Providence Journal>Books>An inside look at life in the ghetto

An inside look at life in the ghetto

GANG LEADER FOR A DAY: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Street,
by Sudhir Venkatesh.

Penguin. 302 pages. $25.95.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
February 24, 2008

In the winter of 1989, a young sociology graduate student named Sudhir Venkatesh arrived at Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes. Armed with a clipboard and a stack of surveys, Venkatesh walked into what was then the nation’s largest housing project and the hub of a booming crack-cocaine trade. Ninety percent of its tens of thousands of inhabitants were on welfare, and local gangs served as both cops and robbers by controlling the flow of drugs, overseeing the local underground economy, and meting out vigilante justice.

Members of a local gang intercepted Venkatesh before he’d knocked on a single door, and, in a scene that’s by turns hilarious and hair-raising, fought amongst themselves about what to do with him. It was touch and go until a young man named J.T. arrived. “[W]hile I couldn’t have known it at this moment, he was about to become the most formidable person in my life, for a long time to come,” writes Venkatesh in his insightful and bittersweet new book, Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets.

J.T., it turns out, was the college-educated leader of a local gang faction. The two men formed an unexpected bond and Venkatesh began shadowing J.T.’s day-to-day operations. Ultimately he spent seven years deeply enmeshed in the life of Robert Taylor and its inhabitants.

The longer he stayed, the more people trusted him, and the more people trusted him, the more inside information he had access to: barbecues and birthday parties; mediation sessions between rival gang leaders, brokered by tenant leaders and local clergy; a dubious get-out-the-vote effort on behalf of Chicago’s political machine; corrupt policemen and unresponsive ambulances; gang mergers and sales strategy meetings; prostitution and crack use and domestic violence and creative ways to fix problems when the Chicago Housing Authority won’t help.

Venkatesh, now a prominent social scientist, built his early career from the data he collected during these years. Gang Leader for a Day is his opportunity to put aside the numbers and tell what happened. What emerges is a textured and complex portrait that is both affectionate and clear-eyed.

Ultimately, life in the Robert Taylor homes is both exactly what you’d expect, and exactly the opposite. It’s filthy, crime-ridden, and subject to the whims of criminals and apathetic bureaucracies. At the same time, it’s a tight-knit community where members look out for one another and do what they must to survive. The problems facing the urban poor don’t have easy answers — just how entrenched those problems are emerges vividly here — but Venkatesh takes a compelling first step by offering up names and faces behind the statistics, showing us just what we as a society stand to lose when we cordon off the projects and ignore the humanity inside them.

Providence Journal>Books>The Ever-Evolving First Amendment

The Ever-Evolving First Amendment

FREEDOM FOR THE THOUGHT THAT WE HATE: A Biography of the First Amendment,

by Anthony Lewis.

Basic Books. 221 pages. $25.

BY BETH SCHWARTZAPFEL
Special to the Journal

During the run-up to a key presidential election, Matthew Lyon wrote a letter to the editor of his local paper. In it, Lyon mocked the sitting president’s “continual grasp for power” and his “ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation and selfish avarice.” Under the watchful eye of a Supreme Court justice, Lyon was convicted of “making odious or contemptible the president and government, and bringing them both into disrepute.” He was sentenced to four months in prison and a $1,000 fine.

This story sounds like one that could not happen in the United States. In fact, Lyon was arrested in his home state of Vermont and convicted under the Sedition Act, in 1798, less than a decade after the Bill of Rights — with its famous assertion that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” — was ratified.

In his new book, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and professor Anthony Lewis brings this and other stories to vivid life to demonstrate that the First Amendment was, and continues to be, a moving target.

Tracing the origins of the First Amendment to King Henry VIII, Lewis writes that English censors dispensed “previous restraints” that regularly prevented books and newspapers from being published. Early interpretations of the First Amendment were that it protected Americans only from English-style previous restraints, and, what’s more, applied only to the federal government — not the states (“Congress shall make no law . . .”).

As the country and the Supreme Court evolved, approaches to the First Amendment changed, too. But it wasn’t until the 1920s and ’30s that the Court consistently began enforcing the freedoms of speech and of the press as we know them today.

