Sunday, November 26, 2017

Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward


A memoir structured around the violent deaths of five young African American men

Jesmyn Ward grew up in DeLisle, Mississippi, a coastal town whose racially segregated people and culture remain deeply damaged by the legacy of slavery. Each of the book's five parts is dedicated to  one of her young male friends and relatives. All of the young men died in violent careless ways, including, most painfully, her nineteen year old younger brother. They died young and society did really not care. Men We Reaped also chronicles Ward’s life: her growing understanding of her charming dad’s lack of dependability which fuels the no nonsense strictness of her mother, a domestic worker supporting four young kids. Thanks to her mother, Ward is offered a scholarship to a private school which leads to a gold plated ticket out of DeLisle: Stanford and the University of Michigan. Far from Mississippi, she can’t, however, shake her homesickness.

I read this book practically in one sitting. Ward is a master of establishing tension. The young men, their love of life and partying, are deftly portrayed. She relates their risky and not so great decisions as well as describes the oppression of small town Mississippi: early neglect in substandard schools, the overpolicing of the black population and the disappearance of manufacturing jobs. These uneducated young men cannot have a single misstep. Otherwise they will pay a life altering price. Sadness permeates this book.

As her first class education takes her further from DeLisle, Ward can’t help but lead a double life. I felt panicky after she returned to Mississippi from Stanford and couldn’t even get a job at the local Barnes and Noble. This book achieves two things: A portrait of the artist as a young woman, and a spotlight shining upon unacceptable conditions existing in America today.







Sunday, November 5, 2017

Nobody Is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey




A young woman goes across the world to go quietly mad

Elyria’s adopted sister jumped off a building. Her mother is an egomaniacal horror. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, Elyria encounters her sister’s shell shocked professor, a young man whose mother also jumped off a building. The professor and Elyria get married but things don’t go well. Elyria starts to hate him and one day, leaves Manhattan and her great job and travels to New Zealand based upon a casual invitation from a visiting writer. After her husband cancels her credit cards, Elyria must rely on the kindness of strangers. And strangers, though kind, are basically uninterested, as the young woman enters more and more into an alienated state.

The plot wasn’t the point of this novel – it was the superb writing and the meticulous creation of a completely mad claustrophobic world. Little by little Elyria acts outside the boundaries, at first the reader thinks she is just taking a trip, but it is not very long before Elyria acts completely nuts. The New Zealanders start to treat her like she nuts, but Elyria refuses to deviate from her plan. She takes the reader along for the crazy ride. Perhaps her conflict is between the desire to be a supportive wife, sister and mother versus an asshole who needs to find out something about herself. The people in New Zealand react very reasonably to her extreme passivity.

The sadness, which is partly a result of the perfectly modulated voice, is also a function of the reality that no one really misses Elyria. Her husband is dumbfounded that she left and humiliated him. He’s not concerned about her in the slightest. A very unique novel.