2020 Book Reviews: January to June
Starting with the most recent…
When Mary Laura Philpott’s essay collection, I Miss You When I Blink, came out last year, it was hailed as the type of book that audiences desperately long for but rarely get to enjoy — like a “relentlessly funny” and “infinitely relatable” blend of “Nora Ephron, Erma Bombeck, Jean Kerr, and Laurie Colwin,” all rolled into one. After months of having it on my list, I finally decided to pick it up this month, and, let me tell you, I was not disappointed. I Miss You When I Blink is truly as wonderful as everyone says.
With hilarious, vulnerable, and introspective insight, Philpott shatters the illusion of the so-called “perfect life,” charting her own evolution from a type A/straight-A student to a young mom who one day realizes that her idea of “cracking the code” isn’t as immovably defined — or as endurably satisfying — as she originally thought. “The to-do list,” she writes, “was supposed to get smaller and smaller as you checked off everything you meant to do and approached the finish line of bona fide adulthood. Instead, you got to the end of the list and didn’t feel like you’d arrived anywhere. You felt more disoriented than ever.”
As she unpacks, unmasks, and ultimately revokes the notion of “having it all,” Philpott gets to the heart of so many of the questions we all face when trying to create an authentic and purposeful life: Why does the horizon of our wants and needs seem perpetually far away? Why do we frame our life choices under a paradigm of “either/or” with no room for nuance or flexibility? And why do we feel an urge to obsessively “linearize” our histories, as if our life choices were as predictably straightforward as the headlines on a resume? As she opens up about everything from dogs, neighborhood squabbles, ex-boyfriends, and awkward celebrity encounters to her depression, her two pregnancies, and her difficult decision to relocate her family from Atlanta to Nashville, she remains honest, vulnerable, and unequivocal, never shying away from calling a spade a freaking spade. It’s okay, she tells us, to feel occasionally untethered (as if “someone has turned off gravity and you’ve been spun into space”) just as it’s okay to abandon traditional touchstones of “success” in order to do what you want to do. Sure, some people aren’t going to like it, and some people may even try to bring you down. But as Philpott reminds us, those people are not genuinely interested in your best interests – they’re just unhappy crabs stuck in a miserably crowded, perfunctory bucket; and “if they’re going to be in the bucket,” Philpott writes, “they want everyone to be in the bucket.”
If you’re ever feeling like you are in such a bucket, then do yourself a favor and pick up I Miss You When I Blink. It will make you feel like you have a friend — and give you that extra boost of courage to do something good for yourself.
Winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize for Literature and the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day is, as one would expect, an absolute masterpiece — immersive, compelling, and thought-provoking, sprinkled with unexpected bits of humor and vulnerability. A thoughtful (and arguably less saccharine) antecedent to Downton Abbey, it tells the story of the “perfect” English butler, Stevens, who has decided to visit his former colleague, Miss Kenton, after the death of his master, Lord Darlington. Stevens’s “journey” is as literal as it is figurative, blending colorful sojourns across the English countryside with illuminating reminisces into his ostensibly blithesome (yet troubling and tragic) past. Lord Darlington, Stevens maintains, was a “truly good man at heart, a gentleman through and through” despite his problematic connections to the Third Reich. For every sinister Nazi Darlington associated with and every anti-Semitic notion he embraced, Stevens insists on his master’s innocence, applying the mythology of aristocracy as some sort of exonerative pardon.
Out of this insistence emerges the book’s central theme of dignity. To Stevens, dignity translates to a total denial of the self. “The great butlers,” Stevens believes,
“Are great by virtue of their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost; they will not be shaken out by external events, however surprising, alarming or vexing. They wear their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit: he will not let ruffians or circumstances tear it off him in the public gaze; he will discard it when, and only when, he wills to do so, and this will invariably be when he is entirely alone.”
As Stevens follows this code and jettisons his independent self, he becomes like an actor, perpetually assuming some manufactured pretense – or, worse, like a hollow shadow, devoid of any conviction, purpose, or emotion of his own. While Lord Darlington coordinates with Nazis and fires the Jewish members of his staff, Stevens fails to push back, trusting in his master’s judgment as well as the assumed incomprehensibility of such lofty “matters of state.” “There are many things you and I are simply not in a position to understand,” he tells Miss Kenton.
