Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and James by Percival Everett

 Source of books: I own both of these, but listened to Huckleberry Finn on audiobook. 

 

 

My mom spent a lot of time reading to us kids when we were young, and this meant we were exposed to some significant classics at very young ages. As in Charles Dickens when we were single digits, for example. 

 

We were also encouraged individually to read other books on our own, and these were surprisingly varied and proved to be influential on my own thinking years later. 

 

One of those books we read together was Huckleberry Finn. 

 

I later re-read it, either in high school or college, and maybe in my 20s after that? In any case, I was both familiar with the book and hadn’t read it in a long time. 

 

I have mentioned that the book was (as of 2014), one of the dozen or so books that were the most influential on me, and specifically because of the scene where Huck decides he would rather go to hell than violate his own conscience. That has been my choice as to how I live my own life ever since, much to the horror of the Evangelicals in my life - my parents, unfortunately, included. Just like Huck decided that black people were humans and entitled to freedom, I refuse to dehumanize LGBTQ+ people, or insist that women be relegated to certain gender roles, for example. 

 

The reason I re-read this book this time was that our book club, The Literary Lush, chose James by Percival Everett for this month. James is a riff on Huckleberry Finn, from the perspective of Jim - and with some important plot changes as well. 

 

Because of that, I figured I had better brush up on Twain’s original, as did several members of our club. 

 

It was, shall we say, interesting, to re-read. As a child and later as a younger man, I think I missed some things. It wasn’t that I failed to remember the problems with the book - I certainly remembered the liberal use of the N-word, and the casual and absurd cruelty that Tom Sawyer treated Jim with at the end. 

 

[Note: Percival Everett also uses the N-word in James, and defends it as being necessary to understand true American history.] 

 

Rather, I didn’t have the background knowledge of Minstrelsy necessary to understand exactly how and where Twain indulges in lazy stereotypes. It is these that are more troubling to me now - because it is both obvious that Twain’s heart is in the right place, and also that he has some glaring blind spots typical of white people of his time. 

 

Having re-read it, I also am now of the opinion that, although Huckleberry Finn is great literature, it is also not particularly useful as a book for teaching children. 

 

There are a number of problems with it in that role, in my opinion. First is that it is, at its core, a book about a racist white kid and his journey in the direction of becoming a less racist person. That’s not a bad story, of course, and may very well be useful for white kids who grow up in, say, a MAGA household, where the Klan’s view of minorities is all they knew. But of what possible use is it for black kids? Why should they have to subject themselves to racial slurs and lazy stereotypes? So they can see a racist white boy become less racist? I’m not seeing it. A worthy book for teaching should resonate for everyone rather than alienate part of its audience.

 

Second, the book feels very dated in a lot of places. And in a way that Shakespeare mostly avoids. (The obvious exceptions are The Merchant of Venice and The Taming of the Shrew.) I mentioned the racial attitudes, of course, but also the culture itself is foreign in many instances, and likely won’t resonate with the average child or teen. Me and my kids are a bit odd in that regard, because we have steeped ourselves in old books practically since birth. But most people don’t have that context. 

 

Third, the canon isn’t static. Just like we no longer consider the Greek and Roman Classics to be the only true classics now, there is nothing magical about the 19th Century. Sure, we read some of the old Greeks - and we should! - but other works have fallen by the wayside, read mostly by book nerds like myself. 

 

There are any number of excellent books by other authors that would substitute. To understand racial issues of the time, I would prefer Frederick Douglass to Twain, for example. His perspective is more accurate and more timeless. With limited space in any curriculum, I think it is better to give that space to other voices. I know this is controversial, but I stand by my opinion.

 

That said, Huckleberry Finn is, despite its flaws, a very funny book. Twain was a master of satire, and this book takes on a lot of staples of American culture, particularly Southern culture. There is the dark humor of the Grangerford and Shepherdson feud which leaves everyone dead. There is the revival meeting, and the attempt to steal a dead man’s estate. There is Huck trying to impersonate a girl. 

 

Even the scene with Tom Sawyer and Jim is hilarious even as it is a bit painful. Tom is just straight up absurd, with his head in his fantasy books, and no grounding in reality - unlike Huck, whose hard life has given him far more common sense than Tom will ever have. 

 

And, the best and most memorable episodes revolve around the Duke and the Dauphin, two quintessentially American scam artists. 

 

I should mention that those two were also highly influential on my thinking. I hadn’t ever really experienced confidence men before, and the way they manipulated and lied their way across the book was eye opening. They were masters of preying on what people wanted to believe, leading people to essentially swindle themselves. 

 

Later, this would lead to my distrust of Bill Gothard (and my objection to joining his cult, which my parents pointedly ignored and overruled.) And even later, to my recognition that Donald “Grab ‘Em by the Pussy” Trump was a charlatan and confidence man as well. (I was correct one hundred percent on both.) 

 

I mean, let’s look at some of the scams. There is the first one, at the revival meeting. The Dauphin pretends to be a reformed pirate, and uses so many of the techniques you can see at work today. The “mildly wicked” schtick who plays on the way puritanical people like to be titillated. (Hence why today, a reformed stripper or ex-gay is the way to go…) Being bad, but not too bad, right? It’s genius in its own way, and it still works today. 

 

There is the attempt to scam the inheritance, which demonstrates how an observant person can glean enough facts and flavor to appear to be part of the family. Trump demonstrates this technique really well, actually. He has picked up just enough of the Evangelical schtick to signal that he is “one of them,” even though he has nothing of Christianity about him. This works particularly well for Evangelicals of my parents’ generation. 

 

The con men feed their victims what they want to hear - whether it is that the dead relative loved them, or that they deserve certain money. 

 

And, there is “The Royal Nonesuch,” the dirty show that isn’t. Twain’s insight into psychology is perceptive: nobody wants to be known as a fool, so better if everyone gets played for a fool than just you. I think this too plays a role in why so many can’t admit Trump scammed them. Or that Gothard scammed them. [Fill in the charlatan of your choice here…]

 

So, the short version: I love and enjoyed Huckleberry Finn and I still think it is too problematic to be taught. 

