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Book Review: The Human Cost of Welfare

This review initially appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on April 20, 2016.

Screen Shot 2016-07-02 at 5.29.09 PM It may be hard to believe that a book discussing welfare policy can be described as a page-turner, but here it is. Authors Phil Harvey and Lisa Conyers spend the bulk of The Human Cost of Welfare: How the System Hurts the People It’s Supposed to Help laying out engaging and often compelling arguments in support of the title, but readers may find themselves hurrying to reach the payoff: possible solutions to the endemic problems of the current welfare system.

You don’t need to be a policy wonk to find much that is thought-provoking and possibly eye-opening in here. Best of all, in the midst of this exceptionally brutal and grueling election cycle, it is refreshingly non-partisan. That’s not to say it’s non-controversial, simply that conservatives and liberals will find elements to argue with in equal measure.

Also refreshing is its willingness to remember that, at the core of all of this, we’re talking about human beings, each of whom has a life and a story. The authors have included snippets of some of these stories, which they collected through nationwide field interviews with people on the receiving end of the welfare system — which, as the authors illustrate, might not always be described as a benefit.

The organizing philosophy of Welfare is best summarized by this quote: “‘There is nothing to suggest that people on welfare are lazy,’ notes Cato’s Michael Tanner. ‘But there is also nothing to suggest they are stupid. If you pay someone as much for not working as you do for working, it should come as no surprise that many take advantage of the offer.’”

The evidence that Harvey and Conyers lay out clearly illustrates the unintended consequences inherent in the current welfare system, primarily in the myriad ways in which it offers disincentives to working. The authors’ “fundamental point: earning money is economically dangerous for low-earning families with substantial welfare income.”

They describe the complex, contradictory, and arcane rules associated with the combination of various alphabet-soup programs like SNAP, TANF, WIC, SSDI, and SSI, and the calculus involved for recipients in determining where they will hit the “welfare cliff” — the specific amount of earned income that will cause their benefits to shut off like a light switch.

Looking at the overall system from the 10,000-foot level — which, let’s admit it, is the view for most people not directly involved in the system — it’s easy to see how these rules have come to exist. The simplistic argument is: If you’re working, you don’t need welfare. The next argument becomes: If you can work, you shouldn’t get welfare.

Nowhere is this concept more clearly demonstrated than in the rules surrounding SSDI, the Social Security disability program, whereby it is basically impossible for applicants to get benefits if they are still working — the obvious argument being if you can work, you’re not disabled. As the authors point out, the barriers to work that SSDI puts up “run directly counter to the intent of the American with Disabilities Act, which seeks to empower the disabled to join the workforce.”

Within the solution space, the authors focus on shifting welfare incentives to tie them to work benefits for both the recipients and the employers who hire them. While not revolutionary ideas, since the book addresses much that has arisen from the 1996 “welfare to work” legislation, there is a wide range of suggestions to consider.

Harvey and Conyers find much to like in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and describe ways to improve and expand the program. They also describe a number of ways to make it less burdensome on employers to hire workers. One unexpected recommendation toward eliminating the current unintended encouragement of poor single girls and women to have children is to provide free access to long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs).

For all the valid issues the book raises and to some degree addresses, the underlying implication is that the jobs are out there if only people had the correct incentives to secure them. This is the point on which the book seems weakest: Except for a brief discussion of apprenticeships as a way of training workers in certain fields, there’s little examination of the inherent mismatch between available jobs and the skills of the underemployed.

The authors note the plummeting engagement of working-class men in the workforce, but do little to address the fact that the loss of traditional manufacturing and farm jobs is increasingly offset by higher-skilled work in technology industries with a far steeper learning curve.

Ironically, one of Welfare’s complaints is that SNAP benefits — what we all know as food stamps — are supposed to be tied to work requirements, but almost never are. That changed as of April of this year, though, as most states now require people without children or a disability to work at least 20 hours a week in order to receive benefits.

In the Washington Post on April 1, 2016, Max Ehrenfreund and Roberto A. Ferdman quoted Rebecca Vallas of the Poverty to Prosperity Program at the Center for American Progress: “Making people hungrier isn’t going to make them find work faster.” In many ways, this book argues that it will.

The crux of the problem, though, may be as simple as it is immoveable. Though they’re only describing one suggested program, the authors may as well be talking about all of them when they say, “The major flaw in this plan is that Congress would never bring itself to enact it.”

Truly, it is hard to envision achieving the political will to enact substantive changes to welfare under the bitterly partisan atmosphere of non-cooperation we’ve engendered over the course of the last few election cycles. Perhaps the authors would be willing to hand out copies of this book to new and returning members of Congress as they convene in January 2017.

Historical Novels Review Winter 2016 Issue

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The following reviews originally appeared in the February 2016 print and online edition of the Historical Novels Review of the Historical Novel Society.

THE LOST TIME ACCIDENTS, John Wray, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Taken together, John Wray’s first three novels clearly demonstrate his facility in representing a broad, eclectic range of subjects, time periods, and characters; thus, this novel should come as no real surprise, but it does. Defying easy categorization, the book weaves elements of science, science fiction, history, pop culture, and religion to produce a funny, mordant, thoughtful, and thought-provoking exegesis on the nature of time.

