Book 326: Polite Society

 

"As Dimple waited for Fahim, she doubted Ania's wisdom for the first time. There was no convincing reason why Fahim would be attracted to a woman like her, obviously provincial, still at times cloddish, when he had the pick of those sophisticated gazelles at media parties. Ania had kept insisting that she could see the signs. but Dimple was worried about the dangers of being wrong. It had taken her months of discipline and training to calm the anxieties that assailed her—worries about her position as some kind of interloper—and now her equilibrium was again wrecked. Ania was too fearless and her friendship too effortless, spilling from her without consequence, leaving a trail of easy generosity and advice. For Dimple that same friendship offered elation and play, but also apprehension and uncertainty, a fear that it would all collapse and crumble to dust."

Dates read: July 9-12, 2019

Rating: 7/10

A few years before I started this blog, I started making a concerted effort to read the much-bemoaned classics. I wasn't an English major (Psychology for me!), so apart from the standard high school mandatories like Gatsby and Mockingbird, I had read actually quite few of them. And what a surprise it was! While some of them deserve their boring reputations, many others have survived the test of time because they're wonderful reading experiences. Turns out I love Jane Austen! Who knew?

When she wrote Emma, Austen famously described her as a heroine that she didn't think people would really like. A smart, pretty, rich girl isn't exactly the most sympathetic of heroines. Clueless proved that Emma could hold up well to adaptation, so when I read that Mahesh Rao had decided to transplant the book to modern-day India in Polite Society, I was curious. Instead of Emma Woodhouse, we have Ania Khurana, beloved daughter of wealthy businessman Dileep. Ania is bored with her socialite life in the most elite circles of Delhi, and when she successfully sets up her spinster aunt Renu, she decides her next project will be her new friend Dimple, who works in PR. Dimple grew up in the country, and though she met a nice guy, Ankit, when she first moved to the city, finds it hard to resist when Ania tries to steer her towards up-and-coming reporter Fahim.

While many aspects of the original are here, Rao puts his own, darker spin on some of the side characters: both the Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax types have very different storylines than Austen gave them, and Dileep is drawn dangerously into the thrall of a faith healer type called Mr. Nayak. The broad strokes of the story play out more or less as expected, though: Fahim does not fall for Dimple and marries impulsively shortly thereafter, Ania grows closer to her longtime family friend Dev (standing in for Mr. Knightly) even as she develops a flirtation with the Frank substitute, Dimple and Ankit come back to each other eventually. But while Austen wraps things up neatly and happily, it's much more unsettled at the end of Polite Society.

Taking a beloved story and adapting it is a tricky thing to do...too close to the original, and it barely seems worth the effort, but too far away and you risk enraging fans. I think Rao struck a good balance, adding plot twists that gave the story new complexity. I especially liked the addition of perspectives besides that of Ania, which had the effect of giving Dimple, Dileep, and even Fahim so much more richness and interest. I appreciated the generally edgier tone and the way it undercut a story that has a lot of romantic wish fulfillment and froth built into it. The story the book tells is compelling, and I think would work even without having read Emma (though the understanding that the heroine is supposed to be kind of annoying is definitely helpful to come in with).

While I enjoyed a lot of what this book did, it was not entirely successful. Rao's prose lacks the wit and verve that really mark Austen as a master of her craft, and is less charming as a result of the inevitable comparison. And while many of the side stories were a welcome addition, it felt like there were too many to give them all time to really develop. The generally lightweight tone of the book (even in the heavier way Rao rendered it) would be compromised by the addition of too many extra pages, but I think another 50 or so would have given it all a little more room to breathe. Overall, though, I found this book very good and would recommend it both to those who already love Emma and those who haven't experienced it yet!

One year ago, I was reading: The Death of Vivek Oji

Two years ago, I was reading: A Perfect Explanation

Three years ago, I was reading: The Coming Plague

Four years ago, I was reading: Love Medicine

Five years ago, I was reading: The Man Without A Face

Six years ago, I was reading: Zodiac

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Book 326: Polite Society

Book 207: The Sellout

"They say 'pimpin' ain't easy'. Well, neither is slaveholdin'. Like children, dogs, dice, and overpromising politicians, and apparently prostitutes, slaves don't do what you tell them to do. And when your eighty-some-odd-year-old black thrall has maybe fifteen good minutes of work in him in a day and enjoys the shit out of being punished, you don't get many of the plantation perks you see in the movies either."