 

Now, let’s talk about James. I had never read any Percival Everett before, although I had considered reading Erasure. Having read this book, I think I need to put more on my list. 

 

James starts out following the plot of Huckleberry Finn, but departs from it about halfway through the book. Because the book is from a different perspective, some events in the original are barely mentioned with a sentence, while other scenes are expanded on significantly. A few are new to the book, filling in gaps that Huck is not aware of. 

 

At that midway point, though, things become very different. After Jim is sold, he chooses to free himself, and from then on, the plot is all original. I found the second half to be more enjoyable to read, because it feels less preachy and less stage-setting and correcting than the first. 

 

Everett essentially uses the first half of the book to establish a few things. Jim (like most of the enslaved) talks in dialect only around white people. He speaks standard English around other black people. He is literate, and a hell of a lot smarter than Twain lets him be. 

 

So, we get a good bit of “code switching,” pretending to be dumb, and so on. And also a lot of “Huck may have told the story this way, but here’s what really happened.” Thus, parts do feel a bit preachy. 

 

The second half, though, is definitely exciting, and the action picks up a lot. One particularly fascinating episode occurs when Jim/James is recruited into a minstrel group. They perform in blackface, which leads to a Twelfth Night level layering of identity. Jim is a black man pretending to be a white man pretending to be a black man. 

 

Exposed in this episode is the limit most white people have in accepting equality. The leader may not approve of enslavement, but he still expects a level of deference and obedience. 

 

I appreciated the songs performed - a lot of classics of a certain era. And also the subtle and not-subtle racism embedded in so many of them. 

 

Related: the roots of both Bluegrass and Country are in Old Time music, which had its origins in “string bands” - groups of black people, enslaved or free, who performed for the entertainment of white people. Particularly after the Civil War, these groups became integrated, combining influences from Ireland, Scotland, Africa, and the Caribbean to form the sounds we know and love (or hate) today. 

 

Another idea that Everett explores in this episode is that of “passing.” One of the ostensibly “white” members of the band is actually an escaped slave - just one with light skin. This was and is common, of course. Since the overwhelming majority of the descendants of the enslaved have significant European genes, it is obvious that rape was not merely common, but indeed endemic to the enslavement system. And, to be clear, there are some brutal rape scenes in this book.  

 

Mark Twain himself would explore this idea in one of his later books, Pudd'nhead Wilson, which is also arguably the first courtroom procedural. To a degree, I believe this book also is an example of Twain’s evolution - there is a clear pattern of his moving away from the bigotry of his youth. Contrast, for example, Roughing It and its horrible treatment of Native Americans with Following the Equator, which shows a far more evolved view of indigenous people generally. May we all grow positively as we age like Twain did. 

 

I will note here that there are some shocking events and revelations in this second half. I won’t spoil things by revealing them, but simply say that they will turn Twain’s version completely on its head. 

 

One of the conversations we had at our book club discussion is whether James feels like Jim from the original. This is a good question. Anytime a character is reimagined by another author, the fit will be imperfect. Doubly so in this case, since Everett’s intent is to show James as very different from Jim as Huck (and Twain) see him. 

 

My own conclusion is that James is a possible version of Jim. Not the only possible one, but one that is possible and plausible. There is another re-imagining coming out this year as well, Big Jim and the White Boy: An American Classic Reimagined by David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson. It also sounds interesting, and could be another possible version of Jim. 

 

Because I listened to Huckleberry Finn on audiobook while driving, I didn’t make notes about quotes, although I suspect many of them are already well known. James, on the other hand, I read in physical form, so I did note a few. 

 

One recurring scene is where James has dreams where he talks to Enlightenment era philosophers - he reads their books on the sly. One of the most fascinating is his conversation with Voltaire, wherein he points out that even though Voltaire is against slavery, he still believes as many of his time did, that white people were more civilized, more developed, more fully human. Ditto for Thomas Paine later in the book. 

 

Quotes from Twain’s book are scattered throughout - often with James providing a riff on the ideas. For example, James builds on Huck’s realization that religion and morality are not the same - and are often in conflict. Everett in one case takes the iconic scene where Huck has his epiphany, and instead gives James the central role in bringing that about. Here is my favorite line in the scene:

 

“Way I sees it is dis. If’n ya gots to hab a rule to tells ya wha’s good, if’n ya gots to hab good ‘splained to ya, den ya cain’t be good. If’n ya need sum kinda God to tells ya right from wrong, den you won’t never know.” 

 

Another line stood out, in the scene where the Duke and Dauphin show up. And brag about how easy it is to swindle people. 

 

I could believe it, I thought, pretending, in slave fashion, not to be there. After being cruel, the most notable white attribute was gullibility.

 

This is so true. And it is particularly (although not exclusively) true of right-wing white people, and most true of all about white Evangelicals, unfortunately. And it is indeed that combination of gullibility and cruelty - ergo Trump’s overwhelming popularity in that demographic. Jim and Huck later discuss why it was so easy to fleece racist religious white people.  

 

“Yes, but them people liked it, Jim. Did you see their faces? They had to know them was lies, but they wanted to believe. What do you make of that?”

“Folks be funny lak dat. Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scares ‘em.”

 

Blogger Doug Muder (a favorite of mine) described what James notes: right wingers believe the lies they want to believe - the ones that are pretty and make them feel good about themselves - and reject the ugly truth about how their beliefs and political policies harm others. The truth scares them, just like it did the enslavers and those who benefited from slavery. To accept the truth is scary, because it demands change. 

 

There are many humorous moments in the book. One of those is the episode where Norman, who is passing, has to pretend to own the darker-skinned James. Norman is nervous as hell about it. 

 

“Listen, you’ve got to relax,” I said. “To all of them you’re white. Hell, to me you’re white.”

“There’s no need to be insulting.”

 

Later, there is another fascinating exchange, involving a young woman, Sammy, who has joined Norman and James on the run. 

 

“We don’t even know where we are,” Norman said. “Bound to be a slave state on the other side of the river.”

“Probably,” I said. “We’re slaves, Norman. Where we are is where we are.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I don’t know. Sounded better in my head.”