Waldemar Tolliver is both the hapless victim and natural product of his notorious family’s history. When his great-grandfather, pickle baron and amateur physicist Ottokar Toula, dies just hours after making the stunning but ill-documented discovery that it’s possible to move freely within the dimension of time, Ottokar’s descendants are trapped in lifetimes of attempting to unlock those lost secrets. Waldy’s family, certain it has the inside track on the right answer, dismisses Einstein as “The Patent Clerk.” “The belief that every physicist since Newton has been a fraud or a sucker (or both) is our family dogma, passed from generation to generation like a vendetta or an allergy to nuts.”

The details unwrap themselves slowly as we read over Waldy’s shoulder while he pens his family’s sordid history for the faithless woman he loves, Mrs. Haven. He writes from inside the depths of his late aunts’ huge, stuffed-to-the-rafters New York apartment where, incidentally, he finds himself entirely outside the stream of time. How he came to be there, how he is named after his great-uncle the war criminal, how his father’s bad science fiction writing is responsible for the founding of a cult (Wray doesn’t bother to hide that he’s describing Scientology), and how his thoroughly eccentric aunts may have finally solved the puzzle are all eventually revealed in this story that, like a black hole, winds ever tighter around its core.

THE VATICAN PRINCESS: A NOVEL OF LUCREZIA BORGIA, C.W. Gortner, Ballantine

Pity Lucrezia Borgia and the legacy of historical gossip permanently attached to her. Simply saying the name conjures up titillating visions of wealth, power, evil, and lots of illicit sex. C.W. Gortner, who specializes in Renaissance fiction featuring strong female protagonists, uses his latest novel to cut through the innuendo and perhaps shine a more historically accurate light onto this notorious woman, who seems to have simply had the misfortune of being born into the wrong family.

Gortner has Lucrezia narrate her own story, and he presents her as a credible witness. She and her siblings are the children of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia and one of his many long-term mistresses; the barest of charades is used to maintain the required appearances. The story opens when Lucrezia is twelve and the conclave of cardinals is set to elect a new pope. We immediately plunge into the stunning complexities, intrigues, and cold-blooded cynicism of life among the Vatican elite. Rodrigo’s machinations win him the papacy, a thoroughly political office that demands constant power-brokering and frequent wars to protect it. Lucrezia is used as any Renaissance princess would be, as a useful tool for cementing allegiances, and she has precious little real influence. However much Rodrigo dotes upon her, or her brother Cesare claims to love her, the entire Borgia clan uses her horrifically and eventually causes her nothing but misery.

The author has invested his novel with impressive historical detail that is woven neatly into the threads of the story, and his afterword and references offer excellent insight and final wrap-up. Though he strikes a few false notes – Lucrezia’s relinquished child seems to play almost no part in her emotional make-up – Gortner gives us a sympathetic portrait of a woman who was treated badly both in life and by the historical record.

THE MAN WHO SPOKE SNAKISH, Andrus Kivirähk, translated by Christopher Mosley, Black Cat

In The Man Who Spoke Snakish, Estonian writer Andrus Kivirähk weaves a melancholy, often brutal, tale of the last gasp of an ancient folkloric culture. He describes a people who live entirely in the forest, keep wolves to ride (like horses) and milk (like cows), command wild deer and goats to come to slaughter, and speak the language of their friends the snakes. It is this ability that offers the people dominion over the wolves, deer, and goats, and the forest in general.

Even as the novel opens, though, we find a culture in steep decline. People are leaving the forest in droves, drawn into the tantalizingly modern life of the village with its foreign invaders’ concepts that appear to offer a better life. The title character, Leemet, lives with his widowed mother and sister in their hut in the forest surrounded by an ever-shrinking community. Leemet’s uncle Vootele is the last fluent human speaker of Snakish, and he insists that Leemet learn it equally well. Vootele teaches Leemet about their ancient protector, the Frog of the North, and about Leemet’s grandfather, the last man to have poisonous fangs, which he used to tear into the “iron men” before those invading knights were able to capture him, chop off his legs, and throw him into the sea.

Though there is humor, particularly in some of the early descriptions and observations, the novel becomes ever darker as Leemet finds himself increasingly isolated. Kivirähk can perhaps be forgiven for drawing caricatures on both sides of the culture clash that traps Leemet, since every folktale features archetypes rather than well-drawn characters. Nonetheless, Kivirähk’s tale is poignant in its depiction of the loss of community, of the utter loneliness of living without the people who most understand who we really are.

Book Review: Almost Everything Very Fast

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on February 22, 2016.

There are two parallel narratives running through Almost Everything Very Fast, German author Christopher Kloeble’s first novel to be translated into English. The connections between the storylines reveal themselves gradually, and it takes almost the entire book before they fully intersect. But we know they will eventually, and the journey to bring them together is a compelling one.

It’s tempting to describe this book as charming, which is surprising given that it describes murder and other violent deaths, rampant incest, Nazi brutality, and a host of lesser ugliness. Credit Kloeble’s unshowy, matter-of-fact — even tender — delivery for bringing in the light.

The primary narrative belongs to Albert, a 19-year-old who has spent the last 16 years in St. Helena’s orphanage, outside his hometown of Königsdorf. Albert is not actually an orphan, though: while he is desperate to know who his mother was, his father, Fred Driajes, is still alive. Unfortunately, Fred has the mental capacity of a young child — a six-and-a half-foot-tall, happy, enthusiastic child whose favorite word is “ambrosial” — and Albert has served as the parent in their relationship for many years.

The lone stable adult in Albert’s childhood is St Helena’s steely headmistress, Sister Alfonsa, with whom he has a close but complicated relationship. She recognizes his intellect, teaches him to play chess, and is obviously fond of him, but also levies his punishment each time Albert runs away to Fred, convinced that this time he can forge a real connection with his “Papaa.”

