Wendell Berry’s “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” & Why I Acquired My First Smartphone at Age 40.5
Wendell Berry is an American treasure: the 89-year-old Kentucky farmer is also a philosopher, poet, theologian, and writer of fiction, and many of his pronouncements bear the timeless wisdom of a biblical prophet. I’ve read his work from several genres and was curious to see how this 1987 essay – originally published in Harper’s Magazine and reprinted, along with some letters to the editor in response, plus extra commentary in the form of a 1990 essay, by Penguin in 2018 as the 50th and final entry in their Penguin Modern pamphlet series – might resonate with my own reluctance to adopt current technology.
The title essay is brief, barely filling 4.5 pages of a small-format paperback. It’s so concise that it would be difficult to summarize in many fewer words, but I’ll run through the points he makes across the initial essay, the replies to the correspondence, and a follow-up piece entitled “Feminism, the Body and the Machine” (1989). Berry laments his reliance on energy corporations and wants to limit that as much as possible. He decries consumerism in general; he isn’t going to acquire something just to be ‘keeping up with the times’. He doesn’t believe a computer will make his work better, and it doesn’t meet his criteria for a useful tool (smaller, cheaper and less energy-intensive than what it replaces; sourced locally and easily repaired by a non-specialist). He is perfectly happy with his current arrangement: he writes his work by hand and his wife types it up for him. He is loath to lose this human touch.
The letters to the editor, predictably, accuse him of self-righteousness for depicting his choice as the more virtuous one. The correspondents also felt they had to stand up for Berry’s wife, who might have better things to do than act as her husband’s secretary. This is the only time the author becomes slightly defensive, basically saying, ‘you don’t know anything about me, my wife or my marriage … maybe she wants to!’ He doubles down on the environmental harm caused by technology and consumerism, acknowledging his continued dependence on fossil fuels and vowing to avoid them, and unnecessary purchases, where possible.
If some technology does damage to the world, … then why is it not reasonable, and indeed moral, to try to limit one’s use of that technology?
To the extent that we consume, in our present circumstances, we are guilty. To the extent that we guilty consumers are conservationists, we are absurd. … can we do something directly to solve our share of the problem? … Why then is not my first duty to reduce, so far as I can, my own consumption?
If the use of a computer is a new idea, then a newer one is not to use one.
He even appears to speak prophetically to the rise of artificial intelligence:
My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. … And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves. The danger most immediately to be feared in ‘technological progress’ is the degradation and obsolescence of the body.
Certain of his arguments felt relevant to me as I ponder my own relationship to technology. I compose all my reviews on a 19-year-old personal computer that’s not connected to the Internet. I don’t listen to the radio and have seen maybe three films in the past two years. We’ve been television-free for a decade and I have never regretted it (Berry: “It is easy – it is even a luxury – to deny oneself the use of a television set, and I zealously practice that form of self-denial. Every time I see television (at other people’s houses), I am more inclined to congratulate myself on my deprivation.”).
I find it so hard to adjust to new tech that my reluctance may have shaded into suspicion. I’m certainly no early adopter, but I’d also object to the label “Luddite”: since 2013 I’ve been using e-readers, which are invaluable in my reviewing work. But for 15 years or more I have been looking at other people and their smartphones with disdain. I prided myself on my resistance. Stubbornness seemed like a virtue when the alternative was spending a lot of money on something I didn’t need.
Receiving my first cell phone in July 2004 (with my dad at left; at Dulles airport).
Two months ago, though, I finally gave in and accepted a hand-me-down Motorola Android phone from my father-in-law, after nearly 20 years of using an old-style mobile phone. As we were renegotiating our phone and Internet contract, I got virtually unlimited minutes and data on this device for £6/month, with no initial outlay. Had I been forced to make a purchase, I think I would still be holding out. But I had gotten to the point where refusal was cutting off my nose to spite my face. Why keep martyring myself – saying I couldn’t make important household phone calls because they drained my pay-as-you-go credit; learning complex workarounds to post to Instagram from my PC; taking crap photos on a digital camera held together with a rubber band? Why resist utility just for the sake of it?
To be clear, this was not a matter of saving time. I’m not a busy person. Plus I believe there is value in slowing down and acting deliberately. (See this book-based article I wrote for the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2018 on the benefits of “wasting time.”) Mindless scrolling is as much a temptation on a PC as on a phone, so avoiding social media was not a motive for me; others with addictive tendencies may decide otherwise. Nor did I view convenience as reason enough per se. However, I admit I was attracted to the efficiency of a pocket-sized device that can at once replace a computer, pager, telephone, Rolodex, phonebook, camera, photo album, television screen, music player, camcorder, Dictaphone, stopwatch, calculator, map, satnav, flashlight, encyclopaedia, Kindle library, calendar, diary, Post-It notes, notebook, alarm clock and mirror. (Have I missed anything?) Talk about multi-tasking!
Out with the old, in with the new?
I would still say that I object to tech serving as a status symbol or a basis for self-importance, and I’d be pretty dubious about it ever being a worthwhile hobby. Should this phone fail me in future, I’ll copy my husband’s habit of buying a secondhand handset for £60–80. I wouldn’t acquire something that represented new extraction of rare resources. Treating things (or people) as disposable is anathema to me, something about which I know Berry would agree. I’m naturally parsimonious, obsessive about keeping things going for as long as possible and recycling them responsibly when they reach their end of life.
It’s one reason why I’ve gotten involved in the Repair Café movement. I volunteer for our local branch, which started up in February, on the admin and publicity side of things. The old-fashioned, make-do-and-mend ethos appeals to me. It’s the same spirit evoked in the lyrics of American singer-songwriter Mark Erelli’s “Analog Hero”:
He’s the fix-it man, the fix-it man
If he can’t put it back together, then it was never worth a damn
Maybe he’s crazy for trying to save what’s already gone
Now it ain’t even broken and we’re going for the upgrade
Nobody thinks twice ’bout what we’re really throwing away
It’s out with the old, in with the new…
I can imagine Wendell Berry still pecking out his words on a typewriter on his Kentucky farm. He’s an analogue hero, too. And he doesn’t go nearly as far as Mark Boyle, whose radical life experiment is recounted in The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology, which I reviewed for Shiny New Books in 2019.
I have pretty much made my peace with owning a smartphone. I have few apps and am still more likely to work at my PC or on paper. I’ll concede that I enjoy being able to post to X or Instagram wherever I am, and to keep up with messages on the go. (I used to have to say cryptic things to friends like, “once I leave the house, I will be unavailable except by text.”) Mostly, I’m relieved to have shed the frustrations of outmoded tech. Though I still keep my Nokia brick by my bedside as a trusty alarm clock – and a torch for when the cat wakes me between 2 and 5 each morning.
Ultimately, I feel, a smartphone is a tool like any other. It’s how you use it. Salman Rushdie comes to much the same conclusion about the would-be murder weapon wielded against him: “a knife is a tool, and acquires meaning from the use we make of it. It is morally neutral” (from Knife).
Berry’s argument about overreliance on energy remains a good one, but we are all so complicit in so many ways – even more so than in the late 1980s when he was writing – that avoiding the computer, and now the smartphone, doesn’t seem to hold particular merit. While this pamphlet will be but a quaint curio piece for most readers (rather than a parallel to the battle of wills I’ve conducted with myself), it is engaging and convincing, and the societal issues it considers are still ones to be wrestled with.
My copy was purchased with part of a £30 voucher I received free from Penguin UK for being part of their “Bookmarks” online community – answering polls, surveys, etc.
April Releases by Brownrigg, Ernaux, O’Connor, Waterman and Wood
Family history is a common element for the first four of these review books: a multi-generational story (incorporating autofiction in places) about Anglo-American writers and the legacy of suicide; a brief slice of memoir about the loss of a mother; a historical novella inspired by family stories and set on an island at the cusp of war; and a poetry collection drawing on a father’s death as well as on local folklore. Addiction and dementia are specific links between pairs. And to round off, a set of short stories about pregnancy and motherhood.