In engaging and accessible style, Lewis considers the ways in which the Court has weighed freedom of speech and of the press with other rights that Americans hold dear. The right to privacy, for instance, versus the right of the press to publish information about one’s personal life. The right of the press to hold policy-makers and public figures accountable versus the right of those persons to not be misrepresented, at best, libeled at worst. The right of a defendant to an unbiased jury versus the right of a press to report on a case as it unfolds. And, in a timely example that turns out to be as old as the country itself, the right of the citizens to their civil liberties versus the responsibility of the government in times of war and danger.

Lewis takes a stand on some controversial issues, breaking with major journalists’ organizations to oppose a broad shield law protecting journalists from grand jury subpoena, arguing against Supreme Court decisions that identify campaign contributions as protected speech, and asserting — reluctantly, it seems — that “we should be able to punish speech that urges terrorist violence to an audience . . . whose members are ready to act on the urging.”

It’s hard to imagine a book about legal history reading like a page-turner, but this book does. The Supreme Court justices whose decisions have shaped our country emerge as conflicted and principled human beings. The questions that have yet to be settled press impatiently against the book’s pages, reminding us that the First Amendment continues to shift under our feet even as we read.

Ultimately, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate is both a paean to the First Amendment and a recognition of its limitations. In a far-reaching and sophisticated reading of American history, Lewis argues that freedom of speech and freedom of the press are nothing without their practitioners.

“Even in a country with constitutional guarantees of freedom, something more is needed to resist fear and its manipulators,” he writes. “That is courage.” With this compelling book, Lewis demonstrates just that.

Providence Journal>Books>Dissecting the medical life

Dissecting the medical life

BODY OF WORK: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab, by Christine Montross. Penguin. 295 pages. $24.95.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
July 1, 2007

Unlike perhaps any other profession in this country, doctoring is almost mythical. Doctors are expected to be healers, emotional guides, soothsayers. To their wisdom and knowledge, we literally trust our lives. The grueling years of medical training and the difficulty of admission to medical school have, for many years, accorded medicine the status and insularity of a caste.
The doors to the profession are slowly being wrenched open, however, with ever-increasing numbers of “nontraditional” students donning white coats after years in other fields; lovers of literature and devotees of science will be delighted that a poet has joined those ranks, and, in a painstakingly beautiful memoir, documented the first years of her medical training.

Christine Montross had earned an MFA in poetry and taught school before arriving, at age 28, for her first year at Brown Medical School, where she is now a resident in psychiatry. In Body of Work, she recounts her surprise at the discovery that there was poetry everywhere in anatomy lab, of all places. In a literal sense, the bones and structures and their Latin names are eerily beautiful, tiny poems in themselves — as when Montross describes “reflecting,” or folding back, the muscles in a cadaver’s back:

“The effect is somewhat like opening a triptych, with the muscles swung wide to reveal their undersides and a new layer of musculature, or sometimes bone, underneath. There is always a moment of expectation upon opening, a strange hope of beauty within all that darkness.”
Using the dissection of a human cadaver over the course of a year as the frame, Montross delves into the history of human dissections, explores the ethical questions inherent in her training and her profession, tells intensely personal stories about her process of discovery and her family, and ruminates on life and death and doctoring.

She and her classmates name their cadaver “Eve.” Montross’ relationship to the woman who donated her body for her training is ever-shifting, sometimes fraught, but ultimately one of reverence and deep respect. The imagery of the dissection is beautiful; the ins and outs of the body’s workings are fascinating, and their descriptions filled with wonder and awe.
Equally gripping, however, is Montross’ frank and clear-eyed recounting of her own changing feelings regarding donation and dissection. “She is on the stainless-steel table of her own choosing,” she writes of Eve. “That simple decision allows me to make her into the type of person I would imagine choosing such a thing: educated, opinionated, concerned with the greater good, unsentimental, rational . . . . It makes it easier to think of her as someone not so different from the way I see myself.”

Body of Work traces the colorful history of medical dissection over the centuries, recounting bands of grave-robbers, papal edicts, and grisly anatomical theaters. Traveling to Italy to visit the intact body of Saint Catherine of Bologna and the creepy crypt of Santa Maria della Concezione, in which the bones of 4,000 Capuchin friars have been fashioned into a macabre sort of tableau, Montross grapples with the deep ambivalence surrounding human bodies. Are they human? Are they holy? Does the body of a criminal deserve any less respect than that of an ordinary person? And what, exactly, does that respect entail: burial, cremation, preservation, or something else entirely?