It never happens, of course. Through years of summer vacations, Fred’s primary occupations are reading entries in the encyclopedia and counting green cars each day from the town’s bus stop. Albert cannot glean any information from him. “Trying to hold a conversation with Fred, one that actually amounted to anything, was the most terrible, Sisyphean labor he knew.” But when a cardiologist callously waves five fingers at them to indicate how many months Fred has left to live, Albert makes up his mind to move in with Fred in a last-ditch effort to discover who his mother is.

The second narrative belongs to Julian, who serves as our link to a difficult past. Readers meet him in the prologue, a sharp old man with painful memories. He starts his story from a tiny Bavarian hamlet called Segendorf, a village so remote that the inhabitants don’t hear about World War I until after it’s already been lost.

Segendorf is so small that a significant amount of inbreeding mars the village: “It frequently happened that somebody’s brother was also his cousin, or somebody’s daughter also her sister. Quite a few local families had produced a ‘Klöble’ — a ‘clumsy, stupid fellow.’ Mothers of such children were spat upon.” (Kloeble seems to have made up this definition for his own name.)

Thus, the characters Jasfe and Josfer Habom are not just sister and brother, they are also mother and father to Julian and his sister, Anni. Tragedy ensues when 11-year-old Julian discovers the truth of that dual relationship, and thereafter he leaves the village and his beloved sister behind.

Though he lives a rich life with his savior and mentor, the undertaker Wickenhauser, he is drawn back to Segendorf for love of Anni, and arrives the night before she marries the one foreigner who has ever survived stumbling into the village, a Pole named Arkadiusz Driajes.

While Julian bides his time and stews over the interloper, he fathers a child with Mina, the Klöble who loves him, who helped him to abscond years before. His child and Anni’s are born days apart. And if the Great War bypassed Segendorf, the Nazis do not, and they perform their own brand of “housecleaning,” rebranding the village as “Königsdorf.”

At its heart, this is a novel about absent parents. Some characters try to spin that absence into a positive. Fred’s next-door neighbor Klondi, who fully understands her own stunning failure as a parent, comforts a young Albert by saying, “Mothers are overrated, Albert. If you ask me, you can count yourself lucky that you grew up without one.” Wickenhauser makes the same point to Julian: “We’re all better off without our parents.”

But, of course, that’s not really true. The void is always too large to fill, though it doesn’t stop any of the parentless characters from trying. Even Fred stalks the sewers of Königsdorf in search of his father, while Albert continues his detective work into the identity of his mother. All he has is a single photograph and a compact that contains two strands of hair that are just as red as his own. And Sister Alfonsa, firmly believing that Albert and Fred should be staying at St. Helena’s in Fred’s last few months, knows exactly the way to lure her favorite back: “I could show you who your mother is.”

Sister Alfonsa has never before hinted that she knows this truth, and her bait does the trick. Albert, Fred, Klondi, and Albert’s old girlfriend Violet pile into Violet’s Volkswagen for the road trip back to Sister Alfonsa and the answers to their many questions.

Ultimately, these answers may not be very satisfying, because, truly, what can ever make up for a lifetime of absence? Perhaps Fred has the answer to this question when he remarks, “We are all Most Beloved Possessions” of those to whom we are most present.

Book Review: The Cabaret of Plants

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This book review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on February 10, 2016.

An orchid that flowers entirely underground. A rainforest vine that closely mimics the leaves of each tree it encounters, changing leaf shape, size, and color within the space of a few yards on the same vine. Passionflowers that have developed a back-and-forth competition with the zebra longwing butterfly to outsmart the other, with the current advantage going to the passionflower, which produces growths on its leaves that resemble butterfly eggs in a botanical “No Vacancy” sign.

We are treated to these wonders and many more in The Cabaret of Plants. Its subtitle, Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination, perfectly sums up this gorgeous and engaging book from British naturalist/author Richard Mabey. A prolific writer, Mabey specializes in delivering accessible, thought-provoking discussions of plant life as it intersects with humanity, as he did in his 2011 book, Weeds.

In Cabaret, Mabey muses that we humans cannot think of plants without using ourselves as a frame of reference. While many people regard animals as beings in their own right, worthy of compassion and respect, there is little of that impulse toward flora.

Mabey worries that modern thinking considers plants purely in terms of their economic value, “defining plants as a biological proletariat, working solely for the benefit of our species, without granting them any a priori importance.”

The author isn’t here to scold his readers, but hopes to make us think “about plants as authors of their own lives,” and tells us, “Most of my own personal encounters with plants…have confirmed this conviction that plants have agendas of their own.”

Cabaret is organized into sections by subject or theme, and each of these has multiple chapters. Every one of them is fascinating. Mabey mixes history, science, and anecdote in roughly equal parts to compulsively readable effect.

The chapter “The Challenge of Carnivorous Plants: The Tipitiwitchet,” for example, describes the early investigations into the why and how of carnivorous plants such as the Venus flytrap and the sundew, but spends as much time on the search for the name’s origin. Rather than being Native American, as first thought, tipitiwitchet is a bit of ribaldry, likening open “flytrap leaves — a pair of moist, red semicircles fringed by hairs, which remorselessly gripped their hapless prey” to female genitalia. A glance at the accompanying color plate, painted in 1847, makes that association hard to refute.

Though the book is wide ranging, it spends most of its time in the Europe and America of the 18th and 19th centuries, eras in which scientific discovery, romantic ideals, and the inculcated Judeo-Christian beliefs in the proper order of things mixed in a heady, disorienting brew.