“I know what it means,” Sammy said. “We’re slaves. We’re not anywhere. Free person, he can be where he wants to be. The only place we can ever be is in slavery.”

 

Finally, there is a scene where Norman and James end up hitching a ride on a steamboat - stowing away, really. The issues of color and class intersect in interesting ways. Norman can pass for white, but he can’t (at least in his bedraggled state) pass for rich enough to buy a ticket.

 

“Look at me.” Even in the dim light I could see how disheveled he was. Aside from being soaked, his clothes were filthy from the hull’s tar. Looking at him like that gave me a renewed appreciation of the power of his skin color. That alone had been enough to faze and control the slave in the engine room. Even though Norman looked like the poorest and worst-off white man, he still commanded fear and respect. But he would not be able to pass through the throng of white people on the decks above us - though they could never identify him as black, they would see him as something worse, a very poor white person.

 

I am reminded of Lyndon Johnson’s famous - and highly accurate - quote: 

 

“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”

 

This, more than anything, explains the phenomenon described as “people voting against their economic interests.” The problem is reducing things to economics. Far more important to most people is status. “I may be poor, but at least I’m not a N----r.” Or, in own era, add in the thrill of kicking immigrants as a way of feeling better about one’s own declining prospects. “At least I’m a real American, not one of those people…” Hey, let me recommend a book in this regard: Dying of Whiteness. 

 

One interesting result of our reading this book (after listening to Huckleberry Finn on audiobook with my two youngest kids) is that my youngest, the 8th grader, read James as well. She is on the cusp of adult literature these days, and it is thrilling to see her choose books like this to explore. Teenagers are so underrated. 

 

I strongly recommend reading these two books together. Certainly, don’t try James if you have never read Huckleberry Finn - that would be to miss Everett’s point entirely, and make some of the plot difficult to understand. The two go together. 

 

***

 

My mom, books, and an unfortunate change:

 

I found that listening to Huckleberry Finn was an emotional experience. As I mentioned above, my mom spent a lot of time reading to us, and of all the memories I have of my childhood, this one ranks really high. If she can be proud of anything she did raising us, she has a right to consider this the pinnacle. 

 

So much of who I am today was informed by the literature we read. David Copperfield opened my eyes to the evils of child labor and the grinding nature of poverty. The Scarlet Letter educated me as to what religious hypocrisy looked like, and how hiding one’s sin leads to self-immolation of the soul. The rape scene in Christy taught me how groomers prey on children - and how religion tends to aid in the coverup. 

 

My mom also encouraged me to read subversive books. An example is The Octopus by Frank Norris, which was about the unholy marriage of big government and big business during the Robber Baron era - and the way that the corruption led to the exploitation of small farmers, in this case in the San Joaquin Valley. Also, Norris was essentially a communist. Animal Farm was another - and one that made me realize that Orwell wasn’t just talking about Communism in that book. 

 

In retrospect, it is almost astonishing how left-leaning my parents were in the 1980s. Sure, they were really into Reagan and voted Republican, but they were also actively anti-racist, pro-immigration, and empathetic toward those less fortunate. 

 

So what the fucking hell happened to them? That is a question I keep asking myself. 

 

By the time I was a young adult, my mom was willing to sacrifice relationships to her belief in gender roles, and my dad was rattling on about how we needed to stop accepting refugees and do something about the Hispanic problem. What the fuck happened? 

 

I’m not really sure, but I have thought about some changes in their reading habits. 

 

For my mom, I’m not sure she actually read any literature she hadn’t already read after her early 20s. All of the books I mentioned above are ones she had already read by the time she introduced me to them. I literally cannot remember the last time I saw her read an actual classic. 

 

What I do remember her reading a lot of was Agathe Christie mysteries - no shade there - I myself read a lot of Christie and love a good murder mystery. Also, a lot of Christian romances - Janette Oke and the like. Nothing wrong with some fun fluff in any case.

 

The more problematic part is she devoured books by charlatans. Mostly “alternative medicine” crap, but also far too many books I would describe as “Christian Crack.” Highly addictive books about stuff like demon possession and culture war insanity that prey on fears and insecurities and offer solutions that look an awful lot like a full rejection of anything modern, secular, and particularly African-American in culture. It feeds on itself, and is truly an addiction. 

 

My dad’s reading followed a similar pattern, unfortunately. From introducing us to Tolkien, Tom Clancy (in a very bowdlerized version…), and C. S. Lewis’ non-Narnia books, to mostly reading religious stuff. I also remember him reading Leon Uris and other thoughtful (if sometimes right wing) authors back in the day, but haven’t seen that much since. 

 

One of the things I looked forward to as a child was being able to talk with my parents about books, so it was a great disappointment that they seem to have stopped reading stuff that would stretch them. Or anything that I recommend they read. I feel like for reasons I will never understand, they chose to stop growing sometime around their late 30s, and instead retreated into trying to recapture the nostalgia of the past. 

 

This is something I have tried to avoid as a parent. If my kids like a book, I read it. And this has meant we have gotten to discuss books a lot. If you poke around on my blog, you will find that I regularly mention books my kids introduce me to - and honestly I have discovered authors this way since they were little. 

 

My goal is also to continue to read books that stretch me. This includes reading classics, of course - and I do love classic literature. But also modern books - like James - that put a new perspective on the past. And non-fiction on a variety of topics. That’s literally the title of my blog: I intend to continue to learn and grow, and, I hope, become a better person as I age, like Twain did, rather than regress into bigotry and reactionism like my parents chose to do as they grew older. 

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro

Source of book: I own this.

 

I have previously read and reviewed two short story collections by Alice Munro, The Moons of Jupiter, and Runaway. As readers know, I love the short story form, and make sure to read in it regularly. 

 

Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage is a collection of nine stories. If I were to guess at a theme that connects them, it is about live changes and the passage of time. Change from childhood to adulthood, change from marriage to widowhood, change from well to ill, and so on. 

 

As I have started doing with some of the collections that don’t have too many stories, I will mention each one in order, and add a quote or two if there was one I particularly liked. 