Just as dissecting the dead is intended as a means to healing the living, interspersed with scenes from the anatomy lab are striking moments from Montross’ clinical training. Some of the book’s loveliest and most wrenching moments are here, in the operating room, where a mentally retarded woman lies on a table, or in the ICU, where the crayoned drawings are tacked next to the bed of a ventilated man. “In this sick and mechanized state, he resembles nothing I have ever loved, even distantly,” writes Montross. And yet, “on his headboard, in a childish, crayon scrawl, is a paper sign that, intentionally or not, is unquestionably for me. In capital letters, it reads: MY DADDY IS GOING TO MAKE IT. HE PRMOSED ME HE WOULD.”

Body of Work is a stunning book, a window into a world that, for many of us, is shrouded in mystery. Ultimately, the stories it tells render both the cadavers and the idealistic young doctors who cut into them in the hopes of becoming healers, complicatedly, heart-wrenchingly, beautifully human.

Providence Journal>Books>When life gets hectic, and a little insane

When life gets hectic, and a little insane

THE FOLDED WORLD, by Amity Gaige.
Other Press. 300 pages. $23.95.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
June 24, 2007

From the first, Charlie Shade was charmed, his golden hair an appropriate metaphor for the kind of guy he was. Midwestern, disarming, and utterly earnest, “he loved to be surprised, for such was the immunity to horror that results from a completely happy and cloistered childhood.”

The Folded World is an artfully-rendered portrait of Charlie and his wife, a meditation on love, relationships and responsibility, and an exploration of what exactly constitutes the dividing line between sanity and madness. With this novel, Amity Gaige, a Brown graduate and creative writing teacher at the University of Rhode Island and Mount Holyoke, follows up on her widely acclaimed novel O My Darling, which garnered her a spot on the National Book Foundation’s debut “5 Under 35” list last year.

Longing for a taste of humanity’s gritty underbelly, seeking to feel that he “morally approved of his own life,” Charlie packed his bags after college and moved east to become a social worker. It was in his new home that he met the underachieving and bookish Alice. Daughter of a lonely and superstitious mother, Alice had moved to the city to escape the suffocation of the small working-class seaside town of her childhood. “Some people are born again by God. Charlie and Alice Shade were born again by one another.”

But their relationship, charmed again by the birth of twin daughters, is tested by Charlie’s all-consuming work on a mobile treatment team. His long hours leave Alice, struggling to be a first-time mother to the infant girls, feeling isolated and abandoned.

Meanwhile, his job brings him into close orbit with the lives of those who have been set adrift by their own minds into sometimes quirky and sometimes dangerous territory. Appropriate professional boundaries are all but impossible for the naively optimistic Charlie, and as he begins to get into risky situations at work, the story steamrolls to a place where his troubles at work and at home collide.

The character of Charlie is a particularly compelling one. Although Gaige professes no experience as a social worker, the often-awkward (and sometimes wrenching) dance of the care provider who must know people intimately, yet simultaneously keep them at arm’s length — provide “detached concern,” in medicine-speak — is portrayed here to stunning effect. The love between Charlie and Alice is sweet and real without being cloying, and Alice’s relationship with her mother is satisfyingly complicated.

Gaige was a playwright before she was a novelist, and that experience is in evidence with the precision of the language and the pace of the story. But the beauty of her prose and her joy in wordsmithing suggest that The Folded World might just as readily have been written by a poet.

Providence Journal>Books>A Mother Deals With Tragedy

A Mother Deals With Tragedy

THE KNITTING CIRCLE, by Ann Hood.
Norton. 346 pages. $24.95.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
January 28, 2007

 Stella had brown hair and a “killer smile,” and was partial to unlikely clothing, such as stripes with polka dots and orange earmuffs indoors. She chose winged creatures — dragonflies and fairies — as her Halloween costumes each year. She was 5 years old when she died, of bacterial meningitis, and left her stricken parents to make sense of their life without her.

In The Knitting Circle, the newest book by Providence novelist Ann Hood, Stella’s mom, protagonist Mary Baxter, finds solace and companionship through knitting. Even as she feels increasingly disconnected from everyone else in her life — her husband, her mother, her kindly, if doofy, boss — she draws close to the six women who are regulars at the Wednesday night Sit and Knit circle. As she learns the various techniques — casting on, casting off, making scarves and socks and hats — she learns, too, the life stories of Scarlet and Lulu, Ellen and Harriet and Alice and Beth. And along the way, she learns that no one, no matter how perfect her life seems, is immune from tragedy.