It’s worth being reminded of the simple, everyday tools that people like Joseph Priestly, Charles Darwin, and Isaac Newton — all of whom Mabey accurately describes as “pre-professional scientists…the last non-specialists” — used in making their discoveries, the most important of which was close observation.

“Unravelling the process of photosynthesis in plants was arguably the most important development in the history of biology,” and Priestly did it with a bell jar, a bowl of water, and a mint sprig.

When it came to having a general fascination with plants, no one beat the Victorians. These folks had the deep and abiding curiosity about plants that Mabey would like to see reignited in modern-day thought, but that curiosity led to rapacious demand to possess the plants that most excited them, much to the detriment of the plants themselves.

It is painful to read about the plunder caused by the Victorians’ love affair with ferns and orchids, in which huge trees were felled to get at the epiphytes living high in the canopy, orchid varieties were purposely destroyed in order to keep supply low and prices high, and most plants didn’t survive anyway because the orchid hunters didn’t bother to note the particulars of the native environment in which the plants grew.

Not everyone loved orchids, however. Darwin in particular found them frustratingly inefficient. In the endlessly inventive reproductive methods plants have evolved to overcome their immobility, few can compete with the jaw-dropping variety of orchids, many of which use insects’ sex drives to help themselves along.

Darwin shook his head at, as Mabey describes, the “extraordinary mechanical contrivances which orchids employ to ensure cross-pollination — rocket launchers, pistons, trap doors, levers, triggers,” as an overly complicated expense of energy.

But even Darwin couldn’t argue with success. When he found a Madagascan orchid with an exceedingly deep well in which it held its nectar, Darwin intuited that there must be a Madagascan insect, probably a moth, with a tongue long enough to get at the nectar and serve as the orchid’s cross-pollinator. Finally found after Darwin’s death, the moth, with its 12-inch-long tongue, was dubbed in his honor “the predicted one.”

There are so many delights to be found in Cabaret — from the hunt for the elusive Amazonian moonflower, to the wonder of self-rejuvenating yews that defy efforts to determine their age, to the sprouting of an extinct Judean palm from a 2,000-year-old excavated seed — and Mabey keeps us enthralled from first to last.

He leaves us with a description of the fallen Queen Beech of Hertfordshire, which tumbled in a 2014 storm after dominating its site for 400 years. He muses, “Trees are used to catastrophes, big and small. They have been tacking around them for millions of years.” The message is clear: Plants in no way depend on us to survive and thrive; we would do well to remember that we depend on them.

Book Review: The Loss of All Lost Things

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This book review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on January 27, 2016.

Consider all the loss it is possible to endure: lost wages, lost opportunities, lost objects, lost youth, lost hope, lost minds, lost innocence, lost loves, lost loved ones, the loss of a child. Consider all the ways that we endure that loss, or don’t endure. That, very simply and eloquently, is what Amina Gautier does in her latest story collection, The Loss of All Lost Things.

This is Gautier’s third collection of short stories, after At-Risk and Now We Will Be Happy. Her first won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and her second won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction. Clearly, her work speaks to readers, and now here is Loss, adding its haunting voice to the others, speaking quietly, powerfully, of the large and small losses in all of our lives.

The collection opens with what is perhaps the most searing of the stories, “Lost and Found,” which is told from the point of view of a young boy who has been kidnapped, snatched up off the street in the brief walk between the school-bus stop and home. The boy thinks of his captor only as “Thisman,” and we are spared all but the barest allusions to how Thisman uses him. What is perhaps more painful is seeing how easily Thisman is able to convince the boy that no one wanted him in the first place and that no one is looking for him. Still, the boy tries to think of himself as lost instead of taken. “Things that are taken are never given back. Things that are lost can be found,” he thinks, and wishes, “If only he could find the Lost and Found and turn his own self in.”

This story is bookended by “The Loss of All Lost Things,” in which we experience this horror from the parents’ perspective. The boy’s sense that his parents were distractedly living above and around him is borne out here, his absence garnering their focus as his presence never could. Then, beyond the misery of helpless waiting and speculating comes the brutal realization that, eventually, life continues on for everyone else.

“Their friends, relatives, and loved ones who wanted them to remain hopeful now want them to admit the worst has come.” And though “they hate each other for their weakness, for the living that muscles through,” the husband and wife only have each other. No one else can possibly understand.

Unexpectedly, the two stories that focus on the parents of kidnapped children are perhaps the most hopeful in the whole collection. In “Cicero Waiting,” the husband and wife already know their 3-year-old daughter isn’t coming back after she disappears in an instant out of his gaze at Target. Though he is unwilling to be forgiven, his wife stubbornly refuses to blame him and continues to reach out to him.

“Could it be that simple?” he wonders. Yes, it could.

Many of the other stories are of more typical losses. For example, a more universal experience of losing a child — that is, of losing the wonderful, loving child you once knew to the ravages of adolescence — is the subject of both “What’s Best for You” and “What Matters Most,” in which a mother tells herself, “It is your fault that you raised a daughter whom you love with a desperation bordering on insanity but with whom you cannot have a civil conversation.” To say that Gautier’s subjects are common or typical, however, does not in any way diminish the power of her stories.

In a nod to writing what you know, Gautier, who teaches at the University of Miami, peoples her stories with professors and graduate students, denizens of the oh-so-insular university universe. She pokes self-aware fun at the world of grad students who “took themselves too seriously” and are trained to think of their world as the only one of any import. When, in “Directory Assistance,” Caroline drops out of that life and winds up training with the phone company, she and her mother celebrate that she finally has a “‘real’ job.”