Yet as Remains goes on, Ishiguro brings other conceptions of “dignity” to the surface that problematize Stevens’s loyalty to his master. In the end, the reader is left wondering whether Stevens wanted to serve Darlington or whether he wanted/wants to actually be him. Certainly, even as Stevens starts to reckon with the indignity of his own subservience, he remains unable to even question his master’s actions, suggesting that he may never be able to shake the pretense of his role or confront the truth of his own life.
I will not tell you how Remains ends, but what I will say is that it makes an indelible imprint on the heart. There is, I believe, a little bit of Stevens in all of us. We can all cling to what is comfortable in favor of what is messy or difficult. We can all be blinded by money, status, and beauty. And we can all retroactively revise or romanticize our histories in ways that make us feel safe, worthy, and blameless — even when all the evidence points to the contrary.
Like a coroner about to perform an autopsy, Ezra Klein begins Why We’re Polarized from a place of conjecture and hypothesis, asking the question that has gnawed at so many of us for so long: How the heck did Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election?
While interesting and natural, Klein tells us that this question is actually not the one we should be asking — far from bringing any clarity or understanding to 2016, it is an inquiry that serves only to intensify our tribalistic allegiances, clouding our judgement, muddling our perspective, and harmfully anathematizing “the other.” “Rather than asking how Trump won,” Klein suggests, “we should be asking how Trump was close enough to win”; certainly, he writes, the 2016 election was not an anomalous “glitch” in the system, but a rather “typical” modern-day contest between a Republican and a Democrat — a battle rooted in ever-increasing ideological hostility, cultural irreconcilability, reactionary partisanship, and deep political polarization.
In his debut book, Klein provides an instructive and compelling guide for understanding why the “typical contest” between Trump and Clinton was as polarizing as it was. Historically, he writes, the Republican and Democratic parties were much more alike. “Each party is to some extent a reflection of the other,” said Thomas Dewey in 1950, “[and] this is perhaps part of the secret of our enormous power, that a change from one party to the other has usually involved a continuity of action and policy of the nation as a whole on most fundamentals.” Yet today, both parties have become more ideologically entrenched, more scornful of compromise, and more threatening to the opposing side than ever before.
Theoretically, Klein tells us, “we join parties because they share our values and our goals, and we trust that their policy judgments will match the ones we would come up with if we had unlimited time to study the issues.” But with today’s divisions, partisanship has become what Klein describes as a “mega-identity,” encompassing and intensifying a range of other identities like religion or race. Meanwhile, people within parties have become much more beholden to the identity of their respective groups. These trends, Klein tells us, have played out in each party, though in different ways. Democrats, for one, have been able to wield more cultural “cred” (which, though laudable, can be exploited and weaponized) while Republicans feel “increasingly dismissed,” often in ways that galvanize feelings of fear, resentment, and defensiveness.
Ultimately, Klein argues, it was this same fear, resentment, and defensiveness that catapulted Trump to power. After Obama’s victory in 2008, he tells us, the notion that the Right was being “left behind” or “pushed out” started to gain more credence with conservative audiences: “White people,” bemoaned Rush Limbaugh in 2010, are “the new oppressed minority” who will soon be “moving to the back of the bus”; “the demographics are changing; it’s not a traditional America anymore,” lamented Bill O’Reilly in 2012. By 2016, Klein argues, Trump was in a position to win not because of Comey or Russia or sexism but because he approached the election as a master marketer, correctly discerning — and effectively capitalizing on — Republican fear. To quote Michael Tessler, “Trump met the party where it was rather than trying to change it. He was hunting where the ducks were.”
Grounded in these observations, Klein’s Why We’re Polarized is much more a “diagnosis” than a prescriptive blueprint for the future, though he does leave his readers with a few potential solutions to consider. He encourages us, for one, to take a step back from news that amplifies our tribalistic identities in favor of mediums and platforms that prioritize balanced and introspective awareness — be cautious, he warns, of “how politics makes us feel.” Importantly, he also advises us to be more mindful of the opportunities afforded by local politics, where citizens tend to have more of a voice and are likelier to find common ground.
Klein’s Why We’re Polarized is the most instructive and illuminating book on our current political climate I have read. That being said, I found myself unable to shake the fear that it was just another voice in the “echo chamber” Klein so vociferously decries. Was Klein, the founder of Vox.com, a Californian, a vegan, and a self-avowed liberal, the best person to write a book about political polarization in 2020? The answer to this question, I would argue, is debatable. What I do know is that if I were a Republican, I would find Klein’s book a difficult one to stomach. It is unlikely, in fact, that I would pick up the book at all.