 

“Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship Marriage”

 

I love the title of the collection - it is a reference to a children’s game of comparing letters in one’s name to the name of another and finding out which of the above fates will apply. Kind of like the petals and daisies. 

 

The story itself is about an unattractive woman and a practical joke that teen girls play on her that unexpectedly leads to an unforeseen consequence. Johanna is an immigrant from Ireland who is, simply put, unattractive. She works for years as a maid and governess for a family, until the mom dies and the granddaughter goes off to college. 

 

Before that, though, the granddaughter and her rather mean-spirited friend decide to trick Johanna by forging a letter supposedly written by, Ken, the granddaughter’s ne’er-do-well father. It’s…a long story. 

 

In any case, Johanna is fooled into thinking Ken, who she has met only a few times, is in love with her and wants to marry her. So, she spends her life’s savings to go be with him, leaving her employer stunned. 

 

When she gets there, she finds him gravely ill, and as everyone else knows, incompetent. But, she nurses him back to health, they marry, and manage to build a life together, much to the surprise of everyone. 

 

It is a surprisingly heartwarming ending, and definitely not the only way the story could have gone. 

 

“Floating Bridge”

 

This is a story of a woman who unexpectedly learns that her breast cancer treatment is working, and, at least for the time being, her prognosis is much better than thought. 

 

She is discharged from the hospital, but rather weak. Her husband has hired a troubled teen girl to help out, and ends up driving to her house because she forgot her shoes. This turns into an extended visit - because you have to - and she stays in the car because she can’t handle another stress. 

 

However, the teen son meets her, and ends up driving her home via a floating bridge - hence the title. He also kisses her, although they both know they won’t repeat it. 

 

There is a line that stood out to me in this story. 

 

But the life she was carrying herself into might not give her anybody to be angry at, or anybody who owed her anything, anybody who could possibly be rewarded or punished or truly affected by what she might do. Her feelings might become of no importance to anybody but herself, and yet they would be bulging up inside her, squeezing her heart and breath. 

 

“Family Furnishings”

 

This story is about an unusual relative who doesn’t fit in, and who hides a secret that only comes to light at the end of the story. 

 

Alfrida, aka Freddy, is the narrator’s father’s cousin, and is the odd person in the family. Whereas the rest are superficial and rural, with so much of their lives carefully patterned on social niceties, Freddy moved to the city, speaks her mind, and refuses to adhere to beauty standards. She is unmarried (although she has had a series of live-in boyfriends), and supports herself by writing.

 

While she and the narrator start out close, they drift apart when the narrator grows up, and the reunion later in life mostly reveals how little they still have in common. But the narrator realizes too late that the distance was unnecessary, and caused by the same snobbishness and insecurity she condemned in the rest of the family. 

 

There is a line in this story that I really loved, because it is a perfect illustration of how my mother is. 

 

Ordinarily, my mother would say that she did not like to see a woman smoke. She did not say that it was indecent, or unladylike - just that she did not like it. And when she said in a certain tone that she did not like something it seemed that she was not making a confession of irrationality but drawing on a private source of wisdom, which was unassailable and almost sacred. It was when she reached for this tone, with its accompanying expression of listening to inner voices, that I particularly hated her. 

 

This unwillingness to admit that preferences are, for the most part, arbitrary and personal - one could say irrational - is something that has always frustrated me. And I would substitute in my case “private source of wisdom” for “sure that God agrees with her.” 

 

“Comfort”

 

This story is haunting for multiple reasons. First, it starts with a woman coming home to find her husband has committed suicide. It isn’t unexpected - he had in fact indicated that when his ALS got bad enough, he would do it rather than linger in suffering. 

 

From there, though, we get the back story. He had been a well-respected high school science teacher, beloved by generations of students. Until the Canadian equivalent of the theofascist group “Moms for Liberty” started a crusade in his town. 

 

In this case, the battle was over Young Earth Creationism, which the agitators demand be taught as equally valid to evolutionary science. I wrote a bit about this a decade ago. After years of conflict - and indeed hate crimes and harassment - and a lack of support from administration - he walked away. 

 

It is his wife’s choice as to what to say at the memorial the school insists on having for him that occupies the heart of the story. 

 

And this one has a number of great lines. 

 

Lewis understands that this debate is not about presenting alternatives - it is about theofascists cramming their doctrine down everyone else’s throats. You can see this in the way the Moms For Liberty sorts are driving book bans. Bans on books by and about people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ people. Lewis puts it this way:

 

“That’s nonsense,” Lewis said. “They don’t believe in equal time - they don’t believe in options. Absolutists are what they are. Fascists.” 

 

The scenes with the principal are frustrating as hell. Bowing to public pressure from a vocal and obnoxious minority, he wants Lewis to take time from his science teaching to explain a particular religious myth. Lewis is abrasive, and responds with a bit of a taunt. 

 

“March in Adam and Eve. With or without the fig leaves.” 

 

The thing is, I am a Christian, and I find this whole YEC thing highly offensive. It is literally a modern affectation, a pseudoscientific way of understanding the beautiful creation myth in Genesis. None other than Augustine warned against a literalist reading of Genesis, and historically, it has been understood as having a primarily theological meaning, not an account of literal history 4000 years ago. 

 

So this isn’t a matter of teaching “Christianity” even, but of teaching a particularly toxic and ludicrous Fundamentalist interpretation. (Very much, I will note, like banning teaching about racism in America, or teaching about the existence of LGBTQ people. It is the same old serpent.) 

 

“Nettles”

 

This is one of those “meeting again after many years” stories. A girl spends a few weeks playing with the son of the man who drills their well. The boy moves away, and she doesn’t see him again until they are adults. They are caught in a rainstorm while golfing, and get into a patch of nettles trying to find shelter. 

 

The story is split between the idyllic (although earthy) childhood memories, and the way those memories are remembered or forgotten later. And also, the tragedy and trauma that both children have endured since. 

 

There is also a scene involving the narrator (the girl) and her friend, and their college days. And also the way they, for years, talked about serious subjects. It is a humorous moment. 

