Book Review: Eric Klinenberg, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (Penguin: 2012)

This review originally appeared in the Dec/Jan 2012 issue of BookForum, available here.

Americans love our icons of individuality — Henry David Thoreau, The Lone Ranger, Carrie Bradshaw — almost as much as we wish all the single people would just settle down and get married. As sociologist Eric Klinenberg writes in Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, “Americans have never fully embraced individualism, and we remain deeply skeptical of its excesses.” [8] Nevertheless, we’d better start getting OK with it–because as Klinenberg shows, this country is getting more single by the minute. The facts are astonishing. “The majority of all American adults are single,” he writes. “The typical American will spend more of his or her adult life unmarried than married, and for much of this time he or she will live alone.” [4] And as he goes on to note, “people who live alone make up 28 percent of all U.S. households.” [5] Adults living alone are “more common than the nuclear family, the multigenerational family, and the roommate or group home.” [5] OK, fine: We’re single. So why are we so insecure about it?

Like his predecessors who have mined the social fallout of the country’s individualist streak–writers such as David Reisman (The Lonely Crowd, 1950) and Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone,1995)–Klinenberg wants to expose a previously underreported fact of American existence, something so huge we’ve come to take it for granted. As he writes, “living alone is something that each person or family experiences as the most private of matters, when in fact is its an increasingly common condition and deserves to be treated as a subject of great political significance.” [6] When it does become the topic of debate, living alone is usually presented as “an unmitigated social problem, a sign of narcissism, fragmentation, and diminished public life.” [6] But Klinenberg maintains that none of these judgments are necessarily true.

Klinenberg begins with a basic admission: This book is about the middle and upper classes. And this concession by itself tells us something important about living alone: People do it as soon as they can afford to. So please do not throw the book (or this review) on the floor when I tell you the first chapter begins at a championship adult kickball game in Brooklyn. Klinenberg starts with the Non-Committals (imagine the sociologist’s joy: that’s the actual name of the winning kickball team) because here we have one of his target groups: people in their twenties and thirties who “have come to view living alone as a key part of the transition to adulthood.” [31] What happened to all the “boomerang” kids, those foot-shuffling college grads who live in their parents’ basements? The data show that there are fewer slackers today than ever before. [31] Maybe they’re just more visible because of the kickball.

Going Solo really gets interesting when Klinenberg addresses a seemingly inevitable fork in the path of American singletons (as he calls them): That moment, usually sometime in their 30s, when living alone morphs from a symbol of status (signifying financial security, confidence, independence) to a symbol of pathos (signifying loneliness, unattractiveness, an inability to find a romantic partner). Klinenberg delves into the challenges of living alone, starting with discrimination at work, as in the case of Sherri, who witnessed married coworkers getting raises as management continued to deny her any pay increases. When she confronted her boss, he told her “You wear all these clothes, and you’re always out, and we figured you don’t need it.” [74]

Sherri quit. But the bigger problem is one that is most Americans under 50 will recognize, single or not. “The work world makes extraordinary claims on the lives of young workers. Give yourself to business during the prime of your life, or give up your hope of achieving real success.” [61] It’s a brutal fact with very real consequences. In the “free agent” [61] labor market that now governs our working life, he writes, “the twenties and early thirties is precisely not the time to get married and have a family.” [61]

Going Solo is most compelling in moments like this, when Klinenberg makes connections between public policy, the law, and the rational choices human beings make in response to economic reality. Why should we be surprised that 50 year-old women are first-time mothers (as featured on the cover of a recent New York magazine with the headline “Is She Just Too Old for This?”), when those women had to devote what had previously been thought of as their “childbearing years” to securing  a financial foothold in an increasingly cutthroat economy?

Klinenberg also spends time on the topic of aging alone (today, one in three Americans over sixty-five lives alone, and that number increases in higher age brackets) [157]. His previous book, the award-winning Heat Wave, investigated the deaths of more than 700 Chicagoans — mostly single — who perished in the city’s 1995 heat wave. A city investigator called them “a secret society of people living alone” [23] and as Klinenberg demonstrated, in many cases their social isolation led to their deaths. Here, Klinenberg explores how American society might make the challenge of aging alone less lonely and more humane. He cites Congress’s passage of the 2006 Lifespan Respite Care Act, which allocates money to help pay for community-based caregiving for the elderly and the disabled [228] as a positive, though inadequate step forward. Quality assisted living facilities are also in high demand. “If as it’s often alleged, the baby boomers are a distinctively self-interested generation,” he writes, “they may well use their political clout to promote housing programs that benefit them first.” [229] If it happens, this could be the Me Generation’s most valuable legacy.

And regardless of one’s age demographic, living alone creates certain challenges for society. “What if, instead of indulging the social reformer’s fantasy that we would all just be better off together,” Klinenberg writes, “we accepted the fact that living alone is a fundamental feature of modern societies and we simply did more to shield those who go solo from the main hazards of the condition?” [221] Indeed, “what if” public policy could be created in response to “facts,” as he suggests, rather than irrational fears? It would be preferable, of course. But it’s so much easier to keep rooting for Carrie to marry Mr. Big.