Five years ago, Hood herself lost a daughter, Grace, at age 5, to a rare form of strep, and Hood, too, found comfort in knitting during her darkest hours. So it is not surprising that her portrait of Mary’s grief is so real and so raw. The unpredictable arc of it — how Mary rallies for a time, and then slides backwards into her loss, how she avoids Stella’s room for the first few months, and then insists on sleeping in Stella’s bed every day — gives Mary’s grief a three-dimensional humanity that a less familiar portraitist might have missed.

Mary herself is a compelling and multifaceted character, one who emerges from the years of her mourning with unexpected revelations and a tentative sort of hope. The other characters, however, are disappointingly monotone in comparison. The particulars of each woman’s tragedy are unique, but the fact of their tragedies becomes predictable, such that as each woman’s history unfolds, it almost becomes a guessing game — a sort of “name her heartbreak” for the reader. The characters ultimately collapse into the sum of their personal misfortunes, rather than taking shape as new people who are wiser and stronger, albeit sadder, than they were before — as Mary eventually does. One revelation toward the end is particularly disappointing; it’s as if this character, who had been satisfyingly elusive and hard to pin down, didn’t have a place in the book unless she, too, had a terribly heartbreaking story to redeem her in the end.

The prose of The Knitting Circle is clear, even as Mary’s perspective is clouded by heartbreak, and the pace of the story is just right. And little Stella, with her Macarena and pasta with butter, is both present and absent throughout.

Providence Journal>Books>Translating an Exile's Experience

Translating an Exile's Experience

MY FATHER'S NOTEBOOK, by Kader Abdolah. HarperCollins. 328 pages. $24.95.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
May 21, 2006

My Father's Notebook is, first and foremost, a book about translation. Ishmael, the novel's Iranian narrator, is the son of a deaf-mute carpet mender named Aga Akbar. Ishmael spends his childhood as his father's shadow and mouthpiece, deciphering the older man's rudimentary gestures and translating them into words.

Now, years later, Ishmael is a political exile living in Holland. Long after his father's death, he appoints himself Akbar's translator again. His father never learned to read or write, but he did invent a cuneiform alphabet, modeled after an ancient inscription near the village where he grew up. Ishmael has his father's tattered journal, and is attempting to translate the cuneiform scrawl into Dutch, his new tongue.

Kader Abdolah, himself an Iranian-born political exile living in Holland, has published three previous novels; this is the first to be translated into English.

From Persian to cuneiform, from cuneiform to Dutch, and now from Dutch to English, the circumstances of Akbar's life and the longings in his heart are sifted through many languages before they reach us, the readers. Abdolah does a remarkable job conveying that sense of frustrating distance, that vagueness born of too many layers of telling and re-telling, of longing for something whose outlines are sketched, but whose details are barely understood.

But sometimes vagueness is just plain vague. And even after finishing the novel, I still wondered what parts of the story were translations of the notebook, what parts were Ishmael's memory, and what were stories told to Ishmael by friends and neighbors.

Feelings were beautifully conveyed, but the events of the narrative were hard to follow and not well-knit into the backdrop of Iranian history. The result is moving, dreamlike stories interspersed with overly didactic history lessons and confusing turns.

Aga Akbar grew up in a village at the base of Saffron Mountain. At the top of this mountain are two holy sites. One is the cave into which is carved the cuneiform inscription which forms the basis of Akbar's script. The other is a naturally formed well, inside which Shi'ites believe that the Messiah sits reading, waiting patiently to emerge.

My Father's Notebook is most moving each time the narrative returns to Saffron Mountain, as it does many times. These scenes are beautifully rendered and effective in describing the wider world through the simple lens of life in the village.

Unlike Ishmael's confusing palimpsest of city and university, political activism and new Dutch identity, Saffron Mountain -- Akbar's home, Ishmael's beloved homeland -- needs no translating. It speaks for itself.

Providence Journal>Books>Revisiting the Days of the Boston Strangler

Revisiting the Days of the Boston Strangler

A DEATH IN BELMONT, by Sebastian Junger. Norton. 267 pages. $23.95.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
May 14, 2006

The year was 1963; police were desperately trying to hunt down the serial killer known as the Boston Strangler. Meanwhile, Sebastian Junger was a toddler in the quiet Boston suburb of Belmont, where a man named Albert DeSalvo was working on the Junger family's home. When an elderly woman named Bessie Goldberg was found raped and strangled in Belmont, the police hastily arrested a black man named Roy Smith, who had cleaned the Goldbergs' house that day. Years later, DeSalvo himself confessed to being the Boston strangler but insisted he did not kill Bessie Goldberg. Ultimately, both Smith and DeSalvo spent the remainder of their lives in jail, but the crucial questions remain unanswered. Who killed Bessie Goldberg? Who was the Boston Strangler? Is justice possible when human beings are so fallible?

