April 2021

Favorites of the month: A Promised Land and All Adults Here

Throughout most of human history (and up until relatively recently), prominent statesmen and women were typically awarded a posthumous epithet or “cognomen,” designed to capsulize a dominant feature of their personality, reign, or legacy. Some were memorable and commanding, such as those given to William the Conqueror, Catherine the Great, and Richard the Lionheart, while others were more closeted or disparaging (i.e., “Ivan the Terrible,” “Alfonso the Slobberer,” “Charles the Fat,” and “Constantine the Dung-Named”). In today’s world, the practice of appending such “cognomens” to the names of our leaders might seem atavistic and silly, though I wonder if something important and insightful could come from it.

If former President Barack Obama were to ever be given an official cognomen, I suspect that it would be something along the lines of “Barack the Honest” or “Obama the Truthteller” – anything to memorialize his unfailing commitment to telling the truth in its most unabridged and unvarnished form. In A Promised Land, the first volume of his presidential memoirs, Obama brings this commitment to the page, unveiling the good, the bad, and the ugly of his entrée into politics, his 2008 campaign, and his first term as president. Early in A Promised Land, he reflects on his decision to enter politics, remembering his youthful and quixotic attachment to “the idea of America, the promise of America.” “If we won,” he recalls thinking before the 2008 election, “it would mean that what had led me into politics wasn’t just a pipe dream, that the America I believed in was possible, that the democracy I believed in was within reach.” “If we won,” he continues,   

“It would mean that I wasn’t alone in believing that the world didn’t have to be a cold, unforgiving place, where the strong preyed on the weak and we inevitably fall back into clans and tribes, lashing out against the unknown and huddling against the darkness.”

In acknowledging (and in many ways celebrating) his early idealism, however, Obama is unafraid to discuss “where the story gets murkier” – where his incentives become more complicated and, in his words, more “open to interpretation.” With an honesty usually reserved for a therapy session or religious confessional, he admits all that he had to put his wife, Michelle, through – “another disruption,” “another gamble,” “another step in the direction of something I wanted and she truly didn’t” – and for what. “Was it vanity?” he asks himself,

“Or perhaps something darker – a raw hunger, a blind ambition wrapped in the gauzy language of service? Or was I still trying to prove myself worthy to a father who abandoned me, live up to my mother’s starry-eyed expectations of her only son, and resolve whatever self-doubt remained from being born a child of mixed race?”

With such unmitigated introspection, Obama goes on to recount the next five years. The 2008 campaign could be absolutely “exhilarating,” he tells us, although most of the time it was misery – like “a non-stop colonoscopy”; “an EKG on the soul.” While to the outside world, a presidential race may seem like a sparkly montage of balloon-filled photo ops, Obama paints a far different and far less glamorous picture marked by sixteen-hour days, sleepless nights spent at AmericInns and Super 8s, and an ever-deepening anxiety that the “airbrushed image” of himself as a candidate no longer mirrored the “flawed, often uncertain person” within. For Obama, too, there was an added, specific, and historically unprecedented pressure, rooted in what he calls the country’s “general nervousness about the idea of a Black person making the country’s most important decisions.” Ridiculed and criminalized for his alleged “foreignness,” Obama was accused of everything from selling drugs and working as a gay prostitute to fathering multiple children out of wedlock, while Michelle was cruelly dismissed as an “angry” Black woman and nicknamed “Obama’s Baby Mama.”

Once Obama gets to his time in the White House, the mood undeniably brightens. His passion for the work virtually beams from every sentence, underscoring each word as an emphatic highlight or amorous doodle: “The work, I loved,” he tells us, “even when it didn’t love me back.” Showcasing his real talent as a writer, Obama manages to turn this love into a literary device, so much so that his recollections of his various presidential trials and tribulations – from his negotiations surrounding the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to the Abbottabad raid that killed Osama bin Laden – read as if excerpted from a political thriller (“That was some real gangster shit back there,” his aide Reggie Love tells him at one point).

As he remembers late-night conversations with Toni Morrison, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first performance of Hamilton, or Paul McCartney serenading Michelle (to the tune of yes, you guessed it, “Michelle”), Obama makes you almost want to put your hat in the ring – to try on his life for size, if only for a day. But, of course, the presidency is not all sunshine, rainbows, and rounds of applause. True to form, Obama never shies away from revealing the hellish parts of the job – the way some of his “most important work involved the stuff nobody noticed”; the way his heart was “chained to strategic considerations and tactical analysis”; the way he was perpetually on “the knife’s edge between perceived success and potential catastrophe”; the way he was forced to maintain “an outward sense of normalcy,” upholding for everyone around him the fiction that ours was “a safe and orderly world.”

To a certain extent, all presidents have had to shoulder these gargantuan burdens. Yet as the first Black president, Obama had to face a uniquely ugly and painful force. “It was as if my presence in the White House,” he recalls, “had triggered a deep-seated panic,” precipitating a new and dangerous form of politics. Indeed, this was a form of politics in which words like “cooperation” and “bipartisanship” represented not a laudable goal but a distant and anathematic “mirage”; this was a form of politics that threatened “to blot out everything” – even the things “your own senses, your eyes and ears, told you to be true.”  

In taking stock of these challenges and changes, Obama never asks for our sympathy, though he does admit to occasionally falling into despair: Would all his “high-minded ideals” really be enough to dismantle the world’s cycles of “fear, hunger, conflict, dominance, and weakness”? he asks. Or were they just “a pretense, a palliative” to temper the doubt and numb the fear of our inevitable mortality? Would “the idea of America, the promise of America” always be here? Or would the forces of violence, greed, racism, and intolerance be too big (and too unavoidably human) for our “democracy to permanently contain”?  