Dates read: February 6-9, 2018

Rating: 6/10

Lists/awards: Booker Prize

Rating books is an inherently subjective task. We try to fool ourselves into thinking that we're able to judge them based on objective quality, but we're ultimately judging them on scales that are both personal and ever-shifting. Tastes change during our lives, and where I see a lyrically-written character-driven masterpiece, someone else might see a purple-prose-laden never-goes-anywhere snore. Some books "feel" better than they are because you read them at the right moment, and others get downgraded because it just wasn't the best time. Which is why I always believe in rating and reviewing even the books that didn't work for me, because hating something you've only seen positive reactions to can make you feel like you're out on a limb and reading someone else saying they didn't like it either can be a relief.

So I was just talking last week about Thank You For Smoking and how the humor really hit home for me and I really liked it. I'm not sure if it was that I ended up reading two satires in a row, or that I didn't connect the same way with the subject at hand, or if it was just not my thing, but The Sellout just never quite clicked for me. This story opens up with our unnamed narrator (we get the last name, Me, but unless I missed something we never got a first name) watching his case go through oral argument at the Supreme Court. His case? He owns a slave and has re-segregated the school in his outlying Los Angeles community of Dickens, which has recently literally been taken off the map. Did I mention our protagonist is black?

We go back in time to get Me's whole story, from being homeschooled by his father, who uses him as a subject in various psychological/sociological experiments in the oddball agricultural community of Dickens, to his childhood friendship with Hominy, a cast member of the Little Rascals (who later pledges himself to Me as a slave after Me saves his life, much to Me's chagrin), to his long-running crush on his beautiful neighbor Marpessa, who drives a city bus, to his eventual decision to pretend there's an all-white charter magnet school going in across the street from the local school that's overwhelmingly attended by students of color, which winds up with him in front of the Supreme Court.

This was a book I read for my book club, and I was surprised to find I was one of the few for whom it didn't especially resonate. But as I listened to the others talk about how they found the satire refreshing for its bluntness and outrageous honesty about the state of race relations in America, I think maybe one of the reasons it fell a little flatter for me is that I'm on the younger side in that group and being more immersed in an internet culture where these issues are more on the forefront maybe made the punches land less hard, since they were more expected. In a world where Get Out was an enormously popular, Oscar-winning movie (and a good, interesting one that I personally really enjoyed), The Sellout's transgressive satire seems almost tame even though it's only a few years old.

To be sure, there are some brilliantly inspired moments (that opening Supreme Court scene, the Dum-Dum Intellectuals, the "sanitized" versions of racially-problematic novels), and if you're looking for a book that will be very up-front and sometimes uncomfortable (so many n-bombs!) about race in America, this is a very good book. Chattel slavery, and the institutionalized racism that persists to this day, is something that we're still struggling with. This book was written during the Obama era, when everyone was busily congratulating each other on living in a post-racial society, and the way it refuses to play along and pretend that was true feels eerily prescient given the election of Donald Trump. This book is smart, funny, and pulls zero punches (though those punches might not land quite as hard as they did even a few years ago, depending on what the dialogue you engage in looks like). It didn't quite ensnare me, but it's definitely worth reading.

One year ago, I was reading: Uncle Tungsten 

Two years ago, I was reading: A Vast Conspiracy

Three years ago, I was reading: The Paper Magician

Four years ago, I was reading: Oriental Mythology

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Book 207: The Sellout

Book 190: The House of Mirth

"She had been bored all the afternoon by Percy Gryce—the mere thought seemed to waken an echo of his droning voice—but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptabilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honor of boring her for life."

