Author Archives: Jennifer Bort Yacovissi

In Praise of Nuance

Are you one of those people who finds it impossible to look up a single word in the dictionary? I am. For me, opening a dictionary is a shiny-pebble adventure in which my eyes constantly race ahead of my lumbering brain—“Ooh, look at this one! Oh, and this!”—and it is the rare occasion that I don’t have to squint mentally to recall the word I was originally searching for. Though the impulse is sometimes aggravating, typically because I don’t have time just to sit and read the dictionary, there is still something wonderful in aimlessly splashing about in a sea of words.

Now let’s take a moment to consider how adorably quaint the preceding paragraph must appear to perhaps the majority of readers who are, after all, reading an online blog. “A dictionary. Really?” Yes, I’m describing the physical act of pulling a book from a shelf, using the helpful thumb tabs to orient myself somewhat close to my objective—the better to limit that inevitable distraction—and then using a finger to navigate through the inviting sea to the intended destination. “Oh, great,” I can hear some of you thinking, “you’re going to be one of those.”

No, I promise I am not here to rail against technology or bemoan the loss of whichever things it’s normal these days to bemoan the loss of. (Perhaps the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition, which I’ve done twice now. Or using sentence fragments, also twice.) For example, I am without question a lover of physical books, reading for me having a tactile dimension that adds to the joy of the experience, but I applaud the advent of the tablet. Anything that encourages people to read more is aces in my estimation, and let’s face it, how else can you really read while brushing your teeth or drying your hair?

Okay, so if I’m not railing or bemoaning, what am I doing? I am praising. I am praising nuance, the subtle shades of meaning, hint, implication, freight, and history that words carry, that make them unique and therefore necessary, that allow each one the opportunity at a given time and place to be exactly the right word. I am not suggesting that there is something nefarious going on just now that is draining nuance out of language; complaints of that sort have been around since folks were working in cuneiform. Instead, I’m suggesting that it is worth the effort, that there is reward to both the writer and the reader, for the writer to know what she means to say, and to find just the right way to say it so that the reader knows exactly what she means, too.

I’m currently reading Steven Pinker’s wonderfully useful and thought-provoking book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. (And now you’re laughing doubly hard at the concept of my reading a style guide, as though the dictionary were not bad enough.) Pinker doesn’t have much use for the pinched and brittle self-appointed guardians of the language who approach the world with a red pen and a humorless inflexibility toward applying rules, many of which he shows to be misguided, contradictory, and typically not absolute. He shows rather than insists to his readers why one approach communicates better than another in a given context, based on how both our brains and English syntax work. I appreciate his measured, fact-based but still humorous approach to a subject too often addressed in overheated, bug-eyed invective about how wrong everyone else is.

I understand that impulse, of course; people who love language have trouble not getting their collective backs up at what seems like willful ignorance or just plain laziness in its general handling. My personal hot button is usage. Much as I love dictionaries, it’s worth remembering that dictionaries offer common usage, not necessarily proper usage. Word meanings are crowd-sourced, and the crowd isn’t necessarily all that concerned about what might seem too-nice distinctions among different words—that is, in the nuance. This is hardly a modern phenomenon: open the Oxford English Dictionary to any given word with a long history and you can trace the evolution of its meaning. Hence, common usage becomes accepted usage, which eventually becomes proper usage. The only difference these days is that the interconnected crowd works faster now and meanings can shift more quickly.

Nonetheless, I was surprised to find that Steven Pinker is fine with the use of anxious to mean eager, one example he uses in his discussion of word usage that people should stop fretting over. For me, it’s impossible to separate anxious from its obvious root in anxiety, which has little to do with eagerness. So while I understand that the use of one for the other is common, I’m pretty certain the careful reader feels how the substitution changes the tone and sense of a scene, and the careful writer makes a specific choice based on the tone and sense he means to convey. That’s the nuance I come to praise. And I know Pinker gets it, too. I’m right there with him when he says, “Style, not least, adds beauty to the world. To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life’s greatest pleasures.” Amen, brother.

Book Review: The Stone Wife

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This review was originally published on 3 December 2014 in the Washington Independent Review of Books.

What do a cliché-spouting Korean pop star, a love-struck weapons dealer, a brutally vengeful land developer, a haughty-but-position-hungry professor, and a 700-year-old carving of a large woman on a small horse have in common?

