Deacon King Kong by James McBride

Source of book: I own this.

 This was this month’s selection for our “Literary Lush” book club. One of the things I enjoy about this club is that I end up reading interesting books that I never would have discovered on my own. I hadn’t heard of either this book (which just came out) and wasn’t familiar with James McBride, although a few of his other books sound familiar. However, I rather enjoyed it, as did other members of our club, making it one of the most universally loved selections since I joined the club. 

 James McBride has apparently written a number of other books, often with historical settings, and was awarded a National Humanities medal by President Obama. I dare say I will be putting his other books on my reading list.

 I’m not even sure what to call Deacon King Kong. It is literary fiction, in my opinion. But it is such a weird blend of pathos and humor that it defies categorization. It is a thoughtful book, but with elements of slapstick and magical realism. It makes a pair of suicides seem like a sacrament - a baptism. It makes a potential affair seem good for the characters. It has killer red ants, killer hooch, and mysterious cheese. And, more than anything, it has a bunch of memorable characters, any of which could be the center of their own story. 

 Set in the Brooklyn projects in 1969, the book starts and centers around a bizarre incident. “Sportcoat,” an old man who lost his wife a few years back and has spiraled into alcoholism, shoots the ear off the local drug dealer, a young man named Deems, who was once Sportcoat’s protege in the local baseball team. From there, the past and present swirl around the fallout from that incident, drawing in gangsters, cops, smugglers, an ancient artifact, and a few old secrets. Sportcoat is the deacon of the title - a deacon of Five Ends Baptist Church who prefers the illicit hooch King Kong to any commercial preparation. 

 As it turns out, there are connections to The Elephant, the last in a line of Italian smugglers. Why did his dad fund the construction of the church, including an epic mural of Christ on the side? Deems, in turn, is the pivot point of a drug war. And why did Sportcoat’s wife Hettie end up floating in the harbor? And what happened to the Christmas Fund money she kept but never told anyone where? 

 McBride brings in an honest Irish cop trying to make it alive to retirement, a dying gangster whose daughter runs a bagel shop, the delightful maintenance man for the building, Hot Sausage, and so many more. 

 I hesitate to describe the book more than that, because the plot is fun and full of surprises (although I figured out a few things ahead of time.) I recommend reading it for yourself. 

 McBride’s writing is outstanding - one of the comments in our club meeting was that from the first few pages, you really feel like you are there. The sights and sounds and smells and social dynamics really come alive. One person who had lived in New York City concurred with the reality of the area described - McBride grew up there, the son of an African American preacher and a Jewish-Polish mother - the daughter of a rabbi. The thing is, McBride doesn’t actually spend a whole lot of words on descriptions: he manages to create the picture without obviously doing so. Also a feature of his style is that he can take shootings and drugs and booze and gangsters and add the humor and slapstick without it feeling like a parody. It’s as much a part of the world he creates as the ghost of Hettie. 

 There are lots of good lines, a few of which I jotted down. 

 The first is an incident that is pretty hilarious, but has almost nothing to do with the rest of the plot: an explanation of how the red ants came to Brooklyn. Hector, the Colombian immigrant, gets too big for his britches, and dumps his wife and kids back home. She tearfully agrees to a divorce, and packs him lunch. When he opens it back in Brooklyn, he finds it full of the red ants, and a note saying “Adios motherfucker...we know you ain’t sending no pesos!” The ants establish themselves, and become part of the yearly life of the projects. This leads into a fantastic sentence in which the ants become

 

...a sole phenomenon in the Republic of Brooklyn, where cats hollered like people, dogs eat their own feces, aunties chain-smoked and died at age 102, a kid named Spike Lee saw God, the ghosts of the departed Dodgers soaked up all possibility of new hope, and penniless desperation ruled the lives of the suckers too black or too poor to leave, while in Manhattan the buses ran on time, the lights never went out, the death of a single white child in a traffic accident was a page one story, while phony versions of black and Latino life ruled the Broadway roost, making white writers rich — West Side Story, Porgy & Bess, Purlie Victorious — and on it went, the whole business of the white man's reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrows slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.