There is only one story here that doesn’t belong. While the themes of “Disturbance” are squarely in keeping with the rest of the collection, its tone is not. Gautier puts us into another world, describing a group of people that has separated from the rest of society and formed its own small town, Togetherness. This would have been a fine story in a different collection, but here it is a jarring anomaly. Putting the readers’ focus on the unfamiliar mechanics of life in a small, closed community, with its parallels to Shirley Jackson’s classic “The Lottery,” takes us away from the simple details of normal daily living, which by themselves are painful enough.

One of her characters makes this point in “Resident Lover,” in considering his ex-wife’s “weird children poems…they were children meant to make one cry because the poetry could not.” Instead, he feels that “the common pain of childhood — of wanting to be older than you were sooner than you ever could be, of feeling vulnerable and dependent, of waiting for everything, of being devalued — any and all of this was enough, hard enough, good enough for a slew of poems.” It is this capturing of the pain and loss common to everyday living at which Gautier excels.

Book Review: A General Theory of Oblivion

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This book review originally appeared in The Washington Independent Review of Books on January 5, 2016.

For American readers not already familiar with author José Eduardo Agualusa, and whose understanding of Portuguese colonialism is perhaps somewhat vague, A General Theory of Oblivion is a sneaky bit of a history lesson.

Portugal, which was comparable to England in the scope and length of its colonial reach, landed in what is now the southwest coastal African country of Angola in 1483 and didn’t cede control until 1975. Hence, it really shouldn’t be surprising that Agualusa is a white, native Angolan who writes in Portuguese.

That he writes with such an empathetic, race-neutral view of the struggle for Angolan independence won’t be surprising to those who have read some of his earlier works, such as The Book of Chameleons or Rainy Season.

At the center of Theory is Ludovica Fernandes Mano — Ludo — a native of Portugal with longstanding agoraphobia. “When still only a little girl, she was horrified by open spaces. She felt, upon leaving the house, fragile and vulnerable, like a turtle whose shell had been torn off.” An incident she thinks of simply as “The Accident” cements her unwillingness to venture outdoors.

After their parents die, she lives with her sister Odette. When Orlando, a visiting Angolan mining engineer, falls in love with Odette, he realizes it is a package deal. He brings both sisters with him to live in the Angolan capital of Luanda, in a huge luxury apartment with a private rooftop veranda and a vast library.

Normalcy begins to erode as the long-simmering conflict for Angolan independence comes to a boil. Odette wants to join the many well-off Angolans who decide that Brazil or Portugal is more to their liking, but the day that Orlando finally agrees, he and Odette never return home from a farewell party.

Three things happen in quick succession: armed fighting breaks out in the streets below; a phone caller demands “the stones” in return for her sister; and Ludo accidentally kills one young man in a group of scavengers about to break into the apartment. After that, she methodically builds a brick wall outside her door that cuts the apartment off from the rest of the building and Ludo from the rest of the world.

From the foreword and acknowledgements, we learn that Ludo was a real person who bricked herself into her apartment for 28 years, writing diaries in notebooks until she ran out of paper and began to write on the apartment walls.

The book’s title comes from something the fictional Ludo writes: “If I still had the space, charcoal, and available walls, I could compose a great work about forgetting: a general theory of oblivion.” But the book might also have been named for one of the chapters, “The Subtle Architecture of Chance,” because at the heart of this story is the concept that chance choreographs so much of what our lives become.

Ludo peeks out at the world around and below her, watching incidents unfold that we see closer up and so make better sense of. Her world shrinks along with her food supply and eventually her vision. Survival comes to depend on burning books and furniture for cooking and heating, raising crops and collecting rainwater in the rooftop gardens, and learning to trap pigeons.

This last is made easier when Ludo finally finds the cache of diamonds hidden in the apartment and realizes the sparkle is just the thing to lure in the birds. Thus, in Ludo’s world, are pigeons worth far more than diamonds.

Interspersed with what sometimes feels like a fever dream of Ludo’s survival inside her castle walls are the swirling stories of the people and events in the streets and halls just outside. The tales may seem random and disconnected, but Agualusa is a master storyteller who doesn’t bother to introduce a character or mention an incident unless it has a larger role to play.

In one small instance, Ludo releases one of the captured pigeons, even though it has swallowed some of the diamonds, because it carries a love note in a cylinder on its leg. That act affects the lives of many of the characters we meet.

And those characters are never cardboard. For example, Jeremias Carrasco (which means executioner), a Portuguese mercenary with a taste for torture, squares off against Magno Mireira Monte, an intelligence officer of the communist MPLA faction who does his own share of inflicting pain, and yet each man eventually reveals a measure of humanity that lifts him out of simple villainy.

Agualusa originally wrote this story as a screenplay, and the novel retains that sense of immediacy. Certainly his economy of words heightens its impact. (The page count is deceptive: this is a tiny book with lots of white space, easily consumed in one long sitting.)

It’s a tribute to Agualusa’s storytelling that the bittersweet redemption found by his characters feels authentic; he and they have earned it.

Book Review: Like Family

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This book review originally appeared in The Washington Independent Review of Books on December 30, 2015.

If you’re familiar with Paolo Giordano because of either of his first two novels, The Solitude of Prime Numbers or The Human Body, be aware that Like Family has little in common with them — little besides the fact that Giordano is the author, and that’s reason enough for his fans to pick this one up, too.

