"The Names of All the Flowers," by Melissa Valentine

As with Yaa Gyasi’s novel, “Transcendent Kingdom,” about which I posted last time (10/28/20), Melissa Valentine’s memoir “The Names of All the Flowers” (The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2020) has a central tragedy: a young woman’s tragic loss of her beloved brother. In both cases, fictional and real, the loss has to do with all the difficulties faced by young black men in the United States. Valentine in particular makes it very clear that her brother’s life represents so many young black men’s lives. Her father is white and her mother is black; they raise six children, always somewhat struggling for money, but hanging on to a barely middle-class life, and making sure their children get good educations. The place the author and her brother grow up is Oakland, California, which added to the interest of the memoir to me, as Oakland is in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I too live, but in a different county. The memoirist is the “good girl” who gets good grades, takes care of family members, and always mediates among family members when there is tension, but for the sake of her beloved brother Junior, she is willing to break some rules too. The memoir is about family, race, gender, education, and much more. It is well-written, feels very “real,” and is poignant and moving.

"Transcendent Kingdom," by Yaa Gyasi

I know I should like, am even supposed to like, the novel “Transcendent Kingdom” (Knopf, 2020), by Yaa Gyasi, author of the best-selling “Homecoming.” I could see that it was well-written and engaged with important themes. It got excellent reviews (although in one or two cases, with slight reservations) from excellent reviewers and publications. But I struggled to finish the book. (I did finish it, but it took a while.) Usually I am interested in themes of race, immigration, family, mother-daughter relationships, education, and the ravages of heavy-duty drugs, all of which this novel addresses. The characters are well-drawn, especially the main character, Gifty, who is also the narrator. Gifty’s family has immigrated to the U.S. from Ghana. Her father returned to Ghana, her mother has psychological problems, and her talented but troubled brother is lost to a terrible fate. Gifty feels, then, that she has to be the successful one. She is studying for a PhD at Stanford, has published and done well in her field, and is devoted to her work with lab mice, hoping to discover what causes addiction and depression. And this, although obviously important work, is where the novel kept losing my attention; there was too much extended exposition about neuroscience for my taste. This is probably a shortcoming on my part, but there it is. I did like the powerful and poignant parts about the family dynamics. Gyasi is obviously a talented writer, and has hit a nerve with her two novels. I will continue to follow her literary progress with interest.

Five Books That Don't Get Their Own Posts

Today I am writing about five books I have read in the past few weeks that I don’t want to write whole posts about, but just to note. When I read a book and don’t post about it, it is usually either because I didn’t feel strongly about it, or because I felt there wasn’t a lot to say about it. Here is my list. About the first two: I have loved reading mysteries ever since I started reading on my own, beginning with the Nancy Drew books. But I sometimes get tired of mysteries and don’t read any for months or years. I haven’t read many for at least a couple of years now, but in these pandemic stay-at-home days, I have picked up a couple and enjoyed them. I read one of Louise Penny’s recent Chief Superintendent Armand Gamache books, some of which I have read before, and I have always savored the Montreal (city of my birth) setting among other attributes. This one was “Kingdom of the Blind” (St. Martin’s, 2018), and I did indeed enjoy it, if mildly. The other mystery was G. G. Vandagriff’s “An Oxford Mystery” (Orson Whitney Press, 2019), and I am sure people who know my Anglophile taste will see why I was drawn to it. It was quite entertaining for its Oxford setting and its female main characters, although not outstandingly well written. Third, I read the bestselling author Emily Giffin’s “The Ties That Bind” (Ballantine, 2020), an absorbing book if too much in the category often called “chick lit.” (I don’t like that label, but I often find it relaxing to read books that people classify that way.) Then, fourth, there was the much more critically esteemed book, “Weather” (Knopf, 2020), by the also critically esteemed Jenny Offill, which is about a woman and climate change and human relationships (sorry, that is a reductive description!) and is mostly written in short fragmentary sections, very intense, which I admired but didn’t particularly enjoy. Fifth and finally, Heidi Pitlor’s intriguing book about a woman ghostwriter, “Impersonation” (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2020), did engage my attention and I relished the literary aspects as well as the parts about the main character’s complicated personal life, but when I closed the book, I felt I wasn’t left with much I wanted to say about it. I apologize if this post sounds dismissive; I don’t mean it that way, and I have a deep respect for how hard it is to write fiction, but I am perhaps trying to convey the mishmash of books I am reading these days, some of which are very satisfying and some not so much, quite possibly my fault rather than that of the authors.

"Monogamy," by Sue Miller

Sue Miller’s novels are reliably “good reads,” and I don’t mean that in a condescending way at all. I have read all of her novels and her book of short stories, starting with the bestseller (later a movie) “The Good Mother” (1986). She is one of the writers that the minute I see she has a new book out, I make a note to get it as soon as possible. She writes her best about women’s lives, loves, and families. Her new novel, “Monogamy” (Harper, 2020), is in this vein as well. As the title suggests, the novel focuses on a couple, Annie and Graham, and is mainly told from the point of view of Annie. It is a good marriage, one that others admire and are drawn to. Graham is a big, amiable, sociable man who owns a bookstore. Annie is an art photographer, although her work has gone a bit by the wayside as she tends to the needs of her husband and (now adult) children. They are both friendly with Graham’s first wife, Freida, the mother of Graham’s son Lucas. Graham and Annie have a daughter, Sarah. But then Graham dies (the front flap tells us this, so I am not giving anything away), and Annie finds that not all is as she had thought it was. She then struggles with reconciling the strong and wonderful relationship the couple had in many ways with the part that was secret. So the novel is “about” many things: marriage and the way every marriage has some unknown parts; parenting, and accepting the difficulties that one’s children may have despite everything parents do to protect and help them; what women often give up for their marriages and children; the varieties of families and friendships (Frieda’s still being such a close part of Graham and Annie’s family); the style of living of a certain strata of professional and artistic people in Boston and Cambridge (and perhaps in general of “the Coasts”), and so much more. So much to think about, so much to relate to, so much to admire about the recognition of, and acceptance of, the “grey areas” of most marriages, relationships, and lives. Suffice it to say that I finished the novel in two days.