They all figure prominently in Peter Lovesey’s The Stone Wife, the 14th installment of his Peter Diamond Investigation series, a dependably popular set of British crime procedurals that debuted in 1991. Lovesey is a prolific crime writer with more than 30 novels and short-story collections to his credit; of his several historical and contemporary series, Diamond is his longest running.

Peter Diamond and his stalwart team of detectives are based in Bath, England. The locale offers a nice selection of plot devices, since the city is on a far more intimate scale than London but still world-renowned, cosmopolitan, and steeped in history. Because each Diamond book stands on its own, a reader new to the series can probably plug in anywhere along the way, though the central characters collect backstory as the series progresses.

All the standard types are here: the gruff and damaged team leader (is there no other way to lend gravitas to all these world-weary cops than to have their loved ones die brutally?); the steady second in command; the ambitious token woman; the irritating know-it-all; the naïve newbie struggling to find his place on the team; and the bureaucratic and political pest of a chief. While not cardboard, none of them are fully realized characters.

The most enjoyable element of a Diamond investigation is not necessarily discovering whodunit — because, frankly, the investigative components are not all that satisfying — but learning which arcane subject we will plunge into during the course of solving the mystery. In installment 13, The Tooth Tattoo, it was the inner workings of a classical music quartet. Here, the subject is Chaucer scholarship. The stone wife of the title refers to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, a bit of a local, if aged, celebrity.

In this story, she is carved astride her horse into a hefty block of stone. The coveting of the stone carving, which has a provenance that not only makes it a contemporary of Chaucer’s, but hints that it may have graced a house in which he once lived, drives the action of the story.

If that sounds just a tad too dry, Lovesey does keep the action bouncing along. The murder occurs just a few pages in, at the height of a hard-fought auction of the stone, which is interrupted by its attempted heist. The victim is a Chaucer scholar obsessed with possessing this particular Wife of Bath. He’s so horrified that someone is trying to make off with her that he charges at the thieves, and one of them shoots him.

Heist gone wrong or cleverly planned murder?

The story is peppered with an interesting cast of witnesses and suspects, and includes a dicey undercover stint for Ingeborg, the team’s blonde former investigative journalist who taps her old contacts to get close to the suspected supplier of the murder weapon. She does so by approaching the young Korean pop star under the guise of a journalist wanting to do a day-in-the-life profile of her and her bankrolling sugar daddy, the weapons dealer.

One fascinating point of cultural division: For an American reader, it’s hard to comprehend the team’s single-mindedness in attempting to track down the supplier of the murder weapon, a 50-year-old revolver, or the fact that apparently there is really only one person worth considering as its source. Even more incomprehensible is that the dealer is less a gun seller than a gun renter; guns are so scarce and valuable that criminals return them after use. It seems almost quaint by U.S. standards.

I’ll admit that I’ve only read a few of the later Diamond books, but I wonder if the series isn’t suffering from its longevity. If all the superfluous detective work in The Stone Wife were removed, we’d be left with a not-very-compelling short story. Lovesey fails to sell several plot points, one late in the story involving the weapons dealer that is so inorganic and unresolved that it almost feels as though the author must be planning to carry it forward into Installment 15, except that the stories don’t intertwine that way.

Finally, the willingness of Lovesey’s perpetrators to confess, and the speed with which they do so — of course, over the objections of their solicitor — is worthy of nothing so much as a “CSI: Miami” episode.

Perhaps that’s what these books are: the literary equivalent of an “NCIS” or “Bones” season finale. Both are entertaining and easy to digest, but it’s best not to think about them too hard or ask too many questions.

Book Review: The Dog: A Novel

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This review was originally published 20 November 2014 in the Washington Independent Review of Books.

Living in a swanky waterfront highrise, cruising in a sweet ride, pulling in big bucks from a cushy (if mind-numbing) job, rubbing elbows with the mega-rich: not hard to take, you say? Then you haven’t read The Dog: A Novel, Joseph O’Neill’s long-awaited follow-up to Netherland. Unfortunately for fans of the lovely, restrained, and insightful writing of O’Neill’s previous novel, The Dog is disappointingly unlovable: a painful, sometimes painfully funny, tortured treatise on the everyday horrors and miseries of modern life, written with such lack of restraint that it feels almost like an endurance test. Do you have what it takes? Are you tough enough to finish this novel? Perhaps that really is what O’Neill is striving for in this cautionary tale that illustrates no matter how bad things are at any given moment, they can always get exponentially worse.