 

We read Jung at the same time and tried to keep track of our dreams. During that time of life that is supposed to be a reproductive haze, with the woman’s mind all swamped by maternal juices, we were still compelled to discuss Simone de Beauvoir and Arthur Koestler and The Cocktail Party.

Our husband were not in this frame of mind at all. When we tried to talk about such things with them they would say “Oh, that’s just literature” or “You sound like Philosophy 101.”

 

That does make me appreciate that I have a spouse who likes to talk literature and philosophy with me. 

 

“Post and Beam”

 

I will confess that I probably didn’t understand this story. I went back and looked online for some takes on it, and, while the plot was consistent, what people thought it meant varied widely. 

 

Lorna is the main protagonist. She has married an older math professor, Brendan, and has fallen into a basic Stepford Wife existence. Two people come back into her life. First is Lionel, a former brilliant student of Brendan’s, but he has undergone a nervous breakdown that affected his memory. The other is Polly, Lorna’s cousin who never left home and never married. 

 

Most of the story takes place in Lorna’s head. She is clearly unhappy, but unwilling to make any changes. Polly, in contrast, has found a way of living, even though it seems boring, that works for her. Lionel lives in the moment because that is all he can do. Brendan is content to have his little wife and little kids and little fantasy life at home. 

 

What struck me most about this one was the description of what Brendan wanted in a wife. 

 

His answering attraction to her seemed to be in the nature of a miracle. She learned later that he had been on the lookout for a wife; he was old enough, it was time. He wanted a young girl. Not a colleague, or a student, perhaps not even the sort of girl whose parents could send her to college. Unspoiled. Intelligent, but unspoiled. A wildflower, he said in the heat of those early days, and sometimes even now.

 

My father-in-law, ironically, used to call his daughters wildflowers as well, although neither of them are what Brendan meant at all. (My wife is a manager at a local hospital; her sister a professor of mathematics. So…wicked smart and assertive. And he is proud of them.) 

 

“What is Remembered”

 

This is another one that feels very 1950s in its view of marriage. (Munro often writes about her parents’ generation.) In this case, there is another marriage that has gone rather stale. The wife has a chance encounter at a funeral that leads to a one night stand - an affair that lasts a mere evening, and the guy is essentially meaningless to her. But the affair sustains her in some way - it adds some meaning to her life that allows her to be happier in her marriage. 

 

I’m not at all sure I feel the same way, and I doubt very much that women with an actual life outside of the home need that kind of escapism. (Perhaps one reason why Ashley Madison ended up being mostly guys and bots…) 

 

That said, there is another badass description that I thought was fantastic.

 

Young husbands were stern, in those days. Just a short time before, they had been suitors, almost figures of fun, knock-kneed and desperate in their sexual agonies. Now, bedded down, they turned resolute and disapproving. Off to work every morning, clean-shaven, youthful necks in knotted ties, days spent in unknown labors, home again at suppertime to take a critical glance at the evening meal and to shake out the newspaper, hold it up between themselves and the muddle of the kitchen, the ailments and emotions, the babies. What a lot they had to learn, so quickly. How to kowtow to bosses and how to manages wives. How to be authoritative about mortgages, retaining walls, lawn grass, drains, politics, as well as about the jobs that had to maintain their families for the next quarter of a century. It was the women, then, who could slip back — during the daytime hours, and always allowing for the stunning responsibility that had been landed on them, in the matter of children — into a kind of second adolescence.

 

I’ll also mention the description of the sermon - one that I swear I have heard a gazillion times. And it still seems as unsatisfying as ever, a pablum account of a promised afterlife. Which, as Rabelais said, is “the great perhaps.” Or, as Hamlet says, “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” But at a time of grief, it seems to me to ring hollow. As it clearly does in this story. 

 

After the affair, she has an interesting thought.

 

So she stayed looking at the froth stirred up in the wake of the boat, and the thought occurred to her that in a certain kind of story - not the kind that anybody wrote anymore - the thing for her to do would be to throw herself into the water. Just as she was, packed full of happiness, rewarded as she would surely never be again, every cell in her body plumped up with a sweet self-esteem. A romantic act that could be seen - from a forbidden angle - as supremely rational. 

 

“Queenie”

 

This is a story of a woman in an abusive relationship, which started with a terrible choice. Queenie runs off with a much older neighbor after his wife dies. The marriage is unhappy, he is abusive, and as he ages, poorer than he was. 

 

The story contains some class A gaslighting, and later the kind of ambiguous “escape” that may not really be anything of the sort. 

 

“The Bear Came Over the Mountain”

 

The collection ends with a fascinating tale. Fiona and Grant meet cute in college, marry, and have a life together. Sure, he cheats pretty constantly, and in a way he later cannot - by sleeping with his college students. (This whole progression, from that sort of thing being an expected badge of honor, to a shameful abuse of power, is fascinating, and Munro writes it well.) 

 

The core of the story occurs many many years later. Fiona has dementia, and finally needs to go to a care facility. There, with her memory mostly gone, she strikes up a romantic relationship with another man, Aubrey, who also has no memory that he is married. 

 

This is a dynamic that is somewhat familiar to me from my legal practice, so I was intrigued to see what Munro would do with it. 

 

As often happens in Munro stories, things are complicated. Grant wants Fiona happy, but that happiness may consist in him enabling her new flirtation. And Aubrey’s wife is determined to bring him home again, rather than tolerate his straying. (And also she needs to save the money. They don’t have a lot. This too is something I am all too familiar with.) 

 

So, there are the nine stories. As usual, I enjoyed Munro’s nuance and craft. In the end, the title itself is the theme: relationships, be they Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, or combinations of those ideas.

 

 

After the Grizzly by Peter Alagona

 Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

This book was another random selection off of the new books shelf. I must say our local librarians often feature books that I might not have otherwise discovered but definitely wanted to read. 

 

This book is specifically about the Endangered Species Act - its history, and its role specifically in California, my home state. Because of this, it talks about a number of species that I care about, and that have caused significant political upheaval in the last couple of decades. 