Why We’re Polarized, do not get me wrong, is an excellent and essential book. I just wish that it had been more inclusively branded — that it was less a book for liberals and more a book for everyone. In that book, perhaps, we could uncover the “prescription” for America’s future that Klein, self-admittedly, cannot.
In The Vacationers, novelist Emma Straub delivers what may be best described as a “brilliant beach read” — a sun-soaked, salty-aired drama filled with loads of humor, wit, wisdom, and emotional complexity. It tells the story of the Post family’s trip to the island of Mallorca, a Mediterranean Eden of sunshine, lemon trees, olive oil, and sheltered coves, where Franny, Jim, and their kids, Bobby and Sylvia, must coexist for two weeks under one roof with Bobby’s “significantly older” girlfriend, Carmen, and Franny’s best friend, Charles, and his husband, Lawrence. Upon the motley crew’s arrival, we learn from Straub that “things have changed” within the Post family, an intimation of disorder which soon metastasizes into full-on familial dysfunction. As opposed to delivering an escape from reality, the Post family’s vacation seems to make their problems more pressing and unavoidable: When they are home, Straub tells us, Jim, Franny, Bobby, and Sylvia are able to suppress these problems and manage their roles as “masters of self-delusion,” but when they are on the island, their mirrors reorient and multiply, forcing some difficult inter-generational reckoning.
As a New York Times-bestselling author of Modern Lovers and All Adults Here, Straub is so good at interweaving the light with the heavy. Featuring her hysterical commentary on everything from plastic surgery and obscure muscle groups to protein powder, sunscreen application, and the “pathetic travesty” of European clubbing, The Vacationers can be laugh-out-loud funny. Yet it can also be incisive and profound, particularly as Straub examines the book’s tough themes of infidelity, divorce, and unrequited love.
Straub is also SO good at leaving the reader hungry for more. While developing a sufficiently informative “context,” she never reveals more than what is warranted by the occasional and momentary flashback. At times, this can come at the expense of the reader’s understanding of Straub’s characters (particularly Jim and Franny). But, then again, I can’t help but think that there is something wonderful and delicious about meeting the characters just as they are — as if we were on vacation with them ourselves, swept up in a summery suspension of time and space.
Believe me when I say – I have never, ever read anything like Glennon Doyle’s Untamed. Like its beautifully bold cover, a kaleidoscopic menagerie of bespeckled gold, turquoise, crimson, and fuchsia, this book absolutely captivated me from start to finish, drawing me in with its unconventional structure and unfettered prose. Raw, vulnerable, and wildly honest, Doyle’s writing reads like a window into humanity’s soul, with each word bursting forth a technicolored illumination of the real, unmitigable truths of life and a masterplan for a freer and more just future.
Transcending all cursory perceptions (and aesthetic manifestations) of what it means to be ostensibly “tamed” or “untamed,” Doyle digs deeper than any memoirist I’ve ever known, exposing all the ways in which our lives stem from either programmed indoctrination or true and Knowing imagination. “Which of my beliefs,” she poignantly asks, “are of my own creation and which were programmed into me? How much of who I’ve become is inherent, and how much was just inherited?”
On every page, and in every thoughtfully curated chapter, she unlocks a new truth, liberating us from the socially constructed cages of fear, bigotry, misogyny, addiction, familial martyrdom, and emotional passivity. In doing so, she transports us to a “truer, more beautiful world” in which our imagination serves as not an escape but a blueprint for a more vibrant, rich, and fulfilling life.
I already know that I will be revisiting Untamed in the future, most likely in a month or two :). Truly – it is that wonderful.
In Furious Hours, Casey Cep constructs a two-pillared tale, with one column staked in the life of serial killer Reverend Willie Maxwell and the other in the pursuit of one legendary writer — Harper Lee — to bring Maxwell’s story to life. Against a rich, multilayered tapestry of race, jurisprudence, literature, and Southern mysticism, Cep devotes the first half of her book to Maxwell’s sanguinary history, steeping each murder and subsequent acquittal in Alabama’s haunted legacy of “ghost bells, war cries, and the clanging of slave chains.” Maxwell’s story ends, fittingly, with violence, as a relative shoots and kills him at the funeral of his last victim.