On the surface, such raw vulnerability and exhaustive self-examination may seem like a shattered illusion or perhaps even a broken promise. Certainly, much of A Promised Land serves to unromanticize our nation’s supposed “ideals.” Yet the realer Obama gets in A Promised Land, the more we are inclined to love him, perhaps even more than we did before. As he confesses his doubts, interrogates his missteps, and unsentimentalizes his wins, Obama shows us not just that presidents are human beings, but that he is a damn good one. Here, indeed, is a man who thinks carefully; who chooses deliberatively; who acts compassionately; who loves whole-heartedly; and who tells the truths that we all need to hear.   

Toward the end of his book, Obama confesses to wondering “how much difference the particular characteristics of individual leaders make” in shaping the course of human history and progress. Are individual leaders just agents or “conduits for the deep, relentless currents of the times,” he wonders? Or are they “at least partly the authors of what’s to come”?

If history has taught us anything, it is that individual leaders and their particular characteristics do make a difference. Through A Promised Land, Obama renders himself an “author” in every sense, becoming not just a chronicler of what has happened, but an architect of what is and what will (eventually) be. “The presidency changes your horizons,” Obama tells us. “Rarely do your efforts bear fruit right away” – the problems are just too colossal and the factors at play are just too complex.

Progress is slow, at times glacially so. But with the right person as “author,” we can narrow – if however slightly – the chasm between where we are and where we want to go. We can embrace Robert Frost’s famous directive, as quoted in Obama’s epigraph: To “make a pass at the infinite” – to obtain from our hopeful grasps into “the remote swirl” a diminutive but elemental fraction of a better future; a promised land.  

Thank God for Barack the Honest; long live Obama the Truthteller.

There are few novelists for whom I cannot resist anything that has their name on it, and Emma Straub is definitely one of them. When I first read the jacket summary of her latest novel, All Adults Here, a multi-generational tale of familial dysfunction set in upstate New York, I immediately added it to my list (although – let’s be honest – I would readily read a Straub novel about farm animals or paint drying). Unsurprisingly, the book does not disappoint. It begins with a tragic traffic collision, witnessed in full by Astrid Strick, a sixty-eight-year-old widow and mother to three adult children – Elliot, Porter, and Nicky. Sudden and emotionally problematic (“The shock was indistinguishable from relief”), the accident dislodges a long-buried memory from Astrid’s past, forcing her to take stock of her life and question whether or not she has been a good mother. While all technically “grown-up” and moderately self-sufficient, Astrid’s three children “would have limped on without her help [if she had been the victim],” writes Straub, for “none of the three of them [were] quite adults, still even now.”  

As a child, Elliot, the eldest Strick, had been “treated like glass” only to be “promptly ignored for the newer, cuter model[s]” that were his siblings. Like so many first children, Elliot cares deeply about what others think; driven by a fear of the past and his own inadequacy, he is “dedicated to the idea of perfection,” but only a perfection that can be neatly packaged and “witnessed” by others. Elliot’s younger sister, Porter, is the middle child of the family, figured mostly as a “general idea” – “a foggy mist.” While her friends are checking off life to-do’s and zooming away from her like “rocket ships,” she feels motionless and abandoned; taking a “chance at delusion,” she repeatedly reengages her married ex-boyfriend, convincing herself that his marriage is a fraud and that their love is truer because she had him first. In contrast to Elliot and Porter, Nicky, the youngest of the Stricks, is more self-assured (and ostensibly happier), although he too is struggling to parent his thirteen-year-old daughter, Cecelia, ironically the most “adult” of any of the characters. At “the first sign of trouble,” Straub writes, Nicky gives up on Cecelia as if she were a “game of Monopoly” and sends her to live with her grandmother, Astrid, at the so-called “Big House.”

Without hitting us over the head with it, Straub exposes a link between the Stricks’ dysfunction and Astrid’s parenting style. While Astrid’s many rules and boundaries were understood (and occasionally welcomed as a “relief”), she seldom invited conversation or reflection, leaving “no room for error” and, by extension, no room for intimacy. When interacting with Astrid as adults, Elliot, Porter, and Nicky all feel as if they are entangled in a sort of “Groundhog Day” in which the same patterns and arguments keep repeating themselves. This feeling is only exacerbated further by the book’s setting, a fictional New England-style town, where “everyone [is] someone’s high school love, or someone else’s mother, or your cousin’s best friend from camp.”

As in her other novels, Straub is so deft at mixing the comical and the profound. All Adults Here covers some pretty entertaining territory (i.e., Rinstas and Finstas, estate sales, screaming toddlers, etc.) while also delving into difficult themes related to sexual orientation, gender identity, infidelity, and grief. Nevertheless, it is Straub’s incisive commentary on parenthood where the book and her writing really shine. In drawing a connection between Astrid’s mothering and Elliot’s, Porter’s, and Nicky’s problems, Straub exhibits how the ways in which a person is parented will indelibly (and perhaps inevitably) dictate the ways in which they themselves will parent: “So much of becoming an adult,” she tells us, is “distancing yourself from your childhood experiences and pretending they [don’t] matter, then growing to realize they [are] all that mattered.” “Being an adult,” she later reiterates, is “like always growing new layers of skin, trying to fool yourself that the bones underneath [are] different too.”

What I loved most about All Adults Here is that Straub ends on a hopeful note, framing the universal experience of childhood as not a carceral and pre-determinative chain, but rather an instructive guide, lighting the path for a new and better way. Parenthood is undoubtedly a reaction to one’s childhood, but it doesn’t have to be a negative or duplicative one. If we want to, we can break the cycles of inattention, misunderstanding, and vicarious living. In Porter’s words, we can be “as warm as an oven”; we can ask our kids how they are doing and actually “wait for an answer.”