I’m sorry. Once again, I’ve been maytagged by the swirl of life but I'm here now, with my thoughts.
Truth is my thoughts are probably no different than yours. The world keeps getting scarier, the violence in Israel is too much to bear, our government seems to be irreparably broken. And, I think seeing the U2 show at the Sphere would make me barf.
So let’s at least for now just stick to the books.
Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
Unlike most big novels like this, it doesn’t fizzle to an end. Shipstead really delivers with a third act that ties everything up with a flourish. So much so, I’d say read it for the ending.
It’s two stories, really–one happening in the present, about a Kristen Stewart-like starlet trying to redefine her career by playing an Amelia Earhart-like aviatrix named Marian Graves. Marian is fictional but the story crosses paths with true history and it’s a treat to learn about all these forgotten tales of incredible women from the early days of aviation.
One reviewer called this novel baggy in a good way and I love this critique. Shipstead wanders and meanders. We hear about the wealthy family of an early 20th Century industrialist and the sea captain who saved his life, we go into surprising detail about the main character’s mother’s childhood, we meet bootleggers and Seattle conservatives. If you just decide to just take your time with Shipstead, however, you won’t be disappointed because a) some of these digressions are my favorite parts of the book; and b) nearly all of these seeming detours are by design. The book is named Great Circle, after all.
The novel jumps back and forth between the present day and the first half of the 20th Century, and while I found all the present-day stuff really good, the historical stuff is the heart of the book. It doesn’t all work; some characters feel a little too obviously plot devices, and Marian was strangely enough the least interesting character. Her single-minded ambition to fly planes was hard for me to really buy, honestly. But maybe that’s just me–I can’t imagine knowing at age 13 what I’d want to do for the rest of my life and then never once straying from that sense of purpose. Sure, she’s an astonishingly self-possessed and courageous woman and her action-packed life makes for a great story. But her utter lack of self-doubt is a romantic conceit that made her harder to relate to than most of the other characters in the book. Luckily, there’s lots of other characters in the book.
If you’re looking to sink into a big well-written novel and if you like historical fiction, this one’s for you. Even with my reservations about the protagonist, the book was a pleasure. It’s beautifully done, and it will reward you in a big way because like I said, she nails the landing.
My friend who calls me Scrappy Pegleg probably reads more than I do. At least she says she does. She reads so much I actually call bullshit; I think she skims most of the books she claims to have read. There’s just no way she could feasibly do it.
A few weeks back, we had a too-brief text exchange (she’s way too busy being a gentlewoman farmer/award-winning documentary filmmaker, and I’m way too busy scratching my dog’s little head and shopping online1). But the love we share is eternal so sometimes a brief text exchange is all it takes. I told her I needed a new book, and she replied that she was reading a book called Star of the Sea. I immediately downloaded it to my Kindle and relished every word. It’s by Joseph O’Connor, Sinead’s brother. It’s not a book about his magnificent sister, may she rest in peace. Dare I say, it’s even better than that.
It’s a historical thriller/mystery. It’s filled with empathy and fully-drawn characters, but also gruesome scenes of depravity and rats and decaying bodies and brutal violence. The novel has an imaginative structure–some of it’s “written” by one of the characters in the novel, and these parts have a style in keeping with novels from the turn of the century. Other parts go into the lives of the characters before they all board the godforsaken ship, the Star of the Sea.
The ship is heading from Dublin to New York City in 1847, and as most of you know, 1847 wasn’t a good year for Ireland. Everyone in steerage on this ship is slowly starving to death. As in, every morning the captain logs how many people died of starvation the night before. This novel does a great job of really pulling you into the full story of the famine in Ireland. It wasn’t just the potato blight, and it wasn’t just the English callously refusing to send relief. Both these things are true, but also true is how many of the Irish landowners evicted their starving fellow Irishmen. People were desperate and scared and did horrible things to each other. I do love reading about people doing horrible things to each other.