With his new book, A Death in Belmont, a now grown-up Junger tells the story of those gruesome years, and in so doing, grapples with these questions. Junger, whose first book, A Perfect Storm, won him international recognition, is an exacting, thorough journalist. In A Death in Belmont, he has expertly sifted through the reams of information related to the period to stitch together a gripping story.

Junger takes great care to introduce us to the characters, painting each with a compassionate and detailed brush. We get to know Roy Smith as intimately as we would the character of any novel -- meeting his family, following him through his youth in Mississippi and his young adulthood as a drifter and petty criminal. Even more moving is the portrait of the times in which Smith grew up. Junger's portrayal of the deep South in the 1920s and '30s is a wrenching reminder of what poverty and racism can do to a person's soul, and what can happen to a society when such harshness is inflicted on thousands upon thousands. Although Smith's story is the most carefully detailed, we also meet DeSalvo himself, as well as each of the Strangler's victims, members of the Boston police, and Junger's own mother, among others; even the owner of a Boston bar frequented by Smith gets a colorful and lively few pages.

In these post-James Frey times, nonfiction is subject to increasing scrutiny, and some have taken Junger to task for his approach. Bessie Goldberg's daughter, Leah, publicly accused Junger of painting Smith too sympathetically. Alan Dershowitz, reviewing the book in The New York Times, said, "nonfiction must be about actual truth, not about how coincidences could lead to a deeper truth." However, A Death in Belmont is more than just a journalist's list of facts. It is a work of art, an essay on the very elusiveness of truth. Without the artistry, without Junger's crafting the arc of a story and drawing conclusions -- admittedly tentative and inherently uncertain conclusions -- no reader would bother reading its 320 pages. Rather than trying to gloss over his doubt, Junger makes it the crux of his gripping story, thus turning it into something larger and more timeless than a simple re-telling of 40-year-old events. It's a gruesome tale; the faint of heart will need to skip the lengthy portions describing the grisly murders. However, A Death in Belmont is a powerful story -- both because of, and despite, its being "nonfiction."

Providence Journal>Books>Shattered Family Finds the Courage to Go On

Shattered Family Finds the Courage to Go On

TORCH, by Charyl Strayed. Houghton Mifflin. 322 pages. $24.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
April 16, 2006

Teresa Rae Wood is the kind of woman about whom her fellow rural Minnesotans say, "it takes all kinds." She hosts a show called Modern Pioneers on her local public radio station, signing off with the same words every week: "Work hard. Do good. Be incredible."

Even as they fit right into their hardscrabble, working-class home in Coltrap County, Teresa and her kids are different. They're vegetarians. They don't own a television. Teresa doesn't believe in marriage, but she does believe in love, and she knew what it was when she fell for Bruce.

He was a perfect fit, and the four of them - Teresa, Bruce, and Teresa's kids, Claire and Joshua -- make a happy, if unconventional, family. Until Teresa gets sick. "Can. Sir. They had to say it slowly, dissected, or not at all." Teresa is 38 years old when, seven weeks after she is diagnosed, she dies.

Torch, by first-time novelist Cheryl Strayed, tells the story of Teresa's family as they suffer with the hand they've been dealt. It's a beautiful book, expansive in its treatment of tragedy and grief, but equally attentive to all of the most telling details. The language is lovely, offering delicious, compelling imagery without being heavy-handed.

Each member of the family responds to Teresa's death differently. Like tiny planets of grief, they revolve around each other but never touch. Even in one another's presence, each feels as if he is drifting alone, unmoored in the vastness of loss.

Strayed's depiction of these dynamics is heartbreakingly real; as a reader you almost want to shield your eyes from what you know is coming, or to holler at the characters, or hug them.

Joshua, a teenager just months from graduation, begins to self-destruct, selling drugs and dropping out of high school. Claire embarks on an unlikely affair with an older man, breaks up her own relationship, and drops out of college while trying desperately to hold herself and her family together. And once Bruce realizes he lacks the courage to kill himself, he remarries so quickly that he estranges himself from Claire and Joshua -- and by so doing, deprives them not only of a mother, but of a father, too.