Dates read: November 17-22, 2017

Rating: 7/10

Lists/awards: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2012)

This is going to sound stuck up, but I've been told I'm pretty since I was a little girl. Now that I'm an adult, I don't think I'm devastatingly good-looking, but I'm generally pretty secure that I'm more attractive than not. It's interesting, the way women are trained to think that our looks are one of the most important things about us, but then we're supposed to wait for men to notice and acknowledge it, and we're ridiculed for the things we do to maintain it in the face of time and aging. My husband worries about putting on moisturizer because his skin feels dry and gets flaky in the winter. I worry about putting on all of the steps in my Asian skincare routine so that I combat wrinkles. Don't get me wrong, I love my k-beauty. But I'm aware that social pressure plays a disproportionate role in how I engage with my face, my skin, my body...not just for my own comfort, but for everyone else's too.

And that's in today's world! The farther back you go, the more a woman's looks were central to her prospects in life. When we meet Lily Bart, the heroine of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, she's 29 and worried that her celebrated loveliness is beginning to fade before she's managed to marry herself off to someone who can support her. Lily was raised in wealth, taught to abhor anything "dingy"...and then her father lost their fortune and died and her mother followed him shortly thereafter, leaving Lily poor and alone. She was begrudgingly picked up by her aunt Julia, who gives her the right address and some pocket money, but not nearly enough to keep herself afloat on the glittering social circuit, where she needs this season's stylish hats and gloves and dresses and is expected to gamble regularly at cards. It seems hopeful, though: she's on her way to her friend Judy's house, where she expects to meet and charm  and become engaged to Percy, a very eligible bachelor.

Instead, she feels no chemistry with Percy and earns the ire of married socialite Bertha when Bertha's ex-paramour Lawrence Selden turns up to see Lily. Bertha splits up the budding romance between Lily and Percy, leaving Lily in a position to have to ask Judy's husband, Gus, to make some investments for her to help keep her afloat. Gus views this as an investment in earning Lily's...favors, and though she manages to keep her head above water and even rise briefly, it all comes crashing down when Bertha invites Lily on a trip to keep her husband George distracted while Bertha carries on with her latest conquest. When George discovers the truth, though, Bertha spreads lies painting Lily as a temptress instead, which begins Lily's descent through the social classes.

This book plays with the same kind of themes Wharton would return to in her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Innocence, which I read a few years before I read this: the artificiality of the upper-class New York "society" in which Wharton herself was born and raised and the way it constrains and even punishes real feeling primary among them. Lily herself is a great heroine: it's so easy to identify with her simultaneous longing to do the "right" thing and make it easy on herself by just finding someone rich to marry her and keep her in comfort and to be true to herself and wait for the kind of real connection she feels with Lawrence. Even though women are by and large much less dependent on men for material support today, I think there still exists the temptation, especially as one approaches 30, to just settle for someone good enough and check "marriage" off the list of things you constantly get asked about as a woman. And the power of the rumor mill, and its ability to ruin reputations, remains potent.

It's thematically similar enough to The Age of Innocence that comparison is inevitable, and for my money, Innocence is the better-developed and more rewarding work. But Mirth was also written 15 years beforehand, so it's not surprising that it's less mature. It does bring the added context of a female perspective, and it's partly refreshing to see how far we've come and at the same time how many things are still largely the same in terms of the constraints that society as a whole places on women. I will say one of the things that didn't quite work for me was the novel's central romance: it's never really developed, we're just meant to sort of assume that they've fallen for each other. It's necessary to have established for a late character moment to work, but it's done so superfluously that it doesn't quite have the power it could have. All in all, if you like a sharp social critique and old-society novels, or just like Wharton, it's definitely worth reading. Otherwise, pick up The Age of Innocence instead.   

One year ago, I was reading: Olive Kitteridge

Two years ago, I was reading: Valley of the Moon

Three years ago, I was reading: The Last Picture Show

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Book 190: The House of Mirth

Book 183: Player Piano

"He knew with all his heart that the human situation was a frightful botch, but it was such a logical, intelligently arrived-at botch that he couldn't see how history could have possibly led anywhere else."

