit heavily. The pay-off was Ed’s surprised reaction at the conclusion: “Holy shit, was that creepy.”

My reading starts at the ~1:01 mark if you want to skip ahead. bit.ly/2Lip3MV

Here’s a bit of trivia: all the books behind & above me on the shelf are by authors whom I know. Unfortunately, my head blocks a lot of them!

Book Review: Enemy of the People

Leave a reply

This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 21 September 2018.

Book Title: Enemy of the People: Trump's War on the Press, the New McCarthyism, and the Threat to American Democracy

Recently, I had occasion to use a quote from Washington Post executive Editor Marty Baron: “We’re not at war, we’re at work.” He uttered those words last October while he and Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times, were at the National Press Club filming an edition of “The Kalb Report” with the host, veteran journalist and author Marvin Kalb.

The topic under discussion was freedom of the press, and Baron was responding to the idea that his newspaper is “at war” with the current administration. While Baron, famously unflappable, appeared almost sanguine about the state of U.S. journalism in the face of endless presidential vitriol, his interviewer, Kalb, was not. In fact, he was clearly alarmed.

That sense of alarm comes through palpably and unapologetically in Kalb’sEnemy of the People: Trumps’s War on the Press, the New McCarthyism, and the Threat to American Democracy. The author makes this clear right up front, answering in the affirmative to his own question, “could I, after all these years, drop my usual dedication to objective journalism and, for probably the first time in my professional life, tell the public what I truly felt about Trump and his approach to the press?”

In fact, he does not confine his opinion to that singular element, as evidenced by such passages as this one: “The partisan split, which had divided American politics for decades, only widened further as Trump and his troops stormed into Washington, taking the nation and the world hostage to his chaotic, authoritarian style of leadership.” When it comes to throwing off journalistic objectivity for the first time in a 60-year career, Kalb has decided to go all in.

Arguably, if any living journalist deserves to do so, it’s Kalb, who interrupted work on his three-part memoir to produce this slender volume. Old enough to have met Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow during the brief post-Stalin “thaw” of 1956, when Kalb was a young translator at the U.S. Embassy, he has witnessed and reported on enough modern history to have earned the opportunity to offer his unvarnished perspective.

In a stunning bit of timing, Kalb had already decided to offer his opinions on the president and the press in a speech he was to give at the Cosmos Club on February 16, 2017. That was the same day Trump tweeted that the press “is the enemy of the American People.” For Kalb, those words, “enemy of the people,” favored by dictators throughout world history, served as his red line. He rewrote the opening of his speech, and the battle was joined.

It’s worth noting that Kalb was a target of the last U.S. president who had an especially ugly relationship with the press: Richard Nixon. Nixon had Kalb’s phone wiretapped and his office ransacked, and yet Kalb feels strongly that there is something more dangerous about this administration even than that one.

Another crucial entry in Kalb’s bona fides is his distinction as being the last of the journalists recruited by Edward R. Murrow — “Murrow’s Boys” — to join CBS News. The bulk of this book focuses on the parallels between junior Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy and Donald J. Trump, and examines the determined reporting led by Murrow and his team to shine a scalding light on McCarthy’s anti-Communist rampage, which eventually led to the senator’s downfall.

Beyond sharing the no-holds-barred lawyer Roy Cohn, McCarthy and Trump share any number of other unsavory traits and abetting environmental factors, including a legislative branch that has misplaced its spine. Both men use the press to their advantage, lie egregiously, and play to the darkest impulses of their listeners. Both are wildly popular with their followers, seemingly untouchably so.

It’s as though Cohn is describing his later client when he spoke of McCarthy as being “impatient, overly aggressive, overly dramatic. He acted on impulse…He would neglect to do important homework…He was selling the story of America’s peril.”

The parallels are useful, but they only go so far. Murrow had a long-standing relationship of trust with the American people, having brought the Blitz alive for them — almost single-handedly creating on-location radio and later television reporting as he did so — and then giving them on-the-ground reporting during World War II. And he kept his powder dry until he felt his team was fully prepared to make the case against McCarthy and his tactics.

And though McCarthy hitched his fortunes to the hottest topic of the time to ride to prominence, he was in the end a one-trick pony. This allowed Murrow and others the relative luxury of having a single area on which to focus audience attention. In contrast, the current president has journalists playing daily — even hourly — Whack-a-Mole, where the shifting, unending outrages lead to a sort of numb exhaustion.

It’s been a long time since America has had an Ed Murrow or a Walter Cronkite to speak to the entire nation from a place of trust. If McCarthy’s moment had come in an age of social media and 24-hour cable news playing to splintered, partisan audiences — well, that would be what we have now, the raging demagogue, but this time with no trusted Murrow-like newsman to bring him to heel.

