The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Source of book: I own this

 

I picked this book up a few years ago, and kept intending to read it. I finally just put it on my list of books that I wanted to prioritize for the year. (Mostly, this is my selections for Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Pride Month, Banned Books Week, Native American Heritage Month, as well as classics of fiction and non-fiction from my collection.) So, count this as an outlier on the list - it isn’t old enough to be a classic yet. 

The Year of Magical Thinking is Joan Didion’s account of the death of her husband of 40 years, John Gregory Dunne and the year of grief and disorientation that followed. Dunne’s death of a massive heart attack right before dinner would have been traumatic enough, but it was combined with another trauma. Their adopted daughter, Quintana, who had struggled with years of mental health issues, contracted pneumonia which went septic and nearly killed her. It was while she was in an induced coma that Dunne died. After Quintana recovered, she collapsed due to a clot and hematoma, and again nearly died. Sadly, after this book was published, Quintana succumbed to yet another medical emergency. So quite the run of bad events for Didion. 

 

Didion’s account of this time is raw, emotional, and scattered. She captures the out-of-time-and-place feeling of loss and grief, with her thoughts triggered in familiar places. Everything triggers memories, and she tries to present them as they came to her. Honestly, while often difficult because of the obvious pain, this is really great writing. 

 

Both Dunne and Didion were professional writers, which appears to have made for an interesting partnership, one that grew closer with the years, until they were almost a part of not only each other, but their art. So, when he dies, she is left with the equivalent of an arm ripped off of her. The marriage is both inspiring for what it was, and the greater tragedy for Didion when it ended. 

 

There are a lot of literary references in the book, for obvious reasons. Literature was something Dunne and Didion shared, and also what comes most readily to mind for Didion to describe moments. The death of Sir Gawain gives the line “I have only two days to live,” while Gerard Manly Hopkins and other poets contribute passages throughout. 

 

The book opens with the lines that Didion wrote down a few days after the death. 

 

Life changes fast.

Life changes in the instant.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

The question of self-pity.

 

These lines will recur throughout the book. 

 

I also loved the description of their marriage - and the assumptions made by other people. 

 

I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right but we were the person the other trusted. There was no separation between our investments or interests in any given situation. Many people assumed that we must be, since one and sometimes the other would get the better review, the bigger advance, in some way “competitive,” that our private life must be a minefield of professional envies and resentments. This was so far from the case that the general insistence on it came to suggest certain lacunae in the popular understanding of our marriage. 

 

That is actually a great description of my own marriage. We are in different professions, but we have taken on different roles over time. For the first part, I out-earned my wife, while she spent more time on schooling the kids and keeping the house clean. Now, she works longer hours and out-earns me, and I have taken the “soccer mom” role in the family. But there is no minefield of resentments. 

 

When we married, a lot of people seemed surprised that we don’t really fight much. We are both strong personalities, but we are on the same team. 

 

Another line that fascinates me from the book is one that comes from Dunne. When Quintana was a child, she felt that bad news was unequally distributed. Her uncle committed suicide and a cousin was murdered. Dunne told her that “it all evens out in the end.”

 

Didion admits that she did not understand what Dunne was meaning, but Quintana did. It wasn’t that good news balances the bad. It is that we all experience loss in the end. It evens out. Grief comes for all of us. 

 

Also profound in the context of our current culture, is Didion’s observation that we are bombarded with the message that we can avert death. And also the punitive corollary: that if death catches us, we have only ourselves to blame. 

 

My wife and I have talked about this a lot lately - she is an ICU nurse, and has observed that the more religious a family member is, the less likely they are to be at peace with the death of a loved one. (It doesn’t matter which religion, either.) As in, “God is going to heal my 95-year-old mother who has terminal cancer” level denialism and disbelief that death will come for us all. 

 

This saddens me. I mean, I don’t exactly look forward to dying, but I know I will. I think I am at better peace with that than a lot of people I know, particularly the religious ones. That really puzzles me too. 