Dates read: October 17-22, 2017

Rating: 5/10

I graduated from law school at the wrong time. 2010 was just a few years after the recession began, and it had completed changed the landscape of legal hiring from where it had been in 2007, when I started. Not only were the biglaw firm jobs (that I never coveted) getting slashed, the kind of government jobs I'd been hoping for (I wanted to be a prosecutor) were incredibly scarce, too. I'd hoped that once I passed the bar, I'd get somewhere in my job hunt, but I spent the next six months unemployed. I sent out hundreds of cover letters and resumes and got nothing more than a handful of form letters letting me know they'd keep my information on file. This was one of the worst experiences of my life. Being without a job was awful.

A lot of that explains why I stayed so long in the job I did eventually get, which was a terrible work experience, but that's neither here nor there. What is relevant is the very real sense of usefulness that one gets from meaningful work. This concept is the key idea behind Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano. In it, he hypothesizes a world in which America, during one of the world wars, focused on automation in order to win. And it didn't stop simply at military automation...instead, virtually every aspect of American life that could be mechanized, was. A generation later, there are two classes of people: the very smartest, who become engineers and managers, and everyone else, who have the choice to either enlist in the military (which is never sent into action anymore) or unskilled labor doing public works.

Our protagonist is Dr. Paul Proteus. The son of one of the architects of the system, he's in leadership at the facility where he works, but even with his top job and satisfying marriage, he feels like something is missing. When his friend Ed blows into town at the beginning of the story, announcing that he's quit his very similar job and reflecting on the plight of the ordinary people of the world, it kicks off a series of changes within Paul. He finds himself questioning the wisdom of the world that his father helped build and he's helping perpetuate. He finds himself longing to work outdoors, with his hands, in a way where his worth is measured in his ability to do the work that will feed him. This kind of thinking is considered dangerous radicalism.

He joins Ed and some other characters in a secret society dedicated to the overthrow of the machines, and ironically is ordered to infiltrate the same by his superiors as a mole shortly thereafter. He's propped up as the "head" of the organization to take advantage of his famous name as they prepare a rebellion against society as it currently exists. There's a parallel plot in which a foreign religious leader is being given a tour of the United States, meeting people and seeing how "advanced" the West has become...that this man sees the masses of the citizenry as and insists on referring to them (in his own language) as "slaves" is a point that is driven in over and over without the slightest modicum of subtlety.

And it's subtlety that's really missing here. This reminded me of some of Ayn Rand's works...not so much in terms of the ideas expressed, but in the way that the story is really kind of window dressing for the author's larger statement about the world. There's not really a lot of character development that goes on, and the plot is predictable. Vonnegut clearly wanted to draw attention to a trend he saw that was troubling to him and kind of propped up a story around that idea. Also, this was his first novel, and while some debuts bring us a writer already in command of their gifts...that's not the case here.

I actually found the novel more intriguing from the perspective of today...the results of the 2016 election and the way the opioid crisis seems to have hit the so-called Rust Belt especially hard demonstrates the real-world rage and despair that happen when people find themselves deprived of the chance to perform meaningful work. Even within my own lifetime, I've watched the way self check-out has replaced retail cashiers. I do exponentially more of my shopping on the internet than I do in stores. Automation is moving brutally forward, and it could be a much shorter time before most of life is mechanized than we think. So the book, even if it is more a statement than a story, does at least raise interesting questions. If you're a Vonnegut completist, there's merit to be found here, but for anyone else, it's very skippable.

Tell me, blog friends...has automation crept into your job?

One year ago, I was reading: The Sky Is Yours

Two years ago, I was reading: Mrs. Dalloway

Three years ago, I was reading: The Winged Histories

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Book 183: Player Piano

Book 125: Between The World And Me

"You must resist the urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children."