 

One of the strengths of this book is that it is nuanced - it doesn’t oversimplify issues the way politicians do, and goes beyond media soundbites to the intertwined complexities of the web of nature, human development, and more. 

 

The author has quite a resume - he is currently a professor at UCSB, and has worked as a park ranger, environmental consultant, writer, and editor. He has also worked with Harvard and Stanford. This book is clearly something he cares deeply about, and it is thoroughly researched, and indeed feels like an insider perspective on species preservation. 

 

The book is divided into two sections of four chapters each (plus an introduction and epilogue), and is split roughly between a history of endangered species preservation and the ESA in the first half, and case studies of four key California species and the efforts to preserve them. Three of the four species live in my home county, and the fourth affects water rights here, so this book is very on point for where I live. 

 

I’ll just dive in with some quotes rather than try to summarize it beyond that. The key idea from the start is that since the enactment of the ESA, the focus has largely been on habitat preservation - which is a good thing. But it isn’t always effective, and there are other methods that are necessary in some cases (the Condor, for example.) Likewise, “habitat” isn’t always an easy concept to define, particularly in cases like the Kit Fox, which has made Bakersfield part of its habitat. 

 

But, more than anything, nothing is as simple as it first seems - particularly if you rely on political talking points. 

 

Since the 1970s, dozens of endangered species conservation conflicts have captured national media attention. Many commentators have noted that in such struggles, the species in question often serve as proxies for much larger debates involving the politics of place, which I define as an ongoing cultural conversation about who should have access to and control over lands and natural resources. Seen this way, endangered species debates are about not only the conservation of biological diversity but also the allocation of scarce public goods, the appropriate level of government intervention in a market economy, the distribution of legal authority among state and federal bureaucracies, the proper role of scientific expertise in democratic institutions, and divergent visions for the political and economic futures of communities and even entire regions. Endangered species have become surrogates for environmentalists who use them to pursue broader political agendas - such as preventing development, establishing nature reserves, or reducing carbon emissions - and scapegoats for those who oppose further regulation or stand to lose from changes in government policies. When it comes to endangered species, one person’s totem is another’s effigy. 

 

Here in California in particular, although this is beyond the scope of the book, the right wing has used environmentalism as a scapegoat to avoid having to examine the deeper systemic issues that are causing the problems they identify. Just as an example, the GOP claims that the cure for California’s housing crisis is to simply eliminate environmental review, bulldoze more farmland and undeveloped areas, and expand further into wildfire territory. Heaven forbid we actually looked at decades old zoning regulations that prevent density in our urban areas. 

 

Another thing I appreciated about this book is that it understands that law and science go together - each has influenced the other, and how we talk about the environment owes as much to law as to science. 

 

This reciprocal process, known as coproduction, creates what science studies scholars call hybrid concepts. Today it is impossible to provide a complete definition of either habitat or endangered species without referring to both science and the law and the relations between them. 

 

Also perceptive in this book is the problems raised by these use conflicts. Often, a side effect of protection is an uncompensated loss to indigenous peoples, or to lower income people who depend on hunting for sustenance, for example. But this too is complicated.

 

A series of authors, led by William Cronon, have argued that the modern American idea of wilderness is based on a peculiar and problematic cultural history that fetishizes primeval nature over the places where most people live and obscures the diverse human values and activities that have helped produce all contemporary cultural landscapes. Numerous researchers in the interdisciplinary subfield of political ecology have adopted postcolonial and neoliberal development theories to show how, in economically poor but ecologically rich regions of the world, nature reserves have often served as a form of enclosure that privileges the environmental objectives of wealthy northern and western countries while making it more difficult for local people to access scarce natural resources. In response, conservationist biologists have defended their work and rethought their approaches. Nevertheless, scholarly debates about protected areas have often devolved into contests pitting ecological protection against social justice - a dichotomy that drastically oversimplifies the issues. 

 

And then, there is the reason this book focuses on California. People outside our state tend to misunderstand it more often than not. For example, despite the fact that one in every eight Americans lives in California, we are seen as “the Real America versus California” - which is ludicrous on its face. Nobody is more American than Californians - we embody the melting pot, and everything from agriculture to nature preserves and all in between. California is far more than Los Angeles and San Francisco, and has a lot more nature than people imagine. 

 

Every state now has listed species. Yet none offers a richer ecological context in which to study endangered species than California. This state has a greater diversity of plant and animal species than any other. It has the second-largest number of endangered species - more than three hundred as of 2012 - after Hawaii. It also has by far the largest number of species at risk of becoming endangered in the future, with at least 50 percent of its vertebrate fauna falling into this ominous category. 

 

It is difficult to explain to non-natives just how species diverse California is. (There is a map in the book, and most of CA is at the top of the diversity chart.) For example, one of my favorite places in the world is Pinnacles National Park - and it has more than 400 species of bees just within its borders. 

 

The opening chapter is all about the extinction of the Grizzly within California. The bear is literally on our state flag, and was a huge part of a certain part of our history. Scientists now believe the California population was its own subspecies - the Chaparral Bear - and now it is gone. 

 

I was fascinated to read the stories of attempts to capture one alive - plenty took place on Mt. Piños, which is a place I have a long history with. As a child, that was our summer camping spot (still is!), and I lived in my late teens on its northern slope. These days, it is difficult to imagine giant bears there - although there are plenty of smaller Black Bears. 

 

Also interesting is the fact that these bears actually were more common in the coastal mountains than the Sierra Nevada. The town of Los Osos - near Morro Bay on the central coast - was named because it had a huge population of Grizzlies. 

 

This chapter also contains a passage about the attempts to preserve declining game numbers (Grizzlies included) in the 19th century. Unsurprisingly, some pretty ugly American traditions reared their heads. 

 

Opinions differed about what had caused the decline of valuable species. Some observers recognized that the causes were numerous and diverse: hunting, development, pollution, the introduction of exotic species, and other factors had transformed the state’s land and waterscapes and reduced the populations of many important fish and game species. Other commentators grasped for simpler and uglier answers. California had attracted immigrants from around the world who sought work in resource-based industries and provided convenient scapegoats for disgruntled whites who were only a generation or two from their own immigrant roots. Chinese and other East Asians often took the blame for over-fishing, while Italians and other southern Europeans received criticism for overhunting. 

