"Silver Sparrow," by Tayari Jones

Many thanks to my good friend SB, a regular reader and supporter of this blog, for recommending the novel “Silver Sparrow” (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2011), by Tayari Jones. The book opens with the attention-catching line “My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist,” and everything else in the story spins off from that central fact. James married his wife Laverne when they were both at a very young age, when she became pregnant (and later lost that baby); later he met and fell in love with Gwen, and started his second family. The daughter of his first family, Chaurisse, born a few years after the first baby died, and Gwen’s daughter, Dana, are about the same age. His second family is aware of the first, but not vice versa. Gwen’s and Dana’s lives are consumed by a fascination with and resentment of James’ first family. Dana and Chaurisse get to know each other during their late teen years, and the plot accelerates from there. Other major characters are Raleigh, James’ ever-present best friend who is as close as a brother, and who quietly adores Gwen, and the girls’ grandmother, Miss Bunny, who raised both James and Raleigh. The main story (not counting brief background information about James and Raleigh as children) takes place over a period of about 40 years, from the late 1950s/early 1960s to the year 2000 (the latter in a brief epilogue); the characters are African American and live in Atlanta. The reader might expect James to be the "bad guy" of the story, and in a way he is, but one cannot help feeling compassion for, and even admiration of, this responsible and dependable (aside from the obvious!) and a bit nerdy man who is trying to do right by both wives and daughters, and everyone else as well. The first half of the book tells the story from Dana’s perspective, and the second half through Chaurisse’s eyes. The book is suffused with the duality of the two families, two wives, two daughters, two perspectives. The novel has much to say about marriage, about males and females, about parenthood, about young African American girls, about female friendship, about middle class African American life, about honesty and dishonesty, about living up to one’s responsibilities and how complex that can be, about pride, and much more. This novel tells a compelling story, with compelling characters, and leaves the reader with much to think about, including the fact that almost no moral decisions are completely right or wrong, good or bad, but always encompass various shades of grey.

Please subscribe to progressive magazines!

This post is a plea to readers to support progressive magazines. Such magazines have always played an important role in providing readers with information not covered in major news sources, as well as perspectives not always well represented in those major news sources. Now we need this information and these perspectives more than ever. I have subscribed to The Nation, The Progressive, and Ms. magazines for decades, and recently (OK, immediately after the 2016 election) resubscribed – after a gap of some years – to Mother Jones. These are all invaluable resources. I also find important progressive writing in some more mainstream but still quite progressive magazines as The Atlantic and The New Yorker. Many of these magazines report strong upticks in subscriptions after the 2016 election, but they still need wider readership and wider support in order to continue to do their often groundbreaking investigative reports and other important stories. Maybe consider subscribing to one of the above magazines, or another progressive publication? And/or giving a gift subscription?

"Vanity Fair's Schools for Scandals," edited by Graydon Carter

How could I not read this book? Its topics are a heady combination of education, social class, sexual politics, true crime, gossip, current events, social commentary and, yes, scandal. “Vanity Fair’s Schools for Scandals” (Simon & Schuster, 2017) is subtitled “The Inside Dramas at 16 of America’s Most Elite Campuses – Plus Oxford!” The book is a compilation of articles that have been published in the magazine Vanity Fair over the past 20 years or so, and is edited by Vanity Fair’s editor Graydon Carter. Each piece focuses on a "scandal" at one prestigious college/university or boarding school, including Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Duke, and Columbia, and the prep/boarding schools St. Paul’s, Exeter, St. George’s, and Kent. Some scandals involve financial issues, some stories report extreme hazing, and some writers portray administrators and faculty whose outsize personalities and reputations come tumbling down. The most prevalent topic, however, is, sadly, sexual abuse of various sorts, especially in the boarding schools. Because these schools are small, isolated, privileged, and entitled schools, and because the participants share those characteristics, and because sexual abuse by its nature tends to be hidden, these abuses of power sometimes went years, even decades, without being acknowledged or punished. Administrators and Board members obviously wanted to avoid bad publicity, and often turned a blind eye, and/or quietly passed bad actors (often teachers) on to other schools without warning the other schools of the problem; this last had the ugly label but vivid of “passing the trash.” Even when presented with the existence of the abuse, those in charge often stonewalled, refused to believe the victims, or minimized the impact of the abuse (and let’s be clear, abuse ranged from unwanted touching to assault and rape, and sometimes the same abuser would prey on many many victims over many years). At the end of many of the pieces, there are short updates about what happened with court cases, and about where various administrators, teachers, and students are now and what they are doing now. Although I have subscribed to Vanity Fair for many years, and had read almost all of these pieces before (in some cases 10-20 years before), I found that reading them in this collected form was a powerful experience. Vanity Fair’s writers are excellent at capturing the auras and environments of these schools. In many cases, the writers themselves had attended the schools they were describing, or others very like them, so they were able to offer insiders’ perspectives. These writers do good investigative research, and they are persistent in getting the story. They write well, with many telling details. And through their descriptions they capture the essence of affluence and social class privilege that often facilitates these scandals. Postscript: Finishing reading this book just as the news arrived of the movie producer Harvey Weinstein's sexually abusive behavior toward young women actors and others in the movie world was a doubly powerful reminder of the way women are sometimes treated by powerful men in various fields. So no, equality has not yet arrived; and no, we are not living in a postfeminist era. There is still a lot of work to be done.

"The Use of Fame," by Cornelia Nixon

I like novels about academe. I like novels about writers. I like novels about marriage. So Cornelia Nixon’s “The Use of Fame” (Counterpoint, 2017), which features all three of these characteristics, caught my interest. The two main characters, Abby and Ray, are both poets and have been married for twenty-five years, when their loving and mainly successful marriage is challenged by their taking teaching positions at universities on opposite coasts. Ray is at Brown and Abby is at Berkeley. They try to make this arrangement work, but it is difficult, and puts an increasing strain on their marriage. Infidelity, health issues, alcohol, pills, and class differences all become factors. It is hard not to sympathize with both characters, especially since it is clear that their relationship is deep and meaningful (although one of them is, at least on the surface, more at fault than the other one regarding their difficulties). But the novel reminds us that sometimes love and history together are just not enough. This is a beautifully written, absorbing, and sad exploration of love and marriage.

And the Winner Is....Kazuo Ishiguro!

Just announced as the winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Literature is Kazuo Ishiguro, the British writer of such novels as "The Remains of the Day" (which was made into a critically acclaimed movie starring Anthony Hopkins) and "Never Let Me Go," as well as five other novels. The Swedish Academy describes his novels as "uncover[ing] the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world." One official of the Academy, Sara Danius, says that Ishiguro is "a writer of great integrity," and intriguingly describes him as a mixture of Jane Austen, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust. The New York Times lists his themes as "the fallibility of memory, mortality and the porous nature of time." Adjectives commonly used about his work include "restrained," "reserved," and "fastidious." The choice of Ishiguro was a bit of a surprise (other writers who had been considered more likely to win included Margaret Atwood, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Haruki Murakami, and Salman Rushdie) but a welcome one by most commentators. Some are particularly glad to see a return to a more traditionally literary author, after last year's contentious choice of Bob Dylan. Interestingly, Ishiguro, a sometime songwriter, has been quoted as saying his hero is Bob Dylan!