The other unfortunate parallel between McCarthy and Trump is that both are exceedingly good at selling newspapers and driving up TV news ratings. Kalb quotes political reporter Willard Edwards of the Chicago Tribune saying, “McCarthy was a dream story. I wasn’t off page one for four years.”

In Kalb’s discussion with Baron and Baquet, both guests acknowledged their respective papers’ return to solid financial ground after a number of rocky years; neither one addressed the role that Trump’s virtual ownership of the news cycle may have played in the health of the papers’ balance sheets. Could Trump be right that the media needs him as much as he needs them?

Kalb has written this book as something of a journalists’ call to arms, reminding them that determined reporters can and do make a difference in rooting out and spotlighting corruption, and in holding our leaders accountable to the people they represent. On August 15, 300 newspapers nationwide published editorials to push back against this idea that the news media is the enemy of the people, rather than being one of the pillars of democracy.

Which brings me back to why I was using Marty Baron’s quote. It was for a poster I carried at a march, in memory of my oldest friend and long-time newsman, John McNamara, one of the five people killed at the Capital Gazette for the sole reason that he worked for the newspaper. So it’s not a big stretch for me to agree with Kalb’s final sentences: “And, so, with all due respect to the office you hold, Mr. President, the ‘enemy of the people’ is not the press. It is you.”

Book Review: The New Inheritors

Leave a reply

This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 23 August 2018.

I remember experiencing Kent Wascom’s 2013 debut novel, The Blood of Heaven, almost as a physical onslaught. Savage and searing, it was also gorgeously written. I remember, too, being stunned that the author was only 27; he wrote like a man who has lived several lifetimes.

Blood was the first in a loosely cast series of books that traces the Woolsacks, starting with bloody-minded Angel, through most of two centuries of Southern, dark-souled American history. And while the first sprawled across years and geography, the second, Secessia, had a completely different tone, kept its lens more narrowly focused — on a New Orleans occupied by Benjamin Butler’s Union troops — and unspooled in less than a year. Still, it remained as unsettling and foreign-seeming as the first.

Here, then, is the third of Wascom’s Woolsack novels, picking up in 1890 and bringing us closer to a more recognizable era just beyond the Great War. Again, this book feels completely different than the other two and yet — now that we know his writing — is fully identifiable as belonging to this author.

The first thing to set it apart is that a Woolsack is not the main character. Instead, Wascom brings us into this story through Isaac, an orphan torn from the one woman — not his mother — who cares for him, but is later adopted by another woman and her family, who fully embrace him as their own. His idyllic childhood and early adulthood on the Mississippi Gulf Coast awaken in him a talent as an artist, and his subject is the natural world he discovers around him.

That’s the second thing that sets this book apart: that any of it might be described as “idyllic.” Stretches of the novel are infused with a sense of light, air, and hopefulness that are entirely missing from the first two.

It’s a setup, certainly, to provide a contrast between the surface beauty and the ugliness that lurks just out of sight (“They were young and white and had money, and this combination could put you a good ways out of the path of the world’s great reaping. But not in every case”), as well as a contrast between the time before, in happiness, and the time after, in misery. Still, we, like the characters, can bask in the golden light while it shines.

Gradually, we’re introduced to the Woolsacks, who spend summers on their own island just across the sound from Isaac’s family. We met Joseph and Marina as troubled children in Secessia, and here they are as adults with three troubled children of their own: Angel, the carefully closeted eldest, named for his notorious grandfather; Kemper, the girl, named for her grandfather’s adopted brother; and George, apparently named for no one, described as a “puny boy with blood-red hair,” nicknamed Red, who spends his life attempting to live up to his grandfather’s unhappy example.

When, freshly arrived home after years of southward travel, Isaac finally meets Kemper, she is stealing crabs from a trap, and he is entirely smitten. He seeks her out the next day and finds her “on the beach shooting arrows into the back of a parlor chair…She looked like the wild survivor of some near-apocalypse, careless of the value that things once had, as if somewhere not far she had a smoldering pile of banknotes for a campfire.”

Wascom is a careful student of history, and his portraits of America are riven with many of its seamier episodes. Sometimes these are used as telling asides, and other times they are woven seamlessly into the backdrop of his stories. Kemper remembers “hearing her mother say that the U.S. had dressed Cuba as a woman in torn clothes on the verge of being raped, then kindly shoved Spain out of the way and took our turn.”

Joseph Woolsack’s money, built on his father’s wealth from slaving, has steadily increased through his own involvement in the Caribbean and Central and South American fruit trade, a notorious business in which ruthless U.S. corporate involvement directly gave birth to “banana republics.”

Kemper, aware of the stained wealth, removes herself from her family but is guiltily willing to take its money to support herself and Isaac. She is also haunted by her role in driving her beloved elder brother from the family after Red’s venomous revelation to them that Angel is homosexual. Once the Great War breaks out and Isaac’s refusal to serve puts him in prison, she is completely alone.