 

After these historical stories, the book turns to the roots of the conservationist movement. It is difficult to summarize this - there is a lot of detail, and a lot of names. Some of the books I have reviewed on this blog are mentioned along with their authors: E. O. Wilson and Aldo Leopold. The Berkeley Circle was particularly influential, and I found that history to be quite fascinating. 

 

What is perhaps most remarkable about the Berkeley circle’s work during the Progressive Era is how much it anticipated future developments in conservation science and environmental ethics. This is not to say that the group’s members were somehow ahead of their time - they were very much creatures of it. Yet their story challenges, or at least complicates, the widespread belief that many features of contemporary conservation, including concern for nongame and uncharismatic endangered species, did not emerge until the second half of the twentieth century. By 1915 the Berkeley circle’s members had developed an intellectual foundation for what, over the next two decades, with the addition of a strong focus on habitat management, would develop into a comprehensive vision for wildlife science and conservation backed by almost every major ethical rationale that supports the work of conservation biologists today. 

 

I also want to commend the author for including the many women who were involved in this effort. Annie Alexander gets quite a bit of attention, and rightfully so. In this connection, I also recommend The Girl Explorers by Jane Zanglein, which focuses on a plethora of women from this era who participated in exploration and science.

 

Chapter three is all about the legal landscape. I don’t have any pithy quotes to offer, but as a lawyer, I found the history to be quite interesting. 

 

It is difficult to imagine now, in an era when the Republican party is engaged in a scorched earth (literally) assault on conservation and environmentalism, but back before I was born, Richard Nixon actually enacted a number of environmental laws - and they were bipartisan, uncontroversial at the time. Not only was the EPA established, but the ESA passed unanimously in the Senate. Imagine that happening today. 

 

Between 1964 and 1980, Congress passed twenty-two major pieces of environmental legislation. These laws introduced regulatory schemes, as in the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act; resource management programs, as in the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act; funding mechanisms, such as the Land and Water Conservation Fund; and administrative procedural mandates, as in the National Environmental Policy Act. Congressional action also resulted in the establishment of new federal agencies, including the Council on Environmental Quality, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency. 

 

It is just astonishing - these have greatly contributed to the quality of life we enjoy, with far cleaner air and water, and more sustainable development. To see one party doing its best to demolish this progress and take us back to unconstrained pollution, exploitation, and destruction is so disheartening. The American Right is not conservative at all - just reactionary and obsessed with endless profits. 

 

Related to this is a foundational belief about human existence as part of nature - a truth that seems so self-evident I cannot understand why so many refuse to believe it. 

 

Unlike most environmental laws, it took an explicitly ethical approach to wild nature. The conference committee’s report on the bill called for “a certain humility” among humans who had become the “custodians” of the planet’s species and ecosystems. “Like it or not,” the authors concluded, “we are our brothers’ keepers, and we are also keepers of the rest of the house.” 

 

This, to me, is a core Christian value. The passage in Genesis did not give humans the right or the mandate to exploit nature, but to care for it. Unfortunately, the Evangelical tradition these days sees itself in the end times, so why not fuck the planet up as soon as possible? God will just give as a new one soon anyway. That’s beyond disgusting, and it is a significant reason that young people are leaving religion. Nothing like the older generations openly shitting the beds of young people to make them distrust you and your beliefs…

 

One particularly interesting idea in this chapter is that of the Habitat Conservation Plan - essentially a way to get approval for development by setting aside habitat elsewhere. This is a staple of environmental law these days, but it really got going in the 1990s. I note that in 1995, the largest HCP was created by none other than Bakersfield. 

 

After all this history, the book looks at specific conservation experiences. The first is about my beloved California Condor. Regular readers of the blog know how much I love these goofy, ugly birds. They were also one reason I am a conservationist today: they were proof that extinctions weren’t just things that happened in the past. 

 

The chapter opens with an excerpt of a Mary Oliver poem, which I have to quote in full. 

 

Vultures

 

Like large dark

lazy 

butterflies they sweep over

the glades looking

for death,

to eat it,

to make it vanish,

to make of it the miracle:

resurrection. No one

knows how many

they are who daily

minister so to the grassy

miles, no one

counts how many bodies

they discover

and descend to, demonstrating

each time the earth’s

appetite, the unending

waterfalls of change.

No one

moreover,

wants to ponder it,

how it will be

to feel the blood cool,

shapeliness dissolve.

Locked into

the blaze of our own bodies

we watch them

wheeling and drifting, we

honor them and we

loathe them,

however wise the doctrine,

however magnificent the cycles,

however ultimately sweet

the huddle of death to fuel

those powerful wings.

 

The story of the return of the Condors to the skies is a great one, and I won’t try to tell it better than the author. A key point is that habitat conservation was not sufficient to save the Condor. It required a host of other interventions including captive breeding and ongoing veterinarian care. Its continued survival will depend in part on the banning of lead ammunition, as the leading cause of Condor death remains lead poisoning. 

 

The second featured animal is the Mojave Desert Tortoise. These live in the desert, obviously, but their evolutionary history is more complicated. The desert we have now is fairly recent. It used to be wetter, and that meant more oases, more native grasses, and better food supplies. Several factors led to the change. A natural change in the climate after the last ice age was one, but also, overgrazing diminished grasses, humans hunted the megafauna (particularly sloths in this area) to extinction before Europeans arrived, and climate change is now making the area even hotter and dryer. 

 

This, unfortunately, has all combined to make the extensive habitat preservation (which is indeed impressive) of limited effectiveness in stopping the population decline. The book discusses all of the nuance around this, and it is worth a read. 

 

The third animal featured is the San Joaquin Kit Fox. Mention that animal to anyone here in Bakersfield, and expect an unexpected response. 

 

Much has been done to preserve habitat in the foothills, but that habitat is fragmented, and it is now believed that necessary genetic mixing is not happening like it should.

 

But.

