You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson

Source of book: I own this

 

This post is a bit late. I started reading this book for Pride Month, but ended up getting delayed in writing about it, both because of vacations, and because I had library books I needed to write about first so I could return them in time. 

 

Andrea Gibson first came to my attention, unfortunately, when they died far too young of cancer. I decided to look up some of their poems, and, liking them, ordered this volume.

 

More recently, I was reminded of her work by a friend. I am a part of a group that meets about once a month to discuss poetry and stuff - my wife coined the term “Poetry Nerd Church” - which is about right. Anyway, one of our members chose a Gibson poem to discuss, and it sparked my decision to read the entire book. 

 

Gibson was lesbian and non-binary, and a survivor - like me - of toxic authoritarian religion. Many of their poems deal with trauma, including spiritual abuse, and so they felt quite familiar, even though I am a cishet guy. 

 

Gibson’s reputation rested not only on their poetry, but also on their Spoken Word readings. There are some poets who should not read their own poems aloud, just as there are authors who should not read their audiobooks. 

 

But Gibson was amazing in their readings, and I highly recommend checking out the ones that are on the interwebs.

 

There are a number of poems that stood out to me in this collection, although, as often is the case, I could have selected any number of ones that I omitted. 

 

Many of the poems are longer, so I won’t necessarily be quoting many entire poems, but rather choosing lines and passages that I particularly liked. 

 

I will start with the one that we discussed in our group:

 

Acceptance Speech After Setting the World Record in Goosebumps

 

I wasn’t, by any means, a natural.
Was not one of those wow-hounds
born jaw-dropped. I was tough in the husk.
Went years untouched by rain. Took shelter

 

seriously, even and often especially
in good weather, my tears like teenagers
hiding under the hoods of my eyes,
so committed they were to never falling

 

for the joke of astonishment.

When I was told there were seven
wonders of the world, I trusted the math,
believed I had seen none of them.

Of course beauty hunted me.
It hunts everyone. But I outran it, hid
in worry, regret, the promise of an afterlife
or a week’s end.

 

Then one day, in a red velvet theater
in New Orleans, I watched Maya Angelou
walk on stage. Seventeen slow steps to the mic.
She took a breath before speaking,

 

and I could hear god being born in that breath.
My every pore reached out like a hand
pointing to the first unsinkable lotus in the bayou 

of the universe. I’d never felt anything like it.

 

Searched the encyclopedia for the feeling’s name 

when I got home: “Goosebumps.”’

Afterwards, I thought—I can do this.
Started training morning to night,

 

crowbar swinging like a pendulum at the wall

of my chest. Tore the caution tape off my life
and let everything touch it.

Allen Iverson on the television in his first season 

with the Sixers, crossover sharp as a V of sparrows
Flying through the paint like Michelangelo’s brush:
            333 goosebumps.

 

My baby sister, sober for the first time
in thirteen years, calling to tell me she just noticed 

our mother’s eyes are green:
            505 goosebumps.

 

One day, my friend scored tickets
to a Prince concert. Tiny venue. I was right 

behind the sound booth. Prince’s entire band 

that evening—women. At the end of the show 

The sound person turned around and whispered,  

He didn’t play one song on his setlist the whole night.

I live on stages. I know what it is to scratch a plan, 

but not the whole trip and still arrive to your destination
two hundred years before your time:
            421 (artist formerly known as) goosebumps.

 

But that’s just the fancy stuff.
Some of them came from simple facts—
It rains diamonds on Jupiter.

189 goosebumps.

Blood donors in Sweden receive a thank you
message when their blood is used.

301 Nordic goosebumps.

 

One night in Ann Arbor, my friend,
still undiagnosed, could not uncurl her fingers

to strum her guitar, so she sang the chords instead.
It was the first time in my life I’d seen pain
become an instrument:
            10 dozen goosebumps

 

for each and every note plucked 

up from the string section of her refusal to silence
her dream. After that, nothing in the world was gray.
Even the movie of my past was released in color. 

The oldest man in my hometown could not 

get to the door to listen to our carols,

so we went inside and sang at his bedside instead. 

Twenty-four boots on the front step 

catching snowflakes with their tongues: 

776 goosebumps.

 

At one point everything started doing it:
A sincere apology: 221 goosebumps

An enemy’s love poem: 222 goosebumps.

 

The moon rising over the continental divide.
My love and I thought it was a car
driving off a cliff, and suddenly nothing 

in the world was dying. You ever felt that? 