Dates read: February 9-11, 2017

Rating: 10/10

Lists/Awards: National Book Award

Reading has many different purposes. One of the primary ones is entertainment, to take your mind off the things that are weighing on you and activate your imagination. Another is knowledge, the deepen and enrich your understanding about the world around you. And another is to challenge you. To make you see things from a new perspective, to force you to reconsider your assumptions about the way things are. A book doesn't have to fit just one, many get at least two or even all three and more besides. But I think to the extent practicable, it's a good idea to try to make sure your reading touches all of them.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a writer that I find challenging. He's incredibly talented and smart, but he pushes back against the way I'm inclined to view the world left to my own devices. Which are, of course, rooted in my own experience. It's easy to forget that the way you see and interact with the world (and the way it sees and interacts with you) isn't universal. Which is why I was really excited when my book club chose as a selection Coates' lauded Between The World And Me. It's a book I'd been meaning to read and that I was glad I had an excuse to force it upwards on my reading list.

Coates structures the book as a pair of letters addressed to his son. Part memoir and part social commentary, Coates relates his experiences growing up as a black man in America, filtered through the lens of trying to impart the lessons that his son will need to stay safe. Between The World And Me focuses intensely on the body, and the ways that the bodies of black people have been used to fuel the American Dream for white people. It's a startling thing to read about in writing as powerful as Coates' is: what it must feel like to always feel like your body is at the risk of being broken.

As a relatively attractive woman, I'm familiar with the feeling of a body that doesn't quite belong to me alone, that others (and by that, I mean men) feel like belongs to them in a particular way. But it's use, rather than breaking, that's usually at issue there. Coates makes the feeling of constantly knowing that your body, and the bodies of those that you love, are targets for violence and rage simply for existing, visceral and real. Coates' love of and fear for his son, his desperate desire to somehow protect him from a world that will see him as a threat simply by virtue of his existence as a black man, is palpable.

This book has become a must-read for white liberals who want to learn more about race relations, a group into which I myself fall. I read an article before I read the book where Coates himself addressed the way his book has been received and expressed some frustration about being constantly asked about how he feels about the way white people have reacted to it. He wrote the book after a friend was murdered by the police, but the conversation hasn't been about police brutality. It's been about how to help white people better understand race. That should be a wake-up call, fellow Caucasians. It's not the job of people of color to make it easier for us to understand what they go through, especially when there is plenty of literature, like this book, that will help us to that work on our own.

Tell me, blog friends...do you think it matters who the author's intended audience is when they write a book?

One year ago, I was reading: The Children of Henry VIII

Two years ago, I was reading: Dune

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Book 125: Between The World And Me

Book 119: Snow

"It wasn't the poverty or the helplessness that disturbed him; it was the thing he would see again and again during the days to come- in the empty windows of photography shops, in the frozen windows of the crowded teahouses where the city's unemployed passed the time playing cards, and in the city's empty snow-covered squares. These sights spoke of a strange and powerful loneliness. It was as if he were in a place that the whole world had forgotten, as if it were snowing at the end of the world."

Dates read: January 18-22, 2017

Rating: 6/10

Lists/Awards: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2012)

When someone asks me if I like the movie Goodfellas, I never know what to say. It's a well-directed, well-acted, well-told story, so I think it's a laudatory work of film and I admire its accomplishments. But I didn't actually enjoy watching it and I have no desire to do so again. It's one of those weird things that happens sometimes for media in all forms, for me. I'll find something to be a significant piece and worthy of praise, but that doesn't mean I always actually like it.

Orhan Pamuk's Snow falls into that weird, middle-ground territory for me. It's a well-crafted tale, rich with context and layers of meaning. But I didn't actually enjoy reading it all that much. From a third-person narrator point of view (we'll get to that later), Snow tells the story of Ka, a Turkish poet who has spent much of his adult life in political exile in Germany, newly returned to his home country for his mother's funeral. When he hears from an acquaintance that a beautiful former college classmate, Ipek, is freshly divorced, living in a border town called Kars, he finds himself a pretext to visit there to see her. The pretext is that there's been a recent wave of suicides among devout Muslim young women, who have been forbidden by government policy to wear their headscarves, and he's there to investigate.