The Whole Staggering Mystery: A Story of Fathers Lost and Found by Sylvia Brownrigg
“The dead don’t come back, but they are not as far away as you think.”
I knew Brownrigg’s name as a novelist thanks to Susan’s blog (see her review of Pages for Her), but when I read about this family memoir it piqued my interest more than her fiction might have. The Brownrigg clan are nobility (really – her brother has the title “Baronet”) but have rejected conventional Englishness over the past century. First her grandfather, Gawen, separated from his wife and moved to Nairobi to work as a journalist. He also published two obscure novels before dying at age 27. The empty bottle of Nembutal and recent changes to his will suggested suicide, though his mother resisted the notion vociferously. Gawen’s son, Nicholas, was raised in California by his mother, Lucia, and became an alcoholic who lived off-grid on a ranch and had an unpublished Beats-influenced novel.
After Nicholas’s death in 2018, Brownrigg was compelled to trace her family’s patterns of addiction and creativity. It’s a complex network of relatives and remarriages here. The family novels and letters were her primary sources, along with a scrapbook her great-grandmother Beatrice made to memorialize Gawen for Nicholas. Certain details came to seem uncanny. For instance, her grandfather’s first novel, Star Against Star, was about, of all things, a doomed lesbian romance – and when Brownrigg first read it, at 21, she had a girlfriend.
Along with the more traditional memoir sections, there are the documents that speak for themselves and extended passages of autofiction. I loved an imaginary letter by Gawen’s older brother, who died in young childhood, and a third-person segment about Beatrice’s life in England during the Second World War. But I mostly skipped over the 90 lightly fictionalized pages about the author’s (“Sophie’s”) life with her father in California. You might view this as a showcase of possible methods for engaging with family history, some of which work better than others. All of it is fascinating material, though.
Published by Counterpoint in the USA. With thanks to Nectar Literary for the advanced e-copy for review.
A Woman’s Story by Annie Ernaux (1988; 2024)
[Translated from the French by Tanya Leslie]
This memoir of Ernaux’s mother’s life and death is, at 58 pages, little more than an extended (auto)biographical essay. Confusingly, it covers the same period she wrote about in I Remain in Darkness (originally published nine years later), a diary of her mother’s final years with dementia; I even remembered two specific events and quotes. Why not combine the two into a full-length biographical recollection? Or pair it with A Man’s Place, Ernaux’s memoir of her father, in one volume? Perhaps her works will be repackaged in the future. But this came first: Ernaux started writing just a couple of weeks after her mother’s death, and spent 10 months over it. It’s clear she was determined to salvage what she could of her mother’s life:
It’s a difficult undertaking. For me, my mother has no history. She has always been there. When I speak of her, my first impulse is to ‘freeze’ her in a series of images unrelated to time … This book can be seen as a literary venture as its purpose is to find out the truth about my mother, a truth that can be conveyed only by words. … I believe I am writing about my mother because it is my turn to bring her into the world.
Ernaux opens with news of the death, and the funeral. But soon she’s pushing back into the past. Her mother grew up in poverty near Rouen and worked in a factory before her marriage, when she and her husband took on a grocery store and café. The Second World War was in some romantic way the great drama of her life. She was exacting of her daughter: “Her overriding concern was to give me everything she hadn’t had. But this involved so much work, so much worrying about money”. In her widowhood she came to live with Ernaux, who was then divorced with two sons, and tried to find a middle way between independence and connection. Eventually, though, her memory loss required admission to a nursing home.
I’ve felt the same about all three short works I’ve read by Ernaux so far: though precisely observed, they conceal themselves behind emotional distance. So while this might seem similar to A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir, I found the latter more engaging.
With thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions for the free copy for review.
Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor
The remote Welsh island setting of O’Connor’s debut novella was inspired by several real-life islands that were depopulated in the twentieth century due to a change in climate and ways of life: Bardsey, St Kilda, the Blasket Islands, and the Aran Islands. (A letter accompanying my review copy explained that the author’s grandmother was a Welsh speaker from North Wales and her Irish grandfather had relatives on the Blasket Islands.)
Eighteen-year-old Manod Llan is the older daughter of a lobster fisherman. Her sweetheart recently left to find work in a mainland factory. It’s 1938 and there are vague rumbles about war, but more pressing is the arrival of strangers here to study a vanishing culture. Anthropologists Edward and Joan learn snatches of Welsh and make recordings of local legends and songs, which are interspersed with the fragmentary narrative. Manod, star-struck, seeks the English researchers’ approval as she helps with translation and other secretarial duties, but becomes disillusioned with their misinterpretations and fascist leanings.
The gradual disintegration of a beached whale casts a metaphorical shadow of decay over the slow-burning story. I kept waiting for momentous events that never came. More definitive consequences? Something to do with Manod’s worries for her little sister, Llinos? A flash-forward to the abandoned island’s after-years? Or to Manod’s future? As it is, the sense of being stuck at a liminal time makes it all feel like prologue. But O’Connor’s writing is quite lovely (“The milk had formed a film over the surface and puckered, like a strange kiss”; “All of my decisions felt like trying to catch a fish that did not exist until I caught it”) and the book is strong on atmosphere and tension. I’ll look out for her next work.
With thanks to Picador for the free copy for review.
Come Here to This Gate by Rory Waterman
I was most drawn to the poems in Part I, “All but Forgotten,” about his father’s last year or so.
The titles participate in telling the story: “Alcoholic Dementia,” followed by “Twin Oaks Nursing Home.”
The sheep-tracks of your mind were worn to trenches.
…
Then what you’ve turned yourself into – half there
on one side of a final single bed
you might not leave till the rest of you has left –
starts, stares through me, says ‘I’m being held
against my will!’, tells a nurse to ‘Just fuck off’
then thanks her. Old boy, when did you get like this?
The sheep-tracks of my mind are worn to trenches.
Then they moved you to a home
that still wasn’t home. ‘Why
am I in this fucking place?
Nothing’s wrong with me.’
So I’d tell you all over again,
but only the easy part (‘You’re
not remembering things well
at present.’ ‘Yes I fucking am’)
and you relearned that you’d
never learn – mindless torture,
until I stopped it. Your
silences were trains departing.
From the miscellany of Part II, I plucked out “Gooseberries” and “Perennials,” both of which conceal emotion among plants. Then Part III, “Lincolnshire Folk Tales,” turns the tone mischievous, with the ABCB end-rhymes of “Yallery Brown,” “The Metheringham Lass,” “The Lincoln Imp,” and “Nanny Rutt” (I felt I’d stumbled on a limerick with its rhythm: “Math Wood is a small plot of trees south of Bourne, / next to McDonald’s and Lidl. / It’s privately owned, full of shot-gun shells, pheasants – / but still, a bit of an idyll”). Plenty of good stuff, then, but it doesn’t all seem to fit together in the same collection.
With thanks to Carcanet Press for the advanced e-copy for review.
This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things by Naomi Wood
I requested this because a) I had enjoyed Wood’s novels Mrs. Hemingway and The Hiding Game and b) I couldn’t resist the title. These nine contemporary stories (five in the first person and four in the third person) all feature women who are pregnant and/or mothers of young children. Three dwell on work–life balance in particular, with the female protagonists of “Lesley, in Therapy” and “Dracula at the Movies” an animator and a filmmaker, respectively. The third, “Hurt Feelings,” in which a medical emergency forces a choice between career and motherhood, was my favourite. Claudia is working on an advertising campaign for a large pharmaceutical company whose newest product targets chronic pain. Although she suspects it’s a placebo, she knows how valuable it is for these people to have their pain acknowledged given it’s as invisible as her history of pregnancy loss.
