Roy Miller's Blog, page 247
March 13, 2017
‘Game of Thrones’ Season 7 Will Debut in July
From left: Peter Dinklage, Nathalie Emmanuel and Emilia Clarke in “Game of Thrones.”
Credit
HBO
On Thursday “Game of Thrones” fans learned the information they have awaited for months: Season 7 of the show will arrive on July 16. But first they had to spend over an hour watching ice melt.
In a memorably misguided marketing gimmick, HBO revealed the premiere date in a Facebook Live video but made fans work for it, concealing the information in a block of ice and asking viewers to comment “Fire” as a torch heated it.
Me waiting for the ICE to melt on #GameofThrones Facebook Page. #GOTs7 pic.twitter.com/W38O5txZFK
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Commentator (@commentatorship)
March 9, 2017
Fans watched ice melt for more than 15 minutes, with “Game of Thrones” stars like Isaac Hempstead Wright and Lena Headey occasionally appearing in the video to urge them to comment. Then the video stopped working.
We will be back and ready for more fire soon. #GoTS7
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Game Of Thrones (@GameOfThrones)
March 9, 2017
It returned after a few minutes and then malfunctioned again, a cycle it would repeat several times. Finally at around 3:09 p.m., after over an hour of stops, starts and countless derisive tweets, the date was revealed.
All told, the ice gimmick lasted longer than an average episode of “Game of Thrones.”
Whatever mockery the show inspired on Thursday, all will no doubt be forgiven by July. Over six seasons, the dense fantasy saga, based on novels by George R.R. Martin, evolved from a big ticket gamble into one of the most celebrated pop culture franchises in the world. The series, with an average of 10.6 million viewers per episode in Season 6, has become the most watched ever for HBO. (The network says actual viewing is more than twice that number when alternate platforms are included.)
The announcement of the Season 7 premiere date is bittersweet for fans, who are eager for the show’s return but aware that it will be the beginning of the end. The creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have confirmed that there will only be 13 more episodes of the show, split over two abbreviated seasons — seven this year, six in 2018. The first six seasons had 10 episodes each.
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“Game of Thrones” seasons have historically debuted in the spring, but the production pushed back the shooting schedule to allow for colder weather at the show’s outdoor locations. (Winter, long promised in the story, is finally arriving.)
This means that the show, which has won the most Emmy Awards of any scripted series in history, including best drama in each of the last two years, will not qualify for the awards in 2017. (May 31 is the cutoff date for 2017 Emmy eligibility.)
Last season wrapped up (spoiler alert) with the cruel but cagey Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) seated on the Iron Throne, with other disparate elements of the sprawling story beginning to converge for a final (sure-to-be-violent) clash.
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On Thursday HBO also posted a trailer for Season 7:
The great war is here. #GoTS7 premieres 7.16. pic.twitter.com/1Jna10kNuQ
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Game Of Thrones (@GameOfThrones)
March 9, 2017
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The post ‘Game of Thrones’ Season 7 Will Debut in July appeared first on Art of Conversation.
When Your New York Apartment Has a Secret Literary Past
It was about three years ago now that my boyfriend and I met the broker of our current apartment. On that December morning, we walked down 84th Street, scanning the building numbers until we found our destination. I felt mildly disappointed as the broker brought us inside the old walk-up building. There was no charming stoop or elegant façade, nothing to distinguish it from the outside. The building itself seemed to recede behind the commercial enterprises on the ground floor: barbershop, dry cleaner, piano bar. This is a building where one glances up to the higher floors and thinks: oh, right, people actually live here.
I should have been used to the sensation by that point. Perhaps because New York has so little space to go around, there is a fierce delineation between the public and private. I’d visit a friend’s apartment for the first time and be depressed by the building’s exterior, the hallways with bad lighting and flaking paint and shabby floors, wondering what it was like to call this place a home. But it always changed when the apartment door itself swung open. The lighting was warm, something in the kitchen smelled good. A separate world was revealed, one created with love and attention, a life carefully built within an indifferent structure.
That morning three years ago, the broker led us up three flights of stairs and opened the door. The apartment was undergoing renovation, but right away we could see the potential. It was bigger than our current place, and it got better light. The kitchen would be brand-new. The rent was reasonable. It was an easy decision.
Before we signed the paperwork and sent in our deposit, we did the requisite Googling—having learned the hard way—to make sure there was no history of bed bugs at that address. The report came back clean, but there was also the question of the piano bar on the first floor of the building. The broker and the super and the landlord had assured us it would be fine. We searched the name of the bar, plus “noise complaint,” and sure enough, there were no results from 311 or other agencies. But the search did return an odd result: an excerpt from the novel Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem.
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I had read and loved the novel a few years prior, when it was published in 2009. The excerpt that Google surfaced came from the beginning of the book. It introduces one of the main characters, Perkus Tooth, and describes his apartment building—which was, in fact, our apartment building:
His apartment was on East 84th Street, six blocks from mine, in one of those anonymous warrens tucked behind innocuous storefronts, buildings without lobbies, let alone doormen. The shop downstairs, Brandy’s Piano Bar, was a corny-looking nightspot I could have passed a thousand times without once noticing. BRANDY’S CUSTOMERS, PLEASE RESPECT OUR NEIGHBORS! pleaded a small sign at the doorway, suggesting a whole tale of complaint calls to the police about noise and fumes. To live in Manhattan is to be persistently amazed at the worlds squirreled inside one another, the chaotic intricacy with which realms interleave, like those lines of television cable and fresh water and steam heat and outgoing sewage and telephone wire and whatever else which cohabit in the same intestinal holes that pavement-demolishing workmen periodically wrench open to the daylight and to our passing, disturbed glances. We only pretend to live on something as orderly as a grid. Waiting for Perkus Tooth’s door buzzer to sound and finding my way inside, I felt my interior map expand to allow for the reality of this place, the corridor floor’s lumpy checkerboard mosaic, the cloying citrus of the superintendent’s disinfectant oil, the bank of dented brass mailboxes, and the keening of a dog from behind an upstairs door, alerted to the buzzer and my scuffling bootheels.