 

I’m not the only reviewer to have noticed that line. It’s arguably the most memorable line in the book.

 The missing Christmas Fund money is not only a big motivation for Sportcoat, it puzzles everyone in the church. Hettie never did disclose its location, and it never does appear. (Sorry about the spoiler.) Did she simply pocket the money herself? It seems possible. Is it hiding somewhere in the church? Also possible. What isn’t a mystery is why she kept it herself. 

 

“She ain’t supposed to walk around with the Christmas box.”

“She had to hide it someplace after she collected for it. Normally she hid it at church. But she didn’t always have time to wait for church to empty out. Sometimes folks would linger eating fish dinners or the pastor would preach overtime or some such thing and she had to go home, so she brung it home with her.”

“Why didn’t she lock it in the pastor’s office?”

“What fool would keep money ‘round a pastor?” Rufus asked. 

Sportcoat nodded knowingly.  

 

I have been a part of a number of churches in my lifetime, and one thing I can say is that I agree with Rufus. And, interestingly, one of the best ways to tell if a pastor is honorable about money is how careful he is to distance himself from the money. The honorable ones keep as far away as possible from it, delegating the financial stuff to someone independent. (Or at least as independent as possible in a small church.) It makes a difference. 

 Another interesting observation comes from the old, retired gangster, the Governor, talking about his deceased brother. (Who was also an artifact smuggler - he found a cave of stolen Nazi treasures including, in a fictional incident, the Venus of Willendorf. This artifact is in the book, although clearly the whole episode is fiction, not fact.) 

 

“He had an apartment in the Village the size of a rugby field. Full of fancy things. I never asked. He had no kids, so I figured it wasn’t anything. My poppa couldn’t stand Macy. He used to say, ‘Macy likes boys.’ I told Poppa, ‘There was a priest at Saint Andrews who’s said to like boys.’ But he didn’t want to hear it. I was a young man back then, fast on my feet and a bit of a wanker, but even then I knew the difference between a sick man who likes children and a man sweet on men.” 

 

This is a distinction lost on a lot of people in my Fundie former tribe, alas. 

 Another perceptive passage concerning sex is between the Irish cop and the wife of the pastor of Five Ends Baptist. She is in a loveless marriage, to an older man who she married before she understood what she was doing. As a divorce attorney, this rings true. 

 

She had been seventeen when she wed a man twelve years older than her. He had seemed to have purpose but turned out to have none, other than an affinity for football games and the ability to pretend to be what he was not, to pretend to feel things he did not feel, to make jokes out of things that did not work for him, and like too many men she knew, daydream about meeting some lovely young thing from the choir, preferably at three a.m., in the choir pew. She didn’t hate her husband. She just didn’t know him.

 

This one too was fascinating. Sister Gee (the pastor’s wife) is pressed for information by Potts, the Irish cop, after an incident in which the hapless Earl tries to put a hit on Sportcoat, but ends up bonked by a wayward bottle, then set on the subway back home by Sister Gee and a young gentle giant from the church. 

 

“You should have called us.”

“Why we got to have the police around every time we has a simple party? Y’all don’t watch out for us. Y’all watch over us. I don’t see y’all out there standing over the white folks in Park Slope when they has their block parties.” 

 

In recent years, as cell phone video has made it increasingly obvious even to this sheltered white guy that our experience with the police is vastly different from the experience of non-whites, McBride calls it straight. “To Protect and Serve,” as the LAPD motto goes, is directed at whites. The police protect “us” from “them.” And serve “us” at the expense of “them.” It’s a heartbreaking state of affairs. 

 

In a conversation later in the book, Potts can’t quite understand why the Five Ends folks are so obsessed with that Christmas Club money. 

 

“You were talking about the church money. It’s got nothing to do with this trouble.”