The snow is already falling thickly when Ka arrives in Kars, and it ends up closing off the community over one long, turbulent weekend in which there are assassinations, coups, and police brutality. There are several storylines, all interwoven tightly: the community debate over headscarves, Ka's courtship of Ipek, Ka's suddenly rediscovered inspiration to write poetry, Ipek's relationship with her sister Kadife, both of their ties to a wanted terrorist, the poverty and desperation of the men in Kars, the hope and idealism of the boys at the Muslim high school. The theme of the tension between the West/secularism and the East/religion is pervasive, coloring all of the events of the novel.

Which turns out to be a story within a story, as we find out that the tale of Ka's time in Kars is being told by his friend "Orhan", based on Ka's own written recollections. It's a little bothersome that although the conceit is that the story is being told by a third party, the narrator seems omniscient more often than not, but it's not a dealbreaker. What is more bothersome is that there is none of the characters is particularly well-developed, or to me, identifiable. Ipek is the embodiment of the virgin/whore dichitomy, either idealized or compared to a porn star. The terrorist, Blue, is constantly described as compelling without much in the story to make the reader understand why. Even Ka, though he is the center of the narrative, remains at a frustrating remove. Like Turkey itself, he's neither completely Eastern nor completely Western and vacillates between the two. He doesn't know his own mind, and it makes him hard to get a hold of as a character.

But the writing and structure is lovely. It's a little snowglobe of a story, and effectively creates the air of emotional claustrophobia that anyone who's been stranded (by snow or flooding or ice) for a few days can understand. I'm not sure that the third-party narrator is as effective a device as it could be, but I got a wry, frustrated smile out of plot machinations that mean that we never actually get to read one of Ka's inspired poems...it lets us just imagine how great the poems must have been without putting Pamuk under pressure to write something magnificent. This was a book club selection, and proved divisive for the most part: there were several people who loved it and just as many who completely hated it, with only very few (like me) falling in between. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it based on my own experience of it, but maybe you'll completely love it like some of my book club friends?

Tell me, blog friends...do you read literature in translation often?

One year ago, I was reading: Housekeeping

Two years ago, I was reading: American Gods

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Book 119: Snow

Book 117: Americanah

"Ifemulu showed her the cover of the novel. She did not want to start a conversation. Especially not with Kelsey. She recognized in Kelsey the nationalism of liberal Americans who copiously criticized America but did not like you to do so; they expected you to be silent and grateful, and always reminded you of how much better than wherever you had come from America was."

Dates read: January 10-14, 2017

Rating: 10/10

Every so often, a thread pops up on Reddit asking people who've come to the United States from elsewhere what surprised them most about this country when they got here. The answers are usually fairly similar: our obsession with germs and our "personal space", our loudness, how big the country really actually is, tipping. I always enjoy reading these kinds of things because I'm always curious about how what seems very natural to us can seem bizarre to people who grew up elsewhere and I try to keep it in mind when I myself travel elsewhere: what seems odd to me probably seems perfectly normal to them. Just because I think of something as "the way things are" doesn't mean it's the way things are everywhere.

Ifemelu, the Nigerian-born-and-raised protagonist of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah, experiences this kind of cultural whiplash twice: once, when she transfers from her university in Nigeria to a small college in Pennsylvania and then the second time, fifteen years later when she decides to return to Lagos. That Ifemelu is black and only really experiences what it's like to be black in a predominantly white world once she gets to the United States, as well as the gap between African-Americans and Africans in America inspires her to start a blog about race, which becomes a major source of income for her and helps earn her a fellowship at Princeton. Once the fellowship is over, she shuts down her blog, leaves her longtime boyfriend, and prepares to go back to Nigeria.

She's nervous about going back, not so much because she doesn't have anything lined up there but because it means she'll be back in the same place as Obinze, the man she loved in high school and college but is no longer in touch with. Adichie uses one of my favorite framing devices to structure her novel: she begins with Ifemelu just before she leaves the US, shows us how she got there through flashbacks, and then proceeds forward. I love getting some information but not all of it right up front: it makes me intensely curious to find out how the situation we first encountered came to be. I hate mystery-style books where all the "answers" are backloaded...it makes the rest of the book feel like it's treading water before the payoff at the end. Those just leave me annoyed by the time I get to the end, but unwrapping the narrative layers one by one keeps me hooked. And Americanah had me like a fish on a hook.