I felt a delighted sense of recognition: the lemony smell of the newly mopped floors, the banged-up mailboxes. Those were about to become my floors, my mailboxes. What were the odds of this? The odds that this writer had decided to house his character in this completely unremarkable building, out of all the addresses available to him in New York City? I had thought we were moving somewhere new only to discover that I had, in fact, spent many hours there already. This confirmed it—we were meant to live here! I had read Chronic City while I was still in college, but now that I lived in New York, I appreciated anew the accuracy of that line: “To live in Manhattan is to be persistently amazed at the worlds squirreled inside one another.” It captured that feeling of visiting a friend’s apartment for the first time: finding it so much more particular, so much more specific than anything you could have imagined.
I told my friends about this weird coincidence. Those who had read the book found it interesting, but I stopped telling the story before long. I didn’t really know what to make of it. It was probably just that: a coincidence. The author had probably walked past this building one day and deemed it good enough. In any case, what we had taken to be a positive omen quickly dissolved in the face of bigger challenges.
I’m not naïve. I know there is no such thing as the perfect apartment in New York. Even if you think you’ve found it, on your first night or third night or tenth night, you will realize that something is wrong. A chain-smoking neighbor, a refrigerator that makes strange noises, a sticky window, a missing-in-action super, a persistent mouse. In a place this crowded and dense, there will always be someone else bumping up against you. But some problems are bigger than others. The trick is figuring out which flaws are worth living with and which will drive you to a breaking point.
In the new apartment on 84th Street, we feared we were getting close to that point. The piano bar on the first floor: of course we could hear the music. How willfully optimistic to think otherwise. That first night in the apartment, our mattress still on the floor, we lay wide awake until 3 in the morning, the strains of “Piano Man” and “Tiny Dancer” echoing up through the walls. It was unbelievably loud, like the band was in our living room. “It can’t be like this every night, right?” we asked ourselves. (Maybe I am naïve.) But good old Brandy’s Piano Bar had been open since 1979, every day of the year except Christmas, and it wasn’t going anywhere. There was no question it would outlast us. So we coped, the way everyone in Manhattan does. We bought white noise machines and fans and ear plugs. We adapted.
I know there is no such thing as the perfect apartment in New York. Even if you think you’ve found it, on your first night or third night or tenth night, you will realize that something is wrong.
Our uncertainty about the apartment lasted for several months. We figured we’d stay for the year, and then move. But one day, we realized that we were doing okay. In fact, we were happy there. It was, after a period of adjustment, the right fit. We’d been right to grit our teeth through those loud nights. Our relationship to this apartment felt like a mature one, one that required us to ask ourselves what we really valued. Eventually, we stopped hearing the music altogether.
After several months in the new apartment, I ran into a friend of mine. She remarked that she’d been coming to our building a lot lately—but not to visit us. Instead, she was there for the secret bookstore on the second floor.
The what?! I asked.
She explained. It was an unlisted address, a word-of-mouth operation. The occupant of the apartment was a bookseller, who, after losing the space for his previous bookstore, had started selling books out of the apartment. It wasn’t remotely legal, running a retail business out of a residence, so he kept it quiet. People found out from friends, or contacted the bookseller through his website, and pressed an unmarked buzzer to get in. It was usually open on Thursdays and Saturdays, and sometimes for poetry readings on Tuesdays.
It is amazing what the mind can explain away, the fuzzy logic that fills a vacuum. I had noticed the comings and goings from this apartment, the clusters of people on the second floor. I assumed whoever lived there was particularly social. Someone who had a lot of dinner parties and cocktail parties. I never thought there was anything unusual about it.
I tagged along the next time my friend went, descending two flights of stairs from my apartment, the stairs I trudged up and down every single day. What followed was like magic, like something out of a children’s book, or a dream: discovering the false back to the wardrobe, the room you forgot existed. The apartment door opened into a narrow hallway, which led to a warren of rooms. The floor was creaky and uneven, and covered in old carpets. Jazz played on the stereo, and a small air conditioner hummed in the window. There were books everywhere: stacked in teetering piles on tables, shelved two deep. There were sections of poetry, biography, pulpy paperbacks, oversized art books, rare first editions tucked into a side room. On a table near the entrance, there was a bottle of whiskey on offer, a stack of cups and a bucket of ice.
I was enchanted. This was a version of heaven, two floors below my apartment. There is a romantic notion of the independent bookseller, one that most publishing people are prone to, even as we know how hard it is, how slim the margins, how high the rents. But still, a bookstore is a lighthouse: the guide through bad weather, the welcoming glow at the end of a long journey. A bookstore is the place where a book is opened and, therefore, where it is born. It is often the best part of the neighborhood. And here I had found one within my own building.
I got to chatting with Michael, the owner of the bookstore. The alliance felt easy, because we had mutual things to gripe about: the music from Brandy’s, our strange neighbors. My happiness at discovering the bookstore was intensified by the chance way I’d wound up here. What if I hadn’t run into my friend, or what if she hadn’t mentioned it? But I was here. This strange building kept yielding surprises. I started to explain the first surprise to Michael, the Chronic City connection, how funny that coincidence of addresses was. The conversation must have gone something like this:
Me: “And, so, isn’t that a weird coincidence?”
Him: “No. Jonathan based it on the apartment right next door.”
Me: “What?”
Him: “My dog was the dog in the book.”
Me: “What?!”
There is a longer version of this story, but the short version is that it wasn’t a coincidence at all. Jonathan Lethem was an old and dear friend of Michael’s. When he was younger, he’d worked in one of Michael’s bookstores. He’d spent many days here, in this building. It wasn’t just an address plucked from the grid. The fictional scrim that I’d imagined floating above our real lives was, in fact, tethered to reality by sturdy ropes.