“It’s got everything to do with it. That Christmas Club money is all we can control. We can’t stop these drug dealers from selling poison in front of our houses. Or make the city stop sending our kids to lousy schools. We can’t stop folks from blaming us for everything gone wrong in New York, or stop the army from calling our suns to Vietnam after them Vietcong done cut the white soldiers’ toenails too short to walk. But the little nickels and dimes we saved up so we can give our kids ten minutes of love at Christmastime, that’s ours to control. What’s wrong with that?”

 

Although Potts isn’t quite getting it, he is falling in love with Sister Gee, and he flounders trying to express his concern for the danger she is in. After all, the drug bigwig wants to put the hit on Sportcoat; and, since the hapless Earl failed, is sending in his big gun: Harold Dean. 

 

He wanted to say, “He’s a killer and I don’t want him near you.” But he had no idea what her reaction would be. He didn’t even know what Harold Dean looked like. He had no information other than an FBI report with no photo, only the vaguest description that he was a negro who was “armed and extremely dangerous.” 

 

Dang, that’s some good satire. And it particularly hits home because “Harold Dean” is actually Haroldeen, a young woman. The whole “hey, he looked like the suspect” is problematic for the reason above. It seems the “all black people look alike” trope is alive and well in law enforcement, alas.

 [Side note: years ago, when I saw the Harlem Globetrotters, one of the jokes was that the big “clown prince” guy borrowed a purse from an older woman in the front row. When the referee told him to give it back, he said he couldn’t, because he wasn’t sure who he took it from. It was some woman. What woman? A white woman. Which one? He didn’t know, because they all looked alike…]

 Anyway, Potts keeps harping on “he’s dangerous.” Sister Gee is ready with a great response:

 

“Nothing in this world is dangerous unless white folks says it is,” she said flatly. “Danger here. Danger there. We don’t need you to tell us about danger in these projects. We don’t need you to say what the world is to us.”

 

Preach it. And Potts really is trying to get it, which makes him better than a whole lot of people in our country. 

 I have to end with a humorous bit. It would take too long to explain the characters and the situation, but suffice it to say that rumor has it that Hot Sausage was killed in a gun battle. (He was only injured, don’t worry.) 

 

Joaquin, several spots behind them, looked strangely sad. “I borrowed twelve dollars from Sausage,” he said. “I’m glad I didn’t pay it back.”

“God, you are cheap,” Miss Izi said. She was standing a good five people ahead of her ex-husband and stepped out of line to address him. “You’re so tight with money your ass squeaks when you walk.” 

 

This book was a lot of fun, thoughtful and perceptive, and packed with great characters. I’m definitely planning to add some more James McBride books to my list. 

 

***

 

Just for fun, here is the list of books that our book club has read. At least the ones I have read too. Most of these were read for the club, but a few were ones I read previously - those posts pre-date the club discussion - and some I read afterward, because I missed the discussion. 

 

Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente

Bad News by Edward St. Aubyn

Circe by Madeline Miller

Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Calypso by David Sedaris

The Air You Breathe by Frances de Pontes Peebles

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

There There by Tommy Orange

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Be Frank With Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Educated by Tara Westover

Stiff by Mary Roach

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne

Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin

Never Mind by Edward St. Aubyn

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

Artemis by Andy Weir

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov 

The Radium Girls by Kate Moore

 

Bad News by Edward St. Aubyn

Source of book: I own this.

Back in 2018, our book club read some of the Patrick Melrose novels. Technically, I believe we were reading the first three, since they are relatively short, but not everyone finished that much. I read only the first novel, Never Mind, which I reviewed at the time, intending to come back and read the rest in sequence. This is the second novel, Bad News. 

Like the first novel, Bad News is somewhere between a novella and a short story, although at around 160 pages, it is definitely long enough to be a novella. It too focuses on an extremely limited time frame, that of a couple days, and a particular scenario or idea, so to speak. 