Unlike his previous novels, fraught as they were, this is a slender, tender volume, easily consumed in a single afternoon, possibly while you’re wrapped up in a blanket on the sofa with a mug of tea.

Giordano admits at the outset that this, generally, is a true story, with names and a few salient points changed, but the sentiment he feels for these people is real. It’s also a bit of a giveaway that the first-person narrator is a Ph.D. in particle physics, a characteristic he shares with the author.

This is the story of a young husband and wife who, it is easy to see, are a bit of a mismatch: Nora is creative, messy, and outgoing, while our unnamed narrator is mathematical, precise, introverted, and somewhat pessimistic. His current position is chronically at risk, but she’s unenthusiastic about moving from Italy to Switzerland so that he can accept a prestigious research grant. Then, when Nora’s pregnancy turns high-risk and she is confined to months of bed rest, Mrs. A. enters their lives.

At first they are a bit put-upon by the way she takes over operations, but it isn’t long before they come to depend upon her.

“By the time Emanuele was born, we were too spoiled to give up her attentions. Mrs. A. went from being Nora’s nurse to being our son’s nanny, as if there were a natural continuity between the two occupations, and although she had not cared for a newborn baby before that, she immediately proved to have very clear ideas — much clearer than ours — on what to do and what not to do.”

Mrs. A. has a primary hand in raising Emanuele. She is often mistaken for his grandmother, and the two dote upon each other. He imitates his parents in calling Mrs. A. “Babette,” after the title character from the Karen Blixen story “Babette’s Feast,” because of how central food is to her place in the family. When, after eight years, Mrs. A. suddenly announces her plan to stop coming each day simply because she is tired, the household goes into a tailspin.

The story begins at the end, with Mrs. A’s death, but from there goes forward and back to reveal the physical and emotional details that allow us to see deeply into these lives. In Like Family, Giordano gives in to a tendency to tell rather than to show, but the telling is often so lovely that it’s hard to complain. For example: “In the long run, every love needs someone to witness and acknowledge it, to validate it, or it may turn out to be just a mirage. Without her gaze we felt at risk.”

And, as he gazes on his sleeping wife: “In the end we are almost never happy or unhappy because of what happens to us; we are one or the other depending on the humor that flows inside us, and hers is molten silver: the whitest of metals, the best conductor, and the most merciless reflector. The consolation of knowing that she is so strong mixes with the fear of not being truly indispensable to her, with the suspicion that I might be sucking the life out of her, like a kind of gigantic parasite.”

It seems unfair, to those of us with a smaller talent set, that a guy with a Ph.D. in something as arcane as particle physics could write as beautifully, as tenderly as Giordano often does. On the other hand, we can just be grateful and keep reading.

Book Review: The Big Green Tent

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 12 November 2015.

Though not exactly a household name in the U.S., Ludmila Ulitskaya is perhaps the leading contemporary voice in Russian literature today, and her fiction has won a long list of prestigious awards in addition to racking up huge sales in her home country. She is a scientist by training, having worked in genetics and biochemistry before being fired in the 1960s for dissidence (a coworker reported her to the KGB for retyping a banned book).

Lucky for all of us that Ulitskaya came to writing late, and that she published her first works after the fall of the Soviet Union; her writing would certainly have gotten her in much the same life-shattering trouble with the Soviet authorities as the characters in her most recent novel, The Big Green Tent, a story focused on the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s.

There are many, many characters under the Tent, all interconnected in one way or another. Readers need to pay attention to understand where in the chronology they might be at any point in the story, since the narrative shifts back, forth, sideways, and around. Minor characters crop up again in unexpected places, creating new connections. There seems at most one degree of separation between any two characters.

We meet the primary three when they are schoolboys in the early 1950s, drawn together by their shared place at the bottom of the school’s social hierarchy. There is Ilya, the tall, brash cut-up; tiny, well-dressed Sanya, already an accomplished pianist in primary school; and Mikha, the redheaded, nearsighted Jewish orphan who joins them in fifth grade.

Two people help them weather the storms of primary school: Sanya’s beloved and cultured grandmother, Anna Alexandrovna, and the new teacher, Victor Yulievich, a one-armed war veteran who recites poetry at the beginning of each class and inspires students to become the LORLs — Lovers of Russian Literature.

There is also Olga, naively unaware of how privileged she is as the daughter of two dutiful party functionaries blessed with a private apartment, a dacha, two chauffeurs, and plenty of food delivered to their door. Upright and honest to a fault, she believes that she is truly part of the collective until, at university, Ilya opens her eyes to the greater truth of Soviet life.

By this time, Ilya has turned an early talent for photography and personal networking into a dangerous career of chronic dissidence. He produces and distributes samizdat, underground literature painstakingly transcribed by hand or typewriter and passed person-to-person and often smuggled out to the West or, in the case of tamizdat, smuggled into the country from the West (transcribing tamizdat is what got Ulitskaya arrested and fired in real life). This kind of quiet, homegrown rebellion — as well as the courage it takes and the price it exacts — is at the heart of the story.

The power of Ulitskaya’s book comes from the accumulation of details that illustrates what happens to people living in a totalitarian society, of the daily humiliations, indignities, and outright nightmares they endure. There is a suffocatingly narrow path each citizen must hew to stay in the state’s good graces, and even that is not always enough.

As a Jew, Mikha has limited options available to him. Nonetheless, he finds happiness working at a school for the deaf, until he makes the slip of talking about the wrong books with the wrong person. Both his job and his opportunity for graduate school evaporate, and he becomes unemployable. After he starts working with some of Ilya’s samizdat friends to produce a magazine, Mikha is arrested and spends three years in prison. A subsequent misstep of helping an old friend means that he’ll be sent back to prison unless he leaves Russia, which to him is untenable.