 

I read this book at a time in my own life when I am grieving the loss of my parents. Not the death of their physical bodies, but the loss of the good people they used to be once. As things stand now, we are estranged, and they have shown no interest whatsoever in trying to repair things. As it has been since my teens, when Bill Gothard told them that God speaks to children - even adult children - through their parents, an estrangement has probably been inevitable. 

 

What has ensued over the past 30 years is very much like what I see my clients experience. I work in elder law as part of my practice, particularly the issues that arise as an elderly person declines physically and mentally. For my parents, the change in them has been very much a form of dementia - not so much a loss of memory, but a moral and spiritual dementia combined with an increasing detachment from the reality that others have to live in. 

 

I have witnessed the erosion of the Christ-following values they raised me with, replaced by Fox News xenophobia and the fear that someone else is getting something they don’t deserve. The empathetic discussions we used to have when I was young started to become assertions of talking points and political slogans from the Reagan and Thatcher years. They made racist and sexist statements that would have gotten my mouth washed out with soap as a kid. And in the era of Covid, they went hard down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole. As I said, it is a form of dementia. 

 

Like dementia, it has been both a gradual slope, yet a punctuated and variable path. There are times I have recognized the old them, but these moments have gotten more and more rare. Once in a while, we could talk and connect, but increasingly, we would bump up against the reality barrier - the ideology of the political and religious charlatans would shut down acknowledgment of empirical reality. 

 

One passage in particular haunted me in this regard. Didion keeps finding herself saying “I need to talk to John about…oh.” 

 

There is no one to hear this news, nowhere to go with the unmade plan, the uncompleted thought. There is no one to agree, disagree, talk back.

 

I feel this particularly about my dad. I keep finding myself thinking that I should talk about this with him, except I remember that the person I could do that with is gone, and has been for a while now. (My mom is more complicated - we haven’t been able to really talk since I hit puberty, something she didn’t take well. And, she has had an emotionally incestuous relationship with my narcissist sister for many, many years, which is a factor in why she rejected my wife.) Again, I am saying this not out of hate for my parents but out of profound grief at the loss of them. 

 

I guess I will end this with the fairly bleak reality of Didion’s experience. 

 

I look for resolution and find none.

 

This is the reality of grief. There is never a resolution because the loss cannot be fixed. Particularly when a relationship has been close - like it was between Dunne and Didion, or between me and the parents who raised me - the scar cannot ever truly heal. We can become functional again, but part of us is gone. That cannot be “resolved” in any meaningful way. 

 

I am curious to read more of Didion - probably her earlier journalistic work. She has a way with words, so I imagine less personal (and traumatic) subjects would be fascinating to read. 

 

Nation by Terry Pratchett

Source of book: Audiobook borrowed from my brother

 

We are, alas, running out of Terry Pratchett audiobooks we haven’t listened to. Fortunately, it looks like they are releasing new audio versions of the earlier books, which are fairly difficult to find on CD. 

Nation is not a Discworld novel, but rather one of his stand-alone books set in the Victorian Era, but in a parallel universe. In this case, what if the future Queen Victoria had become marooned on an island in Micronesia, helping to rebuild a nation after a devastating tsunami? 

 

That is the basic idea behind Nation. Mau, a boy on the cusp of manhood, is rowing back from his initiation ordeal (alone on an island for a week), when his boat is caught by the tsunami. He manages to stay afloat, but returns to find his village in ruins and everyone but him dead. 

 

This causes, to put it mildly, a spiritual crisis, during which Mau decides that the gods do not exist. 

 

Meanwhile, the thirteen year old eventual second in line heir of the crown of a country which isn’t England…but is England, is on her way back to the home country from where she has been staying at a colonial outpost, when the tsunami casts the boat high up on Mau’s island. The entire crew is killed, except, as it turns out much later, the cook, who has sealed himself in a coffin boat. Ermintrude finds herself alone on the island until Mau returns. She eventually helps him recover from the ordeal of disposing of all the bodies (they are sent back to the sea as a traditional internment), and they work to learn a bit of each other’s language. 