Patrick Melrose is now grown up, at least physically. He is twenty-two, and a marginally functional drug addict. The “bad news” that kicks off the story is the death of his abusive father, possibly the most vile person I have encountered in fiction. So, good riddance. Except that he clearly continues to be a demon haunting Patrick. Anyway, David dies in New York City unexpectedly, and as Patrick is the next of kin (his parents split up), he gets to claim the body. Over the course of two days and nights - more or less: it is difficult to follow the exact timeline because Patrick is so drugged out of his mind that sleep and time seem both distorted out of recognition - Patrick sees his dead father, meets with a few friends, visits a few drug dealers, nearly kills himself a couple of times, and works through some of his complex feelings about his father in the most unconstructive way possible. 

As in the previous book, excellent writing combines with a thoroughly distasteful story, unpleasant characters, and drug hallucinations that just won’t end. While not strictly autobiographical, the books are somewhat true to life. St. Aubyn did in fact take obscene quantities of drugs during this time in his life - funded by an inheritance from his grandmother. And it is a miracle he is alive. (As he fully admits.) 

The thing is, despite all the darkness in this book, it does have a sort of humor. It is an ugly, sneering, nasty humor some of the time, kind of like you would expect David Melrose to appreciate. But St. Aubyn also has an eye for a less vicious wit too, and his observations of various broken characters can be empathetic too. It would have been interesting to have seen more of those characters. In the first book, Patrick was less of the focus, so the other people in the story got more of the time. In this one, everything is filtered through Patrick’s head, so much of the time he is way too smashed to even figure out what is going on around him. 

It is kind of interesting to read about drug addiction from someone who writes this way. I have read other books, of course, fiction and non-fiction, in which drugs feature to varying degrees. But there is something peculiarly horrifying about this one. Patrick has what is essentially the great love affair of his life with cocaine and heroin (often at the same time), so St. Aubyn can write a rather authentic love letter to the drugs. But at the same time, reading this book doesn’t paint a pretty picture of drug use and addiction at all. Even as Patrick praises the glorious feelings and the escape from the terror in his own psyche, the horrors of what the drugs do to him and what they make him do are so apparent that I cannot imagine wanting to try one. 

The psychology is fascinating too. I feel as if Patrick takes the drugs in part because he fears he is like his father - and then the drugs enable him to act more like his father. He isn’t an outright abuser, but he can be verbally cruel in the extreme, and he sure does sound like David at times. It is a weird kind of self-awareness, which one wonders if St. Aubyn himself came to possess as part of his therapy. 

There are a few scenes which stood out. Right at the outset, Patrick is accosted on the plane by a guy named Earl, a caricature of the most vulgar of the nouveau riche, and an incentive to never fly with the rich. Yikes. 

Patrick more or less escapes by withdrawing into a mental scene involving his girlfriend Debbie, or, more accurately her father. 

Debbie’s father, an Australian painter called Peter Hickman, was a notorious bore. Patrick once heard him introduce an anecdote with the words, ‘That reminds me of my best bouillabaisse story.” Half an hour later, Patrick could only count himself luck that he was not listening to Peter’s second-best bouillabaisse story.

There is also an interesting line - a remix of Hamlet, in essence - when Patrick is about to eat and drink himself into oblivion in a futile attempt to stay off heroin for the remainder of the day. 

Eating was only a temporary solution. But then all solutions were temporary, even death, and nothing gave him more faith in the existence of an afterlife than the inexorable sarcasm of Fate. No doubt suicide would turn out to be the violent preface to yet another span of nauseating consciousness, of diminishing spirals and tightening nooses, and memories like shrapnel tearing all day long through his flesh. Who could guess what exquisite torments lay ahead in the holiday camps of eternity? It almost made one grateful to be alive. 