The world of the novel had sprung from this very place: the floor I was standing on, the air I was breathing. Michael showed me a picture of his dog, the inspiration for the fictional dog Ava, and told me about his friend, the inspiration for the fictional character Biller. He showed me the kitchen of the apartment next door, which was the model for Perkus Tooth’s apartment in the book, down to the airshaft window and linoleum floor. I had already explained the coincidence to myself, had tucked it away in a corner of my mind, the same way I explained the bustle of the second-floor apartment by imagining constant dinner parties. What else had I failed to imagine? I climbed the stairs home that night, delighted that the wardrobe really did lead to Narnia.
A few weeks later, Jonathan Lethem was in town for a book festival. He dropped by the bookstore that Saturday night. Michael introduced me to him, and I was at last able to close the loop. I told him how much I loved the book, how uncanny it was to share an address with a beloved fictional character. He was perfectly kind and gracious about it. But, for me, there was something eerie about the experience. He was the writer, the creator, the sturdiest connection between fiction and reality. The coincidence, in the end, wasn’t the presence of a fictional character in my building. It was the presence of the writer who had created the character. What had charmed me initially hadn’t disappeared, but it had shifted.
I knew this would make a good story one day. It’s a weird one, even by New York standards. And now I had my ending, didn’t I? But what bothered me was that I didn’t know how to tell it—what the point of it was. Maybe it’s about the mysteries of the city, the facades that conceal worlds behind them, the dolls that we don’t realize are matroyshka dolls. Maybe it’s a story about trade-offs and unlikely compensations. If we hadn’t stuck through the agony of Brandy’s, we never would have discovered the bookstore. Maybe it’s a story about hope, that even when gentrification defines the era, when Dorothy Parker and Max Perkins and the grand bookstores on Fifth Avenue are a vanished dream, there is still a small rebuttal to be found.
But I suspect the story may be simpler than that. I visited the bookstore for the first time in September 2014, and by July 2015 it had closed. The eviction notice wasn’t a surprise; Michael had been expecting it for years. If anyone in the building was unaware of the bookstore, those final weeks would have been the tip-off. Our address became the site of a literary pilgrimage. People flooded in for a long wave of goodbyes. There were articles and tributes to Michael and the bookstore. The secret had been mine for only a few months.
And then one night, returning home, I found a crew of skinny young men and women on the sidewalk, sweating in the hot summer night and smoking cigarettes as they took a break from moving duties. When I passed the second floor, outside Michael’s door, there were boxes and furniture waiting to be carted downstairs. It was like that for a few days, and then it was quiet. No more visitors, no more boxes, no more bookstore. Just another empty apartment that will soon be gutted and renovated and home to tenants willing to pay a higher price, tenants who might be aware of what came before them, but who might not. In the end, it may be the most ordinary story—one about change.
In thinking about this story, I find myself thinking about density, and how that affects a person’s relationship to a place. When the buildings are higher and apartments are smaller, when lives stack atop one another like Lego blocks, it increases a person’s exposure to change. I remember the diagram my science teacher used to illustrate the difference between solid and liquid and gas states. In a gas state, there are fewer molecules, and they are free to zoom around, oblivious of their neighbors. But in a solid state, there are more molecules, and they are packed tightly together. I imagine each of those molecules as a person within the solid state that is New York City. With a tiny radius there is more life, more turnover, more change.
Before we lived on 84th Street, we lived on 77th Street. It’s a difference of seven blocks, half a mile, a ten-minute walk. And yet, for the dislocation I felt, we might as well have moved across the state. Every part of our daily routine changed in that short move. We had a new subway stop, a new drycleaner, a new drugstore, a new coffee shop, a new grocery store, a new parade of faces. There were people whom I’d seen on a daily basis for years, but one day I moved seven blocks north, and I never saw them again.
This, I know, is a common occurrence for New Yorkers. It’s one of those convoluted feelings for which there ought to be a German word: homesickness for a place that is within spitting distance. It’s only possible in a place of density, like New York. In a place where the options are limited, like a small town, one’s routine is resilient. You move half a mile away, and you keep going to the same grocery store, because there aren’t a dozen other grocery stores between your old house and your new house. It seems silly, and seven blocks seems like nothing, until you stop to consider how much life is packed within those blocks.
When I occasionally walk down 77th Street, past our old apartment, that convoluted feeling returns to me. Part of it is nostalgia, remembering everything that happened there. Part of it is regret for not appreciating it more: our scrabbly but wonderful backyard, the quiet street, the diner on the corner. Part of it is curiosity: does the nice guy still work at the drycleaner? Is that three-legged corgi still around? But most of it is a keen sense of time passing. The truth is that we could probably move back to that street, maybe even back to our building. But we wouldn’t do that, because the place isn’t exactly what I miss.
It’s one of those convoluted feelings for which there ought to be a German word: homesickness for a place that is within spitting distance.
The longing flows in one direction. Don’t you miss me? I think in a moment of indulgence, but of course my absence goes unnoticed. I was surprised, though I shouldn’t have been, by how strange it was to return to my college campus for the first time after graduation. There was no evidence of my ever having been there. The bed I’d slept in mere months ago was now occupied by someone who didn’t know my name. This happens even faster in a city like New York. Returning to an old and familiar place brings the memories rushing back—memories impossibly vivid and as specific as fingerprints: the hot chocolate with whipped cream at the diner, the soapy smell of the iron at the dry cleaner, the Godfather soundtrack playing in the Italian grocery store on Sunday afternoon—but they are still just memories. I am keenly aware that when I am thinking about those things, I am also thinking about a former version of myself experiencing those things.
