The Glass Hotel

 The Glass Hotel

By Emily St. John Mandel

Another one of Anthony Jeselnik's book club picks. I am glad I picked it up.

The story ostensibly focuses on a brother and a sister: Paul and Vincent. At the outset, Paul is an addict and Vincent is a young women whose life has been sent off the rails a bit after the death of her mother in a small island town in British Colombia. 

After years apart, they find themselves working at the same hotel on their home island when a strange incident occurs. Someone has used an acid marker -- I do not know what this is -- to etch the words "Why don't you eat broken glass?" into one of the hotel's windows. It is a strange, unsettling message, one that stirs the managers of the hotel, which is for 1%ers, into a frenzy. Paul is blamed. He puts up no fight, but we, the reader, still don't quite know the truth about the incident until much later in the book.

Meanwhile, Vincent also soon leaves the hotel. But she leaves not in disgrace but on the arms of its owner, the Uber wealthy Jonathan Alkaitis. There is something shady about Alkaitis, but Vincent nevertheless dives into the world of money. She revels for a few years until that shadow comes out of hiding. Alkaitis was, as was a bit obvious to the reader, running a Ponzi scheme and had been for decades. It was only during a financial downturn, which caused some investors to pull their money, that it became untenable. 

Lives are, of course, ruined. In prison, Alkaitis begins to see the ghosts of his former investors, often on the day that they die. Vincent, meanwhile, takes to the sea and becomes a cook. Until one night, she disappears in stormy weather. Was her penchant for videoing 5-minute snippets of film to blame? Or was she pushed by an angry lover? We never really find out. 

The book was nothing short of mesmerizing, and I didn't do it justice here. I initially thought that the Alkaitis character, who pretty clearly resembled Bernie Madoff, would be a bit part, and was surprised when he became a central character. But I guess that's probably how his investors felt, too. He came from nowhere and soon became a key fixture in their lives, and remained so even after the money was gone. I so enjoyed this book that I picked up another one by Mandel called Station Eleven, which is better known. So far so good.

Crossroads

 Crossroads

By Jonathan Franzen

This one sat on my shelf for several years. Dad gave it to me one year for Valentine's Day and, knowing
what I know about Franzen, I just couldn't bring myself to pick it up. For some reason, I decided to dig in this September.

Why is it called Crossroads? Because every character is at, wait for it, a crossroads in their life. Add to that fact that the patriarch of the family, Russ, is an associate minister at a Chicago-area church, and you get another layer. And then there is the fact that the youth program at the church is called, wait for it again, crossroads. It's a bit heavy handed.

I am writing this about three weeks after finishing the book, and I really don't feel like going into too much detail. How could I? The book is almost 600 pages! It alternates points of view. We hear from Russ, his drug-dealing son, his wife, another son, and a daughter. They're all pretty messed up. My favorite is the eldest son, whose name I don't recall at the moment. He's so self-righteous that he gives up his student deferment by dropping out of college and notifying the draft board of his decision. Thing is, the war is over. There isn't a draft anymore. And so the gesture, meant to be a kind of fuck-you to his father, who he deems irredeemable hypocrite, is, essentially, meaningless.

So it goes with the rest of them.

Russ' wife is perhaps the least believable characters. She was the daughter of privilege until the stock market crash in the 20s, which prompted her manic-depressive father to suicide. Farmed out to her uncle for raising, she, too, develops a mental illness. It manifests as an obsession with a married man, which leads to a need for an abortion, the need for which results in a stint of prostitution, which is followed by an institutionalization. She keeps it all secret, though, for some 30 years. Which seems a bit far-fetched.

The premise of the book and it's plot, I must say, are a bit ridiculous and unbelievable. And yet I made it almost 600 pages. How? There is something mesmerizing about Franzen's writing and his ability to get you inside the head of his characters that keeps you reading. I didn't love the book. But I certainly don't regret reading it.

Savages

 Savages

By Don Winslow

Another Anthony Jeselnik recommendation. It was very different from the rest of his list. As one Reddit

reviewer wrote: It was one star and five stars simultaneously.

Why one star? Because so much of it seemed pretty god-awful. The main characters are one dimensional and don't really evolve or change through the novel. And the premise is ridiculous: A couple of California weed growers try to take on a Mexican cartel and (kind of) succeed. It's set in Orange County. One of the main characters, O (for Ophelia) is a sex-crazed stoner with unlimited funds and appetites. She is best friends-with-benefits of Chon, an ex-Seal who did several stints in Afghanistan, and Ben, the genius grower. They were happily making millions off their product when the cartel decides it wants to take some. The author also makes some weird stylistic choices, like every now and again moving into movie-script mode, changing "chapters" every page or so, using line breaks like a poet, and trying a bit too hard to make the book seem "hard boiled".

Why Five? Because I couldn't put it down. I ripped through it. The pacing and action is pretty much non-stop. I've read online that maybe some of his other books are better; perhaps I'll check out another one when I need something engrossing and quick. 