I’ll mention the scene in the funeral home where he is accidentally directed to the wrong corpse - complete with a party by the friends and family - and then is tempted to put his foot on his father’s chest as a final gesture of hate. Also the wretched search for drugs in a disreputable part of NYC, because his usual source was sleeping off a binge. Both of these are emotionally devastating, but in different ways. 

Finally, there is a scene where Patrick is talking with friends of his mom’s, and hoping to score with the daughter (he doesn’t), and his father comes up. Eddy (the husband) had his own difficulties with his father. 

“But wouldn’t we now say that he was just wery disturbed?” asked Eddy.

“So what if we did? When the effect somebody has is destructive enough the cause becomes a theoretical curiosity. There are some very nasty people in the world and it is a pity if one of them is your father.”

“I don’t think that people noo so much about how to bring up kids in those days. A lot of parents in your fawther’s generation just didn’t know how to express their love.”

“Cruelty is the opposite of love,” said Patrick, “not just some inarticulate version of it.”

That really is the difference. I know plenty of people who have struggled with their children (and that is me sometimes too), and most of them are just humans who fail. But there are some for whom the issue isn’t “love”: it’s cruelty. David raped Patrick - and that was evil cruelty. His mom looked the other way, which wasn’t love either. So there are ordinary human failings - and we all will fail to a degree. And there is deliberate cruelty, which cannot and should not be dismissed as “they didn’t know how to love.” (Just to be clear, I do not mean to imply anything about my parents here – this is a more general comment stemming from my experience both with divorce law and with toxic church doctrine about abuse.)  

It will be interesting to see where this book series goes from here. It has been pretty dark so far, without much hope. Since the next book is called Some Hope, perhaps there will, at long last, be some. 

My biggest issue with the novels so far is that St. Aubyn, like his protagonist, comes from a place of overwhelming privilege and wealth. Both family background and a multi-million pound inheritance enabled him to chase drugs at ludicrous expense while still living a wealthy lifestyle. His aristocratic family, even if he wasn’t part of that branch, allowed him to drop names and get his degree by the skin of his teeth. He still hobnobs with the A List, so to speak. One of us plebes who did what he did wouldn’t have ended up as a best selling novelist, but broke and imprisoned and eventually dead and looked at with contempt by all. It burns a bit to see that, as it always has, money matters far more than choices if you have enough of it. Although St. Aubyn is a good writer, he also seems to me to be eminently slappable prick and the sort I would loathe to be around in person. (And no, the New Yorker article on him doesn’t help that at all.) Yeah, I feel sorry for him for a horrific childhood, and find his writing fascinating. But, like Patrick, I pretty well dislike him personally, and wish he had had to actually experience poverty for once. Oh well. I feel the same way about Wagner. I shall be entertained, yet also glad I never have to suffer through a dinner party with him. 

***

The Guardian had an interesting article on assumption of wealth and class within the book writing and publishing universe. To a degree, St. Aubyn is a spot-on example of the way things work. I’m not clarivoyant enough to know how to change the system, other than to keep reading books by those outside the “white, upper-middle-class, and privileged” norm. 

***

Here is the list of books that our book club has read. At least the ones I have read too. Most of these were read for the club, but a few were ones I read previously - those posts pre-date the club discussion - and some I read afterward, because I missed the discussion. I have listed them in no particular order. 

Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Calypso by David Sedaris

The Air You Breathe by Frances de Pontes Peebles

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

There There by Tommy Orange

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Be Frank With Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Educated by Tara Westover

Stiff by Mary Roach

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne

Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin

Never Mind by Edward St. Aubyn

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

Artemis by Andy Weir

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov 

The Radium Girls by Kate Moore

Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

This was this month’s selection for our “Literary Lush” book club. One of the things I enjoy about this club is that I end up reading interesting books that I never would have discovered on my own. Daisy Jones and the Six is definitely one of those books I had no idea existed, and likely would never have decided to read. Let me say at the outset that this book wasn’t really my cup of tea. It wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t my kind of book. 