In some places, perhaps you can trick yourself into thinking that certain things will endure. The quaint sleepiness of a small town, a farm passed down through generations: if these things are lost, they come like a blow. Perhaps it is tempting to see the loss as preventable, as avoidable. But in New York, there is nothing to be done. One learns this very quickly. That apartment can’t remain empty; someone else has to move into it. The city doesn’t have room to let monuments remain monuments. When I walk to work in the morning through Central Park, every bench I pass is dedicated to a husband or a wife or a loved one, but often the plaques aren’t visible because someone else is sitting in front of them, a person alive and busy and ignorant of the dedication. I think of this, sometimes, when I walk past where we used to live. There are layers of the city that are visible only to an audience of one. Except to the very few, a bench erected in memory of a loved one is still just a bench.
I think that the best cure for writer’s block is to take a walk, to let one’s awareness sharpen itself against the world like a knife against a stone; to remember how the sunlight changes in the afternoon, or how imprecisely people talk, or how noise echoes through the street. My daily walk to work through Central Park does this: I find myself noticing new things, little things, no matter how many times I trace the same route. My awareness of the changing seasons has sharpened; not just the change, but the way the city absorbs the change. The trees along the Mall are my barometer. There was the day in March when green buds started to appear along the branches, despite the thin dusting of snow on the ground. Then there was the day in October when the trees dropped their colorful leaves all at once, like a grand bow at the end of a show. It was a lovely sight in the morning, the Mall carpeted with crunchy leaves, but by the time I walked home that night, the ground was covered in a thin orange paste, the leaves trampled and transformed by thousands of feet. They were no longer recognizable. I thought about the leaves I’d seen in the woods of rural New England, and how they would remain essentially undisturbed for months. The winter would cover them in rain and snow, but come spring they would be revealed again. With quiet and stillness and open space, something can remain itself for a long time. But in New York City, even in just a few hours, a thing can become something else entirely.
This, I think, is part of the romance. It’s why writers will always write books about New York, and readers will always read them. The city is never static, not even for one day. There is heartbreak in this: old businesses pushed out by rent hikes, neighborhoods transformed by gentrification. But there can be consolation, too, to living in a city where density can conceal so much. There is what seems obvious about New York—the brash, ambitious city I thought I was moving to—but that is only the thinnest layer of ice atop a very deep lake. The city is changing constantly, and that change provides an opening.
We still live in the same building. It’s the apartment in which I have felt like a grown-up for the first time; the apartment in which I’ve begun to think, maybe we could actually live in this city forever. It’s the apartment in which I finished my first book—a book about, yes, New York. I think of how plain our building looks from the outside, how easy it is to miss the front door, sandwiched between Brandy’s and the drycleaners. And then I think of the bookstore, hidden in an apartment on the second floor, and of Chronic City, the novel that sprung from this ordinary-looking place. I think of how much I still don’t know about my neighbors. In my earliest days of living here, the city seemed to repel newcomers like me, and I heard that I was too late: I had missed the old New York, the real New York. But I think of how much I still walk by without noticing, and I keep my eyes open, knowing that the magic remains hidden unless you know where to look.
The post When Your New York Apartment Has a Secret Literary Past appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Bookstore News: March 13, 2017
Memorial for Minneapolis bookseller set; Tucson, a thriving book town; Bangor children's bookseller moves on; and more.
Memorial to Be Held for Gary Mazzone, Beloved Minneapolis Bookseller: Funeral services will be held in Minneapolis on March 18 for bookseller Gary Mazzone, the outreach coordinator and sales director at Magers & Quinn Books and a beloved fixture on the Twin Cities literary scene. Mazzone, 61, died of natural causes on Feb. 23.
Tucson Thrives as a Book Town: On the occasion of the annual Tucson Book Festival, Trudy Mills, co-owner of the city's Antigone Books, said, “The store’s doing better than it ever did."
Bangor Children's Bookseller Moves On: Cathy Anderson recently retired from The Briar Patch children's bookstore in Bangor to pursue traveling and other interests.
Vickie Williams, Owner of Seattle's LEM Bookstore, Dies: The bookseller who owner of the Life Enrichment Book Store, the only black-owned bookstore in Washington state, died last week and a friends set up a GoFundMe site to defray funeral costs and support the bookstore.
University of Puget Sound Bookseller Wins Aspen Award: Barbara Racine, director of University of Puget Sound Bookstore in Tacoma, Wash., won the the Aspen Award in recognition of her lifelong contributions to the bookselling industry by the National Association of College Stores (NACS).
The Colorado State University Bookstore has been named the country’s 2017 Collegiate Retailer of the Year by the NACS Foundation.
Jarir Bookstore Expands Chain in Saudi Arabia: Jarir Bookstore recently opened a new showroom in Medina, bringing the total number of stores the chain has the country to 39 — and 47 in total across Egypt and the Gulf States.
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A Boy Finds a Most Bizarre Creature in This Middle-Grade Novel
ME AND MARVIN GARDENS
By Amy Sarig King
243 pp. Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic. $16.99.
(Middle grade; ages 8 to 12)
“Their tales are full of sorcerers and ogres / Because their lives are,” the poet Randall Jarrell wrote in “Children Selecting Books in a Library.” No wonder fantasy books are popular with kids: Middle-grade readers, in particular, are not far removed from a time in their lives when the real and the fantastic were often indistinguishable — toddler meets light switch, to give just one example.
Therefore, the standard for the suspension of disbelief in children’s novels is both lower and more exacting. Young readers enter imaginary worlds eagerly and effortlessly. An invisible train platform accessible only by walking into a brick wall? No problem. But the jelly beans sold on that train better come in every flavor — every flavor, including earwax and sardine. These kinds of details buttress the sense of realness and wholeness in fantasy worlds.
Stories containing only a single fantastical element pose an authorial challenge: How to make the unreal real without the help of other fantasy minutiae. Amy Sarig King faces that challenge in “Me and Marvin Gardens,” her heartfelt middle-grade debut (she has written many acclaimed young adult novels as A.S. King).
King introduces us to the sixth grader Obe (pronounced OH-bee) Devlin and his rural Pennsylvania environs with a sure hand. The acreage once owned by Obe’s family (presumably white, with a mention of German-Irish ancestry) was sold off a bit at a time by his alcoholic great-grandfather, and is now being turned into housing developments. Phases 1 and 2 are complete, with Phase 3 creeping ever closer to Obe’s home.