Not only is her story structure one that I personally respond well to, but Adichie's writing is absolutely magnificent. I marked what feels like half of the book because she has a such a knack for taking feelings that you have or you recognize and phrasing it in a way that hits you right in the gut because it's so dead on and perfect and you never thought about it like that before. And I loved the way she wrote Ifemelu and Obinze's relationship, from their charmed young love to the reason for their separation and that Adichie isn't afraid to give them new partners, partners they experience happiness with even. There's context and nuance, not just to their relationship, but to their lives. The whole book explores shades of gray, no one is either a saint or a villain. They're people, trying hard and messing up and trying again. I think one of the most important things about reading is its potential to increase empathy, to see people outside of the ones like you as having the same kinds of hopes and dreams and fears as you even if their experiences don't look exactly the same. This book is a beautifully written examplar of that exact principle. It's completely fantastic and I totally loved every second of reading it and I recommend it highly.

One year ago, I was reading: The Bear and the Nightingale

Two years ago, I was reading: The Twentieth Wife

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Book 117: Americanah

Book 103: Invisible Man

"For the first time, as I swung along the streets, I thought consciously of how I had conducted myself at home. I hadn't worried too much about whites as people. Some were friendly and some were not, and you tried not to offend either. But here they all seemed impersonal; and yet when most impersonal they startled me by being polite, by begging my pardon after brushing against me in a crowd. Still I felt that even when they were polite they hardly saw me, that they would have begged the pardon of Jack the Bear, never glancing his way if the bear happened to be walking along minding his business. It was confusing. I did not know if it was desirable or undesirable..."

Dates read: November 10-13, 2016

Rating: 8/10

Awards/Lists: National Book Award, Time All-Time 100 Novels, New York Times bestseller, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

I've never been followed around a store by a salesperson. I've never been afraid when I've been pulled over. No one has ever treated me like I don't belong pretty much anywhere I've ever wanted to go. No one has assumed that I speak for all other people that look like me. These, and countless other indignities I don't have to suffer, are facets of my white privilege. I will never really know what it's like to live as anything other than a white woman, and in the interest of learning about what life is like outside of those confines, I've found myself more and more drawn lately to stories about experiences of people of color.

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man shouldn't be confused with H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man. While the sci-fi classic deals with literal invisibility, the unnamed black man who narrates his story in Ellison's novel is only figuratively invisible. We meet him at the end of his story, living in a New York City basement that he's lit up brightly by siphoning power from the utility. Ellison doesn't belabor the metaphor...right from the start, the narrator tells us that it's his status as a black man in mid-century America that renders him effectively invisible.

The novel is made up of his story and how he came to recognize his own non-entity status. And it hits you in the gut right away: the first incident he relates from his life is when he's awarded a scholarship from a prestigious philanthropic organization in the small Southern town in which he grows up. He's invited to a country club dinner to make a speech about his scholarship, but once he gets there, he and several other young black men are forced to fight each other and be humiliated chasing for electrified coins. Only after he's been degraded is he allowed to give his speech and receive the scholarship and the briefcase. It's a horrifying sequence, incredibly difficult to read, and the book is just getting started.

This experience, and the ones that the narrator has at a black college and then in New York are rooted in a fundamental denial of his humanity. He's entertainment, or a tool, or an experiment, or just disposable. He struggles and fights and gets up after being knocked down over and over again, but he can't escape the fact of his race and the broad social structures designed to keep him and other black men firmly in the underclass. And while things have gotten better today, it's maybe not as much better as we'd like to think.