The basic idea of the book is that it is a rock mockumentary. It’s a book about a fictional rock band (that kind of sort of resembles Fleetwood Mac, maybe?) I think Reid’s point is to write a book that looks at the rock and roll lifestyle from a more female perspective, and the book sort of does that. But I have to wonder why it had to be a fake band rather than a real one. I found it hard to get interested in or invested in the characters, because they and their songs didn’t actually, you know, exist. 

The usual rock biography stuff is in there. The band members sleeping with each other. Lots of booze and drugs. All night songwriting sessions. Drama. Lots and lots of drama. It’s stuff that you expect. 

It might have been one thing if the characters were somehow unique or compelling (as in the case of The Air You Breathe), but they really felt like stereotypes of particular rock stars. Or perhaps like real rock stars who had the identifying details removed. 

On the more positive side, Reid did a good job at keeping the voices of each character distinct - and their stories straight. After all, each has a different perspective and memory of events. 

One thing our group agreed was a significant misstep was the twist at the end: (spoiler alert!) the “author” of the story is the daughter of the male lead singer. The problem with this is that there seems to be no freaking way that the characters would actually be open her - particularly her parents. I mean, who tells their kid about all the sex and drugs in that kind of detail? Or spills their guts about their problems with their spouse? It seems implausible. And unnecessary to the story. 

My wife also noted that despite the lurid details, the language itself was rather naive. Not really much cussing. 

Overall, not the best book we have read, although diverting in its way. 

***

Due to Covid-19, this was our first book club discussion via Zoom.  While not as good as an in-person meeting, it worked, and helped keep us all from feeling isolated. 

***

Just for fun, here is the list of books that our book club has read. At least the ones I have read too. Most of these were read for the club, but a few were ones I read previously - those posts pre-date the club discussion - and some I read afterward, because I missed the discussion. 

Calypso by David Sedaris

The Air You Breathe by Frances de Pontes Peebles

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

There There by Tommy Orange

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Be Frank With Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Educated by Tara Westover

Stiff by Mary Roach

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne

Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin

Never Mind by Edward St. Aubyn

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

Artemis by Andy Weir

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov 

The Radium Girls by Kate Moore

The Air You Breathe by Frances de Pontes Peebles

Source of book: Borrowed from the library.

This was this month’s selection for our “Literary Lush” book club. One of the things I enjoy about this club is that I end up reading interesting books that I never would have discovered on my own. The Air You Breathe is definitely one of those books I had no idea existed, and likely would never have decided to read. We had a great discussion about this book, I must say, and it was universally enjoyed by our club.

The Air You Breathe is historical(ish) fiction. I give it the qualifying “ish,” because it doesn’t particularly closely follow history, in the usual sense. Since Sir Walter Scott essentially created the genre (although you could argue that Shakespeare - or Herodotus - should get credit for that), there have been certain rules about how to do it. If an historical person is the subject (or comes into the book), that person must at least not contradict the know facts about him or her. The historical events should be reasonably accurate, at least as to the major events. It is okay to focus on fictional characters rather than the historical figures; Scott often did this. As I said, these are the usual rules, whether you agree with them or not, so when they are bent, it stands out. 

So, this book is very loosely based on two historical figures, Carmen Miranda and Chavela Vargas. And when I say “loosely,” I do mean “loosely.” The book is essentially “about” a Brazilian singer (Graca, aka “Sofia Salvador”) with more than a passing resemblance to Carmen Miranda. It is told from the perspective of her former servant and then best friend Dores, who is sort of based on Chavela Vargas. Obviously, there is a huge bit of license taken here. The two of them were, in real life, not connected at all, coming from different countries (Brazil and Mexico, respectively), and different styles of music. Oh, and they were 10 years apart in age too. There are plenty of other differences. The real Carmen Miranda didn’t die of suicide at age 26 - although she did die in her 40s of a heart attack with alcohol and drugs (the Hollywood studios were thoroughly complicit in this death as with others) as factors. And the real Miranda wasn’t an heiress, exactly, either. 