When we meet our almost-nameless hero, X, previously a midlevel corporate attorney, he is several years into living with the aftermath of an imploded long-term relationship; whoever he once was, which perhaps wasn’t all that much to begin with, appears to be permanently unrecoverable. He’s paying dearly, and on many levels, for the crime of having stayed too long and too quietly in a lopsided and suffocating situation, but one that didn’t present a compelling reason to leave until it was just that much too late.

It’s a testament to how bad things are made for him stateside — his bank account drained, his professional reputation in tatters, and his personal Google results sabotaged through “a fiendish new form of defamatory publishing that one might term ‘search libel’” — that X is willing to take a job offer after a chance meeting with an old college chum, Eddie, to be the “family officer” of Eddie’s ultra-rich Lebanese family in Dubai. This even after he is stood up for his surprise interview with Eddie’s irrational brother Sandro in an epic and expensive way.

In this case, “family officer” translates as well-paid errand boy, janitor, and baby sitter, the rubber-stamping drudge whose signature is required on byzantine and highly suspect financial dealings. We see almost immediately how badly this is working out, as X composes mental emails to the two Batros brothers that he knows he will never send. They are pointless; no one listens to him.

So, yes, X works for the Batros family and, yes, we end up meeting Alain, the “Al” in the family — Get it? Al Batros. Albatross. — Sandro’s sullen, obese, badly parented 15-year-old son who portends ill for X.

More than anything, X — who offers that he is the dog, always living in the doghouse — wants simply to be acknowledged as “your presumably decent human being presumably doing a pretty decent job of doing his best to do the right thing in what is, however you look at it, a difficult world.” He expends significant effort attempting to be considerate of others, especially the less fortunate, offering a 10-point treatise (with subclauses) to outline his position on providing charitable donations to help out the foreign workers who toil in near-slavery in the United Arab Emirates, and taking pains to ensure that the women he pays for sex are not victims of trafficking or coercion.

His only comforts in an otherwise intolerable existence are sex with those women, of whom he only requires that they be nice to him; occasional pedicures provided by his diving buddy Ollie; and the use of a state-of-the-art massage chair. He defends his ownership of this chair by saying, “It’s not as if it’s stuffed with miniscule underlings coerced into massaging me.”

If all this screams “first-world problems,” it’s still hard to watch X “dreading the empty and shameful hours and days and weeks and years ahead.” Everyone deserves to be the hero of his own life, but X understands that he has washed out of his: not a has-been, but a never-was.

It is tough to understand what O’Neill is going for in the approach he takes in the novel, making his readers work very hard in puzzling ways. The voice is markedly inconsistent. Sometimes, the story comes almost as one long aside, as though X might be offering all this to some guy he met in a bar, and it is stuffed with pages-long, multi-nested, parenthetical digressions. It’s a gimmicky and aggravating device, with O’Neill insisting you notice how many asides he can nest inside the next and then close them all at once. (The answer is six.)

Then, in huge stretches, X launches into disquisitions on a stunning array of topics, usually in protracted and impenetrable pseudo-legalese. O’Neill dares his readers to slog through it, to read it all. The effect is alienating — perhaps intentionally so, but it’s a perilous tactic.

At times, the prose is engaging, though, and some of the more pithy observations are spot-on. O’Neill adds a new collective noun to the vernacular: “a sadness of masturbators,” for the group of men awaiting their turn with the plastic cup and bad porn in a fertility clinic jerk-off room. He treats with disdain the people who keep score of others’ lives, and notes, “The uncharitable observer — is there another kind?”

As the book nears its close, the reader who has made it this far wonders with increasing urgency how the tale will end, since it does not appear to be working its way toward resolution. O’Neill keeps us anxious to the very last. In a story like this, “happy” is far too much to expect, but the fact that X finally makes one decision for himself is perhaps the closest we can hope to get.

Excited to Announce Pre-Pub Endorsement!

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“Jennifer Bort Yacovissi has written a strong, serene, uplifting debut novel. Up the Hill to Home satisfies the heart but also pleases the mind. Readers will discover here a gifted writer with a firm grasp of American history, a fine way of turning a phrase, and a crisp sense of humor. What most novelists find impossible Yacovissi has accomplished: she has given us a living portrait of a loving family.”

Bryan Crockett, Ph.D., author of Love’s Alchemy: A John Donne Mystery

Book Review: The Shimmering Go-Between

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This review was originally published 24 September 2014 in the Washington Independent Review of Books.