A split second when nothing in the world is dying?
            888 goosebumps,

 

and the next day I sharpened a tiny ax
so I could split the seconds myself.
Too much lives in a moment
to not feed it to the fire in the heart, slow.

A Missoula treehouse filled with candlelight.

143 goosebumps.

The octopus documentary.

54 goosebumps multiplied by 8.

The biggest dog in the shelter
hiding behind a teacup chihuahua,
and the woman who came to adopt a cat
taking all three of them home.

1,012 goosebumps.

 

There is no escaping the magic now. 

Beauty caught me and never let me go.
And the thing about the world record
is—if someone breaks it after me,
and they will break it after me,
I will love that so much
that without even trying,

I’ll break it again.

 

That’s pretty wild, isn’t it? Definitely worth reading aloud. 

 

For the next poem, “The Year of No Grudges, or Instead of Writing a Furious Text, I Try a Poem,” there are a few lines that were particularly excellent. But read the whole thing, of course. 

 

I know most people try hard

to do good and find out too late

they should have tried softer.

 

And this:

 

I’ve never in my whole life

been levelheaded, but the older I get,

I’m more level-hearted --

 

and I think we make gods

who look like us for a reason.

I think, in spite of it all, we trust

 

we can be believed in. 

 

And this:

 

That’s how mistakes work

if you’re loving the right kind of people.

And you’re the right kind of people.

 

You’ve walked on water 

so many times you know grace

is super, super slippery.

 

There’s literally nothing

anyone is more likely

to fall from.

 

Wit certainly abounds in these poems. It can be profound, as in the above excerpts. Or it can be just straight up funny, as in the opening of “Time Piece.”

 

I’ve never known who Nick is.

I show up just in the stranger of time,

sift every grain of sand from the Pacific Coast

into an hourglass that fits in my palm.

 

I turn the hourglass upside down and Vancouver

trades places with San Diego. When I ask how

I covered the wildfires in the snow, I say

I had time on my hands.

 

And this later line from the same (rather long) poem:

 

Bitterness is the easiest way

to leave this world having had only

a near-life experience.

 

Okay, that one is definitely more toward the profound end of the spectrum. This one is also good:

 

Regret is a time machine to the past.

Worry is a time machine to the future.

Gratitude is a time machine to the present.

 

The next poem is another I will quote in full, in no small part because I have LGBTQ kids, and I very much want them to be alive and thrive. It is also dedicated to my cousin, who died by suicide after he was rejected by his parents. You can hear Gibson read the poem here.

 

Queer Youth are Five Times More Likely to Die by Suicide

 

means:

You lived five times harder than you should have had to

to still have a body when you graduated high school.

 

means:

Hate worked five times harder

to make your spirit its wishbone.

 

means:

When your mother asked what was wrong,

you were five times more likely to believe you’d lose

her if you spoke the truth.

 

means:

You were told five times more often

you’d go to hell when you died.

 

means:

Burning for eternity seemed five times

more doable than another day in the school lunchroom.

 

means:

You were five times more inclined

to triple-padlock your diary.

 

means:

You were five times more likely

to stop writing your story down.

 

means:

I write my heart out now.

I graffiti billboards with the page of my diary

the bullies used to start the rumors.

 

I tie that page to the end of a kite string and run

a crooked line through the straightest mile

of the Bible Belt.

 

That page is a protest sign.

That page is a bandana washing

the tear gas out of my lover’s eyes.

 

Queer youth are five times more likely to die by suicide.

 

means:

I sneak into fascist sleepovers

and sharpie my pronouns onto the faces

of senators who voted to criminalize my kisses

when I was nineteen.

 

I cut the hate out of my mail

and papier-mache Christmas ornaments

for queer couples whose parents

do not want to know their grandchildren.

 

I hack high school curriculums and delete

every test that does not ask what the P 

in Marsha P. Johnson stands for. 

 

I walk through graveyards with a chisel

correcting the names of trans kids

whose families said, No, when asked,

Can you just let me live?

 

I pace the suburbs with spray paint, editing 

the welcome mats of homophobes until they all

speak the truth: that they personally burned

the roof over the heads of queer youth

are five times more likely to die by suicide

 

means:

There are many days I thirst for my own silence

but walk through the desert screaming instead

because I, like most of my queer friends, don’t have a child

-- I have millions -- from Nebraska to Chechnya,

 

to the Baptist church where I grew up.

My pride in them is a parade I know

won’t keep all of them alive, but I keep cutting

my diary into confetti to throw at their hopes

 

when they float by scared or furious

or laughing or in love and desperate

For the headline to say: Queer youth

are five times more likely to:

 

offer to walk their younger siblings home from school.