Buy the EFFIE PERINE ebook on Amazon by clicking here.

Yes, that beautiful artwork you see (by genius artist Dan Brereton, author/illustrator of the beloved “Nocturnals” comic books, among many others) is the cover of my new novel, EFFIE PERINE, which is finally available as an e-book for Kindle on Amazon.com today! It will soon be available in all the other major formats and ebook outlets (Nook, Kobo, iBooks, etc.) so stay tuned for that announcement.

EFFIE is available at a low initial price of $0.99 as a special thank-you to family and friends who buy the book and post their reviews on Amazon. Reviews are the major way books get sold on Amazon, so please consider posting something, no matter how short and sweet it is — thank you!

Synopsis:
Effie Perine comes to San Francisco on the hunt for work and her long-lost father, so when she’s offered a job at a detective agency she figures it’s a two-birds-one-stone situation. But when her strange new boss invites her into a world of hardboiled mystery, the line between real life and film noir fantasy becomes as foggy as a San Francisco summer — and Effie’s future happiness is at stake.

A novel of mystery and love as well as a coming-of-age story, Effie Perine crosses the genres of fantasy, mystery, and metafiction. Effie Perine tells the story of a young woman just starting out in the world. Raised in rural Northern California, Effie’s mission to find her lost father gives her a sense of purpose as she tries to find her bearings in the big city. But she soon discovers that San Francisco’s familiar landmarks might not be as solid as they first appear. As she’s seduced by her ever-shifting surroundings, Effie starts to wonder if she’s losing the ability to separate dreams from reality.

Readers of slipstream fiction and fantasy will appreciate Effie’s journey through changing historical eras, while mystery fans will enjoy meeting their favorite hardboiled types in wholly new settings. For everyone who ever wondered, Who was Effie Perine?… here is your answer.

My review of THE SWERVE: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt (W.W. Norton: 2011) appeared in The Boston Globe’s Sunday Books section on September 25, 2011:

At the center of Stephen Greenblatt’s dazzling new book, “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern,’’ is a hero: Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459 CE), “[a] short, genial, cannily alert man [who] reached out one day, took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied.’’ It may not sound heroic, but “behind that one moment was the arrest and imprisonment of a pope, the burning of heretics, and a great culturewide explosion of interest in pagan antiquity . . . if he had had an intimation of the forces he was unleashing, he might have thought twice about drawing so explosive a work out of the darkness in which it slept.’’

The work in question was a remote German monastery’s copy of “On the Nature of Things,’’ the epic philosophical poem written by Lucretius ca. 50 BCE . Extravagant as it sounds, Greenblatt argues that Lucretius’s poem is the forgotten keystone in the foundation of western civilization, helping to inspire an entire culture’s rebellion “against the constraints that centuries had constructed against curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material world, [and] the claims of the body.’’ Lucretius, in other words, helped create modernity. By the end of this erudite and entertaining book – no, by the second chapter – he will have you convinced that it’s true.

Greenblatt has written an intellectually invigorating, nonfiction version of a Dan Brown-like mystery-in-the-archives thriller, right down to the suppression of a great work of radical art by the early Christian church. In the first chapter, titled “The Book Hunter,’’ we’re introduced to our detective, Poggio. He’s on the trail of lost knowledge, following clues and his intuition to find the book that “changed the landscape of the world.’’ In its gumshoe mode, “The Swerve’’ races through the inner sanctums of corrupt popes, crumbling monasteries, and a shockingly violent gathering of Catholic bishops at the 1413 Council of Constance. Once the manuscript is discovered, Greenblatt explores all the ways Lucretius’s poem influenced the modern world. As Poggio departs center stage, “The Swerve’’ leaves the mystery genre behind and becomes a vibrant history of ideas, tracing Lucretian thought from the Renaissance through the Declaration of Independence, Darwinism, and Einsteinian physics.

But still there remains a deep mystery to be solved. How exactly does culture change? Specifically, how was it possible “for a whole culture to turn away from reading and writing’’ and then, centuries later, turn back again? Much has been written (and disputed) about just how dark the so-called Dark Ages were, but in Greenblatt’s view they were very dark indeed. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Greenblatt writes, the Christian church undertook “the difficult project of making what appeared simply sane and natural – the ordinary impulses of all sentient creatures – seem like the enemy of the truth.’’ In contrast to Lucretius’s Epicurean-inspired assertion that the highest goal of life is to seek pleasure and avoid pain, Christians “understood that pleasure is a code name for vice.’’ Yet by the 15th century a few educated Florentines began to look around at the ruins of ancient Rome – the crumbling yet still functional aqueducts, the Forum, which was now used for grazing sheep – and wondered what had gone wrong. “The spectacle of the world,’’ Poggio lamented: “how is it fallen! . . . How defaced!’’ A thousand years of Christianity had not improved life on earth. Then again, it hadn’t really tried. After all, redemption was only available after death in heaven, if you were lucky enough to get in. For a humanist like Poggio, who had already been exposed to life-affirming classical philosophies, that was too long to wait.