 

Well, the thing is, the Kit Fox seems somewhat uninterested in sticking to its unspoiled habitat. Instead, it has decided that suburban Bakersfield is a fine place to live, and if you hang around here long enough, you will undoubtedly see one. There are several hundred foxes living here in Bakersfield. 

 

In fact, a friend just posted a picture of one near her office this very morning. 

 Picture by Dana Yeoman. Used with permission.

Yes, they really are this adorable. And this fearless. 

 

Kit foxes live different life-styles on rangelands than in cities. On the Carrizo Plain, they live in earthen dens, keep watch for predators, and hunt for kangaroo rats and Jerusalem crickets. In Bakersfield they scamper around relatively safe from coyotes, den in storm drains under freeway embankments, and rear their pups on plush green fairways. 

 

True story: my wife lived with her grandparents in the local Del Webb planned senior neighborhood while she went to college. When we were dating, a lot of evenings were spent walking the fairways of the golf course after dark. I can neither confirm nor deny that we might have made out in one of the bathrooms a time or two. But those magical twilight hours were also when the Kit Foxes came out. We would see them all the time - they loved that golf course and still do. 

 

The final animal is one that is in the news constantly it seems these days: the Delta Smelt. And the Smelt has become both a totem of wetland protection and an effigy of environmental overreach, depending on which political party you talk to. At stake is a portion of California’s most precious natural resource: water. 

 

Trying to explain the history of California water wars to outsiders is an impossible task anyway, but it is doubly impossible when dealing with a right winger who thinks they know everything because they saw a Fox News report on it. 

 

I had this discussion with a former friend, who I later cut ties with after he said some appallingly racist stuff in connection with Breonna Taylor - I have a line, and this was way over it. But before that, I was already frustrated with his refusal to actually educate himself about issues that he was grossly ignorant about. He came from a Southern state, where water is relatively plentiful, and was ignorant about nearly everything he was so confident he knew. You know, the usual right-wing Duning Krueger stuff. 

 

(Such as the fact that Los Angeles has its own government water utility, just like places all around the US including many red state areas.) 

 

In this connection, repeating the talking points about how much of CA’s water allocation is for “environmental” use, was particularly problematic. Most of “environmental” water in CA is actually in Wild and Scenic Rivers in the northwestern part of the state - rivers which have never been a part of the water grid. 

 

But, because Fox News and some loud GOP demagogues said that we could solve California’s chronic lack of irrigation water by just letting the smelt go extinct, he was sure it was true. It isn’t. Let’s take a look at a few of the factors. First, the Sacramento Delta is the largest estuary on the West Coast, covering some 700 square miles. It is an important wetland to far more species than the smelt. 

 

Some water still flows all the way through the delta. But exactly how much freshwater reaches the ocean instead of being diverted upstream for urban or agricultural use has become the subject of an epic battle. And for good reason. Over the past 150 years, the delta has become the nexus of California’s water control and distribution infrastructure: a vast network of levees, canals, aqueducts, pipes, and pumping stations operated by the state and federal governments, local irrigation districts, and hundreds of private users. As much as 70 percent of the runoff that enters the delta, much of which has already flowed through farms and cities, is diverted again for further use, some of it as far south as Los Angeles. This intensively engineered and increasingly fragile system serves some twenty-five million people and five million acres of irrigated farmland. 

 

But, there is a HUGE issue that the press tends to misunderstand and GOP demagogues intentionally ignore. 

 

When this issue first hit the news, and the Republicans started screaming that environmentalists were “putting fish before people,” various studies had determined that actually, 75 percent of the restrictions weren’t even due to environmental concerns - they were due to a lack of sufficient precipitation. 

 

Yes, California has cycles of drought and abundance - and these are now becoming more extreme on both ends due to climate change. But also, there is a human problem that has created an unsustainable situation. 

 

For decades, water managers have been - to put it nicely - overly optimistic about water supplies. 

 

Water managers were making rosy projections of future water supplies, which encouraged private investment and fueled even more demand; this lead to further promises and provided a rationale for additional projects to develop more supply. By 2008 surface water contracts on the Sacramento and San Joaquin river systems totaled about 8.4 times the average streamflow. Only in extraordinarily wet years, when demand for long-distance deliveries declined anyway, did the CVP and the SWP have the capacity to meet their contractual obligations.

 

Let that sink in for a moment. 

 

When you promise more than EIGHT TIMES the water you have on average, of course you won’t be able to deliver. And then of course customers will be pissed at you, and look for a scapegoat. Politicians will be more than happy to find one for you - or at least a scapefish. 

 

But the underlying problem still remains: there isn’t enough water to satisfy the unrealistic promises. 

 

You can’t fix that with any amount of environmental deregulation. The water just isn’t fucking THERE. 

 

But you can get votes that way, and fool willfully ignorant people into believing you. 

 

The thing is, the last thing the Delta needs is more deregulation. As things stand today, only New Orleans is at a greater risk for catastrophic flooding than Sacramento - California’s capital. But our levees can’t get funding, so it is only a matter of time before the Delta reconfigures itself, likely at the expense of not just farmland but of urban areas as well. 

 

This issue is a reminder that, as Gregg Easterbrook once noted, if there were simple and easy solutions to seemingly intractable problems, someone would already have implemented them. Water - and by corollary, agriculture and people - is a “wicked” problem here in California - there is no solution to the fact that we have less water than we prefer to use. Sustainable use of water, particularly in an era of climate change, is going to require hard choices, multiple approaches - and in the end, everyone has to use less water. 

 

As I noted earlier, a strength of this book is its nuance, and its refusal to accept pat answers. The author’s experience on multiple sides of these issues helps him explore the difficulties we know, and anticipate the need for flexibility as we learn more. 

 

It’s a good book for anyone who cares about California wildlife, conservation, or just likes big bears. 

 

***

 

My one complaint:

 

Why are publishers going with these smallish yet widely spaced sans serif fonts for so many books? They make the books harder to read, and cause headaches for those of us with farsightedness - despite our glasses. There is nothing wrong with the good old serif fonts that have proven easy and comfortable to read. There is no reason to fix what wasn’t broken.