If you liked DON’T LOOK UP…
February 24, 2022
Kandi Neal has included my novella The Bourgeois Anarchist in a post on the captivating blog shereads. The post is headlined “Books to Read If You Liked Don’t Look Up,” and I’m flattered to be included in the list. Actually, I don’t know whether I liked Don’t Look Up because I haven’t seen it. It’s a movie, right? I continue to struggle to keep up with pop culture.

Anyway, this is what Ms. Neal graciously wrote:
“Instead of moving into her own place after graduating college, Susie chose to live in an anarchist commune, and that’s where she stayed for the next twenty years. Now, at sixty-six years old, she lives a comfortable life and teaches at a high-end private school. Even though her apolitical math-loving son calls her the bourgeois anarchist, she’s still committed to fighting the good fight. When she gets injured at a rally and rescued by a female in Antifa gear, the police interrogate Susie, looking for answers. But it’s her son and his unexpected, hilarious point of view that really put things into perspective.”
I’m glad she found Susie’s son Eric hilarious, as he was intended to be. The blog also promises that the ten books listed are “full of page-turning suspense that will have you on the edge of your seat.” For Susie’s story that may be a bit of exaggeration, but hey, it’s better for an author to have readers on the edge of their seats because of suspense than because they’re impatient to get to the bathroom.

Blurred Choices
November 17, 2021
Ellen Prentiss Campbell, an award-winning fiction writer and member of the National Book Critics Circle, has kindly reviewed The Bourgeois Anarchist in Tiferet Journal. Throughout the novella, she notes, “the lines between good and bad, right and wrong, blur”–proving she firmly grasped the book’s main theme.

Though the magazine is available by subscription only, I can offer a quote from the end of the piece, summarizing her take on the 66-year-old protagonist, Susie Alioto:
Susie is an irresistible force. Readers, especially those of a certain age, aficionados of Anne Tyler’s quirky heroines, will enjoy Susie. She carries the baggage of years of living and experience with almost reckless, youthful abandon. And begins to reckon with some skeletons in her own closet and to figure out what’s next.
You can purchase the novella on Bookshop.org.
Democracy and Frogs
June 29, 2019
In my day job, I’ve recently had the pleasure of doing layout on a new translation of an ancient Greek mock-epic poem, “The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice,” a spoof of heroic war sagas. The new translation by A. E. Stallings, with drawings by Grant Silverstein and an introduction by “A. Nony Mouse,” is due out later this year from Paul Dry Books. The text and illustrations are both gruesome and hilarious.
To summarize the poem’s narrative: After committing a selfish and deadly error, the Frog King concocts lies to evade responsibility, and as part of his cover-up he leads his subjects into a war on false pretenses. Things go badly for the amphibians, and the entire race will be wiped out—until the gods intervene to stave off genocide.
Could there be parallels to the current day?
After pondering this matter, I’ve decided conditions are very different in our democratic era. Because we no longer believe the gods will intervene.
ABC: Educational Success Stories
September 17, 2015
Here’s a photo from another standing-room-only book launch. I like that tall guy’s shirt, but I’ve got to start arriving early enough to grab a seat! Or I should remember to claim a chair before I linger at the wine table.
The book being celebrated, last night at Main Point Books in Bryn Mawr, PA, was A House Alive with Words by Patricia Zita Krisch (the person way up front in the red dress). Subtitled Stories from the ABC Program, a path to college for inner-city youth, it focuses on eight boys from the ABC House in Lower Merion Township, a well-to-do suburb of Philadelphia. Part of a national program called “A Better Chance,” ABC House takes academically talented, economically disadvantaged boys of color and houses
them together while they attend Lower Merion High School. Along with a home, the program provides academic and personal counseling and guidance. The goal is to get the boys into college and on the path to success.