Lucretius’s “On the Nature of Things’’ offered something radically different. The “Lucretian challenge,’’ as Greenblatt calls it, rests on a basic principle known as atomism, one of the foundations of Epicurean philosophy. Man was not formed in the image of his Creator: There is no Creator. Instead, everything, including man, is made of tiny particles called atoms, “the seeds of things,’’ Lucretius explained, which are eternal, indestructible, and infinite. They come together in infinite varieties, with a natural balance between creation and destruction, which goes on forever. Two thousand years later the philosopher George Santayana would call this “the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon.’’ While gods may exist, they do not control or even care about the lives of humans. “[T]he fact that it is not all about us and our fate . . . is, Lucretius insisted, the good news.’’ Free of superstition, man could fix his efforts on that which he could actually control: the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Of course Lucretius knew nothing of Darwinian evolution nor of molecular biology nor of quantum physics. Astoundingly, all these modern scientific theories would prove him right.

“The Swerve’’ is the story of Poggio’s heroic rediscovery of a book that has shaped human consciousness for over 2,000 years. It is a thrilling, suspenseful tale that left this reader inspired and full of questions about the ongoing project known as human civilization. Although Lucretius was neither an atheist nor a hedonist, his views were anathema to Christian leaders so they were censored and nearly forgotten. But thanks to the subversive and strenuous efforts of one determined 15th-century scholar, Lucretius’s gift to humanity was saved. Greenblatt reminds us that Thomas Jefferson, who owned eight copies of Lucretius’s “On the Nature of Things,’’ described himself as “an Epicurean,’’ someone who rejected superstition in favor of “sensation, of matter and motion, [on which] we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.’’ “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’’ certainly reflects an Epicurean philosophy; perhaps, thanks to Greenblatt’s heroic rediscovery, Lucretius can lead us into the light of reason once again.

I had the pleasure of reviewing Yannick Murphy’s new novel, THE CALL, in last week’s Boston Globe. You can read it on Boston.com or below…

The Call, by Yannick Murphy (Harper Perennial, 223 pages).

Many readers disdain high-concept novels for good reason: they’re usually more fun to write than to read. But if they give it a chance, most readers will find that Yannick Murphy’s remarkable new novel THE CALL succeeds where others fail. The concept? This novel is written in the format of a daily journal; to be precise, the call log belonging to a veterinarian in a small New England town.

CALL: A horse with lameness.
ACTION: Drove to farm. The poorest farm I have seen so far… The owner’s boy sat on the rusted seat of a tractor that did not look like it could move, but grew up from the ground where it was, pushing itself through the dirt and had come to rest…Tall grass grew up high alongside its tires, past the height of the wheel wells.
RESULT: After I felt the horse’s leg, I told the owner about the heat. I told her she would do well to stand the horse’s leg in a bucket of ice water. The woman shook her head. “No ice,” she said…
WHAT I SAID TO THE WIFE IN BED: Am I getting grayer? The children told me I have more gray here…
WHAT THE WIFE SAID: No, you don’t have more gray than usual. It’s just that the children are taller. They can see the gray they have never been able to see before.
WHAT THE NIGHT SAID: Coyotes rule.

THE CALL is a portrait of a family, Dr. David Appleton, his wife Jen, and their three children: Sam (12), Sarah (10), and Mia (6). When Jen says, early in the book, “Be careful hunting, David. He’s still so young. You only have one son, you know,” we can tell something terrible is coming.

“CALL: My son. I can’t get him fast enough… I can see the holes in the cloth of his coat, and the goose feathers sticking out from them, wavering in the wind.”

When Sam is shot by an unseen hunter, he falls into a coma and the Appleton family feels everything that was once stable slip away. And yet… as much as David and Jen fret about Sam’s prognosis (“WHAT THE WIFE SAID I DID IN MY SLEEP: Cried.”), life in all its tiny details goes on. (“WHAT THE TRUCK IS TELLING ME: Check engine.”). As David makes his rounds to the horses with toothaches and pregnant goats his community comes into focus. Aging Dorothy, for instance, with her pet sheep Alice, who lives inside the house. The rich couple with their mansion and Great Dane. Jim Bushway, the careless farmhand who shoots “rock tiger” — chipmunks — and leaves them where they fall. With his son frozen in a coma each member of this small town becomes either a source of information about his attacker or a suspect. The person calling the Appleton’s home and then hanging up, over and over, isn’t helping matters.

What will become of the wounded son? Why is David seeing spaceships in the night sky? And who is calling him and what does he want to say? This is a suspenseful novel; the format demands that much be left unsaid, so the reader is constantly looking for clues wherever they turn up. Just how suspicious is that careless farmhand? Will the tension in the Appletons’ marriage finally explode? (“WHAT MY WIFE CAN DO: Make me angrier than I have ever been.”). Although most of these questions are answered, they’re not ultimately the point of this novel, because no matter how tragic Sam’s condition, daily life still includes things like lunch, and sick cows, and swim meets. “WHAT I THINK WE MUST BE: Crazy to spend an entire weekend waiting in the gym of a technical school, but I know years from now we will look back and say these were good times, maybe the best because we were with our children all the time.”