Other highlights included “Peek-a-Boo,” in which pregnant twin sisters fly to Italy to remonstrate with their father, who refuses to cede a holiday flat to the next renters; and “Wedding Day,” about a woman bitter enough to try to sabotage her ex’s big day by demanding he bring their daughter, the flower girl, home by bedtime. “Flatten the Curve” is about restrictions and desires during Covid lockdown. Family, neighbour, and co-worker dynamics fuel the drama. In a few cases, Wood imagined promising situations but didn’t deliver on them. I could hardly believe “Comorbidities,” about a mother who films a sex tape with her husband to distract from her eco-anxiety, won the 2023 BBC National Short Story Award. If Wood was aiming for edgy, she landed on peevish instead. “Dino Moms,” the final story, was worst, with its absurd dinosaur-vet reality-TV setup. Overall, the collection is too one-note because of the obsession with motherhood (“It is not very interesting to be in love with your child; it’s commonplace, this sacrificial love”). Back to novels soon, please.
With thanks to Phoenix (Orion) for the free copy for review.
Does one of these catch your eye? What April releases can you recommend?
March Releases by Akbar, Bosker, García Márquez, and Wrenn
I’m catching up after a busy end to last month. Today I have an uneven debut novel from a poet whose work I’ve enjoyed before, a journalist’s jaunty submersion in the world of modern art, a posthumous novella from a famous Colombian author I’d not previously read, and a (literally) trippy memoir about C-PTSD, coral, climate breakdown, queerness and more. I can pinpoint a couple of elements that some or all of them have in common: beauty (whether in art or in nature) and dead mothers.
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
I’d read the Iranian American poet’s two full-length collections and particularly admired Pilgrim Bell, one of my favourite books of 2021. That was enough for me to put this on my Most Anticipated list for 2024, even though based on the synopsis I wrote: “His debut novel sounds kind of unhinged, but I figure it’s worth a try.” Here’s an excerpt from the publisher’s blurb: “When Cyrus’s obsession with the lives of the martyrs – Bobby Sands, Joan of Arc – leads him to a chance encounter with a dying artist, he finds himself drawn towards the mysteries of an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of Death; and toward his [late] mother, who may not have been who or what she seemed.”
Cyrus Shams is an Iranian American aspiring poet who grew up in Indiana with a single father, his mother Roya having died in a passenger aircraft mistakenly shot down by a U.S. Navy missile cruiser (this really happened: Iran Air Flight 655, on 3 July 1988). He continues to lurk around the Keady University campus, working as a medical actor at the hospital, but his ambition is to write. During his shaky recovery from drug and alcohol abuse, he undertakes a project that seems divinely inspired: “Tired of interventionist pyrotechnics like burning bushes and locust plagues, maybe God now worked through the tired eyes of drunk Iranians in the American Midwest”. By seeking the meaning in others’ deaths, he hopes his modern “Book of Martyrs” will teach him how to cherish his own life.
This document, which we see in fragments, sets up hypothetical dialogues between figures real and imaginary, dead and living, and intersperses them with poems and short musings. But when a friend tells Cyrus about the Brooklyn Museum installation “DEATH-SPEAK,” which has terminally ill Iranian artist Orkideh living out her last days in public, he spies an opportunity to move the work beyond theory and into the physical realm. So he flies to New York City with his best friend (and occasional f**kbuddy), bartender Zee Novak, and visits Orkideh every day until the installation’s/artist’s end.
This is a wildly original but unruly novel with a few problems. One: Akbar has clung too obviously to his own story and manner of speaking with Cyrus (e.g., “I honestly actually do worry about that, no joke. Being a young Iranian man making a book about martyrdom, going around talking to people about becoming a martyr. It’s not inert, you know?”). Another is that the poems, and poetic descriptions, are much the best material. The only exception might be a zany scene where Zee and Cyrus chop wood while high. But the main issue I had is that the plot turns on a twist 50 pages from the end, a huge coincidence that feels unearned. I admire the ambition Akbar had for this – a seething, open-hearted enquiry into addiction, love, suicide and queerness – but look forward to him getting back to poetry. 
With thanks to Picador for the proof copy for review.
Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See by Bianca Bosker
I was a big fan of Bosker’s Cork Dork (2017), her deep dive into the world of fine wine. Her second book is similarly constructed and equally fun: more personal than authoritative, light yet substantial, and accessible to the uninitiated as well as those with an existing interest in the subject. She begins as a complete novice, wondering if she’ll ever know what art is, let alone what it means and whether it’s any good (“the familiar feeling that everyone got the punch line except me”). By the end, she has discovered that, like the love of wine, art appreciation can be a way of expanding and savouring one’s life.
The aim was to get the broadest experience possible, generally through voluntary placements. She started out as an assistant at Jack Barrett’s 315 Gallery, where one of her tasks was to paint a wall white; she failed miserably to meet his expectations even for this simple task. He never lost his fundamental distrust of her, a writer and outsider, as one of “the enemy.” It was expected that she would attend as many art shows and openings as possible per week. “Talking shit was essentially a job requirement.” Bosker might not have known what to make of the art, but others were gossipy, snobbish and opinionated enough to make up for it. When she was tasked with writing a press release for an exhibit, a gallerist taught her the clichéd shorthand: “Every f**king artist allegedly transforms the familiar into the unfamiliar, or vice versa.”
In the course of the book, the New York City-based author also:
- attends the Art Basel Miami Beach contemporary art fair and sells photographs on behalf of Denny Dimin Gallery;
- befriends performance artist and “ass influencer” Mandy AllFIRE, who – ahem – sits on Bosker’s face as part of a temporary installment;
- serves as a studio assistant for French painter Julie Curtiss, whose work is selling for alarmingly high amounts at auction (not actually what a painter wants, as it tends to signal bad things for a career);
- meets a pair of North Dakota collectors known as “the Icy Gays”; and
- works as a Guggenheim Museum guard.
This last was my favourite episode. Forty-minute placements on particular ramps gave her time to focus on one chosen artwork – for instance, an abstract sculpture. She challenged herself to stay with it for that whole time, doing as one artist advised and simply noticing five things about the work. Before, her “default approach to art had just been to plant myself in front of a piece and wait for the epiphany to wash over me.” Now, she worked at it. In fact, she counsels newcomers to not read a caption because many people take a title at face value and an interpretation as gospel, and so don’t experience the art for themselves.
At times I found the book slightly scattered in the way that it zigzags from one challenge to another. There’s differing attention to various experiences; a week-long art school merits just one paragraph. And there’s no getting past the fact that some art she encounters sounds outlandish or just plain silly. (Is it any surprise that she mistakes part of a wall, and a mousetrap, for art pieces?) Ultimately, I think it’s best if you have at least a modicum of appreciation for modern art, which I don’t; whereas I do enjoy drinking wine even if I don’t have a trained palate.
Even so, Bosker’s writing has such verve (“artists were coyly evasive about their work and treated my questions like I was a cactus running after their balloon”; “a hazy daydream of an idea solidified into a yappy, un-shut-uppable chihuahua of want”) that you’ll be glad you went along for the ride. She concludes that taste is subjective, but “Beauty … pulls you close.” Art is valuable because it “knocks us off our well-worn pathways” into something uncharted, a tantalizing prospect. 
With thanks to Allen & Unwin (Grove Press) for the free copy for review.
{SPOILERS IN THIS NEXT ONE}
Until August by Gabriel García Márquez
[Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean]
A posthumous ‘lost’ novella was not a good place for me to have started with this celebrated author. García Márquez okayed the fifth draft of the text in 2004, 10 years before his death. By this time he was already suffering with memory loss that interfered with his creativity. His sons got the message that he didn’t think the book worked and should be destroyed. But they didn’t do his bidding and, revisiting the book nearly a decade on from his death, decided it wasn’t that bad, if not up to the standard of his best work, and that it should see the light of day after all.
Every August 16th, Ana Magdalena Bach travels to the island where her mother is buried to visit the grave and lay gladioli on it. (My review book came with a bag of three gladioli bulbs and a mini Colombian chocolate bar.) Each year she takes a different lover for the one night at a hotel. The first time, the man leaves her a $20 bill and she feels ashamed, but it doesn’t stop her doing the same thing again for the next four years in a row. Once it’s a long-ago school friend whom she runs into on the ferry. Another time, by golly, it’s a bishop.