By the time a book is in galley form and sent out for review, there is almost always a synopsis on Amazon or Edelweiss that describes the plot. For The Shimmering Go-Between, Lee Klein’s debut novel (Atticus Books, 295 pages), there is nothing. This appears to be intentional, since on the book jacket itself there are two head-scratching statements: “It’s best not to reveal too much”, and “All we can say is: please no spoilers.” This leaves the reviewer in a bit of a bind. One presumes that Klein wants people to read his novel, so how does he suggest enticing them to do so?

The title is from a quote by Vladimir Nabokov: “Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall tale, there is a shimmering go-between . . .” Indeed, the book is one long collision between normal, everyday real life—sprinkled as it is with familiar heartache and tragedy—and eye-popping, alternate-universe fairy tale.

We meet Dolores when she is twelve and still undeveloped, but taking advantage of her brother’s pornography collection while she heals from a bad fall from her bike. It’s not a great summer, and it turns worse when she starts feeling oddly nauseated and notices that her stomach is distended. Doctor visits and blood tests reveal the answer: Dolores suffers from parthenogenesis. Perhaps more devastating, she suffers from parents who don’t believe her when she insists that she is truly untouched. After three consecutive, terminated “episodes”, she’s put on birth control and the matter is never discussed again. (Just an FYI to the author: The Immaculate Conception refers not to Mary’s conceiving a child without benefit of insemination, but rather to her own conception free from the stain of original sin. It’s a common—ahem—misconception.)

Yes, perhaps that’s a spoiler, but since all that happens by Page 15, there’s plenty more surprises to come.

Dolores’s condition and history isolate her, and she keeps herself deliberately separate from her peers. She makes it almost through college before finally allowing herself to be wooed by a young politician named Max who has nice eyes and a beard. If Dolores as a virgin is hyper-fertile, Dolores having sex with a bearded man has all sorts of unimaginable outcomes that raise thorny moral issues that reverberate throughout the book, and that Klein and his characters sometimes notice but on which they take no particular position.

The outcome of her and Max’s college affair sets the stage for another long stretch of determined isolation during which Dolores throws herself into her editorial work at National Geriatrics. Eventually, though, she admits to being smitten by her best friend at work, a widower named Wilson whom she describes as tall, kind, and—could it be otherwise?–bearded.

It turns out that Wilson is the heart of the story in many (almost) literal and figurative ways, and on several levels. We get to know both him and his late wife Rue more fully than we do Dolores, who almost becomes a secondary character later in the book. Eight years on, Wilson is still quietly mourning Rue’s sudden death from a collision with a deer; five seconds earlier or later would have made all the difference. But that type of if only . . . randomness is universal. In the sublimely alternate worlds that Dolores, Wilson, and Rue experience, it’s not just that the universe is random, it’s as though any possibility of true choice is removed from the equation. Virtually no consequence is the result of a character’s freely elected choice or action. Wilson’s free will is so compromised that he is controlled by not one but two occupying and competing forces. His one personal choice is to cultivate a unique sexual talent that he shares with paying subscribers through his website; he can hardly be expected to anticipate the consequences when that talent marries up with the product of his blackmail-induced assignation with Dolores. By the time we figure out who is actually narrating the story, the pressure is building toward explosions both personal and widespread.

In a story like this, in which the author introduces multiple levels of reality that demand his readers’ trust and willingness to go along for the ride, it’s imperative that the reality we’re familiar with be utterly believable. Thus, after years of consciously isolating herself for fear of what results from intimate contact, it makes no believable sense that Dolores’s first gambit to re-enter the world is to blackmail her friend, the man she fantasizes about spending a normal life with, into having sex with her. Even more unbelievable, we never hear her consider the probable outcome, based on her past history. He has a beard for heaven’s sake! How can she possibly be caught unawares? There are several such elements that just don’t feel true, when they really need to.

Dialog is not Klein’s strong suit, but his prose is sometimes captivating. Outside of Wilson, Rue, and Dolores—it’s a lovely detail that Wilson surrounds himself with women whose names mean sorrow—the other characters are there merely as plot devices. When Max comes along again late in the novel, it takes a minute to remember that we know him. Klein’s sketches, which are sprinkled throughout to illustrate apparently random story components, have a quirky charm. Klein compares his story to those of George Saunders and Charlie Kaufman, and it’s easy to see the same meta-ness here as in, say, Being John Malkovich. Fans of Saunders’s fiction and Kaufman’s films will probably appreciate this tale that goes between the reality we know and the other ones that just haven’t broken through yet.