The truthful evocation of family is the real triumph of THE CALL. “When we are alone we like to tell each other how wonderful our children are, but it is something we do not tell others,” David says, describing a conversation with his wife. “We tell each other with abandon, things we have lately seen in our children that prove how smart and wonderful and cute they are… it’s cathartic, as if we need every once in a while to do this bragging, or so that we remind each other of how right it was for us to have married one another.” There is much love in this novel, and just as much truth about the pain and pleasure of family life. “What is taking place is as layered as something in nature,” writes Murphy of an encounter between two of her characters. She could well be describing her own clever and beautiful book.

My review of Richard White’s RAILROADED: Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (W.W. Norton, May 2011) appeared in the Boston Globe on 5 June 2011. You can read it there or just keep looking down… there it is.

RAILROADED by Richard White

“Overbuilt, prone to bankruptcy and receivership, wretchedly managed, politically corrupt, environmentally harmful, and financially wasteful, these corporations nonetheless helped create a world where private success often came from luck, fortunate timing, and state intervention. Profit arose more from financial markets and insider contracts than from” [505] — can you guess the final word in this sentence? “Financial products,” perhaps, a la Lehman Brothers? “Mortgage-backed securities,” as in the case of AIG? Or is this all about Enron and its fraudulent energy business? No, the final word in this sentence is “transportation:” we’re talking about the transcontinental railroads of the late nineteenth century. [505] Welcome to a scathing and wonderful new book about American business and its crimes over a hundred years ago: Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. Stanford University professor Richard White, one of our country’s greatest historians, has written a book that will entertain and outrage its readers with scenes of corporate greed and mismanagement and the federal bailouts that enabled them. Even as the railroads went bankrupt, their owners grew rich — all subsidized by the United States government. Think of Railroaded as Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker, set in a Gilded Age just as fantastically sick as the bond-trading offices of Salomon Brothers in the newly-deregulated 1980s.

White’s argument is simple yet surprising. It was not the success of the transcontinental railroads that transformed America: it was their failure. These railroads – which, incidentally, were not even transcontinental (they stopped at the Missouri River and let the existing railroads take over from there to the Atlantic), were poorly conceived and often terribly executed. When they failed – and almost all eventually did — they brought the entire economy down with them, as in the case of the Panic (and resulting multi-year depression) of 1873 which was, in White’s words, “Above all… a railroad depression.” [83] The sources of their failure — incompetence and greed — were obscured from the public. The Central Pacific Railroad’s Annual Report for 1873 assured its investors that its prospects were “never brighter” even as it decided to pay its debts with money earmarked for taxes and workers’ wages. [86] White is straightforward in his assessment of the Central Pacific’s policy: “everyone agreed to lie.” [86]

White is not arguing that transcontinental railroads should never have been built; instead he asks, “Why were so many of these railroads built at at a time when there was so little need of them?” [xxiv] Yes, building railroads through land not yet settled by Euro-Americans (though long home to Native Americans) did bring new American farms and towns into existence, but many of those settlements lay in climate zones good for railroads but terrible for farmers. Thousands of bankruptcies and broken dreams followed. White uses the two Dakotas, North and South, as a case study of how the American West might have developed without federally-subsidized railroads. The subsidized transcontinentals ran only through North Dakota, where the railroad corporations were given public lands for free as a “right of way” and then charged settlers to live on them. In South Dakota, “the government aided settlers, not railroads, while securing a more efficient railroad network and denser settlement… Farmers paid less for land [in South Dakota], settled the better lands more quickly, and avoided marginal arid lands.” [486] That’s how capitalism is supposed to work, isn’t it: business emerges to meet demand? Not when it came to the transcontinentals. White doesn’t disagree with the idea that “railroads defined the age” [xxii] of an emerging modern America, but he has a different explanation for that belief: They were, like so much in the Gilded Age, corrupt.

Don’t pick up Railroaded expecting a romance of steam engines, lonesome whistles blowing, or poetic vistas glimpsed from the sliding doors of a boxcar. This is a story about the dark arts of accounting and the seemingly paradoxical fact that the transcontinental railroads were simultaneously “unsuccessful and powerful.” [505] Don’t look for a Darwinian model of business, either. White demonstrates “how the unsuccessful and the incompetent not only survived but prospered and became powerful… it was the triumph of the unfit, whose survival demanded the intervention of the state, which the corporations themselves corrupted.” [505]

The phrase “Too big to fail” irked most Americans when we heard it used to explain why taxpayers had to pay for the greed and incompetence of Wall Street in the early 2000s. “What were the results of a world dominated by large, inept, but powerful failures whose influence could not be avoided?” [505] White asks. In Railroaded, he provides answers to the nineteenth-century version of the same problem that plagues us today. Yet here we are again.