It’s refreshing to have a woman in middle age as protagonist and for her to claim sexual freedom. However, the setup is formulaic and repetitive, the sex scenes are somewhat excruciating, and the hypocrisy of her gleefully having one-night stands while fretting over her husband’s potential infidelity is grating. I did like the ending – Ana hears that an anonymous elderly gentleman has been paying to have gladioli laid on her mother’s grave year-round and she wonders if she is in a sense following in her mother’s footsteps all along without knowing it; and decides she’s had enough and exhumes her mother’s remains, returning to her husband with a bag of bones (gruesome!).
But nothing about the plot or the writing – fluid enough bar one awkward sentence (“She listened to him worried that he meant it, but she had the strength not to appear as easy a woman as he might think”) – suggested to me a master at work. At best, this might be reminiscent of the late work of misogynist-leaning authors like Coetzee or Updike.
In my mind García Márquez is linked with magic realism, so I’d be better off trying one of his more representative works. I have several of his earlier novellas on the shelf (received as review copies as part of the same recent marketing push), and if I get on better with those then I’ll be sure to try one of the most famous full-length novels. 
With thanks to Viking (Penguin) for the free copy for review.
Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis by Greg Wrenn
Wrenn is an associate English professor teaching environmental literature at James Madison University. He has also been exploring coral reefs for 25 years, with a love of marine wildlife sparked by growing up in Florida. But all along, he’s been trying (much like Cyrus Shams) to come to terms with addiction, queerness, suicidal inclinations, and especially his mother’s place in his life. She made him feel dirty, that he would never be good enough; she hit him with a wooden spoon and bathed him until he was 17. Though he never found out for sure, he suspects his mother was sexually abused by her father and repeated the cycle of molestation.
This is the third C-PTSD memoir I’ve read (after What My Bones Know and A Flat Place), and has a lot in common with I’m Glad My Mom Died, which features a co-dependent relationship with an abusive mother. After Wrenn’s parents’ divorce, he and his mother remained close. “I had been her therapist, confessor, girlfriend, and punching bag.” He helped care for her after a stroke but eventually had to throw up his hands at her stubborn refusal to follow doctors’ orders. Drawing on the Greek etymology of ecology (oikos means house or family), Wrenn insists on a parallel between the personal and the environmental here: “What we’re facing amounts to global C-PTSD” as “Mother” Earth turns against us. On each trip to Raja Ampat, he knows the coral reef is dying, his carbon footprint only accelerating it.
There’s a lot in this short memoir. Even the summary had me shaking my head in disbelief. For me, though, the tone and style were too erratic. Wrenn can be wry, sorrowful, or campy; he includes scientific data, letters to Adrienne Rich and an imagined descendent, a chapter riffing on “Otters” (the animal and the gay stereotype), flashbacks, and E.T. metaphors. The final third of the book then takes a left turn as he experiments with therapeutic psychedelics via ayahuasca ceremonies in South America, and ditches dating apps and casual sex to try to find a long-term relationship. The drug literally alters his brain, allowing him to feel trust and love. Add on nature and a husband and that’s why he’s still here rather than dead by suicide.
Like Akbar, Wrenn published poetry before switching genre. Their books are both amazing in premise but wobbly in execution. Still, I’d say both authors are laudable for their effort to depict lives wrenched back from extremity. 
With thanks to Regalo Press (USA) for the proof copy for review.
Reviewing Two Books by Cancelled Authors
I don’t have anything especially insightful to say about these authors’ reasons for being cancelled, although in my review of the Clanchy I’ve noted the textual examples that have been cited as problematic. Alexie is among the legion of male public figures to have been accused of sexual misconduct in recent years. I’m not saying those aren’t serious allegations, but as Claire Dederer wrestled with in Monsters, our judgement of a person can be separate from our response to their work. So that’s the good news: I thought these were both fantastic books. They share a theme of education.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (illus. Ellen Forney) (2007)
Alexie is to be lauded for his contributions to the flourishing of both Indigenous literature and YA literature. This was my first of his books and I don’t know a thing about him or the rest of his work. But I feel like this must have groundbreaking for its time (or maybe a throwback to Adrian Mole et al.), and I suspect it’s more than a little autobiographical.
It reads exactly like a horny 14-year-old boy’s diary, but “Junior” (Arnold Spirit, Jr.) is also self-deprecating and sweetly vulnerable; Alexie’s tone is spot on. Junior has had a tough life on a Spokane reservation in Washington, being bullied for his poor eyesight and speech impediments that resulted from brain damage at birth and ongoing seizures. Poverty, alcoholism, casinos: they don’t feel like clichés of Indian reservations here because Alexie writes from experience and presents them matter-of-factly. Junior’s parents never got to pursue their dreams and his sister has run away to Montana, but he has a chance to change the trajectory. A rez teacher says his only hope for a bright future is to transfer to the elite high school in Reardan. So he does, even though it often requires hitch-hiking or walking miles.
Junior soon becomes adept at code-switching: “Traveling between Reardan and Wellpinit, between the little white town and the reservation, I always felt like a stranger. I was half Indian in one place and half white in the other.” He gets a white girlfriend, Penelope, but has to work hard to conceal how impoverished he is. His best friend, Rowdy, is furious with him for abandoning his people. That resentment builds all the way to a climactic basketball match between Reardan and Wellpinit that also functions as a symbolic battle between the parts of Junior’s identity. Along the way, there are multiple tragic deaths in which alcohol, inevitably, plays a role. “I’m fourteen years old and I’ve been to forty-two funerals,” he confides. “Jeez, what a sucky life. … I kept trying to find the little pieces of joy in my life. That’s the only way I managed to make it through all of that death and change.”
One of those joys, for him, is cartooning. Describing his cartoons to his new white friend, Gordy, he says, “I use them to understand the world.”
Forney’s black-and-white illustrations make the cartoons look like found objects – creased scraps of notebook paper sellotaped into a diary. This isn’t a graphic novel, but most of the short chapters include several illustrations. There’s a casual intimacy to the whole book that feels absolutely authentic. Bridging the particular and universal, it’s a heartfelt gem, and not just for teens. (University library) 
Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me by Kate Clanchy (2019)
If your Twitter sphere and mine overlap, you may remember the controversy over the racialized descriptions in this Orwell Prize-winning memoir of 30 years of teaching – and the fact that, rather than issuing a humbled apology, Clanchy, at least initially, doubled down and refuted all objections, even when they came from BIPOC. It wasn’t a good look. Nor was it the first time I’ve found Clanchy to be prickly. (She is what, in another time, might have been called a formidable woman.) Anyway, I waited a few years for the furore to die down before trying this for myself.
I know vanishingly little about the British education system because I don’t have children and only experienced uni here at a distance, through my junior year abroad. So there may be class-based nuances I missed – for instance, in the chapter about selecting a school for her oldest son and comparing it with the underprivileged Essex school where she taught. But it’s clear that a lot of her students posed serious challenges. Many were refugees or immigrants, and she worked for a time on an “Inclusion Unit,” which seems to be more in the business of exclusion in that it’s for students who have been removed from regular classrooms. They came from bad family situations and were more likely to end up in prison or pregnant. To get any of them to connect with Shakespeare, or write their own poetry, was a minor miracle.
Clanchy is also a poet and novelist – I’ve read one of her novels, and her Selected Poems – and did much to encourage her students to develop a voice and the confidence to have their work published (she’s produced anthologies of student work). In many cases, she gave them strategies for giving literary shape to traumatic memories. The book’s engaging vignettes have all had the identifying details removed, and are collected under thematic headings that address the second part of the title: “About Love, Sex, and the Limits of Embarrassment” and “About Nations, Papers, and Where We Belong” are two example chapters. She doesn’t avoid contentious topics, either: the hijab, religion, mental illness and so on.
You get the feeling that she was a friend and mentor to her students, not just their teacher, and that they could talk to her about anything and rely on her support. Watching them grow in self-expression is heart-warming; we come to care for these young people, too, because of how sincerely they have been created from amalgams. Indeed, Clanchy writes in the introduction that “I have included nobody, teacher or pupil, about whom I could not write with love.”