Red, for his part, is haunted by voices in his head. After having to teach himself as a child how to smile in an attempt to cover up his otherness, he begins to hear the voices in early adulthood and learns how to cover that up, too, though he listens to their violent instruction.

This is a family not destined for happiness.

The novel moves at various times through the eyes of Isaac, Kemper, and Angel, with a touch of Marina and too little of Neda, the woman who cares for Isaac through his first four years. The pieces of Red’s story come primarily through the eyes of his reluctant enforcer, a well-read black man named Rule Chandler.

Each one is trapped, one way or the other, by expectations they can’t meet and would refuse to anyway, and by circumstances that someone else has dictated for them.

If there is a weakness to The New Inheritors, it’s an unevenness in pacing that makes it feel at times that Wascom is in a hurry to move on. I, for one, did not want him to hurry; the beauty and richness of his observation and detail when he dives deep made me long for more.

If I understand correctly, there is one more book expected in the Woolsack series, which should bring us close to or into the present day. Since the only next-generation Woolsack children belong to schizophrenic Red, it appears he is to be the patriarch ushering the family into the latter half of the 20th century.

Given that Wascom makes an art of illuminating the many ways that America’s history belies the vaunted ideals on which it was founded, it should be riveting to watch him take on the more recent moments in the American story.

Probing for the Empathy Bone

Leave a reply

This column originally appeared in Jenny’s “Write Now” book blog in the Washington Independent Review of Books on August 9, 2018.

One of the questions famous authors are often asked is, “Why do you write?” I’m not a famous author, so no one has ever asked me that, but I’ve thought about it for myself. I write to think things through, to find a new perspective, to discover a way of seeing that I hadn’t considered before.

And though I write primarily for myself, I also want to share my writing in the hope of touching readers in a way that stays with them — that, in some tiny way, perhaps, changes them.

But can it? Will it? Lately, I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing far more than I’ve been writing.

If you follow this column at all, you may know that, in January, I labeled this my Year of Writing, and I anticipated relating a year’s worth of the ups and downs of drafting a novel.

My novel-in-progress is about another fraught era in American history, this one at the turn of the 20th century, told through the experiences of one family in Washington, DC. It highlights a series of historical events that, in my view, offers a chillingly on-point parallel to some of the havoc of our current times.

But I find myself in the classic writing low spot of wondering, “What’s the point?”

Instead of writing during these last six weeks since my friend, journalist John McNamara, was murdered in Annapolis, MD, I’ve been thinking a lot about empathy — or, for fans of Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy, an alternative that he calls “rational compassion.”

Certainly, as a writer, I feel that an enhanced sense of empathy is crucial to developing believable characters, or, in nonfiction, to representing other people in a humane, nuanced way.

On January 20, 2017 — perhaps you remember that day — I posted a blog entry, “Toward Compassion,” which was all about the relative value of empathy. As I said there, “I’m one of those people who believes that a lack of empathy leads us to parochial and isolationist views of the world, an us-against-them mentality that rarely leads to positive outcomes.”

But my recent meditation is whether people who seem to lack empathy can actually learn to feel it. Is there an empathy bone that some people have and others don’t? Or is it more like a muscle that just needs to be isolated and exercised to get into shape?

Is there anything I could ever write that would lead someone to begin to feel a sense of empathy, especially for a character — or a real person — who doesn’t look, act, and think exactly as they do?

Along with many others, I spent much of last month considering, for example, the contrast in empathy exhibited around two recent events that unfolded in parallel, one in a flooded cave in Thailand and the other at the U.S.-Mexico border. Much ink has been spilled in that comparison; was anyone swayed?

So I continue to wonder, particularly in our entrenched us-against-them political moment: Can an author’s words really change anything?

Writer Joyce Winslow, for one, is giving it a shot. She was, for two years, commentary editor for the nonpartisan, nonprofit Rand Corporation, and currently works with private clients, having helped 60 in the past two years achieve publication in top-tier papers.

Winslow teaches a popular class at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC, called “Writing OP-EDs to Make a Political Difference,” in which she guides her students in understanding what it takes to write successful opinion pieces for local and national news outlets.

Much like classic debate prep, she urges her students to consider the opposing viewpoint, underpin their work with credible research, use tools of persuasion rather than passion, and dismantle opposing arguments without rancor.

Winslow teaches that true persuasion — the possibility of influencing or changing another’s position — demands fully understanding the opposing viewpoints and exercising a level of tolerance and respect that disarms a defensive reaction.

Speaking of disarming: I was thinking about empathy very specifically this Saturday, as I watched Marjory Stoneman Douglas parent Manuel Oliver create a beautiful mural in honor of his son Joaquin’s 18th birthday, while a small but vocal group shouted bullhorn-amplified slogans at him from across the barricades.