The family has managed to hang on to a tiny parcel of land that includes Devlin Creek, Obe’s special place, where he discovers an unfamiliar animal: “His back end was dog, except for the nubby tail. His front end was porcine. . . . His hooves were weird because he had toes.”
Obe names the creature Marvin Gardens, after the Monopoly property. Marvin is slimy: Touching him is “like petting algae.” He eats plastic and produces toxic scat.
What will Obe do to protect Marvin from Phase 3? Like most young first-person narrators, Obe is self-aware and sensitive, with the portrayal of his interior life unusually nuanced. His concern and uncertainty both drive the plot and are the reason for the story’s success: The realness is contained within Obe himself. We believe him, so by extension, we believe his world — which includes an animal whose favorite food is milk-jug caps.
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Most chapters begin with the phrase “There was . . .” or “There were. . . .” Chapter 1: “There were mosquitoes”; Chapter 45: “There was science.” This strategy initially seemed to me a risky one: I’ve often asked writing students if they really want to start a chapter with two completely empty words. But I admire writers who intentionally use poetic technique to amplify prose. And that repetition is reinforced by occasional chapters titled identically “One Hundred Years Ago,” telling how Obe’s great-grandfather lost the family land. Like a poem or song with motif and chorus, all the repetition becomes another element propelling the story forward even as it explores the past.
A good children’s novel always contains opportunities for learning — which is not the same as didactic moralizing, since story takes precedence. Here readers can learn about land use, ecology and plastic; there are also subplots about bullying and consent. Most of the secondary characters are adroitly drawn — Obe’s mother and sister; a terrific teacher; two friends. Obe’s father is somewhat flatter, though he’s partly redeemed by his Monopoly obsession, which inspires the name of Obe’s animal friend.
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A final quibble: It strains credibility that Marvin Gardens, a peculiar and good-size animal unafraid of humans, is undiscovered until Obe happens on him. But as with any story, not just fantasies, we readers skip lightly over small cracks in the plot when the book’s world is constructed with such skill and passion that we can get lost in it, as we do along Devlin Creek.
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March 12, 2017
Picture Books That Deliver Eureka Moments
Badger brothers Tic and Tac are bored in “Laundry Day,” by Jessixa Bagley (“Boats for Papa”). They have built a fort, fished, and read all their books forward and backward. Then their mother asks, “Well, would you like to help me hang the laundry?” Their response is enthusiastic, so much so that she’s free to slip off to the market while they handle the clothesline. Only one problem. They run out of clean clothes.
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What follows is an act of exuberant excavation. The boys empty the house of all its contents, sacrificing utility, comfort and convenience to the joy of the clothesline, to the open air. They hang combs, alarm clocks, carrots and checkerboards, apple cores, roller skates, LPs, plungers and paintings. The vibrant array of objects is matched by the book’s brilliant color and the moments of delightful minutiae present in each illustration. This Marie Kondo-esque meditation on objects and their uses evolves into an exploration of the nature of play and work. On her return, the wise matriarch surrenders to her sons’ reinvention of laundry. Why resist? Why hold on to the labors we never wanted in the first place? The boys themselves, freshly bored, imagine the other domestic arenas where their riotous skills might be best put to use. Dinner?
“Tidy,” another badger book, this one created by Emily Gravett, reminds me of my onetime Brooklyn landlady. Returning home once, I entered the paved-over garden of her home. She spied a bunch of chard peeking out the top of my grocery bag. “Yick,” she said. “Green things.”
“Tidy’s” badger, unlike Tic and Tac, is an efficient fellow named Pete. He decides he needs to clean up the forest. Off-color blossoms are pruned while woodland animals are scrubbed. Explosive portraits of nature meet a disciplined hand, reverent of detail. Fallen leaves are bagged in plastic, and ultimately all the trees are removed so that a neat, thick layer of convenient concrete can be poured over all that icky mud. The horror is complete. “This forest is practically perfect,” Pete says. It resembles a parking lot. But soon he is tired and hungry and these woods are no longer a poor man’s overcoat. There are no bugs or worms to catch for dinner. The door to Pete’s cozy burrow is covered in cement.
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Pete raises a good question about the role of the oblivious disrupter. Where do dumb and discovery meet? Or how does dumb stop being dumb? Most poignantly here, in Pete’s brave, sad confession, one I wish we heard more often: “I have made a mistake.” Failure is the most tested tool of learning. While some mistakes of environmental destruction might take a bit longer to correct than those in picture books, Gravett leaves her reader content in a messy, happy, blissfully imperfect restored forest, filled with perfectly imperfect creatures.
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From “My Awesome Summer by P. Mantis.”
It is in this kind of forest that Paul Meisel’s “My Awesome Summer by P. Mantis” picks up, with illustrations that lead a reader into the large happenings of the smallest of worlds. This celebration of nature’s strangenesses and wild wonders is narrated by a hungry praying mantis, those creatures of such bright green intensity and surprising camouflage, spotting one can cause a temporary opening in the fabric of a day, a moment of pause in an otherwise hectic, distracted life.
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Meisel leads his reader through three seasons with this fascinating critter. Along the way, we confront confounding nature. “I’m hungry. Growing so fast!” our narrator says. “I ate one of my brothers. O.K., maybe two.” Between multiple (hysterical) acts of cannibalism, our narrator hides like a stick, sheds her skin, tricks predators, and eventually learns how to fly. She is humorously unapologetic — she is who she is, in all her wonder. And, she is hungry. As a reader learns much about this marvelous creature — for example, praying mantises are the only insects that can turn their heads from side to side — it is not hard to begin to wonder: What odd human behaviors might themselves boggle the mind of the majestic praying mantis?