And that is, I think, why she was so hurt and disbelieving when people pointed out racism in her characterization:
I was baffled when a boy with jet-black hair and eyes and a fine Ashkenazi nose named David Marks refused any Jewish heritage
her furry eyebrows, her slanting, sparking black eyes, her general, Mongolian ferocity. [but she’s Afghan??]
(of girls in hijabs) I never saw their (Asian/silky/curly?) hair in eight years.
They’re a funny pair: Izzat so small and square and Afghan with his big nose and premature moustache; Mo so rounded and mellow and Pakistani with his long-lashed eyes and soft glossy hair.
There are a few other ill-advised passages. She admits she can’t tell the difference between Kenyan and Somali faces; she ponders whether being a Scot in England gave her some taste of the prejudice refugees experience. And there’s this passage about sexuality:
Are we all ‘fluid’ now? Perhaps. It is commonplace to proclaim oneself transsexual. And to actually be gay, especially if you are as pretty as Kristen Stewart, is positively fashionable. A couple of kids have even changed gender, a decision … deliciously of the moment
My take: Clanchy wanted to craft affectionate pen portraits that celebrated children’s uniqueness, but had to make them anonymous, so resorted to generalizations. Doing this on a country or ethnicity basis was the mistake. Journalistic realism doesn’t require a focus on appearances (I would hope that, if I were ever profiled, someone could find more interesting things to say about me than that I am short and have a large nose). She could have just introduced the students with ‘facts,’ e.g., “Shakila, from Afghanistan, wore a hijab and was feisty and outspoken.” Note to self: white people can be clueless, and we need to listen and learn. The book was reissued in 2022 by independent publisher Swift Press, with offending passages removed (see here for more info). I’d be keen to see the result and hope that the book will find more readers because, truly, it is lovely. (Little Free Library) 
Winter Reads: Claire Tomalin, Daniel Woodrell & Picture Books
Mid-February approaches and we’re wondering if the snowdrops and primroses emerging here in the South of England mean that it will be farewell to winter soon, or if the cold weather will return as rumoured. (Punxsutawney Phil didn’t see his shadow, but that early-spring prediction is only valid for the USA, right?) I didn’t manage to read many seasonal books this year, but I did pick up several short works with “Winter” in the title: a little-known biographical play from a respected author, a gritty Southern Gothic novella made famous through a Jennifer Lawrence film, and two picture books I picked up at the library last week.
The Winter Wife by Claire Tomalin (1991)
A search of the university library catalogue turned up this Tomalin title I’d never heard of. It turns out to be a very short play (two acts of seven scenes each, but only running to 44 pages in total) about a trip abroad Katherine Mansfield took with her housekeeper?/companion, Ida Baker, in 1920. Ida clucks over Katherine like a nurse or mother hen, but there also seems to be latent, unrequited love there (Mansfield was bisexual, as I knew from fellow New Zealander Sarah Laing’s fab graphic memoir Mansfield and Me). Katherine, for her part, alternately speaks to Ida, whom she nicknames “Jones,” with exasperation and fondness. The title comes from a moment late on when Katherine tells Ida “you’re the perfect friend – more than a friend. You know what you are, you’re what every woman needs: you’re my true wife.” Maybe what we’d call a “work wife” today, but Ida blushes with pride.
Tomalin had already written a full-length biography of Mansfield, but insists she barely referred to it when composing this. The backdrops are minimal: a French sleeper train; Isola Bella, a villa on the French Riviera; and Dr. Bouchage’s office. Mansfield was ill with tuberculosis, and the continental climate was a balm: “The sun gets right into my bones and makes me feel better. All that English damp was killing me. I can’t think why I ever tried to live in England.” There are also financial worries. The Murrys keep just one servant, Marie, a middle-aged French woman who accompanies her on this trip, but Katherine fears they’ll have to let her go if she doesn’t keep earning by her pen.
Through Katherine’s conversations with the doctor, we catch up on her romantic history – a brief first marriage, a miscarriage, and other lovers. Dr. Bouchage believes her infertility is a result of untreated gonorrhea. He echoes Ida in warning Katherine that she’s working too hard – mostly reviewing books for her husband John Middleton Murry’s magazine, but also writing her own short stories – when she should be resting. Katherine retorts, “It is simply none of your business, Jones. Dr Bouchage: if I do not work, I might as well be dead, it’s as simple as that.”
She would die not three years later, a fact that audiences learn through a final flash-forward where Ida, in a monologue, contrasts her own long life (she lived to 90 and Tomalin interviewed her when she was 88) with Katherine’s short one. “I never married. For me, no one ever equalled Katie. There was something golden about her.” Whereas Katherine had mused, “I thought there was going to be so much life then … that it would all be experience I could use. I thought I could live all sorts of different lives, and be unscathed…”
The play is, by its nature, slight, but gives a lovely sense of the subject and her key relationships – I do mean to read more by and about Mansfield. I wonder if it has been performed much since. And how about this for unexpected literary serendipity?
Yes, it’s that Rachel Joyce. (University library) 
Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell (2006)
I’d seen the movie but hadn’t remembered just how bleak and violent the story is, especially considering that the main character is a teenage girl. Ree Dolly lives in Ozarks poverty with a mentally ill, almost catatonic mother and two younger brothers whom she is effectively raising on her own. Their father, Jessup, is missing; rumour has it that he lies dead somewhere for snitching on his fellow drug producers. But unless Ree can prove he’s not coming back, the bail bondsman will repossess the house, leaving the family destitute.
Forced to undertake a frozen odyssey to find traces of Jessup, she’s unwelcome everywhere she goes, even among extended family. No one is above hitting a girl, it seems, and just for asking questions Ree gets beaten half to death. Her only comfort is in her best friend, Gail, who’s recently given birth and married the baby daddy. Gail and Ree have long “practiced” on each other romantically. Without labelling anything, Woodrell sensitively portrays the different value the two girls place on their attachment. His prose is sometimes gorgeous –
Pine trees with low limbs spread over fresh snow made a stronger vault for the spirit than pews and pulpits ever could.
– but can be overblown or off-puttingly folksy:
Ree felt bogged and forlorn, doomed to a spreading swamp of hateful obligations.
Merab followed the beam and led them on a slow wamble across a rankled field
This was my second from Woodrell, after the short stories of The Outlaw Album. I don’t think I’ll need to try any more by him, but this was a solid read. (Secondhand – New Chapter Books, Wigtown)
Children’s picture books:
Winter Sleep: A Hibernation Story by Sean Taylor and Alex Morss [illus. Cinyee Chiu] (2019): My second book by this group; I read Busy Spring: Nature Wakes Up a couple of years ago. Granny Sylvie reassures her grandson that everything hasn’t died in winter, but is sleeping or in hiding beneath the ice or behind the scenes. As before, the only niggle is that European and North American species are both mentioned and it’s not made clear that they live in different places. (Public library)
The Lightbringers: Winter by Karin Celestine (2020): An unusual artistic style here: every spread is a photograph of felted woodland creatures. The focus is on midwinter and the hope of the light coming back – depicted as poppy seed heads, lit from within and carried by mouse, hare, badger and more. “The light will always return because it is guarded by small beings and they are steadfast in their task.” The first of four seasonal stories. (Public library) 
Any wintry reading (or weather) for you lately?
My Best Backlist Reads of the Year
Like many bloggers, I’m irresistibly drawn to the new books released each year. However, I consistently find that many of my more memorable reads were published earlier – most of these happen to have been published between one and a few years ago, with the ‘oldest’ being from 2004. These dozen selections – alphabetical within genre but in no particular rank order – together with my Best of 2023 post (coming up tomorrow), make up about the top 10% of my year’s reading.
Fiction
Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt: The heart-wrenching story of a woman who adopts her granddaughter because of her daughter’s drug addiction. The prose is stunning as Boyt traces the history of this complicated, makeshift family. The title has a wry double meaning, but also connotations of anticipatory grief. There can be love even where there is estrangement, or eternal separation. That is one of the enduring messages of this gem of a short novel.