MY NEW AMERICAN LIFE by Francine Prose

Svetlana Kirilenko made me love The Sopranos. You remember Svetlana: the peroxided, chain-smoking, one-legged immigrant Russian home care nurse who became Tony Soprano’s lover. It wasn’t just her charmingly unsentimental personality; I liked the fact that she appeared in the series at all. Svetlana was exactly the type of person we come into contact with every day yet rarely see dramatized. Now Francine Prose puts a Svetlana-esque character at the center of her novel, My New American Life. Her Lula is Albanian, not Russian, and she’s a nanny, not a nurse, but she’s got a lot in common with Svetlana – which may not be a good thing, in the end.

On the novel’s very first page Lula refers to Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlen’s 1961 tale of a human born on Mars who returns to Earth and finds it a hostile home. Putting an immigrant at the center of a novel has always been a good strategy for seeing one’s native culture in a new light. Lula toils illegally as a waitress in lower Manhattan along with a staff of other illegal immigrants: Dunia, her fellow Albanian, Eduardo the Mexican busboy, and a bulimic model from Belarus. After work, “everyone got drunk and bet on who’d get deported first.” [9]

Lula is twenty-six, pretty, and her “visa problem was keeping her up at night.” [10] She answers a Craigslist ad for a nanny and is surprised to find that Mister Stanley is on the level, not like the guy who taught her English back in Albania in exchange for sex. What a country. Mister Stanley hires her to watch his teenaged son Zeke after school and in return she not only gets paid but he will also help get her U.S. citizenship. “The Balkans had no expression for ‘win-win situation,’” Lula muses. “in the Balkans they said, No problem, and the translation was, You’re fucked.” [17]

Lula’s glass-half-empty outlook on life serves as the novel’s central joke: she expects the worst, which never arrives. That’s the odd thing about the book: nothing terrible ever happens to her – undertipping is as bad as it gets. It’s puzzling, but somehow all the real drama ensues just out of frame: we hear secondhand that Eduardo the busboy gets deported. Lula’s friend Dunia prostitutes herself to a closeted, rich plastic surgeon: “The shopping is better [in America],” Dunia says. “The sex is worse.” [184], but this is all told after the fact. Lula, in contrast, lives in a bubble of suburban safety, surrounded by well-meaning Americans trying to help her. Her boss pays her well, she’s represented by the most famous immigration lawyer in New York City, and the only hint of danger comes from a brief encounter with her fellow Albanians.

This is a story about one woman’s inner world, and whether the outer world can change it. That’s the problem: not much changes. Lula’s pessimism can be endearing – “Paranoia was Balkan for common sense,” [127] Lula says – but it’s not original. The “Balkan shrug” [115] of resignation she employs so often is a familiar trope, an accurate portrayal of a certain kind of post-Communist apathy, no doubt, but not especially revealing. When Lula muses in Chapter Four that “[i]t was so hard to live among strangers with whom you shared no history, no knowledge of a way of life that went back and back,” [100], the passage suggests that Prose will explore this drama more deeply as the book goes on, but that doesn’t happen. A list of some of the non-events Lula experiences include: a college tour that’s a disaster – but only for the teenaged son (we hear about it secondhand); Lula’s lawyer making an inappropriate advance – or not (Lula isn’t sure); Lula being forced to hide a gangster’s gun and while, according to Chekhovian logic, the gun is eventually fired, no one is hurt and Lula’s is never held responsible; Lula being attracted to a seemingly dangerous man, but their relationship is never consummated and the extent of his criminality is never revealed. This picaresque tale of Lula’s non-adventures in suburbia leave us wondering if the main fact of Lula’s new life is its lack of excitement.

Prose makes a point of referencing The Sopranos throughout the novel, which only begs an uncomfortable question: what has Prose revealed about the inner lives of ethnic Europeans adapting to life in the Garden State that The Sopranos, an epic series spanning nearly the entire first decade of this century and described more than once as “novelistic,” didn’t already? It may not seem like a fair comparison – The Sopranos is generally recognized as a masterpiece — but then, isn’t an actual novel supposed to have the advantage in this area? Surely the genre is specially designed for this purpose, to burrow deep inside the psyches of its characters in a way no other narrative genre can touch. As likable as Lula is, ultimately we know her about as well as we knew one-legged Svetlana Kirilenko, a minor character who appeared in just a few episodes. The time seems ripe for a great novel about immigration, yet after spending three hundred pages immersed in her new American life, we leave Lula (we never learn her surname) with little more than a Balkan shrug.

My review of Joyce Carol Oates’s A WIDOW’S STORY in the Boston Globe. Bragging rights: pretty sure mine is the only review that wedges in a reference to MARLEY AND ME.

Books reviewed in this essay: Joyce Carol Oates, A WIDOW’S STORY; David Shields and Bradford Morrow, editors, THE INEVITABLE; Antonia Fraser, MUST YOU GO?; Joan Didion, THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING

Three years ago I saw a billboard for the movie Marley & Me and I suddenly understood everything about the American attitude toward death. You’d recognize the poster: a happy Owen Wilson hugging a happy Jennifer Aniston, the couple bound together by the leash of their adorably naughty puppy, Marley. Except the billboard I drove by that day had been vandalized by someone with a can of blood-red spray paint. There, slapped across the faces of all three carefree blonds were three cold words: THE DOG DIES.