To notice the different accents of sparrows.

To find an eyelash and spend twenty minutes

trying to pick what to wish for.

 

Five times more likely to:

 

never outgrow blanket forts.

To know there is a word for the scent in the air

after it rains. To see livelines look like telephone wires

and call a friend who’s having a bad day.

 

Five times more likely to:

 

adore the last man who walked on the moon

just because he wrote his daughter’s initials there.

To know there is no universe in which they would not

be proud of their own children.

 

Queer youth are five times more likely to:

 

see you how you dream of seeing yourself.

To write something in your yearbook that will get you

through the next decade. To spot a stranger crying 

and ask if there’s anything they can do to help.

 

Five times more likely to:

need us to do the same.

 

I tear up every time I read that poem. I think it is up there with my favorite Langston Hughes Poem, “Let America be America Again,” for its emotional impact and its demand for justice. 

 

There are a few shorter poems in this book. Including this one, which is thoroughly related to the previous one:

 

No Such Thing as the Innocent Bystander

 

Silence rides shotgun

wherever hate goes.

 

A few of the works in this book are also closer to prose than to poetry. For example, the hilarious “To whom it Definitely Concerns,” which begins:

 

please accept this letter as formal notification that I am resigning from 

the position of My Own Worst Enemy.

 

Another one of those, “What Love Is,” which is about, among other things, coming out, and growing up in the rural south, and contains this gem:

 

What I was certain of was that they weren’t coming because they knew I’d ended my last show with a poem about how church yard sales are secretly the best places to buy dildos.

 

Oh man, the stories I could tell. Gibson is spot on with that observation. Attorneys often find out a lot of things about those “sweet little church ladies.” Just saying. 

 

Later in the piece, after a fascinating anecdote about a show they did where a girlfriend’s parents showed up (hence the prior line), and the father, crying, said “I’m seventy-six years old and I just tonight figured out what love is.” 

 

Some of the poetry is about climate activism, including “Homesick: A Plea for our Planet,” wherein they note that back when our generation was kids, you could still be a Republican and believe in science.

 

but the principal gave me 

a gold ribbon and not a single bit of attitude

about my radical political stance

because neither he nor I knew

 

it was political. Science had not yet been 

fully framed as leftist propaganda.

The president did not have a twitter fed

starving the world of facts.

 

Hence how I, a person who is conservative by temperament, finding myself described as a leftist and even a communist, because I believe in science and facts and reality, not the alternative universe of the Orange Fascist. Which can lead into the next short poem:

 

Good Grief

 

Let your

heart break

 

so your spirit

doesn’t.

 

The poem, “The Test of Time,” about her mother’s slow disability and loss of function, contains a line I wanted to highlight. 

 

but there is a test we can all take to find out the future.

It’s called the test of time. And what you do is you live

 

until you die. And you refuse to let the hands of your clock

curl into fists to fight the lessons off. Even if the lessons

 

are brutally hard.

 

Another short poem spoke to me. It’s a hard thing to follow some days, I must say. 

 

Wellness Check

 

In any moment,

on any given day,

I can measure 

my wellness

by this question:

 

Is my attention on loving,

or is my attention on

            who isn’t loving me?

 

I am going to mention one line I take issue with in “My Girlfriend’s Karaoke Song.” In it, the girlfriend sings Jewel’s song “You Were Meant for Me,” which is a good song. But the poem claims that Em is a “very difficult key.” Now, I do agree the song is not a beginner-level song, but it isn’t because of the key, which is actually easy on guitar and in the middle of the typical human vocal range. (And also, Em is a fantastic violin key - ask Mendelssohn…)  It’s because of where the melody begins in relation to the key. It’s picking the note out of the air at the beginning. So, a bit of a whine from one kind of artist to another. 

 

Oh well. 

 

Anyway, I want to end with another poem that really spoke to me - and sparked a bit of defensiveness from some religious friends. Obviously, the poem isn’t meant to be systemic theology, but a response to the all-too-common way the afterlife is used as a means of abuse toward those who don’t kow-tow to the gatekeepers of theology. 

 

What Sucks About the Afterlife

 

On Earth, everyone loved butterflies,

but I trusted the caterpillars more.

I trusted the ones who knew

 

they were not done growing.

On Earth, I was a work in progress,

was comforted in the knowing

 

that I had a million mistakes still in me

to learn from. I changed my mind

more often than I changed my socks,

 

and whenever I was criticized

for mismatched thoughts, I’d say,

Who wants to be today

 

who they were yesterday?

Becoming was how I prayed.