This is what life becomes for the three friends: Ilya knows he must leave the country and so he does, though it destroys his family. Sanya is desperate to leave but, as a Russian, he isn’t allowed. Mikha is invited — then encouraged, then harangued — to leave but refuses. Eventually he realizes there is one final choice open to him.

Tent is an homage to 19th- and 20th-century Russian writers, all of whom suffered to a lesser or greater degree at the hands of the state, whether pre- or post-Revolution, for their work. It is also a damning indictment of life under the Soviet/KGB boot heel where, for example, “The Soviet authorities persecuted the unemployed, including those whom they themselves banned from official employment.”

Finally, it offers a portrait of how people learn to work within the constraints placed on their existence. Anna Alexandrovna practically creates a Paris salon, with a wide-ranging collection of books and music, a piano, artwork, and a crystal chandelier, all of which are held in the state-assigned apartment partitioned from a reception hall of a former mansion, where 28 residents share a single kitchen and one toilet.

Last year, Ulitskaya wrote an article in The Guardian decrying the ever-shrinking right to free speech under the current Russian regime. She was also profiled in The New Yorker, in which the article’s author, Masha Gessen, stated with certainty, “Soon enough, your books will be banned in [Russia],” and Ulitskaya agreed, saying, “I’ll be eaten before it’s all over,” then adds, “But maybe I won’t live long enough to see that happen.”

How chilling to know that Russia’s foremost author, known worldwide, has every expectation that she is destined either to live under that resurrected boot heel or die to avoid it. The Big Green Tent is not historical fiction, at all.

Book Review: The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories

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This review was originally published in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 30 October 2015.

What is it about the spare beauty of Anthony Marra’s prose that makes us want to laugh and cry at the same time? His sentences are so deceptively simple and yet so layered with meaning that a paragraph, and then a page, and then a story leave a reader somewhat breathless and a little shell-shocked. Stack the interleaving stories on top of each other and it’s almost too much to take in.

This was the revelatory experience so many of us had in discovering his debut novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, and here is Marra again as he offers us the luminous, fully intertwined stories of his second book, The Tsar of Love and Techno. Each story is written to stand on its own, but the magic is revealed in how he has fitted them all together.

In Constellation, Marra introduced us to the bombed-out wreckage of Chechnya through two wars. Tsar bring us back again, in and around Grozny, designated by the United Nations as “the most devastated city on earth,” where reclaimed office doors from destroyed buildings are used to repave the streets because every cement truck is hijacked before it can reach a crater to fill it in.

There is also the frozen Arctic hinterland of Kirovsk, originally a forced-labor camp, which is chronically in the running for the title of world’s most-polluted city because of the Twelve Apostles — the dozen belching smokestacks of the nickel-smelting operation that blot out the sky — and Lake Mercury, “a man-made lake of industrial runoff whose silvered waters are so veined with exotic chemicals they lap against the gravel-pocked banks year-round, unfrozen even in February.”

The landscape of Marra’s work is an indelible part of the stories he tells and in so many ways inseparable from the characters he creates. Here, though, a landscape is very literally part of the story: “Empty Pasture in Afternoon,” a landscape painted by Chechen artist Pyotr Zakharov in 1843, together with the physical landscape depicted in it, serve as two of the many threads binding together the stories of Tsar.

(It’s instructive to understand how much of the backdrop of these stories is nonfiction, and a glance at Marra’s list of references underscores the point. Many of Zakharov’s works were destroyed or badly damaged when the Grozny art museum was shelled, and work continues on their restoration.)

The opening tale, “The Leopard,” is set in 1937 Leningrad and thrusts us immediately into the through-the-looking-glass insanity of Stalin’s communist purification. His purges are in full frenzy, as we learn from lead artistic censor Roman Osipovich Markin, whose workload of erasing enemies of the state from photos and paintings is growing exponentially in a country where the slightest suspected infraction earns the accused a prison sentence, deportation, or death.

Markin is practicing his own quiet subversion by replacing the faces of those he expunges with that of his brother, Vaska, whose arrest and death Markin failed to forestall. What causes Markin’s eventual downfall is not his very first insertion of Vaska’s face into that same Zakharov painting, or any of the hundreds of subsequent images he paints of Vaska from boyhood to old age. Rather, it is his refusal to fully excise the image of a ballet dancer he does not even know.

If “The Leopard” sets the stage for everything that comes after, the second story, “Granddaughters,” serves as a kind of Greek chorus to bridge the space between then and now, to explain what we need to know, and to introduce, directly or indirectly, virtually every other character in the collection.

From it, we grasp that Markin’s dancer was the prima ballerina for the Kirov before her arrest and deportation to Kirovsk, but what’s important is that she becomes “Galina’s grandmother.” Galina — beautiful, shrewd, lucky enough to make it big — is at the center of everything, though we only ever see her reflected through the lens of other characters.

With Marra, every detail holds meaning. The only question is: For which of these characters will we most ache, for whose redemption most yearn? It might be Ruslan, the former deputy director of the destroyed art museum, whose home and family are part of Zakharov’s ruined landscape. Possibly it is Vaska’s grandson Sergei, whose mere existence is Markin’s great triumph, but who fails even at becoming a proper drug addict.