Years ago I read Nothing to Envy, by Barbara Demick, an incredibly well-reported and compelling book about life in North Korea. Her descriptions of the famine in North Korea haunt me to this day, and this novel reminded me of it. In our land of plenty, where food is entertainment and Ozempic is the hot new drug, it’s honestly hard to imagine starvation at this scale. At least hard from my neighborhood where all the fridges are teeming with fresh produce and the cabinets are jammed with delicious snacks. Not even a mile from me, families are going to bed hungry but endemic starvation is something else. Famines nearly always have a political element, or are the result of some power imbalance. The way we humans conduct ourselves with these bullshit notions of scarcity, and withhold needed resources to our fellow humans to prove our power. We are astonishing in our capacity to be cruel.
Anyway, back to the book. Like a good gothic thriller, it’s spooky and filled with surprising plot twists. Like a good work of historic fiction, its characters give facts feeling and texture. And like a great novel it draws out and deepens your empathy for people in our world right now. In the novel, when the ship filled with desperate refugees arrives in New York harbor, the way the city receives it is an absurd dose of deja vu. These refugees are the ancestors of the firemen and cops complaining about the 300 or so refugees “invading” Staten Island today.
The Fraud by Zadie Smith
Gorgeous, stylish, witty Zadie Smith is justifiably a literary star so her book is getting lots of attention. As a result, I think everyone’s expectations are inflated, and she’s held to quite a high standard. Like, I couldn’t even follow what the critic in the New York Magazine was even talking about, except that she was disappointed.
My friend didn’t like it either and he didn’t finish it. Which meant his copy was available for me to borrow. It is dense. The setup is a little confusing: the main character, Mrs. Touchet, is a widow who’s living with her cousin and his family. He’s also widowed, but has recently impregnated the maid and she’s now his new wife. He’s a somewhat successful novelist, and Mrs. Touchet is simultaneously weary of his egotistical indulgences and always lovingly supportive.
Like Star of the Sea, the book is also about a genuine piece of history which resonates today. An obvious fraud is claiming to be an aristocrat who is owed an inheritance. He’s generated a populist surge of support despite–or maybe because–he’s clearly not who he says he is. This case with its echoes of Trump’s rabid fan base is in part what inspired Smith to write the novel. (Her New Yorker essay about writing the novel is a fun appetizer to the book, or maybe your whole meal.)
This novel is about writing novels, about whether any writer can really understand another person well enough to write their story, whether any of us can ever really know each other. At one point, her cousin’s new wife takes Eliza to the rough neighborhood where she was raised. Eliza Touchet had been dismissive of this maid-now-new-wife, and in this scene and again later in the book, we’re reminded that people are more than your superficial theories about who they are and why they do what they do.
The Fraud requires your full attention–initially, I needed to really concentrate on it in order to even understand what was going on. Sometimes that’s a refreshing change of pace, and after about 50-70 pages I was fully engaged and enjoying it, even when I had to flip back a few pages and reread.
The best part of this big complicated book is Mrs. Touchet, and luckily she’s on nearly every page. I missed her when the story briefly shifted to Jamaica. She’s a smart independent-minded woman in an era that had no use for such a creature, and it made her opinions extra interesting to me–especially since they were often kept to herself, rarely expressed to the people around her. Yet another example of how we can never really know what the people around us are thinking.
Her cousin, William Harrison Ainsworth, is based on an actual novelist of the time whose star is fading, unlike his friend Charles Dickens, whose legacy was established during his lifetime (and secured with a burial at Westminster Abbey). Don’t most of us have a friend or acquaintance in our life whose professional success far outsrips our own? God, imagine if your friend was Charles Dickens.
Some of the most affecting and funny passages for me were the parts where Mrs. Touchet grapples with her cousin’s mediocre writing and his delicate ego. (He was a cousin by marriage and she was his former lover, along with being the lover of his first wife–I told you Mrs. Touchet was independent-minded.)
I’m not sure this book is for everyone, but if you’re willing to dig in, it’s pretty amazing. For me, the novel felt like Smith folded together bits of genuine English history with her own fascinating creative brain and produced a sparkling, multi-faceted gem, a prism through which to consider things a whole new way.
I have so much more to write about, but I’m guessing you have to get back to work, or your train is arriving at the station, or the line you’re in at Target has finally delivered you to the cashier. So I’ll stop here, but I’ll write more soon. Until next time, pray for peace.
Do you know “& Other Stories”? I just got a wrap sweater that makes me actually excited for the cold to descend.
You weren't ghosting; you were reading, which helps us all!!