Sitting in the audience during the relative’s trial is Lee, now a world-famous author. It is here where Furious Hours really finds its stride, beginning with a colorful and engrossing portrait of Lee’s life to that point. Cep does a masterful job of helping the reader understand Lee — her genius, her compassion, her paradoxical complexity — particularly as it pertains to her relationship with race. Ultimately, it is Lee’s “unfamiliarity with the lives of African Americans,” her “moral muddiness concerning black criminality in a criminally racist society,” and her “own deep delight in the self-serving mythologies of the southern gentry” that play a huge part in making her book on Maxwell, The Reverend, an immensely difficult (and perhaps even an impossible) one for her to write.
In my opinion, the real pièce de résistance of Furious Hours lies in the book’s final two chapters, where Cep artfully transfigures what otherwise might be a tragic and anticlimactic end into a deeply thoughtful disquisition on the “abyss” which can separate a once-in-a-lifetime story and the blank page — or, in this case, the unfinished book. Lee, Cep tells us, is unable to finish The Reverend due to a whole litany of factors, including her mounting alcoholism. With a mixture of reverence and warning, she frames Lee’s “writer’s block” as not a symptom but a disease, which, if left untreated, can metastasize into an insuperable cancer of depression and “discontent.” Ultimately, by ending the book as she does, Cep is able to deliver a powerful cautionary tale and a must-read for any artist whose proverbial “mockingbird” risks becoming more like a weighty “albatross” under the bastilles of comparison, perfectionism, insecurity, fear, or addiction.
I am so grateful that Cep herself was not plagued (or at least not conquered) by any such albatross — her own “mockingbird” is truly a masterpiece.
With radical imagination, Sue Monk Kidd’s fourth and latest novel, The Book of Longings, brings to life the story of Ana, a young Jewish woman from the Galilean town of Sepphoris, who marries a young carpenter, Jesus, from Nazareth. With her characteristically immersive style, Kidd delivers a tapestry of life, love, and color, weaving together history, scripture, and imagined experience in a way that transcends time and space. Though separated by more than two millennia, I as a reader felt so close to Ana and identified with her often untenable “largeness”: Like Ana, I want to contemplate and pray as much as I want to run and dance; I want to read and consume as much as I want to write and create; I want to please and obey as much as I want to interrogate and rebel. Fortunately for me, there is much more room in twenty-first century America for such “largeness” than there was in first-century Galilee, though there are elements of the church’s deeply patriarchal and misogynistic formation that still feel present and binding. Why, for example, are there passages which exonerate rape in the Bible? Why are almost all of the women referenced in the Bible unnamed? And why were no women counted among the Twelve Apostles?
With these important questions, Kidd asks us to examine which of our beliefs — including Jesus’s “bachelorhood” — are steeped in patriarchal history. Marriage, Kidd tells us, was a normative and elemental part of life in first century Judea as well as a man’s “civic, family, and sacred” duty. In fact, the church did not clarify that Jesus was unmarried — or identify virginity as a higher virtue — until the second century, nor did it conclusively settle on Jesus’s divinity until the year 325 A.D. at the Council of Nicaea. As a Christian myself, I believe in Jesus’s divinity as, I think, Kidd does too. Certainly, even as she imagines his marriage to Ana, she is able to find Jesus’s divinity in other things — namely, his self-sacrificial love, his ethos of unconditional forgiveness, and his intimacy with God. In doing so, she forces the reader to wonder: Would Jesus’s divinity be affected if he were married to a woman? And if so, why?
Honestly, when it comes to answering these questions, I am at a total loss. I attended Catholic school for nine years growing up, and I know many of my former teachers and priests would have urged me to throw this book in the fire, as they did with Harry Potter (!), The Golden Compass, and The Da Vinci Code. Yet even as the notion of a married Jesus sits uncomfortably with me personally, I admire and applaud The Book of Longings for its audacity — for the way Kidd so courageously and unapologetically leans into her questioning, putting all man-made dogma and structures aside in favor of true creative exploration. It is something that we as readers and writers should emulate, not fear or deride.
In A Woman of No Importance, Sonia Purnell illuminates the long-overshadowed story of Virginia Hall, the Baltimore socialite turned Allied spy and champion of the French Resistance. With “three solid years of detective work” under her belt, Purnell is able to construct a thoroughly researched, impeccably detailed universe in which each character and each event comes alive with striking believability; with a subtle, yet impactful sentimentality, she draws the reader in, inch by inch, as she works to humanize “the most dangerous of Allied spies” from the icy, impenetrable claws of war.