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He comes in peace: from “Life on Mars.”We are a curiosity, and we are curious. Why are we here if not to explore the wonder of this world? Even if sometimes we do this by stumbling into and through our explorations. In Jon Agee’s “Life on Mars,” a young astronaut has made his way to the red planet. The appeal of these pages comes in the juxtaposition of the brightest reds and yellows against a space palette of subdued grays and black. We learn that our astronaut is looking for life and that he is considered “crazy” for doing so. “Nobody believes there is life on Mars. But I do.” His conviction in himself is hopeful. He’s brought chocolate cupcakes to aid in his search, a bit of bait, a gesture of friendship.
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But as the drabness of the planet and the critical voices back home overwhelm our hero with self-doubt, he fails to notice he’s being followed by a friendly-looking, large red Martian. As disappointment and doubt mount, he misplaces his box of cupcakes and his spaceship. It is in this darkest moment of feeling lost that our young astronaut at last spies a brilliant yellow flower growing in the gray. He is delighted. He has found life.
After scaling an oddly shaped red Martian, I mean, mountain, he’s reunited with his cupcake box and his spaceship. While he leaves the Martian unmet, we are made hopeful by fresh questions and mysteries about our ultimately unknowable and inexhaustibly interesting universe.
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Each of these four books invites us to be fearless with our faults and bold in our explorations, and to remember wonder is never withdrawn. Each may also serve to remind some readers of their Samuel Beckett, in case they have somehow forgotten the Irish absurdist’s refrain. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
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Why ‘The Outsiders’ Lives On: A Teenage Novel Turns 50
S.E. Hinton’s classic endures as teenagers continue to relate to its rebellious characters.
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Gothic Fiction – The New York Times
Under Rawblood’s roof, Mary Villarca flies into rages and stabs out her own eyes with a poker. (Found on the floor beside her, “the tip still glowed red.”) Her son, Alonso, becomes “addled with opiates,” and his daughter, Iris, the novel’s central narrator, impales him with his own hypodermic needle during a bloody fight. Even the family dog dies of “fear.” Alonso, once a budding immunologist like his idol and contemporary Pasteur, likens “her” to a disease. As he explains it, “she travels in our blood, passed down.” She is “a biological inheritance, as much as a spiritual one.”
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Blood-borne pathogens, both real and metaphoric, figure prominently in “Rawblood.” The most interesting chapters are set in the 1880s, a time when superstitions about the connection between physical and mental illness were giving way to the emergence of a “bright landscape of science.” If only “Rawblood” cohered around the notion of illness as metaphor. Instead, the narrative rambles off to sunny Italy, then back to misty England, where Iris, heeding a message her father sends her in a dream, sets Rawblood afire.
The novel is told from the perspectives of five characters: Iris Villarca, the last of the line; Charles Danforth, her maternal uncle; her mother, Meg Villarca; her grandmother, Mary Hopewell Villarca; and Tom Gilmore, a stableboy who serves as Iris’s romantic interest. Adding to the confusion, the timeline zigzags back and forth over the decades for no apparent reason. In the end, this multigenerational saga strains not only the storytelling talents of the author but the patience of the reader.
THE ROANOKE GIRLS
By Amy Engel
277 pp. Crown, $25.
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This first foray into adult fiction by a young adult novelist has a family tree worthy of Greek tragedy. Yates Roanoke, a Kansas oil baron and family patriarch, is a predator who has had sex with his sisters and female descendants, creating a monstrous genealogical heritage in which daughters might be nieces, sisters cousins and granddaughters actually daughters. As the narrative moves back and forth in time, the secrets of these tangled relationships are gradually revealed — most notably when Yates’s adult granddaughter Allegra goes missing and he summons home her cousin Lane, who left Roanoke as a teenager, to help in the search.
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As vile as Yates’s transgressions are, their repugnance pales in comparison to Engel’s portrayal of the Roanoke girls, who seem to crave his attention. Even Lane, the novel’s central narrator and seemingly the least emotionally scarred, fondly recalls the time when, as a teenager, she churned ice cream with Granddad as he gripped her thigh, his “pinkie slipping under the edge of my jean shorts.” Upon her return to Roanoke, Lane feels “dismayed by how much my body wants to keep moving in his direction, sit beside him, rest my head on his shoulder.” Worse, in a flashback chapter, Lane’s mother, Camilla, pictures her organs “turning black and rotten, even as she keened with pleasure” during a “dark, twisting horror show of love.”
The novel’s grotesquerie is somewhat mitigated by the banality of its prose. Characters’ eyes “wink,” “twinkle,” “sparkle,” “spark” with “mischief” and, somewhat alarmingly, “bounce.” Lane’s high school boyfriend, Cooper, with whom she rekindles a romance, has blond hair “darkened to the color of winter wheat” and a cigarette that “dangles negligently from the corner of his mouth.” When they meet, “his golden brown eyes study me with plenty of fire but very little warmth.”
A Gothic tale, contemporary bodice ripper, mystery story and supermarket tabloid feature rolled into one, “The Roanoke Girls” may be shocking in its premise, but ultimately it offers few surprises.
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A New Memoir From the Author of ‘Whip Smart’ Explores Her Family Origins
Melissa Febos
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Deborah Feingold
ABANDON ME
Memoirs
By Melissa Febos
308 pp. Bloomsbury. $26.
In “Abandon Me,” Melissa Febos explores, among other things, the legacy of her two fathers: her birth father, a Native American named Jon, with whom she reconnects over the course of the book, and the father who raised her, a sea captain she refers to simply as “the Captain.” It is not lost on her that both fathers come from and represent worlds many see as relics of history. “Eyes always widened when I told people that my father was a sea captain. Do those still exist?”
The subtitle of Febos’s book is “Memoirs,” perhaps in recognition of the way it circles back around different stories, weaving together an exploration of her origins with moments taken from her childhood, addiction, recovery and her work as a dominatrix (which was the subject of her first memoir, “Whip Smart”), before progressing through a self-destructive love affair. Yet even for those with a more conventional family history than hers, origin stories never really have one starting point. Think of the biographer’s recurring problem of how far back in a subject’s lineage to begin. Some of the most enjoyable parts of “Abandon Me” come when Febos explores her histories, weaving in tidbits like the popularity among Nantucket sea wives of the “ ‘he’s-at-home,’ an early ceramic dildo.”