You’ve heard of programs like this. Do they really work? Trained as a sociologist, Krisch understands the social and educational problems the kids face—such as being singled out, in a class of white students, to give the “African American view” on an issue—but she goes beyond those to portray each of the boys as an individual with his own experiences, insights, struggles, and delights. One of her significant observations is that the boys’ greatest resource turns out to be their group itself, the camaraderie they develop and the support they give each other.
Nationally, ABC graduates include well-known people like Tracy Chapman and Deval Patrick. But the program is not about making governors or Grammy winners, it’s about giving ordinary smart kids a chance at a successful life. Krisch’s “stories” from the program, including the tale of one boy who was kicked out, help us comprehend the scale of changes that will be needed for everyone to have a better chance.
The publisher’s site is here, and the book’s Amazon page here.
The Rabbi’s Wife’s Choice
June 1, 2014
While waiting impatiently for the copy of Robin Black’s novel that I preordered last July (damn these publishers and their extended marketing campaigns!), I saw that she’d published a new story on Five Chapters, and I went to it eagerly. Called “The Rabbi’s Wife,” it’s as well-crafted and psychologically complex as the stories in her first book, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This—and even more provocative.
To talk about it, I have to give away the surprise twist that emerges, so if you haven’t read it yet, go do that now, at this link. Then come back and argue with me about it. Because I’ve been arguing in silence with the author, and the main character, Hannah, and myself for several hours now, and I need somebody else to direct my rantings at.
OK, you’ve read it? So you know the story is about Hannah, nearing 70, widowed a few years ago when Ben, her rabbi husband, died. She stopped going to synagogue after his death and cut her ties with the congregation except for her best friend Myra. She wants to remember Ben as the man she married when they were both “graduate students in psychology, non-believers,” before he betrayed her, in a way, by becoming religious, essentially forcing her—though she agreed to it—into the role of “rabbi’s wife,” with all the public duties that entails: “Part of loving Ben meant accepting a kid of amputation of self.” And yet she realizes that she now is betraying him, in a way, by stripping him in her thoughts of the rabbi-role he cherished.
So far, this is typical of Black’s stories in its subtle moral insight and sharp analysis of the myriad small treacheries of everyday life. I can’t think of any contemporary writer who is better at this kind of vision. But then the story goes to another level as we learn more about Hannah’s current situation.
The immediate occasion of the story is Myra’s funeral—Hannah’s close friend and confidante has died suddenly. At the shiva, the gathering at Myra’s house, Hannah empathizes with Myra’s ex–daughter in law, who recently divorced Myra’s son. The young woman is too good for the son, and Myra had supported her in breaking free. As the story of the young people comes out, we learn more of Hannah and Myra, and we see that Hannah has a breaking-free for herself in mind.
Hannah has been dating a man, Peter, for eight months now. She likes him, even enjoys having him in her bed, where he forges “a shelter into which she, the old tired she, could disappear.” But now he has been diagnosed with lung cancer and given two years to live—the same prognosis her late husband was given. Having suffered through the years of chemo, surgery and radiation with her husband, and then the inevitable grueling death, Hannah doesn’t feel she can do it again with Peter. Myra, her confidante, urged her to break off with him immediately: “The fact that you were sleeping together doesn’t indenture you to him.” He has children, Myra pointed out. You’re not his wife, Myra argued. “He’s a perfectly nice man, but you do not owe him this.”
Now Myra is suddenly dead and Peter is waiting for Hannah to come to him after the funeral. This nice man—a “genial man,” a “gentle being”—expects her to stay with him through his crisis. But as she sits alone in Myra’s bedroom gathering her thoughts, Hannah determines that she will not. She refuses to stomach another excruciating death. Life is unfair, she knows, and “she will conspire in the cruelty it brings.” She marches out on the way to Peter’s house, where her “newly ruthless self” will tell him, no doubt in the kindest possible terms, that she’s through with him and he’ll have to find others to help him die.