But here - I am past the finish line:

 

I have a heart of gold,

and I never have to dig for it.

I couldn’t do anything wrong if I tried,

and trust me, I try, but

 

I get hot-headed, and my rage 

toasts the marshmallow on an angel’s

celestial s’mores. I lose my temper and find it

in the halo lost-and-found box.

 

Lies won’t let me tell them,

They handed me a sticker

that said My Name Is and I wrote 

Everyone by accident. I can’t remember

 

what selfishness is. Yesterday I said

something angry about an ex, and a quarter

of my tastebuds jumped off my tongue.

I’ve known nothing

 

of bitterness since.

Right before I died, I thought

In the afterlife, I’ll apply for a job

at a mistake factory. They’ll be awed

 

by my resume. If anything, I’m over qualified.

But there’s no place where they make

mistakes here. Everyone is flawless,

Everyone’s blunders are photoshopped

 

right off their lives before

they even happen. Is this heaven

or hell? I can’t tell. I looked

that famous carpenter up

 

in the phone book, but his number 

wasn’t listed, and I need to ask him

where to find the wood to build 

some missteps. I’m not about to spend

 

eternity burning in the lie that holy 

and perfect are the same thing.

Do you understand?

 

A promised land

is not a promised land

if I can’t keep learning.

 

Dare I say “Amen”? In an interview, Gibson elaborated a bit about “how much of this world would change for the better if we were collectively more interested in growing and learning than we were in our own rightness. Attachment to rightness instantly shuts down vital conversations. I imagine a world where folks are thrilled about the possibility of having their minds and hearts changed every single day, and that world is so beautiful.”

I very much enjoyed this collection, and will be adding additional Andrea Gibson collections to my library. 

 

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

This book was recommended by one of my kids. Since I do try to read stuff they like, I gave this one a shot, despite the fact that it is not a genre that I read. 

 

Specifically, this book is a YA romance. And also historical fiction. I should add that it is a lesbian romance involving a Chinese-American girl, and set in 1950s San Francisco, during the height of the Red Scare - and the Lavender Scare. 

 

Actually, though, I found myself enjoying the book. Sure, it’s high school, so big emotions and not always the most subtle writing. But it did have well-researched cultural details, some historical characters, and the author’s own family history as inspiration. I would rate it as better than average. 

 

The author clearly did her research about everything from the deportation of one of the Chinese-American founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to the gay nightlife of San Francisco in the 1950s. 

 

The story is about Lily Hu, 17 year old high school senior, with aspirations to join JPL and design rockets. No, this isn’t unrealistic: women were involved with JPL from the start, and were the original computer programmers. In the notes at the end, the author gives the historical background for the various elements of the book. 

 

Lily falls in love with a white girl, Kath, who goes with her to the Telegraph Club, a fictional lesbian bar patterned after historical gay bars of the time. 

 

This leads to a series of events, from Lily’s falling-out with her longtime friend Shirley (who is, in the way of high school queen bees, a bit possessive) to her outing to her traditional family. 

 

I kind of hesitate to give more of the plot than that, because it’s that kind of a book: you want to read it to find out what happens. 

 

There are a plethora of fascinating characters. The high school kids don’t fit easy stereotypes, and all seem normally insecure and struggling to figure out who they are and what they want their futures to be. 

 

There are a number of members of the local lesbian community, from male impersonator Tommy Andrews (based on a real-life person), to other young women who gravitate toward the safe spaces in a hostile culture. The impersonation thing was apparently popular for a while - and was done by heterosexual people as well, before it eventually became associated with LGBTQ culture. 

 

The adults in Lily’s family aren’t great, I will admit, but they also aren’t villains or caricatures. They are all-too-typical traditional parents who don’t want to admit they have a “deviant” child. Kind of like my own parents, unfortunately. The aunt, while she doesn’t really understand, does appear to be more helpful. 

 

The book also weaves in the line that Chinese-Americans had to walk in that difficult era. The first race-based immigration restriction was the Chinese Exclusion Act. Then, during World War Two, the Chinese were our allies. But after the communists won the civil war, Chinese-Americans were viewed with suspicion. In fact, the co-founder of JPL was deported, then became the “father of Chinese rocketry.” It’s a sad and sordid history.

 

Within the book, the casual racism, even within the LGBTQ community, is explored in what I thought was a thoughtful way. Again, people are complicated, and have blind spots. 

 

I also enjoyed the various places in San Francisco. I recently got to see the ruins of the Sutro Baths and read about that history. At the time the book was set, these were in decline, but not gone. The author captured a certain feel of the city and the time setting quite well. 