This is a hard book to read. Not because of the quality...Ellison's writing is incredible. But it's heavy and dark and the unending awfulness of what the narrator is subjected to is a lot to get your head around. I usually try not to get heavily into politics on this blog, but I read this book right after the 2016 election, and it really made me think about the racism that persists in our society. Despite the "grab them by the pussy" tape that we all heard, and the many sexual assault allegations against him, a majority of white women voted for Donald Trump rather than the candidate who has worked on women's and children's issues for her entire adult life. And while there are lots of factors that motivated people to vote for him, he was an open bigot as well as an open misogynist. It's hard not to see that as white women "choosing" the interests of white supremacy over feminism. I'm not saying anyone in particular who voted for Trump is absolutely a racist or hates women, I think it's easy to underestimate your own internal bias or internalized misogyny, a lot of it works on unconscious levels. If I were a black person in America, I have to think that I'd feel pretty invisible (at best) right now too.

Tell me, blog friends...what piece of fiction has especially resonated with you lately?

One year ago, I was reading: Eleanor of Aquitaine

Two years ago, I was reading: Oriental Mythology 

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Book 103: Invisible Man

Book 87: The Other Side of the River

"That's not to say the history isn't there. Whites have killed blacks before. Or killed because of blacks. The stories have passed on from generation to generation, over supper or over a beer, on stoops or in parlors, told by grandmothers and by pastors, the narratives shaped and reshaped by people's prejudices and blurred memories and by their own experiences. And while they may not be recorded in history books, they exist just as powerfully and vividly in these oral tales."

Dates read: September 6-10, 2016

Rating: 5/10

Maybe it's just my own privilege, or growing up in a small, fairly homogeneous town, or cluelessness, or other/more things, but I feel like the shooting of Michael Brown really kicked off a national movement of racial issues back into the mainstream. As much as we, as a country, tried to clap ourselves on the back for electing our first black president and pretend really hard that we're living in a post-racial world, it didn't work. Racial divides, state-sanctioned violence against people of color, and institutionalized prejudice still exist. As a white person, it's been an exercise in learning the limitations of my own experiences and trying to figure out how to do better in the ways that I can. There's a whole process to that, of course, and it's one that requires constant learning and growth.

But really, of course, these issues have been a problem for a long, long time. It doesn't seem like the early 90s were that long ago, but it's somehow been 25 years since then. And in 1991, the mysterious death of a black teenager in small-town western Michigan inflamed the same kinds of tensions that surround race today. Alex Kotlowitz's The Other Side of the River examines the fallout of the drowning of 16 year-old Eric McGinnis on two towns, Saint Joseph and Benton Harbor, divided by race and class, and yes, a river.

If you're the type of person who needs their mysteries to be solved, don't read this book. We never do find out how Eric ended up in the water where he perished. He could have been walking and slipped. He could have tried to swim. He could have been chased and fallen in. He could have been pushed in. Trying to figure out exactly what happened bedevils Kotlowitz, as well as Jim Reeves, the detective assigned to the case. What they do know is that Eric, from mostly black Benton Harbor, came into overwhelming white Saint Joseph one evening to go to a teen dance club. He had recently had a short flirtation/relationship with a white girl. At some point in the night, he was busted stealing cash from a car and was briefly chased down the road by the furious owner. And a few days later, his body surfaced.

Kotlowitz pulls back and widens the frame to give us the context for the scene in which Eric's death occurs. He talks about the history of the two towns, how Benton Harbor was initially the big, prosperous one and Saint Joe was little more than a string of beach cottages...but, like in so many cities, white flight during the 60s drained it of capital. Despite being neighboring communities, the divides between St. Joe and Benton Harbor just got deeper and deeper as the years passed. The communities had already been roiled before Eric's death when a white police officer shot and killed a black teenager who he mistakenly believed was a dangerous suspect in a crime. So when Eric drowned and the St. Joe's police department, unused to handling potential homicides, made some tactical errors and failed to find any serious suspects, unease and suspicions between the communities flared back up.

The book is interesting enough, and well-written enough, but it doesn't really go anywhere. Kotlowitz clearly wants to get his readers to think about all sides of the issue (and by that I mean there's a definite sense that he knows most readers will be white and leads them through the struggles of the local black community so they understand why a drowned teenager was viewed with such suspicion), but he doesn't have anything especially insightful to add to the conversation. It's a solid read, but ultimately doesn't resonate much.

One year ago, I was reading: Behave

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Book 87: The Other Side of the River