Homesick by Jennifer Croft: Each vignette – some just a paragraph long – is perfectly chosen to reveal a family dynamic and a moment in American history. What Croft does so brilliantly is to chart the accretion of ordinary and landmark events that form a life. In the end it didn’t matter whether this was presented as memoir or autofiction, so true was it to the experience of 1990s girlhood, as well as to sisterhood and coming of age.
Search by Michelle Huneven: When middle-aged restaurant critic Dana Potowski is invited to be on the search committee to appoint the next minister for her California Unitarian church, she reluctantly agrees but soon wonders whether the experience could be interesting fodder for a new book… The setup might seem niche but will resonate with anyone who’s had a brush with bureaucracy. Pure pleasure; lit fic full of gossip and good food.
Under the Rainbow by Celia Laskey: Researchers identified Big Burr, Kansas as the most homophobic town in America. An Acceptance Across America task force descends on the rural backwater for a two-year program promoting education and friendship. Each chapter in the linked short story collection is a first-person, present-tense confession from a local or a queer visitor, whose stories interlock. Laskey inhabits all 11 with equal skill and compassion.
The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry: This utterly immersive novel examines Thomas Hardy’s relationship with his first wife, Emma Gifford. It opens on the morning of her death. The couple had long been estranged, but Hardy was instantly struck with grief – and remorse, his guilt compounded by what he found in her journals. A universal tale of waning romance, loss, and regret. Beautifully understated; perfectly convincing for the period but also timeless.
Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout: As Covid hits, William whisks Lucy from her NYC apartment to a house at the Maine coast. She’s an Everywoman recounting the fear and confusion of the early pandemic. Isolation has benefits: the first ‘room of her own’ she’s ever had, and time to ponder her childhood trauma and what went wrong in her marriage. Astute on American politics and writers’ inspirations; an effortless voice and emotional intelligence.
Nonfiction
Bibliomaniac by Robin Ince: Ince was meant to undertake a stadium tour in Autumn 2021, but a Covid resurgence put paid to that. Not one for sitting around at home, he formulated Plan B: 100+ events, most of them in independent bookshops, over the course of two months, criss-crossing Britain and hitting many of my favourites. He’s not just a speaker at them but, invariably, a customer. I sensed a kindred spirit in so many lines. Witty and open-minded.
A Line in the World by Dorthe Nors: Nors lives in rural Jutland along the west coast of Denmark – little visited and largely unknown to foreigners. This can be both good and bad. Tourists feel they’re discovering somewhere new, but the residents are insular. Local legends and traditions, bird migration, reliance on the sea, wanderlust, maritime history, a visit to church frescoes, and more. Gorgeous writing and atmosphere, despite the bleakness.
Here and Now by Henri Nouwen: This collection of micro-essays under themed headings like “Living in the Present” and “Suffering” is a perfect introduction to the Dutch Catholic priest’s theology. I marked out many reassuring or thought-provoking passages. I was taken by his ideas that the life of compassion is one of “downward mobility” and that inner freedom comes when you don’t judge anyone. Peaceful and readable; a good bedside devotional.
Poetry
Ephemeron by Fiona Benson: Exquisite poems about the ephemeral, whether that be insect lives, boarding school days, primal emotions or moments from her children’s early years. The book is in four discrete corresponding sections but themes and language bleed from one into another and the whole is shot through with astonishing corporeality and eroticism. The form varies but the alliteration, slant rhymes and unexpected metaphors make each poem glisten.
Leave Me a Little Want by Beverly Burch: Burch’s fourth collection juxtaposes the cosmic and the mundane, marvelling at the behind-the-scenes magic that goes into one human being born but also making poetry of an impatient wait in a long post office queue. Beset by environmental anxiety and the scale of bad news during the pandemic, she pauses in appreciation of the small and gradual.
Making the Beds for the Dead by Gillian Clarke: Full of colour and nature imagery, profuse with alliteration and slant rhymes, relishing its specialist terminology, and taking on the serious subject matter of manmade disasters. Several sequences are devoted to gardening and geology; some pieces are ekphrastic, or dedicated to particular poets. The title sequence tackles the 2001foot and mouth disease outbreak. “The Fall” is on 9/11. Very affecting stuff.
My overall favourites were: in novels, Search and The Chosen (one contemporary and one historical) and in poetry, Ephemeron.
What were your best backlist reads this year?
Nonfiction and Poetry Review Catch-Up: Carson, Dixon, McLaren, Sharpe
Today I’m finally writing up four review copies that came my way quite a while ago (last year in one case). A bereavement memoir about a friend lost to opiate addiction, a nature-rich poetry collection, a practical book about being part of positive movements whether led by religion or not, and an eye-opening work of cultural criticism about Black art and suffering.
The Dead Are Gods: A Memoir by Eirinie Carson (2023)
When I was back in the States in May for my sister’s nursing school graduation, I got a chance to talk to her best friend, who is a library assistant. During the never-ending reading-out of names (it was a whole-college ceremony, as opposed to the one earlier in the day just for the nursing cohort), I read Hello Beautiful on my Kindle, tucked inside the graduation program; this friend openly read a library copy of The Dead Are Gods on her lap. When I teased her that at least I kept my book hidden, like I do at church inside the hymn book, she said (re: church), “Or you could just … not go?” (On which, see the McLaren review below!)
Anyway, it was nice to see this book out and about in the world, and it reminded me to belatedly pick up my review copy once I got back. As a bereavement memoir, the book is right in my wheelhouse, though I’ve tended to gravitate towards stories of the loss of a family memoir or spouse, whereas Carson is commemorating her best friend, Larissa, who died in 2018 of a heroin overdose, age 32, and was found in the bath in her Paris flat one week later.
Carson wrote this three years afterward, yet the feeling is still raw. Addressing Larissa as “you” for much of the book, she loops through their history in short chapters that hop around like memory does. They met as teenagers in London and bonded over being Black models and rock music fans. After their wild years, their paths started to drift apart. Carson moved to California and married and had children; Larissa relocated to Paris and, apparently, kept partying. Her dependency came as news to Carson – all the more ironic because her father, too, is a heroin addict and mostly not present in her life.
Anyone who has suffered a loss will find much that resonates here, no matter the circumstances or timing. Carson puzzles over the difficulty of making a narrative out of death and grief (“How should I remember you? Am I doing it right? Is this enough?”), of even comprehending the bare facts of permanent absence. She’s working towards understanding, and desperate to let people know about the marvel that was Larissa. Apart from in the title chapter, the language does not stand out so much as the relatable emotion. (And it’s hard to take their pet name- and typo-strewn e-mails seriously.) Still, I marked out lots of passages to save: “It is frustrating when the one person who could answer all of your many, many questions is the dead person. … Searching for meaning in the most meaningless event in our lives feels a little stupid but I still search.”
With thanks to Melville House for the proof copy for review.
A Whistling of Birds by Isobel Dixon (illus. Douglas Robertson) (2023)
Dixon was a new name for me, but the South African poet, now based in Cambridge, has published five collections. I was drawn to this latest one by its acknowledged debt to D.H. Lawrence: the title phrase comes from one of his essays, and the book as a whole is said to resemble his Birds, Beasts and Flowers, which is in its centenary year. I’m more familiar with Lawrence’s novels than his verse, but I do own his Collected Poems and was fascinated to find here echoes of his mystical interest in nature as well as his love for the landscape of New Mexico. England and South Africa are settings as well as the American Southwest.
Snakes, bees, bats and foxes are some of the creatures that scamper through the text. There are poems for marine life, fruit and wildflowers. You get a sense of the seasons turning, and the natural wonders to prize from each. Dixon’s poetry is formal yet playful, the structures and line and stanza lengths varying. “Tirrick” is full of wordplay relating to Arctic terns; phrases flit across the page to mimic flight in “the bats”; “Hummingbird ~” mixes Latin names with vivid descriptions: “the oil spill of God’s glory / taking wing” and “sweet-wrapper glamour scrap / hovering shadow-gloss”.