If we listened to that Greek chorus of six breezily disloyal lifelong friends bound together in the wasteland of Kirovsk, we’d be prepared to dismiss Galina’s sweetheart, Kolya, as a two-bit hoodlum/soldier on whom she’s squandering herself. Don’t be fooled. Kolya is the one.

In fact, almost every character holds surprising depth, even Kolya’s big, lunk-headed fellow soldier, Danilo, who is forced to confront the lie that has sustained him and his entire army unit for ages. “His red eyes radiate substratum pain, an ache so deep and unyielding that Kolya witnesses it as a geologic event.” Every one of these characters is fully human. They are pricked and they bleed.

It’s also somehow disconcerting to be reminded that not everyone sees Vladimir Putin as a bad guy. “When the KGB man won the presidency in 2000, we celebrated…When our children read aloud that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century we nodded and told them, ‘This is the truth.’”

Truth, as always, depends entirely on perspective, and — fortunately or unfortunately — each of us holds one uniquely our own. The truth here is that Anthony Marra has once again delivered us a gift of heartbreaking warmth, humor, and humanity. Accept this gift.

Historical Novels Review Fall Issue

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The following reviews first appeared in the November 2015 online and print editions of the Historical Novels Review, published by the Historical Novel Society.

THE WAKE, Paul Kingsnorth, Graywolf

Screen Shot 2015-11-15 at 5.49.09 PM Paul Kingsnorth’s challenging, heavily researched first novel The Wake is written in what he describes as a “shadow tongue” of Old English, or, as it would be in the language of the book, “sceado tunge.” He includes a brief glossary for the words that have no relation to modern English (such as “fugol” for “bird”), but generally the reader must learn to translate as the story unfolds. The raw human tragedy that the damaged and damaging narrator Buccmaster of Holland relates makes the searing story clear enough.

Buccmaster is an important man in his world, as he often reminds those around him: a free tenant farmer with land, a large house, people who work for him, and a seat in local government. All that changes when William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, invades, and Normans sweep through the countryside in an orgy of pillaging, burning, raping, and killing. Buccmaster loses everything, including his family–everything, that is, except for a misplaced sense of his own superiority as a leader and as the one chosen to cast out the foreign invaders. For him, this includes Christianity, which he sees as a false, foreign religion that rules by fear of damnation. Buccmaster looks instead to the old gods of England, as his grandfather taught him. They speak to him, goading him to act, telling him to trust no one, and he listens too well.

If, as it has been said, the past is a foreign country, it’s worth learning the language to make this visit.

CROOKED, Austin Grossman, Mulholland

Screen Shot 2015-11-28 at 7.48.01 PM Take Richard Nixon’s well-documented political biography and much-analyzed personal foibles, throw in some good old-fashioned Cold War spy craft, and finish it off with an odd mix of National Treasure and Men in Black, and that approximates what Austin Grossman serves up in his latest novel. His inspiration, apparently, is that no one has ever definitively explained the motive behind the Watergate break-in. That Grossman is a video game designer (Tomb Raider, Deus Ex) hints at what to expect.

Decidedly, this is Dick Nixon as you’ve never seen him before, along with a whole cast of historical figures playing wildly against type. In particular, there’s Ike Eisenhower as Wizard-in-Chief, an other-worldly Henry Kissinger—“no one liked to be within two feet of him”, and with good reason—and not-so-dutiful wife Pat, whom Nixon, as first-person narrator, describes as even more misunderstood than he. Though this is wildly alternative history, Grossman effectively captures the zeitgeist of the late ´40s and early ´50s as the Cold War blossomed and the atomic age and its doomsday implications hung like a mushroom cloud over everything. The premise here is that the world is filled with demonic beasts and various extraterrestrials, that the New World population was allowed to survive based on black magic and shadowy deals with this other populace, that every U.S. president has had more or less knowledge and mastery of these forces, and finally that part of the Cold War arms race was the competition to control and deploy these unpleasant forces. While Grossman offers glimpses of these sinister projects, he never gives us the big reveal; he only alludes to the showdown Nixon orchestrates to allow mankind to continue, paid for with his own downfall. Nixon tells us that he’s seen the devil, but we never do. What a letdown.

THE BIG GREEN TENT, Ludmila Ulitskaya (translated by Polly Gannon), Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Screen Shot 2015-11-28 at 7.58.44 PM Ludmila Ulitskaya’s 500-plus page, classically Russian novel The Big Green Tent offers a tale of three schoolboys drawn together by their shared status as outcasts—intelligent, artistic, regular targets of the schoolyard bullies—who become lifelong friends. This is a richly layered story that manages to be both intimate and grand in scale simultaneously.

When Ulitskaya appears to complete the entire life story of two of the main characters within the first 150 pages of the book, a reader is tempted to wonder where else she is going to take the story. The answer is that she circles back again and again to explore different elements of her characters’ lives, to expose more details and to follow various trajectories of actions and events that in turn spawn other trajectories. Each chapter or section, as tangential to the central action as it may appear to be, eventually ties back to the main characters and reveals yet another facet of the expanding story. Permeating every aspect of the novel—in both mundane details and in seismic, life-changing events—is the calculated, heartless, and systematic brutality of the Soviet regime, which retains its character well beyond the death of Stalin and the rise of Khrushchev, an era the characters misread as offering a respite from the cultural chokehold of Stalin. Each of the main characters is tripped up in one way or another by the system, and must choose a path forward. Sharing a love of Russia and a hatred of the regime, some would do anything to leave and others would do anything to stay—anything, of course, but accept the mindless, unquestioning obedience the Soviet system demands of them.