Through it all, Teresa's presence is everywhere: literally, as when the radio station plays re-runs of Modern Pioneers, and figuratively, as the memory of her spunk and her courage propels her loved ones onwards and upwards, out of their grief and back into the world and all its exquisite adventures.

Providence Journal>Books>Biography of a restless brother

Biography of a restless brother
Ken Dornstein works through his feelings about his older brother, killed in the Pan Am flight 103 crash

THE BOY WHO FELL OUT OF THE SKY: A True Story, by Ken Dornstein. Random House. 304 pages. $23.95.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
April 9, 2006

David Dornstein is larger-than-life, an incessant reader and scribbler and arguer of all things literary and aesthetic, a self-styled modern-day Dharma bum. He sleeps on the floor with ramparts of books walling him in, and works odd jobs around New York City to support his Art. He starts stories, hundreds of them, and though he can't sit still long enough to finish any but a handful, he envisions himself as the next Great Novelist of his generation.

He sits in coffee shops for days at a time, smoking, pontificating, and writing in his notebooks. He writes his hopes, his frustrations, letters to his family and friends and Norman Mailer, even notes and suggestions to potential biographers, whom he just knows will read them once he is catapulted to fame by a tragic early death. He just barely graduates from Brown, where he makes an art of lengthy manifestoes on why he hasn't completed his assignments, and then takes off to travel.

He was in seat 40K on Pan Am flight 103 when it exploded six miles above Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988.

The 25-year-old could not have known that his predictions of an early death would turn out to be right, nor that a biographer would indeed comb through his notebooks -- least of all that the biographer would be his little brother, Ken.

The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky is Ken's story as much as it is David's. It is a moving portrait, both of a restless and brilliant young man who died before achieving his potential, and of his crushed younger brother, who was also robbed of his potential by David's murder.

Ken is a reluctant biographer, but David is even larger in death than he was in life; in the 10 years after the bombing, Ken returns again and again to the notebooks, hunting for some secret that might release him from the crushing weight of David's shadow.

He begins a project that he calls the Dave Archives, in which he tracks down all of his brother's former friends, lovers (of which there were many), teachers and colleagues, and gathers recollections, photographs and letters.

This brings him to Kathryn, one of David's first and most serious girlfriends. They are surprised to find themselves falling for each other.

For years, Ken wavers, committing and then changing his mind, convinced that his true motivation must have something to do with David, haunted by contradictory but equally compelling Biblical mandates. Deuteronomy 25:6 commands that a dead man's younger brother must marry his widow, while Leviticus 18:16 says, "do not uncover the nakedness of your brother's wife." Not that David was married to Kathryn, nor were the Dornsteins religious, but Ken nevertheless feels "caught, roughly speaking, between Deuteronomy and Leviticus."

Ken is an editor at the PBS documentary series Frontline, and the prose of this book reads at times more like a documentary than a novel. But it is ultimately a heartbreaking and beautiful account, one of Ken's journey to know David, to find himself amidst the rubble of the tragedy, to write a book his big brother would have been proud of, and, finally, to finish the decades-long chapter on grief and start a fresh one on hope.

Providence Journal>Books>Heppner's characters are miserable, for no reason

Heppner's characters are miserable, for no reason

PIKE'S FOLLY, by Mike Heppner. Knopf. 317 pages. $23.95.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
April 2, 2006

Pike's Folly is a miserable book. It's about miserable people who make each other miserable. For no reason. It's hard to discern a theme here, but if there is one, it's "for no reason." "I hate 'why,' " says the book's central character, Nathaniel Pike, who has recently erected a parking lot on the top of a thickly forested mountain, inaccessible except by helicopter and hiking boots. "I declare war on why."

Author Mike Heppner, a Rhode Island native who set the book largely in Providence, seems to have done the same. In the tradition of Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, Heppner uses caricatures instead of characters, and sets the plot in an absurd version of the real world. But where Pynchon and Wallace use caricature and absurdity as a means of satire, Heppner uses them-- you guessed it -- for no reason.

Nathaniel Pike and Gregg Reese are both outrageously rich. Pike is cocky, self-important, and defiantly uncharitable; he spends extravagant sums on intentionally useless, wasteful things. Reese, on the other hand, is dogged by guilt about his wealth and feelings of inadequacy in the face of the Reese family legacy. Although (or because) the source of its money is shadowy at best, the Reese family is a philanthropic force, one whose name is plastered on every do-good project in Rhode Island.