With her flaming scarlet hair and prosthetic leg, Hall seems at times the very embodiment of the “stranger than fiction” maxim: How, I so often thought, could one person be SO fearless and SO indispensable to what was arguably the most important paramilitary operation of World War II, especially during a time when espionage was perceived and orchestrated exclusively as “a man’s affair”? How, I wondered, could she have succeeded in engineering such massive escapes, supply re-routes, and explosive handovers and leading HUNDREDS of men in guerrilla with one working leg!? (I repeat: ONE WORKING LEG!)
Fortunately for the Allied effort, the enemy shared this incredulity, never imagining that a disabled woman could marshal so much influence. Throughout her book, Purnell illuminates how Hall capitalized on the Nazis’ underestimation of her, foregoing many of the quixotic dreams and ego-driven dalliances that so often got her male comrades in trouble. It is this discomfort with glory, this near-monastic devotion to her work, that Purnell suggests made Hall the agent she was and, in the end, an absolutely essential part of the French Resistance campaign.
A Woman of No Importance is fascinating and riveting (I truly couldn’t put this down!), though there was one facet of Hall I wish Purnell had dug into a bit more — that is, Hall’s reasons for wanting to fight. There are moments in A Woman when Hall’s heroics come off as a little self-serving and opportunistic: The perils of war, Purnell reveals, gave Hall a sense of freedom and “spiritual peace”; but sometimes that “peace” — that recalcitrant longing for adventure — could come at a price, placing “her dearest friends in the gravest of danger.”
With that said, I suspect my questioning of Hall’s “true” motives suggests far more about me (a scaredy-cat, through and through!) than it does about her. I feel privileged to have read her story and am so grateful for Purnell for bringing it to life such color, depth, and nuance.
In The Perfect Mile, Neal Bascomb chronicles the quest of three legendary runners — America’s Wes Santee, Australia’s John Landy, and England’s Roger Bannister — to run the “fabled four-minute mile,” a feat so perfect, “four laps, four quarter miles, four-point-oh-oh minutes…that it seemed God himself had established it as man’s limit.” With a melodic, immersive style, Bascomb’s words seem to fly off the page just as his mythologized milers “float on the track,” delivering a story that feels much more like a rhapsodic symphony than a strict historical account. In the creative mold of Seabiscuit or The Boys in the Boat, he constructs his narrative not as a cursory overview but as a deep-rooted oak, anchored in places and driven by characters that could not be more different from one another, yet whose destinies coalesce to form one glorious, highly riveting end.
As a master craftsman, Bascomb lodges Santee, Landy, and Bannister in the exciting spirit of their times (i.e., Queen Elizabeth, Edmund Hillary, Cold War, etc.) while situating them at the cornerstone of two questions surrounding athletic “integrity”: (1) Is a champion made by triumphing over the clock or by triumphing over his opponent?; (2) Is athletic achievement a means to an end (i.e., a more fulfilling and robust life) or an end in and of itself, to be secured at the expense of all other interests and pursuits?
In my opinion, it is the timelessness of these questions that makes The Perfect Mile such an interesting and relevant read. Certainly, while Bascomb never answers either question explicitly, he does make us wonder what sports today would be like without the “improvements” of the past half-century — the high-profile ad campaigns, the sophisticated equipment, the engineered diets, or the performance-enhancing drugs. Would we think of today’s athletes differently if we lived under the parameters of amateurism? How would we think of our own physical fitness?
Above all, it is the soul of The Perfect Mile that I believe makes it a must-read for anybody who enjoys a feel-good sports story — especially runners. I am by no means a fast runner myself (I was definitely the “caboose” of my high school cross country team!), but I do love to run and feel like the process of getting out there, on the track or on the field or around your neighborhood, can teach us a lot about endurance and courage. To quote John Landy, “Running has all the disappointments, frustrations, lack of success and unexpected success, which all reproduce themselves in the bigger play of life.”
In The Hope of Glory, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham (American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House) examines the seven last sayings of Jesus as transcribed in the Gospels, applying a historical lens with which to better understand Christianity’s most seminal (and arguably most misunderstood) moment. Meacham’s book, it is important to say upfront, is not about proselytization but rather perspective and context. No matter what your beliefs, his essays serve to enrich our understanding of what was an undoubtedly epochal event, imbuing the story of Jesus’s death on the Cross with a greater sense of “reason and wisdom” while underscoring the universal and transcendent importance of self-sacrificing love.