Shocking! Of course, the vandal had merely stated the obvious, as anyone who has ever paid money to see a tearjerking film about man’s best friend knows. The dog always dies. But don’t tell! In this country we have a special phrase, the verbal counterpart to a flashing yellow traffic light that flares when we get too close to such a transgression: Spoiler alert.

There’s only a single true ending to any story about man (or dog), assuming it goes on long enough, and THE DOG DIES is just one particularly harsh way of putting it. At the end of life is death. This is not news, it’s just a spoiler. Nevertheless, seeing the fate of Marley up there in red scrawl was a shock. We Americans – myself included – don’t want to find out what happens at the end. Acknowledging the end would just… spoil it.

“Death is the most obvious – common – banal fact of life and yet,” as Joyce Carol Oates writes in her new memoir, A Widow’s Story, “how to speak of it..?” [233] Oates’s book is the spoiler alert writ large: it begins with death and doesn’t budge for the next 400 pages. A harsh, often excruciating tale of loss, regret, fury, and love, A Widow’s Story is aptly titled. Oates wrote this book not as a memorial to her husband, the editor Raymond Smith, but as a testament to the suffering of widows and of anyone left behind when a loved one dies. Hers is the latest in a string of wives’ memoirs of their husbands’ deaths over the past several years. Antonia Fraser’s Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking provide illuminating counterpoint to the question Oates – and everyone who has faced such a loss – must ask: “I can’t do this alone. And yet – what is the option? The Widow is one who has discovered that there is no option.” [74] The only thing to do is to contemplate it. And for a writer, that means exploring death through words.

The challenge of writing about death is obvious. “Of death, mortals are absolutely ignorant,” Lynne Tillman writes in a new essay collection entitled The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death, edited by David Shields and Bradford Morrow. “The dead, fortunately, are beyond caring.” [282] One contributor to The Inevitable does claim an unusual perspective on the matter at hand: horror novelist Peter Straub, who had a near-death experience when struck by a car as a seven year-old. Reliving this memory as an adult, though, offers little of use to the living. “One of the few things I did understand [about the near-death experience] was that I was not supposed to be able to imagine or describe it.” [221]. So much for a report from the front lines. When it comes to death, describing what it feels like, what it means, to lose someone we love is the only privilege the living are granted.

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it,” [188] writes Joan Didion, “… the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.” [189] Joyce Carol Oates concurs, writing “Do not think that grief is pure, solemn, austere and ‘elevated.’…Think of crude coarse gravel that hurts to walk on… Think of towel dispensers when they have broken and there is nothing to wipe your hands on except already-used badly soiled towels.” [111] If Oates’s metaphors seem out of place or extreme, perhaps you (like me) have never experienced the loss she has. Didion recalls “despising” the “whining” memoir of widowhood written by Dylan Thomas’s wife Caitlin, when she read it at age twenty-two. [198] Now, nearly fifty years later and a widow herself, Didion reconsiders. “Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.” [26] As Oates writes: “This is not Mozart’s Requiem Mass. Think instead Spike Jones, those unfunny ‘classical’ music jokes involving tubas.” [111]

These books are major spoiler alerts. Not only are we all going to die, they advise us, but those we love will die, too, possibly right in front of us. Or maybe when we’re not looking. Either way it’s going to hurt. A strong theme across these books is the appalling lack of effective ritual we twenty-first century moderns have devised to cope with death. “Our culture is skittish of mourning, impatient and awkward with bereavement’s uneven process,” writes Melissa Pritchard in The Inevitable. “The overall message I had gotten from society… was make haste.” [138] Didion finds comfort in the straightforward advice of Emily Post, ca.1922, whose instructions regarding where to sit at a funeral, how to feed a widow, and what to expect from the bereaved speak from “a world in which mourning was still recognized, allowed, not hidden from view.” [60] Cultures with extravagant outward-facing rituals of mourning, whether in contemporary India or Victorian England, may strike today’s American readers as embarrassing, but give them this: they seem to work. So many mourners in these pages suffer from the absence of ritual. After her husband’s death Oates is showered with phone calls, emails, and letters from friends. These she can appreciate. But the “Sympathy Gift Baskets” she could do without. “Why are people sending me these things?” Oates wonders. “Do they imagine that grief will be assuaged by chocolate-covered truffles, pate de foie gras, pepperoni sausages?” [107] The kind intentions of the senders are evident to her, of course, but the uselessness, the waste, of such an outpouring ultimately disgusts her. Surely as a culture we can collectively come up with something better than silently sending goody bags, or as Oates coins the custom, engaging in “the siege of trash?” [109]

Perhaps those with a faith in religion have it easier (and perhaps not) but none of the writers in these books profess to believe in an afterlife, though Didion’s yearlong period of “magical thinking” did allow her a brief fantasy that her late husband could enjoy a heavenly meal somewhere with the recently-deceased Julia Child. For these secular folk, “afterlife” denotes the life that one must go one leading after losing a loved one, a “posthumous life – my life after Ray,” as Oates puts it. [170] Antonia Fraser’s memoir is a book about life, not death – it ends when Harold Pinter dies. Yet it is bookended by two love poems about death that Pinter wrote for his wife. The last, written in 2007, read:

I shall miss you so much when I’m dead
The loveliest of smiles
The softness of your body in our bed
My everlasting bride
Remember that when I’m dead
You are forever alive in my heart and in my head
[313]

Considering that he was an outspoken atheist, it’s surprising to find Pinter indulging in a fantasy of an emotional afterlife. Pinter was dying of cancer when he wrote it, so perhaps he was motivated by the hope of lessening his wife’s pain. Perhaps. “In the graveyard, we all lie down together,” Robin Hemley reminds us in The Inevitable, offering the solace, if you can call it that, of all humanity’s ultimate earthbound reunion. [209] Surprisingly, at the end of her dark memoir Oates finds a thread of light, acknowledging the “small treasured things” that make life as a widow bearable. “This is my life now. Absurd but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd.” [415] Life may be unpredictable, but death is not. Oops – spoiler alert.

It was inevitable, wasn’t it? The yoga memoir. Despite apprehension, I thought Claire Dederer’s POSER was great. I reviewed it in the Boston Globe a few days back. You can read the review at their website or below.

Don’t forget to breathe.

Claire Dederer, POSER: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses
Review by Buzzy Jackson

This book is going to be big. Claire Dederer manages to pack everything into this mom-oir: childbirth, money, schools, social class, career anxiety, parenting, sex, friendship, marriage, and yes, yoga. And don’t forget Dansko clogs – “always, always, [the] clogs… ” [31] Thousands of American mothers share Dederer’s clog-shod experience as they glance up from their darling, maddening new babies to find themselves in a new sphere: hip, progressive, trying-really-hard-to-do-it-right mom-world. POSER is written for them.
“We were a generation of hollow-eyed women, chasing virtue. We, the mothers of North Seattle, were consumed with trying to do everything right… cook organic food, buy expensive wooden toys… Also, don’t forget to recycle.” [19] Dederer and her husband are freelance writers trying to make their creative careers mesh with the demands of raising two young children. Despite their creativity they find themselves sinking into traditional roles, “he was Earner, I was Mother, like characters in some phenomenally boring Ionesco play.” [33] As a writer, however, Dederer is never boring. POSER achieves a yoga-like balance between pain and humor. While she may skewer the pretentions of her fellow moms and yoginis, she never lets herself off the hook, either. Her honest descriptions of her own fears and shortcomings as a parent, wife, and daughter are at the center of this book. Dederer first attempts yoga to relieve an aching back (thrown out while breastfeeding, natch) but is soon seduced, despite her skepticism and aversion to Tibetan prayer flags, by the calming effect it has on her mind. “I didn’t think of it as an escape; I just felt the relief of moving and not thinking. There was also this relief: It was a room I didn’t have to clean.” [82]
Dederer occasionally lapses into Erma-Bombeck-visits-the-ashram mode but in fact her experience with yoga teaches her something profound: how to recognize and face her own pain. “Discomfort, anxiety, dread – they had been lurking there all along, and I had been avoiding them, rushing away from them.” [231] Her acknowledgment of this pain forces her to realize something surprising: “In response to my 1970s mom” – who ditched Dederer’s father for a younger, hipper man and joined the counterculture post-divorce – “I had become a 1950s housewife.” [231] Dederer’s examination of this paradox is one of the most rewarding sections of the book. Her attitude toward her mother is both compassionate – “To be a young mother at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the ‘70s was to have missed it… They, like everyone else, wanted freedom and meaning.” [57] – and angry – “What happens… when a generation of children grows up with parents who want to be free, and who think that freedom is movement?” [58] For Dederer and her brother, what happened was a desire “to be good, all the time. We would stay married, no matter what, and drink organic milk.” [60] But her quest for total control over her family life, for “an uninterrupted story” in which “no one leaves… [and] everyone sticks together and follows the rules” [232] is nearly as destructive as her mother’s desire to have it all, 1970s-style. Yoga helps her recognize, if not solve, this central issue.
From the bendier-than-thou instructors to the more-locavore-than-thou preschool parents, Claire Dederer captures everyone in her Dankso world with humanity and gentle wit. So many readers will relate to her story; not just the long minutes spent in downward dog or the hours lost wandering the aisles of Whole Foods, but the years of pondering the mysteries of family relationships, past and present. And the fleeting moments spent staying, as the yogis say, focused on the breath.

If it’s December 27th where you are, you’ve probably seen enough plastic in the past week to last, well forever (I think it lasts forever, anyway). Credit cards, American Girl dolls, race cars, bubble wrap, clamshell packaging… it’s all plastic, baby. So it seems an appropriate moment to assess our plastic culture.

My review of sociologist Laurie Essig’s new book, AMERICAN PLASTIC: Boob Jobs, Credit Cards, and Our Search for Perfection (Beacon Books: 2010) appeared in yesterday’s Boston Globe – you can read it at this link or below.