I wondered at the impulse of armed individuals to taunt, hector, and shout invective at a man whose son was murdered in a hail of gunfire at school just six months ago.

Is the empathy bone missing, or has the muscle simply atrophied?

At the time, I was wearing a picture of my murdered friend, John, pinned to my shirt and standing with his widow — that word alone delivers a fresh gut-punch each time — and the endless taunting felt like its own physical assault.

Maybe that was the point. Perhaps they weren’t out to change our minds, just to torture us a little more.

On our side of the barrier, the overarching message was simple and direct: Vote. That is the drumbeat sounded by both the March for Our Lives/Road to Change that sprang from the MSD massacre, and the March on the NRA that sprang from many others. It’s the same take-away I had when I wrote about the way to honor the victims of the Capital Gazette massacre. Participating in a protest is great for messaging, but voting is what makes the change.

There are many things that I will remember from Saturday’s march, but here are two: There were hundreds of sunflowers, as many as the organizers could find, because sunflowers were the last thing that “Guac” Oliver bought before he was murdered, to give to his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day.

And, though the MSD march veterans chanted “Don’t engage” for us newbies as the counter-demonstrators started to get under our skin, they themselves have made an art of engaging. As the rally wound down, several of the kids took bouquets of sunflowers to the other side of the barricades and began to speak quietly with some of the NRA participants, respectfully engaging them in conversation and attempting to find common ground.

I don’t know whether it will make a difference, but it is certainly worth the effort to try. And to keep trying.

I guess I have my answer.

Book Review: Night Gaunts

Leave a reply

This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 27 July 2018.

Each of the stories in this most recent collection from Joyce Carol Oates originally appeared in other publications. It may be that reading them separate from each other would have allowed each one to stand on its own, thereby heightening the reader’s appreciation. In putting them together, neither the whole nor the parts benefit.

How so?

The author’s repetitive narrative tics — such as her intentional overuse of parenthetical phrases — nag to the point of intrusiveness. She also uses the avoidance of names to make a point: the cruel Sunday school teacher in “Sign of the Beast” is too evil to be named; the obedient Asian lab technician in “The Experimental Subject” is a useful but obscure functionary. Unfortunately, the constant use of “Mrs. S___” for the one and “N___” for the other is simply aggravating. In “Walking Wounded,” the device spirals out of control.

It seems that facial birthmarks are particularly malign, as evidenced by descriptions in two different stories. In “Sign of the Beast,” the narrator states, “The birthmark on my (left) cheek like a pustule was shameful to me.” And in the titular “Night-Gaunts,” the protagonist’s abusive, syphilitic father sports one. “The birthmark has become an inflamed-looking boil that no amount of make-up and powder could disguise.”

Nonetheless, the stories here are appropriately disturbing. The nightmares that Oates conjures are generally grounded in the ugliness of daily life, of the situations beyond our volition that drive us to the edge of reason. In particular, “The Experimental Subject,” which is the longest of the tales, is most effective precisely for its groundedness, its observance of the quotidian details that make its horror plausible.

In it, our unnamed protagonist — about whom Oates gives us all possible clues to understand that his name is Nguyen, so why bother being so coy? — pretends to be another student in order to cull out a chunky, awkward, friendless undergraduate as the experimental subject needed for the next phase of his revered professor’s “research” project.

The unsuspecting mark, Mary Frances, is described in terms usually reserved for apes (“an unusually low simian brow…large splayed feet and a center of gravity in the pelvic region”) and cattle (“tentative manner like that of a creature that is being herded blindly along a chute”). Certainly, it helps the researchers to dehumanize a person before performing inhuman experiments on her without her knowledge or consent.

Interesting in concept is “The Woman in the Window,” in which Oates imagines the story captured in Edward Hopper’s painting “Eleven A.M., 1926.” We spend time in the head of the woman sitting in the chair by the window, wearing only shoes, and in that of her abusive, married lover, who is tardy and still taking his own good time to get to their tryst.

Whenever she finally decides to employ them, I, for one, am rooting that her sewing shears get the job done.

Abuse — psychological, emotional, physical, sexual, often in combination —forms the common theme in almost all of these stories, which then capture the catastrophic results. Sometimes the abuse is practically invisible, as in “The Long-Legged Girl,” in which the long-term effects on Elinor of Victor’s constant affairs — or possibly unconsummated obsessions — with his beautiful, adoring undergrads finally leak out in an equally almost-invisible retaliation.

A little disconcerting, though, is the amount of attentive detail given to cataloging the physical defects of characters like Elinor and Mary Frances to the point that it feels like the author’s personal disdain speaking. And yet, I might not have noted that if I hadn’t read these stories in collection.