Finishing the story, which I read on a printout, I tossed the pages down in a small spasm of disgust. Hannah values her own comfort and sense of identity over the needs of her dying lover. At first thought, this seems too easy an assertion of the primacy of women’s rights over obligations to oppressive males.
But it’s not easy, of course. Hannah wishes deeply that she were not in this position. She doesn’t admire herself for deciding to be selfish for once. Eight months, the length of her relationship with Peter, is a terribly ambiguous amount of time: beyond casual, in our current way of assessing these things, but nowhere near an ironclad commitment.
And I’ve skipped over some of the details that deepen the story: the profusion of funerals that the rabbi’s wife attended over the years, the sense that there was always a death on the horizon; Hannah’s negotiations with Ben about the public role she would play when he became a rabbi; some insights into Myra’s character that enrich the advice she gives to Hannah. But it comes down to Hannah’s choice to stay with Peter or abandon him, a choice fraught with moral and psychological angst.
It’s interesting that when we consider such matters on a large scale, our sense of morality tends to shift. Should a people under the sway of a relatively benign but oppressive foreign power value freedom over loyalty, even if obtaining freedom means cracking some skulls? Yes, we said in the American Revolution. Yes, we would still say today. We will sacrifice lives (especially those of others) for freedom and self-determination. Personally, when I think about matters on this scale, a vague utilitarian calculation prevails: if, in the long run, there will be more happiness with freedom, then…
On the personal level the moral sense doesn’t, and probably shouldn’t, yield to utilitarianism, and it’s harder to see justice in Hannah’s behavior. Yet it’s hard to blame her either. We can line up arguments for and against her:
For Hannah:
She surely doesn’t deserve the agony of nursing Peter to his death. Especially so soon after doing the same for Ben, her long-time husband.
Against Hannah:
Practically no one deserves the suffering life metes out. And Hannah’s total lifetime suffering, added up, doesn’t seem like a horrifying amount. She has had children she loved with a husband she loved; she has had friends in the congregation; she had her special friend, Myra. Yes, she lived a lie in some sense, but who doesn’t, in some sense?
For Hannah:
After surrendering to her husband’s desire to become a rabbi—because it amounts to that, ultimately, a surrender, even though we don’t see what particular dreams of her own she had to give up—she is not required to surrender to any other man’s needs.
Against Hannah:
Of course she’s not required to take care of Peter—and perhaps he’s wrong to assume she will—but we’re talking about what she ought to do. She deliberately chooses to be cruel to him to make her own life easier. She is not being asked to surrender anything except her own pleasure. That is selfishness, not good behavior.
How many more pro-con arguments could we list? Five, ten? Dozens?
I’m irritated with Robin Black for writing this story, and dazzled that she has created a text that provokes such dense reflection. I’ll keep thinking about the rabbi’s wife for a long while, and if I ever meet that old lady, I may scold her or hug her, or both.
Grunge in the Burbs
June 16, 2013
Conquistador of the Useless, the first novel by Joshua Isard, teems with references to bands I’ve never heard of. The book is also way too cool to use quotation marks around dialogue. All this should annoy me, but I enjoyed the tale anyway.
The story is told in the first person by Nathan Wavelsky, an early-thirties guy with a boring desk job, a nice wife, Lisa, a new home in the suburbs and a passion for grunge and pre-grunge bands that speak to his alienation. How does a grunge couple end up in the burbs? Well, they left the hip inner city because they got tired of the noise and the hipsters’ pretense. Of course, Nathan doesn’t like the pretense of the suburbs either; he’s immediately snarky about the new neighbors who invite them for dinner:
So, Kristy [the neighbor wife], says, how long have you been married?
Four years, Lisa answers.
That’s wonderful, Kristy says, we’ve been married almost eight years now.
She says it like they’d beaten us at some contest.