Something We Said

 Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me

By Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor

I first heard the author, who is Richard Pryor's daughter, on Fresh Air. I am glad I picked up the book.

First of all: Being Richard Pryor's daughter sounds like it was a pretty wild experience. I am somewhat familiar with Pryor's work, mainly through his collaborations with Mel Brooks, but knew very little about him outside of that. He was a complicated figure to say the least. He was raised in a Chicago-area brothel. It was a violent, traumatic upbringing that seems pretty clearly connected to some of his "hang ups", as he described them, later in life. The first was his relationship to women. He was never with one very long, and fathered children by lots of them. To his credit, he seemed willing to maintain relationships with the mothers of his children, but infidelity and conflict were constants in his love life. The second, of course, was drugs. Cocaine and alcohol were a big part of his life until the infamous night that he lit himself on fire -- whether intentionally or as a result of a free-basing accident I still don't know -- and, in the painful aftermath, went sober.

All of this turmoil makes you wonder how he was able to maintain enough time and energy for his pretty significant creative output.

But that's not what this book is about. It's about the author's complicated relationship to her father and, to a lesser extent her mother, particularly in light of his pioneering use of what we now can call the N-word. Using it -- the full IT -- was a mainstay of his comedy; it was part of what made him groundbreaking and edgy. During the first part of his career, Pryor's use of it was a kind of re-appropriation, a way to harness the power of the word and use it as a way to fight against racism rather than gird it up. That changed, though, after a trip to Africa, where he realized that, despite being surrounded by black people, the N-word was absent. He disavowed it, explaining that using it, even in the context of re-appropriation, still somehow reinforced America's peculiar racial hierarchy.

Liz, as she is known, traces not only her father's use of the word, but her very personal experience with it. She switches between vignettes about her childhood, her first days teaching at Smith College, and the historical progression of the word and its meaning. All of it is powerful. She does a great job of highlighting what are, now, shameful moments and explaining what she learned and how she grew from them. As a teacher, I was particularly struck by her initial reaction to and subsequent reflection on the first time she heard a student -- and a white student at that -- use it in her classroom; it was a quotation from Richard Pryor's role in Blazing Saddles. In the moment, she basically did nothing. But it set her on a path of figuring out how to do better. I am not black, have never been called the N-word -- but I still can identify with this.

I was also fascinated by the historical "Interludes". I learned a lot about the N-word -- such as the fact that the "N-word" as a way to refer to it became popular as a result of the prosecutor's use of it during the OJ Simpson trial. Huh?! And that there is a historical record of black people re-appropriating the word as far back as the 1800s. I'm hoping to use some of these in my class next year. 

Anyway -- a great, thought-provoking read.

Magnificence

 Magnificence

By Lydia Millet

The last in the trio of books featuring T., a development tycoon who, in the last book, found a change of

heart in the jungle of Belize. That novel was told from the point of view of Hal, the husband of T.'s secretaries, Susan, who agrees to go find T. as a way to escape his discovery that his wife was having an affair. It ends with him bleeding on the sidewalk after being stabbed during a robbery. Will he make it?

No, he will not. And so this book is written from the point of view of Susan, his wife. Turns out, she'd been having lots of affairs. While Hal responded to the accident that left his daughter, Casey, paralyzed by fretting over her, Susan responded with adultery. Hal's death put her in a tailspin. She is, she decides, a murderer; Hal never would have gone to Belize if he hadn't found her out. She is lost, and listless.

Until, one day, she receives a call from a lawyer. Her great uncle has died, and left her a large estate in Pasadena. There is no money, but a trust has been set up to pay for it's upkeep. When she arrives, it is larger than the even imagined. And, strangely, stuffed with taxidermy; heads are everywhere.

She does some research, and finds that her uncle loved to hunt, and, in fact, headed a hunting organization. With little else to do, she throws herself into the house, reorganizing the stuffed animals based on plans of famous natural history museums. It too will be a museum, she decides. There is a chance I am wrong, but it seems to me that her uncle's hunting in some ways matched Susan's infidelities; she, too, was seeking trophies of a kind, and Hal's death has her organizing them in her head.

There is not much of a propulsive plot in this book. A minor conflict arises in the form of Susan's cousins, who are jealous of her inheritance and sue to overturn the uncle's will. It seems obvious from the reader's point of view that she will prevail, but there is tension nevertheless. In addition, this threat spurs Susan to learn even more about the house, and a new mystery arises. The original plans contained a large basement, yet Susan has seen no evidence of it.

A search leads her to a manhole. It doesn't belong to the city. A backhoe is hired to remove the lid, and when Susan descends into the cavern it uncovers, she finds even more animals. At first, it just seems like overflow from the main "collection". But there are strange dates, and then she connects the dots: they are all extinct. There is even a room dedicated to a dodo skeleton. And then, farther on, a different room. It's contents? The remains of humans who were the last of their tribes. 

What does it all mean? I don't know, but it speaks to human's odd relationship to endangered species. We are fascinated by them, hyper focused on their potential demise to the point, perhaps, of ignoring the animals right nearby, who, if we aren't careful, will also end up on the list.