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Less successful are the sections given over to Febos’s obsessive affair with a married woman named Amaia. As she recounts Amaia’s increasingly possessive behavior, we feel her pain but don’t see more than the familiar outlines of someone who loves a person she knows is bad for her, tries and repeatedly fails to leave before she finally does. Her digressions into texts ranging from Homer and Jung to Peter Jackson’s early film “Heavenly Creatures” are often fascinating, but they come to feel like attempts to make the affair stand in for more than what it wants to be, or to provide relief from its ultimate hollowness. There’s a reason many of the most powerful accounts of obsessive love, like Annie Ernaux’s “Simple Passion” and Marguerite Duras’s “The Lover,” are spare and stark in form: They deny us the same relief the obsessive lover is denied.
In a recent piece in “Poets & Writers,” Febos describes the experience of teaching writing to young women, so many of whom are afraid that relating their own experience will be seen as self-indulgent. Febos is certainly right about the sexism behind this perception. Reading her book, however, I kept thinking that whatever condemnation and self-consciousness accompany writing about the self, the commercial pressures have been running the other way for some time now.
At one point, Febos recounts a meeting with her agent where she talks about her obsession with King Philip’s War and her desire to write historical fiction. The agent responds, “Readers aren’t into Native Americans.” He urges her to write something “more urban, more edgy.” Many writers I know have had similar experiences — and if women are especially told they are navel-gazing for writing about themselves, it is equally important to recognize the ways they are guided away from writing about anything else. Febos reports that she realized the story of King Philip was “my own story calling.” It’s not a reader’s job — or a reviewer’s — to tell writers what book they wish had been written instead, but I wonder what might have happened if Febos had directed her lyrical gifts to King Philip or to shaping the fragments assembled here into a fully realized work that could both report history and imagine it fully.
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A Refugee Crisis in a World of Open Doors
Mohsin Hamid
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Ed Kashi
EXIT WEST
By Mohsin Hamid
231 pp. Riverhead Books. $26.
You own a house or rent an apartment. You live with your family or by yourself. You wake in the morning and drink your coffee or tea. You drive a car or a motorbike, or perhaps you take the bus. You go to work and turn on your computer. You go out at night and flirt and date. You live in a small town or big city, although maybe you are in the countryside. You have hopes, dreams and expectations. You take your humanity for granted. You keep believing you are human even when the catastrophe arrives and renders you homeless. Your town or city or countryside is in ruins. You try to make it to the border. Only then, hoping to leave, or making it across the border, do you understand that those who live on the other side do not see you as human at all.
This is the dread experience of becoming a refugee, of joining the 65 million unwanted and stateless people in the world today. It is also the experience that Mohsin Hamid elicits quietly and affectingly in his new novel, “Exit West,” which begins “in a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war.” The city and the country are unnamed, unlike the two characters at the story’s center: Saeed and Nadia, a young man and woman whose courtship begins in this moment of impending crisis. They are cosmopolitan city dwellers who meet in “an evening class on corporate identity and product branding,” and whose first date is at a Chinese restaurant.
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Refugees at a transit camp in Idomeni, Greece, October 2015.Credit
Ashley Gilbertson/VII for UNICEF, via Redux
Hamid’s enticing strategy is to foreground the humanity of these young people, whose urbanity, romantic inclinations, upwardly mobile aspirations and connectedness through social media and smartphones mark them as “normal” relative to the novel’s likely readers. At the same time, he insists on their “difference” from readers who may be Western. Their city is besieged by militants who commit terrible atrocities, evoking scenes from Mosul or Aleppo. As for Nadia, she was “always clad from the tips of her toes to the bottom of her jugular notch in a flowing black robe.” But while this robe seems to be a form of conservative Islamic dress, one of the starkest signs of difference between Nadia and non-Islamic readers, she is more daring than Saeed. She is the one who offers him marijuana and psychedelic mushrooms, and she is the one who initiates sex. The robe, it turns out, is camouflage to allow Nadia to be an independent woman.
The backdrop for “Exit West” is both the plight of refugees from places like Syria and the specter of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. Hamid takes full advantage of our familiarity with these scenes to turn “Exit West” into an urgent account of war, love and refugees. Politics also matters as it does in his other novels, which likewise dealt with pressing issues: the troubles of contemporary Pakistan (“Moth Smoke”); 9/11 and the tensions between being Pakistani and American (“The Reluctant Fundamentalist”); and naked capitalism and ambition in an unnamed country (“How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia”). Throughout his oeuvre, Hamid envisions an interconnected world in which East and West inevitably meet as a consequence of complicated histories of colonization and globalization. The dramas and love stories of individuals like Saeed and Nadia cannot be separated from these histories, even if, in their own lives, those histories are not necessarily preoccupations. Until, that is, those histories erupt.
When they do, people die. They do so often, unexpectedly and in violent circumstances. Hamid offers a few incidents like this, and in their spare detail they are enough, as when Nadia’s cousin is “blown by a truck bomb to bits, literally to bits, the largest of which, in Nadia’s cousin’s case, were a head and two-thirds of an arm.” Refusing to dwell on the morbidity of such a scene, Hamid declines to turn the destruction of the city and its people into a spectacle, the way they would normally be visible to those outside the country, watching its doom from a digital distance. Examining the destruction at a slight remove, Hamid discourages readers from pitying the city’s residents. Instead, focusing on Saeed and Nadia, and removing the particularities of the city, the country and its customs, Hamid aims to increase the depth of a reader’s empathy for characters who can be, or should be, just like the reader. The reader, of course, must think about what would happen if her own normal life was suddenly, unexpectedly upended by war.