 

The book also deserves credit for avoiding anachronisms. All too often, particularly in YA literature, modern terms, modern ways of thinking, and modern perspectives are imported into older times, making the characters feel unrealistic. 

 

Not so in this book. Lo carefully uses the phrases, the ideas, the internal drama, that actually work for the 1950s. Again, she spent time reading writings from the LGBTQ community of the time, which really helped with her feel. It was totally believable that a traditionally raised Chinese-American girl would struggle with her sexuality and find herself drawn to an underground community the way the book describes it. 

 

In this sense, too, the book is a reminder that LGBTQ people have always existed, in every time, place, and culture. In some of those, they were able to live as themselves without persecution, in others, not so much. 

 

There is a bit of relatively minor (and again, realistic) sex in the book, that feels very much like the kind of tentative exploration kids of that age would do. The buildup is also very realistic, very sweet, and wholesome - almost naive in the way so many of us were at that age.

 

There are some minor weaknesses to the book, at least for me. These are common to YA literature in general, of course. Some of the emotional stuff was a bit simplistic. I’m not really into the high school drama stuff, so a few parts felt like they lagged. But I am going to put these down to me, not any actual flaw to the book. Looking back, it really is well written for the genre. 

 

I want to mention one particular line, just because of its personal connection to me. Lily has fled from her home, and ended up with Lana, Tommy’s partner. 

 

Ultimately, there is the problem of what the way forward will be with Lily’s parents. Lana has an insight that I think is excellent. 

 

“She’s having a hard time right now because you’re not what she expected. But we’re never what our parents expected. They have to learn that lesson.”

 

That is the crux of things. And yes, I can honestly say that my kids aren’t what I expected too. The question for all of us parents is what we do with that fact. Will we learn the lesson, and love our children for who they are, not what we imagined they would be? 

 

Or, like my parents chose to do with me (and my wife and kids), keep trying to “fix” the “defective” child? 

 

The book ends without a real resolution to this issue - it is about a specific time in Lily’s life, not her entire story. We have to guess at whether Lily and her parents will come to an understanding or not. There is a hint that her father might be open to it, but it is less clear about her mother. 

 

I wasn’t able to find much online about the author’s own experiences, other than what she shares in the book. Her grandmother was white, and her grandparents got stuck in China for decades after the communist revolution. She was born in China, but came to the US as a child. 

 

Malinda wasn’t her given name, but one she personally chose as a child after she found Americans couldn’t pronounce her Chinese name. 

 

She is lesbian, married to a woman, but nothing I have been able to find indicates whether her parents or other relatives are accepting of her - she talks a lot more about their insistence she get a “real job” rather than write than about her sexuality. I know that for most LGBTQ people, even now, family tends to be complicated. My hope is for my own kids that they know they are accepted and embraced for who they are, not who I imagined they would be. 

 

One final thought: this book is top five for challenged and banned books in school, so if you like to seek out the books that the bigots hate, this is a great choice. 

 

Oh, and Lo has an interesting blog, which you might check out as well. 

Tilt by Emma Pattee

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

This book was our selection for this month for the Literary Lush Book Club. While ordinarily, I like discovering books I would not otherwise have read, I will say that I hated this book, for reasons this post will make clear. 

Tilt is a book about two things. First, the narrative story, which is that of a large earthquake near Portland, which strands the very pregnant protagonist in an IKEA, and her subsequent wanderings in the day after the event. The other thing, which is what I think the author really wanted the book to be about, was her ambivalence about pregnancy, motherhood, and the father of the child. 

 

Which, okay, I guess. If that were it, I would just have said, “this isn’t my kind of book,” and moved on. I have read a number of books like that, which didn’t do it for me, but for which I can just admit that, like, say, Brittany Spears, I just don’t find interesting. 

 

But this book wasn’t merely not my thing, it was genuinely problematic in a very real and a very moral way. It commits (in my opinion) the serious literary crime of portraying humans as acting in ways that humans do not in fact act. But more troublingly, the author chose to indulge in lazy stereotypes that, despite not actually saying it out loud, constitute racist and classist dog whistles. This then contributes to certain phobias and fantasies that middle class white people tend to have about minorities and impoverished people: that they are “animals” just waiting for a disaster to rip the veneer of civilization off, and then they will loot and steal and mug and do violence just for shits and giggles. 

 

Which is literally not what humans do - including poor people and people of color.

 

I find this particularly offensive because I have literally lived through a significant earthquake (the Whittier Narrows quake) while living in a primarily minority, working class neighborhood. So I have seen first hand how people respond. And it isn’t at all what this book portrays. 