BOOK REVIEW: Laurie Essig, American Plastic: Boob Jobs, Credit Cards, and Our Quest for Perfection

“I just want to say one word to you. Just one word… plastics.” When Mr. McGuire offers this advice, if you can call it that, to young Benjamin Braddock in the 1967 film The Graduate, is it possible he had “boob jobs, credit cards, and our quest for perfection” in mind? “[O]ne cannot understand America,” Laurie Essig writes, “without understanding plastic.” [x] Like Mr. McGuire, Essig believes that understanding plastic is the key to understanding contemporary America.
Sound absurd, doesn’t it? But in this fast-paced book, sociologist Laurie Essig makes a strong case for the idea that plastic – both in the form of money (e.g., credit cards and other forms of easy credit) and in the form of surgery (e.g., boob jobs, nose jobs, etc.), has become Americans’ favorite problem-solving tool, whether they can afford it or not. “We wish the world were different. We wish we were different. The solution, it seems, is plastic.”[xiii]
Essig’s style is breezy but her message is as pointed as a syringe full of Botox: the American Dream is a myth and our addiction to plastic conspires in obscuring that fact. “Our desire for plastic is the result of massive shifts in our culture and our economy that affect us all. Plastic money covered up the fact that most of us were getting poorer while a few of us were getting richer.” [xiii] Hers is at heart an argument about political economy. Essig’s approach adds a new facet to a growing argument about the complicated web of consumerism, health, and the American ethos of individualism expressed in recent books such as Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America and Judith Warner’s Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. As Essig argues, America’s cult of individualism “grew up alongside capitalism to free the state from responsibility to the individual and make the individual see failure as a personal, not a structural, problem.” [25] How all this relates to boob jobs is surprisingly straightforward: “This ideology says that we are responsible for ourselves, and that we all have a chance to make it if we just work hard enough. In this case, the hard work of beauty becomes something we all must do, and if we don’t, then we deserve our low pay, or lack of healthcare, or lonely, unmarried futures.” [25] If at first the reader finds this line of logic hard to take seriously, just spend some time with the many women Essig interviewed for the book (women make up 90 percent of the cosmetic surgery patients [xix]) who explain that they spent thousands of dollars on bigger boobs, smaller noses, and flatter stomachs because they hoped that by looking better they would be less likely to be fired from their jobs. Less likely to be dumped by their husbands. Less likely to hate themselves. It’s a sad story.
And a common one. Essig’s strength is her humor, combined with real compassion for and identification with the average American woman who finds it hard to love her own body. She coins a term that’s stayed with me since I finished the book: “ordinary ugliness.” This is the state of being, well, normal: “stretch marks, cellulite, wrinkles, the downward pull of gravity, the realization that our bodies are not and can never be perfect.” [84] Ordinary ugliness has always been with us; it’s just plastic surgery that’s new. Essig notes that when her mother reached late middle age, she “believed it was acceptable to ‘let herself go.’” – to stop dyeing her hair, pulling on a girdle, and wearing uncomfortable shoes. “I don’t know at what age I can stop dying [sic] my hair or working out,” writes Essig, who is in her forties, “but it’s definitely not anytime soon, if ever.” [87] Of course, the next generation of American women – her daughters – started their “beauty work” earlier than their predecessors and will probably keep doing it into very old age. [87] Why? Because despite real advances in American women’s lives, women are still “trapped in a culture that insists happiness can only be obtained through the transformation of the body.” [159] That, plus the fact that we live in a world trying to sell us stuff, constantly. Essig can’t simply blame the media for the problem; as she observes, many of the women who cite the media as the root of their dissatisfaction with their own appearance go on to get unaffordable plastic surgery anyway. As one cosmetic surgery patient explained, ruefully, “The hard part is to distinguish between what I want and what society wants.” [166]
In the past decade the popularity of plastic surgery (measured in the number of procedures) has increased by 465 percent. [xiii] Most of those procedures were paid for on credit. [xvii] You may read these statistics and scoff, having never gone in for “a little work” yourself, but as Essig notes, even if you’ve never considered plastic surgery, “chances are you’ve assumed debt” – whether in the pursuit of a house, nicer furniture, or more education – “in order to create a more perfect future.” [xiii] As the Reagan administration dissolved banking regulations in the 1980s and revised the tax code to benefit the richest among us, increasingly poorer working Americans turned to credit to finance their version of the American Dream. And we’re still doing it. Guess what, Benjamin Braddock? Mr. McGuire was right.

November was a good month for Shaking the Family Tree. Although a snowstorm kept me away from a scheduled reading at the Steamboat Springs Library, I was able to hit the Denver JCC’s Book Festival as well as the San Gabriel JCC’s Book Festival in beautiful (and so not-snowy) Glendale, CA! I loved meeting those wonderful women who put on that event – thanks again to all who came out for it.

Colorado Public Radio (KCFR-Denver)’s Ryan Warner and I had a nice interview for his morning show, “Colorado Matters,” and you can listen to it here.

I’ve also seen a number of libraries, from Dallas to Portland, Oregon, recommending SFT for their holiday readers. Thanks, United States of America! I love you!
xo