That’s typical of Nathan’s sarcasm. There aren’t many people he cares for. What he does like is drinking tea in the tree-shaded quiet of his backyard, bothered by no one. He also loves listening to his music, reading his books. He has no ambitions and doesn’t see the need to develop any. Isard sets him up, in fact, as a prototype of his generation. Here’s Nathan describing himself and Lisa during and after college:
Neither of us were National Merit Scholars or Phi Beta Kappa members—we always studied, but refused to end up in the college’s counseling office because we had anxiety attacks over a B.
This is also the way we treated our jobs. We worked hard in the office, but tried not to think about it when we got home.
It wasn’t that we didn’t aspire to a promotion, it’s that we didn’t aspire to anything. We were the kids who heard their public school teachers tell them that they could be anything, even President of the United States; whose parents insisted that we would be the generation to change the world; who grew up in the age where everyone’s special.
Then we looked at the politicians, our teachers, our peers.
And we said, Horseshit.
And we were happy.
With Nathan thus coasting through life, Isard tosses him some trouble. Nathan’s best friend, who has become a rich adventurer, breezes into town and invites him to climb Mt. Everest. The thought intrigues Nathan because he has always liked climbing mountains (though he has no experience on difficult ones) and because he’s drawn to experiences that are “wonderful and useless.” But a trip to Everest, with the real possibility that he might freeze to death there, conflicts with Lisa’s sudden interest in beginning a family. Nathan finally grasps Lisa’s seriousness about nesting when she starts painting the house by herself and buying new furniture:
We’ve been here for five months, Nathan, and until today we had a hobo’s table next to our couch, a bedroom that makes a summer camp cabin look ritzy, and no plan for any of it. We’ve got a stove, a dishwasher, and a washer/dryer that came with the place because the last owners didn’t want them anymore.
Yeah, I say, but those things still work fine.
Who gives a shit if they work, she says, they’re not fucking ours.
It is, at this moment, that I realize the full gravity of the situation.
Nathan also gets into trouble by lending Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle to a teenage neighbor girl, Rayanne, a cultural faux-pas worsened by his indifference to propriety. He is shunned by the adult neighbors, who assume he’s been corrupting minors, and again Lisa is not amused:
What kind of relationship do you have with Rayanne?
The kind where I lend her books and music.
And where you think about how hot she’s going to be.
Oh come on—
Is it also the kind where you invite her into our house when I’m not home?
Yeah, I say, to give her a book.
You didn’t tell me that part of the story, she says, you didn’t tell me she came in here with you. How do you think that looks?
I don’t know, I say, polite?
The humor, as should be evident by now, keeps Nathan amusing even when his unwillingness to be impressed with life becomes profoundly unimpressive. Yet, since this is a Serious Novel, Nathan does at last experience Personal Growth—and though I’m capitalizing these concepts to poke fun at them as Nathan himself might, the end is genuinely moving as well as unexpected.
It’s a good read even if you’ve never heard of Pixies, Green Day, Social Distortion, Mudhoney, Screaming Trees, or Jane’s Addiction. Even better, I guess, if you have.
A Fragrant Tragedy
June 10, 2013
From the opening of Ru Freeman’s ambitious and moving new novel, On Sal Mal Lane, set in her native Sri Lanka, we know that tragedy looms. The Prologue, in italics, sketches the background of the conflicts between Sinhalese and Tamils that erupted into war, and the first chapter of regular text begins in this way:
“God was not responsible for what came to pass. People said it was karma, punishment in this life for past sins, fate. People said that no beauty was permitted in the world without some accompanying darkness to balance it out, and, surely, these children were beautiful. But what people said was unimportant; what befell them befell us all.”
Lest we forget the context, this narrative voice from on high returns from time to time to update national political developments and remind us of the doom hanging over the characters.
Yet the novel’s basic action scarcely ventures beyond the tiny, flower-bedecked, semirural lane of the title, on the outskirts of the capital city, Colombo. The people there form a microcosm of Sri Lankan ethnicities and religions—Sinhalese, Tamils, mixed-race Burghers; Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Catholics—all in the space of nine households. Most of the plot centers on the children of Sal Mal Lane, especially the four Herath kids, who are sensitive, talented and a bit more upscale than their neighbors.