There are portraits and elegies; moments where the speaker is present versus fable-like omniscient warnings or teasing. I particularly loved “River Mother” (an ode to a pregnant crab), “The Guests” (about a “festival of frogs” after rain), the praying mantis depicted in “A Missionary in Neon Green” (“Soul on stilts, / a gog-eyed alien”), and the everyday ecstasy of “On First Spotting a Snake’s Head Fritillary.” The book is in collaboration with Scottish artist Douglas Robertson, who provided 12 black-and-white illustrations, and is a real gem.
With thanks to Nine Arches Press for the free copy for review.
Do I Stay Christian? A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed and the Disillusioned by Brian McLaren (2022)
McLaren is one of the important gurus in my life. This follows on closely from his previous book, Faith after Doubt, which I reviewed last year. You might think that the title question is only rhetorical and the answer is a firmly implied Yes. But what’s refreshing is that the author genuinely does not have a secret agenda. He doesn’t mind whether you continue to consider yourself Christian or not; what he does care about is inviting people into a spiritual life that includes working towards a regenerative future, the only way the human race is going to survive. And he believes that people of all faiths and none can be a part of that.
But first to address the central question: Part One is No and Part Two is Yes; each is allotted 10 chapters and roughly the same number of pages. McLaren has absolute sympathy with those who decide that they cannot in good conscience call themselves Christians. He’s not coming up with easily refuted objections, straw men, but honestly facing huge and ongoing problems like patriarchal and colonial attitudes, the condoning of violence, intellectual stagnation, ageing congregations, and corruption. From his vantage point as a former pastor, he acknowledges that today’s churches, especially of the American megachurch variety, feature significant conflicts of interest around money. He knows that Christians can be politically and morally repugnant and can oppose the very changes the world needs.
And yet. He believes Christianity can still be a force for good, and it would be a shame to give up on the wealth of its (comparatively short) history and the paragon that is Jesus (whom he provocatively describes as “an indigenous man who prepared for his public ministry with a forty-day vision quest”). The arguments in this section are more emotional, whereas in the previous section they were matter-of-fact. However, McLaren poses a middle option between leaving the religion dramatically and remaining meekly; he calls it “staying defiantly.” My husband and I read this as a buddy read, and that will be an important concept for us: how can we challenge the status quo of our church, our denomination, this too often staid faith?
Part Three, “How,” offers ideas for how to build a resilient faith that prioritizes harmony with the environment and with others while sidelining economic concerns. He may not believe in literal hell, but he’s as end-times-oriented as any fire-and-brimstone preacher when he insists, “we have to prepare ourselves to live good lives of defiant joy in the midst of chaos and suffering. This can be done. It has been done by billions of our ancestors and neighbours.” He ends with a supremely practical piece of advice: ask yourself “whether your current context will allow the highest and best use of your gifts and time.” Lucid and well argued, this is a book I’d recommend to anyone questioning the value of Christianity.
With thanks to Hodder & Stoughton for the free copy for review.
Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe (2023)
This work of cultural criticism takes the form of 248 numbered micro-essays, some as short as one line and others up to a few pages. The central topics are Black art and Black suffering – specifically, how the latter is depicted. The book kept slapping me awake, because her opinions were not what I was expecting. Her responses to her 2018 visits to two landmarks in Montgomery, Alabama, the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, give a taste of her outlook. The museum draws a direct line between slavery and mass incarceration; the memorial documents all known cases of lynching, and she’s in its graveyard when a white woman comes up to her, crying and apologizing. When people ask Sharpe why she didn’t reply, she says, “she tries to hand me her sorrow … to super-add her burden to my own. It is not mine to bear.”
Many of these early notes question the purpose of reliving racial violence. For instance, Sharpe is appalled to watch a Claudia Rankine video essay that stitches together footage of beatings and murders of Black people. “Spectacle is not repair.” She later takes issue with Barack Obama singing “Amazing Grace” at the funeral of slain African American churchgoers because the song was written by a slaver. The general message I take from these instances is that one’s intentions do not matter; commemorating violence against Black people to pull at the heartstrings is not just in poor taste, but perpetuates cycles of damage.
The book is a protest, strident yet calm, but also a celebration of the Black humanities and an elegy to her late mother, who prepared her to live as a confident, queer woman of colour in a white world. Sharpe decries the notion that art by BIPOC is only of sociological interest, to inform white people about “identity” – this is both a simplification and a means of othering.
Books—poetry, fiction, nonfiction, theory, memoir, biography, mysteries, plays—have always helped me locate myself, tethered me, helped me to make sense of the world and to act in it. I know that books have saved me. By which I mean that books always give me a place to land in difficult times. They show me Black worlds of making and possibility.
And she mainly credits her mother for introducing her to the literature that would sustain her: “My mother wanted me to build a life that was nourishing and Black. … My mother gifted me a love of beauty, a love of works. She gave me every Black book that she could find.” I loved the account of their Sunday afternoon teas, when they had cake and each read aloud a short piece they had memorized by the likes of Gwendolyn Brooks or Langston Hughes.
I found the straightforward autobiographical material, particularly the grief over the loss of her mother, more emotionally resonant than much of the book’s theorizing. The scholarly register can occasionally be off-putting, e.g., “I write these ordinary things to detail the everyday sonic and haptic vocabularies of living life under these brutal regimes.” The other media include letters, headlines, lists, and photographs, creating an overall collage effect. That the book occasionally made me uncomfortable is, no doubt, proof that I needed to read it.
With thanks to Daunt Books for the free copy for review.
Salt & Skin by Eliza Henry-Jones (Blog Tour)
I was drawn to Eliza Henry-Jones’s fifth novel, Salt & Skin (2022), by the setting: the remote (fictional) island of Seannay in the Orkneys. It tells the dark, intriguing story of an Australian family lured in by magic and motivated by environmentalism. History overshadows the present as they come to realize that witch hunts are not just a thing of the past. This was exactly the right evocative reading for me to take on my trip to some other Scottish islands late last month. The setup reminded me of The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel, while the novel as a whole is reminiscent of The Night Ship by Jess Kidd and Night Waking by Sarah Moss.
Only a week after the Managans – photographer Luda, son Darcy, 16, and daughter Min, 14 – arrive on the island, they witness a hideous accident. A sudden rockfall crushes a little girl, and Luda happens to have captured it all. The photos fulfill her task of documenting how climate change is affecting the islands, but she earns the locals’ opprobrium for allowing them to be published. It’s not the family’s first brush with disaster. The kids’ father died recently; whether in an accident or by suicide is unclear. Nor is it the first time Luda’s camera has gotten her into trouble. Darcy is still angry at her for selling a photograph she took of him in a dry dam years before, even though it raised a lot of money and awareness about drought.
The family live in what has long been known as “the ghost house,” and hints of magic soon seep in. Luda’s archaeologist colleague wants to study the “witch marks” at the house, and Darcy is among the traumatized individuals who can see others’ invisible scars. Their fate becomes tied to that of Theo, a young man who washed up on the shore ten years ago as a web-fingered foundling rumoured to be a selkie. Luda becomes obsessed with studying the history of the island’s witches, who were said to lure in whales. Min collects marine rubbish on her deep dives, learning to hold her breath for improbable periods. And Darcy fixates on Theo, who also attracts the interest of a researcher seeking to write a book about his origins.
It’s striking how Henry-Jones juxtaposes the current and realistic with the timeless and mystical. While the climate crisis is important to the framework, it fades into the background as the novel continues, with the focus shifting to the insularity of communities and outlooks. All of the characters are memorable, including the Managans’ elderly relative, Cassandra (calling to mind a prophetic figure from Greek mythology), though I found Father Lee, the meddlesome priest, aligned too readily with clichés. While the plot starts to become overwrought in later chapters, I appreciated the bold exploration of grief and discrimination, the sensitive attention to issues such as addiction and domestic violence, and the frank depictions of a gay relationship and an ace character. I wouldn’t call this a cheerful read by any means, but its brooding atmosphere will stick with me. I’d be keen to read more from Henry-Jones.
With thanks to Random Things Tours and September Publishing for the free copy for review.