 

But why listen to me? Maybe take the time to read Rebecca Solnit’s excellent and well researched book on disasters, A Paradise Built in Hell. 

 

The bottom line is that there are two competing phenomena during disasters:

 

Most humans pull together during disasters, creating mutual communities of aid. In fact, ordinary people tend to do better than organizations at rescuing people, feeding people, and otherwise getting stuff done. 

 

This is my experience as well. And it is well documented. But so also is the other one:

 

Along with this cooperation tends to come what Solnit calls “elite panic.” That is, those who benefit from the status quo feel threatened by their loss of power and privilege, and tend to do really horrible things. 

 

To quote Solnit here:

 

“[F]ear of social disorder; fear of poor, minorities, and immigrants; obsession with looting and property crime; willingness to resort to deadly force; and actions taken on the basis of rumor.”  

 

And that is exactly what this fucking book does: it blithers on and pushes the narrative of elite panic: the fear of social disorder, fear of the poor, fear of minorities, obsession with looting and property crime, a bizarrely violent scene that not only makes no sense but feels like a fantasy come to life. 

 

Now, to be clear, the author quite obviously tries to avoid looking racist and classist. Few characters are even described at all - we have no idea what anyone looks like. She creates “plausible deniability" by never saying the looters and the teenaged gang members are minorities or poor. 

 

Instead, she just lets the dog whistle work. Clearly nobody is envisioning white collar white people looting televisions. Clearly nobody is envisioning the teenagers as preppies. We all know what she is talking about because it is already culturally engrained. 

 

And, for those of us who have visited Portland (which is the whitest large city in the US for historical reasons) and can thus picture where the protagonist is wandering (there is a map in the book too if you need), it is obvious that she is walking through parts of the city that suffer from poverty and the lingering effects of segregation and redlining. No seriously, go check out the book’s map and compare it to the historical redlining map for Portland. 

 

This book is a master class on how to say “scary black people” without actually saying it. 

 

I personally believe that authors, editors, and publishers have moral duties to society and to the more vulnerable members of that society. 

 

The crux of this is to avoid doing harm. Whenever an author indulges in harmful stereotypes, it harms those who belong to those stereotyped groups. This is well known and generally understood. 

 

For example, if a writer were to openly write female characters as incompetent, unintelligent, and needing male supervision, it would be quickly flagged as inappropriate. Likewise, if open “lazy negro” tropes, or “slant-eyed orientals,” or “poor people are stupid” or other equally lazy and harmful social prejudices were to be used, I believe they would have been flagged and removed. 

 

The author gets away with it in this case because she avoids open identification of groups, and relies on stereotypes which have unfortunately become part of our cultural background. 

 

That doesn’t make this okay, in any way. In fact, it is more insidious, because it feeds prejudices that are not always acknowledged - or admitted. 

 

In this case, by feeding the stereotypes that poor people - particularly people of color - will go feral and loot during disasters, the author perpetuates our racist and classist botched responses to disasters, causing significant human suffering for the most vulnerable in our society.

 

So, for me, this book isn’t merely bad literature, but it is bad morality, and as such, I do not recommend bothering with this book. 

 

That said, let me get into things a bit more. 

 

Even without the dog whistles, I have a lot of issues with the book. As I noted, very few people in this book behave in a recognizably human manner. Honestly, the poor IKEA worker, the young woman, is the one person that made sense to me. My wife noted that in real life, she could well have been Black. It turns out eventually that she isn’t, but a retail job, young child, etc., well…at minimum, she is the kind of low income, working class person that would plausibly be helpful in a disaster.

 

Here is the thing: normal humans act in predictable ways in a disaster like this. 

 

We first check to see if we are intact, or at least intact enough. We get ourselves free of encumbrances, stop bleeding if we can. After we take care of ourselves, we work to help others around us, make sure others are okay and help them if not. If we are home, we start with others in the household, then check our neighbors.

 

The IKEA worker does exactly that. 

 

We would typically next check things we were taught, like looking for gas leaks or other unsafe conditions, help rescue those around us if needed.

 

Once the triage is complete, and only then, would we move location. And, if we move, it would be typically to go home. 

 

In fact, as someone who lives in earthquake country, most of us have had this discussion. If safe, go home and meet there. If not, then plant your butt and wait where you are. In no case should one wander around. 

 

The protagonist (and probably by extension, the author) are the kinds of people that us rational and prepared sorts would have to force to behave rationally and not hurt themselves. Seriously. Gah. 