So, what I would instead say is that the part of the book that details Sofia Salvador’s professional trajectory hews pretty closely to the real story of Carmen Miranda. And the character of Dores is definitely patterned after that of Chavela Vargas, although the story has rather little in common with Vargas’ biography. 

Having explained all that, the point of the book isn’t really to tell history, but to tell an engrossing tale of friendship, music, love, desire, and grief. And at that, the book does a good job. I found it quite the enjoyable read - in the vein of a light summer book rather than literary fiction. For the most part, the writing is good, although not exactly profound, and the story keeps one turning the pages. There is also a cast of interesting characters, although I did kind of wish a few of them had been fleshed out a little better. But, this is the consequence of the narrator - Dores - being obsessed with Graca and focusing on her throughout. 

It isn’t quite accurate to describe what Graca and Dores have as a friendship, I think. Graca is not really capable of true reciprocity or love - for anyone. She has her obsession with being a star, and she turns out to be really good at it. This does in fact reflect the real story of Carmen Miranda. She too went from obscurity to being a well-respected singer in Brazil. Then, she went to Hollywood during World War II, when the US suddenly needed South American allies, and started casting Latinos as exotic and desirable characters, rather than villains with mustaches and accents. The typecasting, discrimination, and exhausting hours that the book describes are accurate as well. 

As a musician, though, the scenes involving music were the ones that I enjoyed the most. The “roda” - the circular samba jam sessions - was rather like some of the jazz, blues, bluegrass, or rock oriented jams I have had the pleasure of participating in (although not on the regular scale described in the book.) The guitarist, Vinicius, who holds the band together musically and artistically, is well written, and very much of a recognizable type to any working musician. He is the guy that everyone knows is the key to the whole thing - if he (or she in many cases) leaves, the center cannot hold. And he (or she) is so devoted to the music that money or commercial considerations always take a back seat to the groove. 

Likewise, any working musician can recognize Graca. She is a diva. A really talented and mesmerizing diva. But a diva nonetheless. She doesn’t want to make time to practice, but can just jump in at the last moment and nail it anyway. (Something only possible on a solo part - don’t try that if you are a rhythm section player.) Everyone in the band knows that she (or he - there are plenty of male divas too) sells the records, lands the good gigs, and draws the crowds. But they (we - I’m experienced here) also know that it is all that hard work behind the scenes that makes the diva’s act possible. Without the practice and the dedicated background artistry, a band sounds like crap, no matter how good the lead singer. As long as a band has only one diva, this works, and everyone succeeds. More than one diva, and, well, the history of music is littered with the wreckage which results. 

I would also say that the relationship between Graca and Dores is fascinating. There is the initial dynamic, between servant and (young) master, that reflects the uneasy tension between children who want to be friends and the knowledge (which dates nearly from birth) of an uncrossable social gulf. Graca will always be loved by her parents and have a place to live as long as they do. But Dores, an orphan, could be abandoned to fend for herself or starve with impunity. True equality in a relationship is pretty doomed under those circumstances. Then when the two of them run away from the convent school to fend for themselves in Rio, things have to shift. After all, Dores is now the competent one in most ways, and tires of being expected to continually feed Graca’s ego. 

Complicating this is Dores’ sexuality. The real life Chavela Vargas was a lesbian, while Dores is written as a lesbian-leaning bisexual, so it isn’t a perfect match. But it is clear that Dores is madly in love with Graca - obsessed with her more than with anyone else. No other relationship she has with men or women really comes close to the level of passion that she has for Graca. 

Graca, on the other hand, is pretty strongly heterosexual, although her inability to form real bonds means that her sexual relationships with men are about her rather than deep bonding with another human. So this is the great unrequited love of Dores’ life, the one she obsesses over until she dies in her nineties, the one she nearly drinks herself to death over, and the one that haunts the story she tells. The author makes the relationship thoroughly believable, despite the outsized personality of Graca. 