While coupling rich historical insight with theological discernment, Meacham is unafraid to embrace the incomprehensibility of the Crucifixion as both an example and symbol of suffering. In doing so, he accepts that having faith in something beyond this world is “complicated, challenging, and sometimes confounding.” Why, he wonders, does there have to be evil? Why, he asks, does there have to be death? Ultimately, he concludes that “we must make our peace with mystery” and accept that “there is no spell, no formula — only shadow and impenetrability and hope.”
Bryan Stevenson prefaces Just Mercy with a quote from American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, which reads, “Love is the motive, but justice is the instrument.” In telling the story of his fight to absolve Walter McMillian, a man sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit, Stevenson personifies and illuminates Niebuhr’s wisdom, proving the centrality of justice to the alleviation of social and structural wrongs. Set in Alabama’s Monroe County, the birthplace of Harper Lee, Stevenson’s book is simultaneously inspiring and maddening. Revealing how little we’ve progressed since the fictionalized days of Atticus Finch and Tom Robinson, it illustrates how the explicitly segregationist policies of Jim Crow have been simply refiltered into what still remains a disproportionate, racially charged, and largely inculpable criminal justice system.
Employing an artful structure, Stevenson alternates the story McMillian’s wrongful conviction with those of his other clients, bringing to light the stories of juvenile offenders who’ve been sentenced to life in prison; the shifting of care for Americans suffering from mental illness from hospitals to prisons; and the egregious abuse endured by American prisoners. Stevenson’s archive of stories is more upsetting — and more galvanizing — than I could have ever imagined.
I feel so often I indulge in theoretical discussions around society and politics, but I seldom am able to grasp the human impact, the lived experience. I am so grateful to Stevenson for doing the work to not just protect, but invaluably humanize the lives of the forgotten and the misunderstood.
If you would like to learn more about Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative, please click here. It’s definitely worth a visit.
Nicholas Buccola’s The Fire is Upon Us is one of the best books I have read in a long, long time. Building a historical landscape that is as informative as it is spellbinding, Buccola uses The Fire to reconstruct the parallel paths of James Baldwin, the literary lion of the civil rights movement, and William “Bill” Buckley, the father of American conservatism, toward their incredible climactic convergence – a historic televised debate, dated February 18, 1965, at the Cambridge Union. Charting Baldwin’s and Buckley’s lives from boyhood to adolescence to adulthood (Baldwin was 40 at time of the debate, Buckley 41), Buccola artfully stages a powerful juxtaposition, framing Baldwin as a “moral revolutionary” and Buckley a recalcitrant traditionalist, stuck in a sluggish, racially-rooted mindset of pacification and perpetual delay. Buccola’s retelling of their debate at Cambridge is downright riveting — it made me laugh, cry, and literally JUMP for joy.
What I think is perhaps most compelling about Buccola’s book, however, is the lasting resonance he ascribes to Baldwin. Through his novels and essays, Baldwin conceptualized a pathway for an America inured by gridlock, bigotry, and miscommunication, embracing a future marked instead by “universal human dignity.” He warned that, as human beings, we too often deny ourselves and others the truth and freedom this dignity can afford; we too often define our lives by the false power and “mythology” of things that separate us from our fellow man.
This is something all of us do and will continue to do because, as Baldwin reminds us, we are all human. Truth will come, however, when we try to focus on our shared humanity. It is a lesson that rings as true today as it did in 1965, and I thank Buccola for the incredibly timely and imperative reminder.
In this Cinderella-inspired novel, Ann Patchett tells the story about two siblings, Maeve and Danny, who are abandoned by their mother and forced to live under their cruel and vindictive stepmother. After the death of their father, Maeve and Danny’s stepmother exiles them from the titular “Dutch House,” a colossal mansion outside of Philly, resigning them to lives of comparative hardship and poverty. As a reader, I felt incredible sympathy for Danny (the narrator) and Maeve, though I grew to really dislike them. As the book went on, I found myself increasingly frustrated by their unwillingness “to be dislodged from [their] suffering.” Their victimhood became something of an obsession, driving every decision and perception while keeping them locked in a limbo of purgatorial cowardice, indecision, and resentment.
That said, I couldn’t put the book down — Ann Patchett is just that brilliant writer. As in Commonwealth, she explores so many fascinating themes in the Dutch House, from childhood trauma and sibling relationships to divorce, Catholicism, and the conditionality of forgiveness. And as in Commonwealth, she is able to make the ordinary absolutely enthralling, rendering relatability a superpower with which to reflect upon the profoundest of questions: Does our call to help one another encompass or supersede our familial obligations? Is there a way to truly be free of one’s past? And why do bad memories tend to always overshadow the good ones?