Some of the book's other miserable characters include Stuart, Pike's personal assistant, who wrote one pretentious novel some years ago and vacillates between berating himself for his pretension and berating himself for not being able to write another. Stuart's wife, Marlene, is a pathetic creature with no self-esteem who takes to exhibitionism so someone will finally look at her. Gregg's daughter, Allison, is a lost soul who dreams of doing something, but lacks any motivation to do so because she can comfortably live forever off her family's money. And Allison's boyfriend, Heath, is a "filmmaker" interested in "transgressive cinema" (read: downloadable clips of naked Marlene circulated around the Internet). The overwhelming sense is that even Heppner has no love for these characters, that he made them pathetic and miserable just to march them naked in front of us and say, look how pathetic and miserable they are.

The plot revolves loosely around Pike's "Independence Project," which consists first of the parking lot, and then a fully-stocked Kmart at the top of the inaccessible mountain. Various environmental activists and government bureaucrats get involved as they channel their righteous indignation at this latest incarnation of Pike's waste. Things almost get interesting in several spots - when the factions come to loggerheads in the contested parking lot, for instance, or when one of the bureaucrats digs up some skeletons, literally from Pike's (or is it Reese's?) closet -- but in the end, it all comes to nothing. The fight fizzles before it even begins, and the skeletons? They're made up. For no reason.

Heppner could have done a lot with this book. It could have been a comment on capitalism, on wealth, greed, consumerism. It could have been a comment on philanthropy, on the obligations we have to one another as human beings. Instead, it is adamantly about nothing. "The only things worth doing are pointless things," says Pike. I disagree. Reading this book was pointless. And not worth doing.

Providence Journal>Books>Love and healing beat the odds in Waldman's poignant novel

Love and healing beat the odds in Waldman's poignant novel

LOVE AND OTHER IMPOSSIBLE PURSUITS, by Ayelet Waldman. Doubleday. 340 pages. $23.95.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
March 5, 2006

Emilia Greenleaf has always prided herself on being a tough woman: proud, independent and sexy. She met and married the man of her dreams, Jack Woolf, a successful lawyer who is also kind and sensitive and handsome.

But now everything is wrong. Emilia must steel herself just to leave the house. She falls to pieces daily, in public places, with no warning. Jack's son, William, is a precocious little know-it-all, which is no wonder. William's mother is a neurotic ex-wife who seems hell-bent on exposing Emilia for the fraud of a stepmother that Emilia knows herself to be.

None of this would pierce Emilia so thoroughly had she not just lost her baby, her perfect Isabel, to SIDS during Isabel's very first night on earth.

Ayelet Waldman's Love and Other Impossible Pursuits is the story of Emilia picking up the pieces, of how she and Jack try to rebuild their marriage from within the ruins of their grief. Most of all, it is about learning to love little William, "this scrawny know-it-all of a boy, with his irritating precocity and his embarrassingly cloistered and self-centered view of the world." In so doing, Emilia is able to achieve what she would not have thought possible: healing.

This is a wonderful book, engaging and startlingly honest.

Waldman is perhaps best known as a wife and mother. Her column in the online magazine Slate and her occasional essays for The New York Times focus almost exclusively on her husband, novelist Michael Chabon, and their four children.

Even a cursory skim of these and her "Bad Mother" blog offer such a personal look into her family that you feel as if you are invading their privacy; you become privy to secrets that seem like, well, none of your business. So I suppose it is only natural that our window into Emilia's world is so stunningly clear, and that Waldman's insights into this character are so authentic.

Emilia is relentlessly reflective, policing herself to the point of paralysis. She is selfish and childish in her grief, and she knows it. She throws tantrums, lashes out unfairly at people who love her -- and then, compounding the anguish that caused the outburst in the first place, she is racked with guilt at having done so.

As a result - and this is to Waldman's credit -- I don't like Emilia; at times I feel trapped in her head, stuck like a gerbil on a wheel of self-loathing and sadness that's going nowhere. Still, the story is so compelling -- her grief is so real and so raw -- that you stick by her almost out of loyalty.

And it's worth it. When the fog starts to clear, you, too, feel as if you've received the gift of a second chance and that love may not be such an impossible pursuit after all.