The other characters are fascinating as well. There is Nena, the servant woman who adopts Dores after her mother dies. Nena can seem harsh to Dores, but at the core of this is the reality that Dores has to learn to survive in a world in which she is disposable. (If you read the slave narratives, this was rather common - and still persists today in the cultures of vulnerable minorities around the world. Survival often depends on a superhuman ability to submerge one’s dignity and natural human responses to abuse - and so parents and others feel they have to essentially abuse their children to train them to hide their hurt and anger.) Nena, though, ends up risking her own future to see Dores get a chance to thrive. 

Senhora Pimentel, Graca’s mother, is complicated. Married off at a young age to a dissipated and selfish man who wanted her money and an heir, she does her best to protect her daughter and show kindness to Dores. Her early death in childbirth is partly responsible for Graca’s self destructive behavior. 

I also enjoyed “Madame Lucifer,” the mobster who becomes Graca and Dores’ protector and promoter. He is the first to recognize two key things: Graca is a world-class vocalist and entertainer, and Dores has the ambition and ruthlessness to survive in a hostile world. He sees himself in Dores, so to speak. 

There are no truly simple characters in the book. Everyone is flawed in some way, and selfish in many. Even Senhor Pimentel, who is pretty dang loathsome - I mean, he rapes the servant girls as soon as they hit puberty, drinks constantly, and shows up late in the game to sponge off of Sofia Salvador - but he also acts very much in line with societal expectations. He marries for money, and tries to enable Graca to do the same. The fact that she would rather become a singer (a disreputable profession for an aristocrat!) isn’t his fault. And in his own mind, he is rescuing Graca from the clutches of the unscrupulous Dores by horning his way in as manager. He isn’t entirely wrong in his assessment of Dores, honestly. She doesn’t play by the rules - that’s a luxury for those for who wrote the rules to be in their favor. But she arguably does love Graca more than Senhor Pimentel does - loves her as a person, not as female chattel to be properly settled in life. Ultimately, Senhor Pimentel makes a fatal mistake in thinking that he can use his position as the man who legally controls Graca until she marries (and another man takes over ownership) and simply outlast Dores. But Dores refuses to be outlasted - and sees no reason to play fair either. 

But I am probably revealing too much of the book at this point. The story is engrossing, the characters are memorable and compelling, and the book makes a great vacation read. I wasn’t sure I would like it when our club chose it, but it grew on me pretty quickly. 

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Our book club hosts played a loop of Carmen Miranda scenes (and played her music) during the time before our discussion. While I was familiar with Carmen Miranda, I hadn’t really seen much of anything she was in. (My wife is a different story - her knowledge of old movies and music is astonishing.) I was struck by just how electric she was. There is no doubt that she was the most interesting thing in every scene, and it was hard to look away from her face, despite the ludicrously over-the-top staging. She was one of those divas who was truly a superstar. 

Just for fun, here is what is probably her most famous - or infamous - scene, “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat.” The book contains essentially a description of the filming, and the other diva in the film: director Busby Berkeley. I am inclined to agree with the New York Times review of the film, in which the reviewer said, “Mr. Berkeley has some sly notions under his busby. One or two of his dance spectacles seem to stem straight from Freud.” Yeah, there is some...ahem...disturbing imagery in this scene. And also a potential source of George Lucas’ idea of the Sarlaac. You won’t be able to unsee it once you see it. 

 

And, in contrast, here is some more authentic Samba:



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Just for fun, here is the list of books that our book club has read. At least the ones I have read too. Most of these were read for the club, but a few were ones I read previously - those posts pre-date the club discussion - and some I read afterward, because I missed the discussion. 

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

There There by Tommy Orange

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Be Frank With Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Educated by Tara Westover

Stiff by Mary Roach

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne

Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin

Never Mind by Edward St. Aubyn

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

Artemis by Andy Weir

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov 

The Radium Girls by Kate Moore