 

Again, here the IKEA worker is the lone normal person. She solves the immediate issues around her, then goes to get her kid. 

 

Here, though, we have yet another unrealistic scene. By this time, several hours after the quake, we have people wandering around. In real life, there would have been a rescue of any possible survivors. To the extent possible and necessary, that building would have been pulled apart brick by brick to get at any survivors. No need for one woman - the sole rational human in the book - to do a solo rescue. 

 

In contrast to a rational, normal person, the protagonist first goes to her husband’s place of work. Why? Surely he would have gone home, not stayed there. 

 

My guess is that she did so because the plot required that the protagonist find out her husband lied to her, so we needed a scene. That’s bad writing. No plot should require the characters to act irrationally. 

 

And then, after that, she goes wandering off again. Presumably, if her husband were alive (and he probably isn’t), he would go home. So she should have just gone home. (Again, who raised the author? Did her parents not have a disaster plan at all?)

 

But no, we have a 9 months pregnant woman wandering all over the city. 

 

And that then leads to the weird ending, with a feral birth scene, and god only knows what all the author intended to convey. I mean, I am trying to imagine any pregnant woman I have known who would decide - while in labor - to abandon the shelter of an intact house, which probably has food and supplies of some sort that could be of use - and ends up giving birth in a park instead. 

 

It was this scene, I think, that convinced me that the whole book was really about the protagonist’s ambivalence about pregnancy, motherhood, and her partner, and all the rest was just scenery for that inner drama. 

 

Which, not my thing. And it certainly didn’t require promoting all that elite panic along the way. 

 

Oh, and I have to also mention one more bizarre and unrealistic thing before I forget:

 

Within hours of the earthquake, the military is on scene. Now, there is a military base nearby, so yeah, maybe they go out there with the cops and first responders. 

 

But somehow, they have parked two tanks blocking a bridge. 

 

What the fuck? 

 

Why would they bring tanks out? There is no invasion to stop, and presumably they don’t intend to just open fire on their own civilians. 

 

There are two actually plausible scenarios. 

 

The bad one is that the military did what it did after Katrina, and go out with weapons to “stop the looting” because scary black people, etc. But not with tanks! They are expensive to run, and don’t do well on already damaged roads. Instead, they would be in their regular vehicles for transporting people. 

 

The better case, though, is that the military is actually pretty damn good at the logistics of getting food and water to people. And in Portland, it is entirely likely that that is what would have happened. 

 

Likewise, I am not ready to throw the Portland police department under the bus here, and assume that they would be unwilling to help with the rescues along with the fire department - which definitely would be working on helping.

 

But even if there was the desire, how the hell do you teleport a couple of tanks? The roads are damaged, and regular vehicles are having issues - in practice, this would mean roads blocked by immobile vehicles, which is actually a nightmare for tanks. They just aren’t good at urban warfare, let alone urban rescue. 

 

Seriously, what editor let that scene stay in? This is bad writing and bad editing. 

 

So what would an actually realistic book have looked like? 

 

Well, maybe we could have learned about the rescue efforts at the IKEA. We also know the protagonist’s arm was hurt - but that seems to go away in the second half of the book? In any case, that would have been part of the triage - is she okay? 

 

Then, after the dust settled, a normal person would have noticed her pregnancy, and asked about how she would get home. Or about temporary shelter from the heat until then. Because that’s what normal humans do. 

 

Perhaps she would have just walked home, waited for her husband or news about him. 

 

When she went into labor (which maybe doesn’t happen if she doesn’t panic-walk around the city), she might have sought assistance from a neighbor. Does she even know any of them? I mean, there are probably nurses or assistants living in her building, statistically speaking. 

 

Even someone like me might have been some help - I have been present at the births of my five kids, am married to a nurse, and pay attention. I would have known the basics: assuming no dire emergency issue, make sure baby is breathing, give baby skin-to-skin contact with mom to keep warm, no hurry on the cord cutting, get mom some food and water. 

 

Eventually, we might have learned something interesting, like whether her husband is alive or not. And the name of the baby. 

 

Instead, we got this mess of a book, which feels like an uncomfortable exploration of the protagonist’s fears, dysfunctions, and bigotries, at the expense of any sense of human realism, with a big dose of dog whistles, and an annoying degree of navel gazing. 

 

Save yourself the time, and read a better book instead. I strongly recommend A Paradise Built in Hell - it has a chapter on the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which is truly eye-opening as to how humans actually function - and also one on hurricane Katrina, which illustrates the human suffering caused by the kind of delusional bigotry the author puts on display in Tilt.