Perhaps the novel’s greatest achievement lies in the way it locates significance in the tiniest domestic actions. A wayward teenager, Sonna, quarreling with his father, is denied a birthday party. As a make-do, Sonna’s mother invites the Herath children over for an elaborate dinner without stating that it’s for the boy’s birthday. Later, discovering the truth, the Heraths feel bad that they didn’t take a present. They count out coins from their allowance to buy a chocolate for Sonna, put it in a shiny bag and try to deliver it. He isn’t home, though, so they stash it in their refrigerator to keep it from melting. The next day, Mr. Herath, rummaging for a sweet after lunch, finds the candy and eats it. The children are too abashed to stop him, afraid their mother will find out they’ve been associating with Sonna. Having no money to buy another treat, they reconcile themselves to feeling ashamed, and they let the matter drop.
Ending a chapter, this little tale hovers as a portent. How will the mistakenly consumed chocolate contribute to the slowly unfolding tragedy? This technique encourages the reader to focus on causes rather than on what comes next. For me, though, the weighty foreshadowing has its downside because it discourages page-turning; I was none too eager to arrive at the moment of implosion.
Another potential difficulty is that the profusion of characters makes it hard to become deeply invested in any one of them. Eventually the reader comes to care for several of these people, but it takes a while. Among the Heraths, there are four children of various ages, plus the father and mother. Five other children play significant roles, as do ten or more adults. The interplay is complex, and even the troublemakers and bigots have some redeeming features. The upside is that we get a rich, complex view of a neighborhood, both its uniqueness and its inability to escape the sociopolitical trends that are drawing the larger society into turmoil.
The language is often as fragrant as the blossoming sal mal trees that surround the lane and the spicy curries prepared by the women. In these lyrical passages Freeman’s affection for her homeland shines through. Here’s a paragraph plucked almost at random:
“The gusty wind that dominated a short respite from the monsoons was beginning to tease the children of Sal Mal Lane. It tugged at their school uniforms, inverted umbrellas held against the sun, and combed and recombed their hair, first this way then the other. It whispered stay! stay! to them as they stood waiting for their school buses, shivering in the cool morning hours, a request they tried not to hear. They giggled as their skirts and shirts lifted this way and that, their books fell out of their careless hands, and the ribbons tied into their braids and ponytails, blue and white for the Herath girls, green and white for the Bolling twins, refused to stay in their knots. But each evening the children acquiesced. They put down their books, put on their home clothes, and went outside. They went to fly kites.”
Another treat is the occasional profound remark that could be framed and mounted on the wall. At one point the younger Herath boy, Nihil, seeks reassurance about the rumors of civil war and the announced intention of other boys on the lane to join the army. He questions his friend, old Mr. Niles, who answers: “People do not go to war, Nihil, they carry war inside them.” At times such philosophizing can become a bit heavy-handed, but it serves to reinforce the themes of the novel.
When the long-awaited tragedy arrives, it occurs on two levels. On one level we witness a political event as the quiet street is overcome by the conflict raging around it. But the greater tragedy is rooted in the personal stresses we have seen developing: father vs. son, neighbor vs. neighbor, social outsiders trying to gain a place among those they admire and envy. No one on Sal Mal Lane is entirely innocent. As the second-oldest Herath child, Rashmi, reflects near the end, “Everybody was responsible for what had happened to their street.”
Even as calamity intrudes, however, the people of the lane bond together, across ethnic boundaries. The victims are cared for by their neighbors. The dénouement rekindles a sense of hope, and the novel ends with a young person reading from Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, “a tale of striving for high ideals amid human frailty, turmoil, and change.”
On Sal Mal Lane is not a quick read but one to savor, one whose images and ideas will linger in the reader’s mind.