I've really enjoyed delving into Millet. I hope she writes another book.

Ruthie Fear

 Ruthie Fear

By Maxim Lukutoff

Sickel gave this to me during our visit to the cabin this summer. He'd meant to mail it, and inside was a
note that said: "This book is crazy!" Obviously, I was intrigued.

To be honest, I didn't find it all that crazy -- for most of it. It is the story of the titular character, Ruthie Fear, who lives in a trailer in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana with her father, Rutherford. One of the main themes of the book is the gentrification of the area by outsiders while longtime residents see their lives upended. This particularly grates on Rutherford, who simmers not-so-silently with rage. They were technically poor, but with all the public land around, they were rich -- until the really rich started taking that land away. Rutherford is particularly incensed when a country music star moves into the valley and starts baiting ducks near a public pond. Why? Because it is illegal to shoot baited ducks. 

We watch Ruthie struggle in the valley to find a life of meaning and, it seems, upward mobility. She is torn, both loving and despising the insularity of Montana mountain life. She briefly attempts to flee to Las Vegas, inspired by a poster of the city her father brought back from his only trip out of Montana. But she can't quite make it, and winds up robbing a tourist for bus fare back.

It's all pretty ordinary, if disturbing. Except. One day when she was seven years old, Ruthie saw a creature. It had no head, spindly "insect" legs, and a kidney-shaped body covered with feathers. Rutherford believed it to be a figment of her imagination, but Ruthie held fast. She build a blind so she could see it again. But it never appeared. 

Until. One morning she was duck hunting, and there it was. And then there was another. And another. Gun shots rang out through the valley. Hundreds of the creatures had appeared, and been killed. They brought them to the local dump, where the fire warden was waiting for approval to light the pile of carcasses up. But when he did, they gave off a noxious smoke that killed everyone whose nostrils it entered. All along, it had been posited that the valley would be better off with fewer people. And now there were.

The creatures were obviously a metaphor for something. The author certainly seems unsympathetic to the Big Sky-ification of Montana. What, exactly, they stand for I'm not quite sure. But this was a good read, propulsive till the end.

Ghost Lights

 Ghost Lights

By Lydia Millet

I'm not sure if the reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey was intentional, but the main character of this

installment of Millet's cycle, Hal, is definitely on autopilot. He works for the IRS and, even after a decades-long career there, is still a true believer. He is happy to be a cog: in the governmental machine, in his marriage, in life in general. Especially since the accident, on a snowy Colorado night, that left his daughter, Casey, paralyzed. That loss, in which he had no direct role, is all Hal seems to have room for in his brain. 

But then the machine turns against him. He returns home early from work one day to find his wife's co-worker, Robert, leaving his house. Huh. He finds said wife, Susan, showering. And in the folds of the rumpled bed, a shiny piece of metal packaging. His heart races. Could it be...? No. Yes? No? Yes. He follows her to the office the next day and witnesses it: she is having an affair. 

Autopilot off. He is due at a dinner party at Casey's house, and decides to have a few drinks beforehand, something quite uncharacteristic. When talk turns to Susan's boss, T. -- who we met in How the Dead Dream -- Hal stays out of character. Someone needs to go to Belize to find T., Susan insists. I will do it, Hal insists back. It's no problem. The true believer has months of vacation time accrued.

Down Hal goes. Finding T., who against all odds is not dead, is actually easier than anticipated. All he had to do was ask for Marlo, the foreman on T.'s now-destroyed island resort project. But Hal doesn't know that. So he accidentally enlists the help of a German couple with two tow-heads. The patriarch, Hans, is all business and somehow calls in the U.S. Coast Guard to search the area where T. was last seen. The matriarch, Gretel, takes a shining to Hal that results in some inebriated, late-night beach sex. 

One morning, Hal, sleeping on the pool chaise, is woken by Marlo, who takes him to the island. T. is there, feral, with a new perspective on life. The pursuit of money for money's sake, he avows, is silly. He is bearded. He is dressed in rags. He is, after speaking with the brother of the guide who died on his jungle journey, taken into custody.

Hal freaks out. He goes to the embassy and finds cynical help, who insist there is nothing to worry about. T. insists there is nothing to worry about. Hal is not so sure. Still, things are looking up. He has confronted Susan on the phone; there will be a future for their marriage. He has confronted his autopilot tendencies; he will be different upon return. 

The machine, though, will not compute. Just as he feels like he has made some peace with the world, an unnoticed boy, who Hal tries to make room for on the sidewalk, stabs him, takes his wallet, and leaves him for dead. Will he die? It certainly seems so. But I thought T. would die, too.

Hal's final thoughts are on the nature of Jesus, and the way that the lives of the rich are antithetical to who he was. He meditates on the way the many suffer and die for the few when it was actually supposed to be the other way around. Though not rich by American standards, he is a bit astonished to realize that he is, in fact, one of the few. Not as much as T., though. Does he die for T.'s sins?