Two Novels on Aging: "Hieroglyphics," by Jill McCorkle, and "The Weekend," by Charlotte Ford

I have just read two novels featuring “older” characters, both books at least partly about the topic of aging. “Hieroglyphics” (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2020), by the wonderful writer Jill McCorkle (whose books I have read for decades), is a deep dive into the lives of a recently retired couple, Lil and Frank, who have moved from Boston to North Carolina, where Frank spent his childhood. Frank is obsessed with the house where he grew up, and Lil is equally obsessed with going through old letters and diaries with the idea of leaving a family history for the couple’s adult children. Both of them are remembering both good and bad events in their lives. At the same time, both of them find that they are having more trouble remembering things in general. The novel is also about secrets, families, parenting, and the role of place in our lives. “Hieroglyphics” is both profoundly human and humane, on the one hand, and quite discomforting, on the other. There is some joy, but there is also much melancholy, and overall the book felt bleak to me. The other novel I read "about" aging is “The Weekend” (Riverhead, 2020), set in Australia and written by the Australian author Charlotte Ford. Three lifelong friends in their early seventies gather at the beachside home of their late fourth friend, in order to clean out her belongings, at the request of her lover. Their weekend together illuminates both the friends’ deep connections and the ways in which they have diverged. They get on each others’ nerves, and old secrets are revealed. The author does not avoid facing some of the inevitable problems of aging, and this book too has its bleak aspects. Yet at the end we know that the women’s friendship is deep and lasting, despite everything. I am always glad to see novels with older characters, as this is a stage in life that is too often neglected in fiction. I am also always glad to read fiction with the theme of friendship, especially female friendship.

"Daddy," by Emma Cline

The characters are ordinary, but with an air of disappointment. They are passive, feeling that things happen to them without their will or control. They limply hope that things will get better, but don’t do much to change things. To be clear, though, these are people who are basically OK – safe and healthy and with enough money. Nothing truly bad is happening to them, just a sense that life is not living up to their expectations. These are the people in Emma Cline’s short stories, in her new book, “Daddy” (Random House, 2020). Cline’s name may be familiar to readers, as her 2016 novel “Girls” was a bestseller. Rachel Kushner’s back cover blurb compares Cline to Mary Gaitskill and Joy Williams. It happens that although I have respect for Kushner, Gaitskill, and Williams, all of whom I have read, I have not really enjoyed their work. There is something chilly about the work in each case. Yet although I understand Kushner’s comparison of these writers’ work with Cline’s stories in “Daddy,” the note of sadness (often inchoate) in her stories ameliorates some of the aforementioned chill. I should note too that there is a mildly tawdry feeling to some of the stories, as in the story (“Los Angeles”) of the middle-class girl who has moved to Los Angeles hoping to be an actress, knowing how predictable she is being, and who although she has a (low-level) job and some support from her mother, stumbles into selling her underwear to men to make some extra money. She distances herself from this scheme by taking an ironic tone; “It was that time of life when anything bad or strange or sordid happened, she could soothe herself with that thing people always said, ‘it’s just that time of life.’ When you thought of it that way, whatever mess she was in seemed already sanctioned” (p. 46). Many of the other characters in the other stories in this collection reiterate this passivity and acceptance of “fate,” this avoidance of responsibility for their own lives and decisions, as I commented at the start of this post. Thus the stories claim our attention but somehow end up dampening that interest.

RIP Florence Howe

I was very sad to hear that Florence Howe, one of the founders of the field of Women’s Studies, and the founder of the breakthrough publisher The Feminist Press, died earlier this month (September 12, 2020), at the age of 91. She was a great pioneer and, although not as famous as some other feminist icons, had a deep and wide influence on the lives, intellectual and otherwise, of many, many women, even many who have never heard of her. She taught at Goucher College and realized how little attention was given to women’s lives and women’s literature in colleges and beyond. She practically founded the field of Women’s Studies. She tried to persuade several publishers to publish more work by women, but they declined, saying that it would not sell. So she started her own press, The Feminist Press, in 1970. There she published work by authors out of print as well as by contemporary authors. These included Zora Neale Hurston, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Grace Paley, Paule Marshall, Ama Ata Aidoo, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Tillie Olsen, Marilyn French, Alice Walker, and Barbara Ehrenreich, along with several anthologies. Note the diversity timewise as well as in race and ethnicity. The Press especially focused on marginalized voices. Gloria Steinem stated that the Feminist Press “created an opening for hundreds of women writers and thousands of readers.” I was and am one of those readers; I am old enough to remember when women writers were much less published, and when literature classes were bereft of works by women (except for the very few “classics”). Early on I found and read many of the Press’ books, often, and gratefully, “discovering” writers new to me through the Press. I also took one of the first Women's Studies classes offered by my university. (Note: Years later I taught several Women's Studies classes, especially Women's Literature classes.) I hope Florence Howe knew how many, many women (and some men too!) appreciated what she and The Feminist Press, along with the Women’s Studies field she helped to found, did for women and for all who care about equality and inclusion. Thank you, Florence Howe! You made a huge difference in the world!