Buy Salt & Skin from the Bookshop UK site. [affiliate link]
or
Pre-order Salt & Skin (U.S. release: September 5) from Bookshop.org. [affiliate link]
I was delighted to help kick off the blog tour for Salt & Skin on its UK publication day. See below for details of where other reviews have appeared or will be appearing soon.
Sidle Creek by Jolene McIlwain (Blog Tour)
I’m a sucker for “dirty realism,” a term coined in the 1980s to encompass gritty stories of blue-collar Americana: Ron Rash, David Vann, Daniel Woodrell et al. (I wrote a whole article about it in 2013). It’s less common, certainly, to find women writing in this subgenre, and that feminine touch is part of what makes Sidle Creek unique. In this debut collection of 22 short stories, loosely linked by their location in the Appalachian hills in western Pennsylvania and a couple of recurring minor characters, Jolene McIlwain softens the harsh realities of addiction, poverty and violence with the tender bruises of infertility and lost love.
The title story, which opens the book, has a shifting first-person point-of-view, first telling us about and then putting us into the mind of Esme Andersen, who’s 20 in 1975. Various diagnoses have plagued her family, medical words that repeat as chants: hemorrhage, endometriosis. Superstitions around the creek cast it alternately as a potential site of harm or healing as her single father tries to help her deal with her severe periods. The cover image comes from “Shell,” in which Tiller Shanty reads signs in the markings on red-winged blackbird eggs. He learned his skill of divination from his Vietnamese wife, but conceals from her a portent about her future. It turns out there’s more than one way to lose a beloved.
Grief is a resonant theme in so many of the stories. “The Fractal Geometry of Grief” is a shining example. Hubert Ashe, a widowed mathematician, becomes obsessed with a doe and sets up trail cams and a feeding station to watch her. It’s not clear whether he believes the animal is a reincarnation of his wife or not, but it’s unwise to get so attached in a hunting area. In “Seeds,” a man finds a photograph of his dying wife as a girl and revisits the sadness of her life. “Steer,” one of the most affecting stories, has a middle-aged man hit by anxiety, unable to forget the death of one of their cattle back when he was 16. As horrific as the experience was, it made him receptive to both beauty and pain.
Animal suffering is indeed frequent – something that seems important to mention, as I know a lot of readers who avoid scenes of it whenever possible. In “Eminent Domain,” the electricity shed where teenagers used to go drinking is found to be full of slaughtered cats. It’s the prompt the protagonist needs to escape this dead-end town. “Loosed” is a masterpiece in the vein of Demon Copperhead (though much more violent) about a man who makes money on increasingly cruel sport: cock fighting, then dog fighting, then dirty fights between his own four sons. The flash forward that ends this one is devastating. I, too, am sensitive to reading about animal deaths, but the animal suffering only matches the human here. The nastiness of “The Less Said” makes that plain.
Pregnancy or infant loss is a recurring element. In just three pages, “Seed to Full” expresses a world of sorrow as a woodworker crafts a coffin for his infant son. Even where it is not a central subject, infertility is mentioned in a number of stories. In “You Four Are the One,” four adolescent neighbor girls help Cinta Johns out around the house, hoping with her that this fifth pregnancy will be the one that lasts. “The Steep Side,” a memorable closer that shifts between past and future, has a teen coming across a crashed van, a heavily pregnant woman, and an older woman claiming to be a nurse. What he sees haunts him into adulthood.
There’s an air of mystery to that one, and particularly in “Those Red Boots,” about the disappearance of a waitress who worked at a Hooters-style joint where all the comely staff wear the same uniforms and perform titillating dances. My preference was for longer stories like this where you get greater depth of characterization and more scenes and dialogue. I might have considered cutting a handful of the flash-length stories. However, even in these micro-fictions, there are still interesting setups. My favorite among them was “The Fourth,” in which Independence Day fireworks are triggering for shell-shocked Uncle Ron.
At times harrowing, always clear-eyed, these stories are true to life and compassionate about human foibles and animal pain. I would highly recommend them to readers of Kent Haruf and Jayne Anne Phillips. McIlwain has such an established voice that this hardly seems like a first book. I can’t wait to read whatever she writes next.
With thanks to Melville House for the proof copy for review.
Buy Sidle Creek from Bookshop.org [affiliate link]
I was delighted to be invited to participate in the blog tour for Sidle Creek. See below for details of where other reviews have appeared or will be appearing soon.
Eighth Blog Anniversary! & Thoughts on the Women’s Prize Longlist
Last year, in the manic busyness that preceded moving into our house, I completely forgot to mark my blog anniversary. This time (8 years!) I wanted to be sure to remember it. Why have I not noted before that it coincides with International Women’s Day?! I’m pleased with that.
By Հայկ Ափրիկյան, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Yesterday evening the Women’s Prize longlist was announced.** Of my predictions, 4 were correct, which is pretty good going for me. I got none of my personal wishes, however. Of course, I would have preferred for us to have one of my lists. Still, overall, it’s a fairly interesting mix of new and established authors, with a full half of the list being debut work. Seven of the authors are BIPOC. I’ve read 2 of the nominees and would be amenable to reading up to 7 more. My library always buys the entire longlist, so I’ll eventually get the chance to read them, but not soon enough to add to the conversation.
Read:
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (CORRECT PREDICTION): Follows the contours of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, transplanting the plot to 1990s southwest Virginia to uncover the perils of opiate addiction. Ten-year-old Damon Fields lives in a trailer home with his addict mother, who works at Walmart, and his new stepfather, a mean trucker. Tragedy strikes and Damon moves between several foster homes before running away. His irrepressible, sassy voice is reminiscent of Holden Caulfield’s in this Appalachian cousin to Shuggie Bain.
Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris: Drawing on her own family history, Morris has crafted an absorbing story set in Sarajevo in 1992, the first year of the Bosnian War. Zora, a middle-aged painter, has sent her husband, Franjo, and elderly mother off to England to stay with her daughter, Dubravka, confident that she’ll see out the fighting in the safety of their flat and welcome them home in no time. But things rapidly get much worse than she is prepared for. It was especially poignant to be reading this during the war in Ukraine. 
Requested from the library:
Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks – Sounds good, if too much like this year’s Opal & Nev.
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell (CORRECT PREDICTION) – I was going to skip this because I wasn’t keen on Hamnet, but I do love O’Farrell in general, so I guess I’ll give it a try.
Interested in reading (but can’t find):
Homesick by Jennifer Croft – N.B. This was subtitled “A Memoir” at its U.S. release.
Children of Paradise by Camilla Grudova
Memphis by Tara M. Stringfellow
I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel (CORRECT PREDICTION)
Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin
Not interested in reading:
Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo – Like I said when it was nominated for the Booker, I have to wonder why we needed an extended Animal Farm remake…
Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes – I really should have predicted this one. It’s a hard pass on the Greek myth retellings for me.
Trespasses by Louise Kennedy (CORRECT PREDICTION) – I avoid anything set during The Troubles. (Sorry!)
Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh – The Water Cure was awful.
The Dog of the North by Elizabeth McKenzie – The Portable Veblen was trying too hard.
Pod by Laline Paull – Her novels always sound so formulaic.
The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff – Nah.
See also the reactions posts from Cathy, Clare, Eric and Laura.
**The announcement has traditionally been on International Women’s Day, but I’m guessing that this year they brought it forward to pre-empt news of the inaugural Carol Shields Prize for Fiction longlist. This prize is open to novels, short stories and graphic novels by women, published in calendar year 2022, with parameters otherwise quite similar to those of the WP except that it’s only for U.S. and Canadian residents. {EDITED} To be honest, I was not convinced that the literary world needed an additional prize for women’s fiction, especially as North Americans tend to do well in the WP race. However, at first glance, its longlist is a lot less obvious and more interesting, with 11/15 BIPOC and some short story collections as well as a graphic novel in the running. It remains to be seen if I’ll follow both prizes or switch allegiance. Some of the CSP books may prove difficult to access in the UK. So far I have read Brown Girls and can get The Furrows from the library. Of note: the Carol Shields Prize is worth a lot more ($150,000 U.S. vs. £30,000).
What have you read, or might you read, from the longlist?
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 