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Patricia Wall/The New York Times
Most likely, the reader, like Saeed and Nadia, would flee. They do so through the sudden, unexplained doors that appear throughout the city and that are portals to other places. While the city is unnamed, these sites of refuge are named — Greece, London, the United States. In their concreteness, versus the deliberate vagueness of Saeed and Nadia’s city, they call for identification from readers of the novel who live in these kinds of desirable places that the refugees want to go. The novel implicitly asks these readers why doors should be closed to refugees, when those readers might become refugees one day? How these doors work is not Hamid’s concern. The doors can be manifestations of magic realism, fantasy or science fiction, or all three, but they simply stand in for the reality that refugees will try every door they can to get out.
What happens once Saeed and Nadia arrive at these promised lands makes up the second half of the novel, in which it seems that “the whole planet was on the move, much of the global South headed to the global North, but also Southerners moving to other Southern places and Northerners moving to other Northern places.” Here Hamid’s novel reveals itself to be a story not only of the present but of the future, where migration will be the norm. Depending on one’s point of view, this is either terrifying or hopeful. When everyone is moving, then mobility becomes normal rather than disturbing. While these movements cause unrest on the part of the “natives” — what Hamid, in a postcolonial reverse, calls the inhabitants of the host countries — the vision that he ultimately offers is peaceful. After the natives get over their initial fear of strangers, both the natives and the strangers discover they are just as likely to get along as not. From this measured, cautious recognition of a mutual humanity, the natives and strangers attempt to forge a new society.
This gentle optimism, this refusal to descend into dystopia, is what is most surprising about Hamid’s imaginative, inventive novel. A graceful writer who does not shy away from contentious politics and urgent, worldly matters — and we need so many more of these writers — Hamid exploits fiction’s capacity to elicit empathy and identification to imagine a better world. It is also a possible world. “Exit West” does not lead to utopia, but to a near future and the dim shapes of strangers that we can see through a distant doorway. All we have to do is step through it and meet them.
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The Story of O: A Recollection by Oliver Sacks’s Surviving Partner
Oliver Sacks working at his desk, 2015.
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Bill Hayes
INSOMNIAC CITY
New York, Oliver, and Me
By Bill Hayes
Illustrated. 291 pp. Bloomsbury. $27.
The British neurologist Oliver Sacks transformed the medical case study into a new literary form. In books like “Awakenings,” “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” and “An Anthropologist on Mars” he presented not just clinical facts but recognizable human beings, people we could identify with despite their otherness. He enabled us to see the world through the eyes of men and women with autism, Tourette’s syndrome or memory loss: those who experienced reality differently and expanded our conceptions of emotion, time and space. His stories read like metaphysical fairy tales.
Shortly before he died of cancer in 2015, Sacks turned his attention on himself in an autobiography, “On the Move,” followed by a frank set of articles in The New York Times later published as “Gratitude.” He shared not only his thoughts about life and death but, for the first time, his sexuality and how he had recently found love with a fellow writer, Bill Hayes.
Hayes has now written his own memoir, “Insomniac City.” The reader goes to it hoping that he will do for Sacks something like what Sacks did for his subjects, painting a portrait that mixes intimacy with intellectual understanding. But this is a different kind of book, a loose, impressionistic collection of prose snapshots, street photographs and journal entries. And Sacks isn’t Hayes’s only focus. His other subjects are New York City and himself.
Hayes moved from San Francisco after the death of his partner from a heart attack. Sacks contacted Hayes after reading his book “The Anatomist,” about the classic 19th-century medical text Gray’s Anatomy. Hayes didn’t suspect Sacks was gay, but they eventually connected, and by the end of 2009 they were lovers. Hayes was 49, Sacks 76. Sacks had not had sex in 35 years; this was his first sustained physical relationship.
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Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times
The author is very good about the day-to-day life of the couple, giving us their routines of food, music, affection and sleep. The best details are from his journal, where Sacks is called O. We learn that O enjoyed pot, which he always referred to as “cannabis”; that in this age of laptops he continued to write with a fountain pen; and that he was initially very nervous about going out in public with Hayes. They visited Iceland and had lunch with Björk — Sacks didn’t know her work, but she was a great fan of his. One Fourth of July he went into raptures when the fireworks triggered some lovely hallucinations. He stood on their rooftop crying out: “The primary cortex! The genius of the primary cortex!”
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Hayes was present when Sacks heard the terrible news from the cancer doctor; he watched Sacks examine the CT scan of his own liver. Sacks decided to forgo chemotherapy and not prolong life “just for the sake of prolonging life.” He wanted to enjoy as best he could the six to 18 months left to him.
Throughout the book, Hayes includes portraits of New York strangers: skateboarders, cabdrivers, people met on the subway, the dealer at their local newsstand. There’s an innocent “gee whiz” quality to his writing here that some readers will find charming, but these characters are pale distractions in comparison with Sacks; a little of them goes a long way. We end the book hungry to know more about the good doctor.
His death is still recent, and Hayes probably needed more time to bring his memories of the man into sharper focus. What’s gained in immediacy is lost in weight. Sacks comes across as a gentle, learned, highly eccentric academic, but he was so much more. If you haven’t read any of his books, you would never know what an extraordinary talent he was: cerebral, tender, alien, mysterious.
And there always was something mysterious about Dr. Sacks. This anthropologist on earth was wonderfully articulate when he wrote about others, but when he wrote about himself, in “A Leg to Stand On” and “Uncle Tungsten,” even in “On the Move” with its glimpses of his early life as a weight lifter and motorcyclist, he became abstract, disassociated, dry; he could not bring himself to emotional life. The silence was not just over his homosexuality. It was more like a shyness so deep it resembled a form of Asperger’s syndrome. But this lack, a “deficit” much like those he describes in his patients, helped him to connect with those patients. Taking nothing for granted, he used an intense intellectual curiosity in place of empathy to put himself in their minds. Hayes tries to use love to get inside this literary magician’s head, but love by itself isn’t enough.
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