 

My advice to the author would be that perhaps she needs to actually spend some time with people outside her white collar white people world. Maybe hang out in a working class minority neighborhood, where mutuality is far more common than in her own world. It might help her write realistic humans next time. 

 

***

 

“But what about the LA Riots???”

 

I am tempted to snark here about the difference between a natural disaster and a human-caused disaster - in this case a gross miscarriage of justice. But the thing is, natural disasters often become human-caused disasters. So the line is blurry.

 

What I will say is that if you cannot tell the difference between an earthquake and systemic police brutality, you might need to educate yourself. If you cannot tell the difference between a hurricane and the systemic injustice of poverty, de facto segregation, and racialized government response that followed, well, again, you need to educate yourself. 

 

I lived through the LA Riots, by the way. You can read about that in my long footnote to this post. They were scary, to be sure, as a white person. Too many, though, seem to have taken the wrong lessons from the experience, even people like the author, who I would suspect from other elements in the book considers herself a good liberal. 

The Robber Bridegroom by Eudora Welty

Source of book: I own this

 

I am a part of a group of three (mostly online) friends who read books together. This is the most recent choice. 

 

I suggested reading something by Eudora Welty, because neither of my friends had. We ended up picking this one because it sounded interesting and because I hadn’t read it. 

In retrospect, this is such a different book from any of the other Welty books I have read that I think it may have given the wrong impression.

 

The Robber Bridegroom is based loosely on a Grimm story, with the setting changed to the deep South of a couple centuries ago. It incorporates elements from other fairy tales - the darker ones - so those familiar with Grimm and Andersen and others will undoubtedly find plenty that is familiar. There is also a definite reference to the Cupid and Psyche myth - something another member noted. 

 

This is, notably, quite different from Welty’s usual fare, which is contemporary Southern realism. (See my list at the end of this post.) 

 

Also different, in my view, is that this story seems to use a lot more stereotypes of African Americans and Native Americans than her other works. As one of our other members pointed out, these characters seem to fill the role of dwarves or fairies or other mythical beings in the story. I also noticed that at least the black stereotypes come from the characters themselves - we only get the white perspective.

 

Welty takes the fairy tale inspiration, and combines it with the “tall tale” tradition which is a notable American contribution to folk stories. Think Paul Bunyan and the various creations of Mark Twain and Bret Harte and others. This melding of genres actually works really well, in my opinion. 

 

Another thing Welty does is borrow a few historical figures for characters. Mike Fink was a legendary riverboat pilot, who, like many historical Americans such as Daniel Boone, became as much a legend as a real person. Little Harp also was a real person, and was as nasty as he is in the story. 

 

Given the source material, it is inevitable that a story like this have some uncomfortable elements. As in the Cupid and Psyche story, rape culture is taken for granted. A man or a god “ravishes” an innocent maiden, who later falls in love with him - and that is plenty icky. And yet, the story continues to fascinate us for many reasons, and every retelling - including the wonderful C. S. Lewis version - finds a different and fresh take.

 

In this book, the moral universe is…complicated. Are there any heroes? We take for granted that Jamie Lockhart, the robber bridegroom, is a hero because he saves Rosamund from her abusive stepmother and neglectful father, despite his rape and general dishonesty. 

 

We forgive Clement for his neglectful parenting because he claims to love his daughter. We condemn Salome for being a cruel stepmother. 

 

And yet, none of these really fits an obvious definition of good or evil if you think closely. Even Salome has been saddled with a child that isn’t hers, who her husband favors over her. And she knows she is unattractive and was married for reasons that had nothing to do with love. 

 

This is the thing with fairy tales, though: if you start thinking more deeply, the surface meaning is rarely the only point. 

 

Overall, an interesting story, but one flawed by the stereotypes. It is definitely worth reading, but not particularly representative of Welty’s usual writing. 

 

I did note one line that was memorable. Goat, a feeble-minded young man who works for Salome with the hope of helping get his sisters married off somehow, is put to work spying on Rosamond. He sees the bandit (Jamie in disguise) force Rosamond to remove her clothing, then ride off with them. 

 

But at the final point, seeing Rosamond separated from her clothes, he had had to make his mind up which to follow, and he had decided upon the clothes. It was evident that the clothes had cost money, and Rosamond had not, and he was influenced by the bandit’s choice in the matter as well. 

 

Now that is classic Welty snark. 

 

For those who haven’t discovered Welty, or want to read more, here are the other books I have written about:

 

A Curtain of Green (short story collection)

The Wide Net (short story collection)

The Optimist’s Daughter (Pulitzer Prize-winning novel)