 

Soon afterward, survivors of the disaster start showing up at the island: an aged priest, a traumatized woman who cannot feed her newborn, a young couple and his brother, an old woman with a storehouse of cultural knowledge, and eventually a few dozen others. Mau, as the sole survivor of The Nation, is now the chief, and has to figure out how to rebuild society from what is left. This is what humans do after disasters – it isn’t the chaos conventional (western) wisdom claims – they rebuild.

 

And there are a lot of things to figure out. Ermintrude has decided she hates her name and tells Mau it is Daphne. They must figure out how to feed the infant. A baby must be delivered. And beer must be carefully made so that the toxic ingredient is rendered harmless. 

 

Oh, and Daphne’s ship had a mutiny, and those mutineers have now joined forces with cannibal raiders and are headed for the island. 

 

Mau is worried that he doesn’t have a soul, because of the failed manhood ordeal. Daphne is having to figure out how to live in a completely foreign culture with expectations she struggles to understand. And both of them hear voices in their heads - the voices of Mau’s ancestors. 

 

And then there is the question of religion. Mau does not believe in the gods anymore, but the voices of the grandfathers keep insisting he find and replace the “god anchors” - white stones that had to have been brought from thousands of miles away. And most of his people are religious, so he can’t merely dismiss religion, but has to work with it in a way that strengthens the nation. 

 

The book is very philosophical throughout, exploring the relationships between faith and doubt, the problem of evil, the connection humans have with their ancestors, and the tension between tradition and science. 

 

Pratchett wasn’t a particularly religious person, describing himself as an atheist for most of his life. At around the time Nation was published, however - after he had been diagnosed with the early onset dementia that would kill him in a half dozen years - he made a statement in an interview that parallels a line in the book. 

 

“I believe in the same God that Einstein did ... And it is just possible that once you have got past all the gods that we have created with big beards and many human traits, just beyond all that on the other side of physics, there just may be the ordered structure from which everything flows."

 

This is as good of an explanation of the mystic religious tradition, Christian or otherwise. To reduce God to a parody of human traits seems wrong even by the standards of religion itself. Throughout his books, Pratchett’s relationship to religion is fascinating. In Discworld, the gods are real, just like magic is real. He doesn’t spend time hating on religion, but does - correctly - identify certain fundamentalist strains to be a significant source of evil in the world, along with greed and lust for power. But Pratchett doesn’t disrespect religion, choosing instead to explore the more interesting questions where philosophy and science intersect. 

 

Like so many of Pratchett’s books, there are bad puns, cultural references, so many ways the fictional world resembles our own. Some of the parallels are more than parallels - real life scientists from Darwin to Carl Sagan make cameos in the epilogue - and the “god anchors” and the House of the Grandfathers might be based on Nan Madol. 

 

Perhaps as a final thought, Pratchett embodies how many thoughtful Brits have a complex relationship with the Empire. Just like many of us Americans have with our own empire. Pratchett clearly loves Great Britain, even as he criticizes her faults. He is less comfortable with the legacy of the Empire, and has no illusions about its atrocities. In this book, he gently looks at the way imperialists plant flags, backed by guns, to claim what was never theirs. He also looks at cultural chauvinism, and notes that many ancient and “primitive” civilizations, in the South Pacific as well as the Americas, were actually more scientifically developed than Europe in the past. The idea that we white folks were “civilizing” and uplifting indigenous peoples was always a bunch of shit, but even more so considering what we were too blind to see or understand. 

 

To that end, Pratchett envisions an alternative timeline in the case of the Nation. Rather than being exploited or isolated, the island is able to enter a mutually beneficial relationship, thanks to the foresight of Mau and Daphne. The Nation becomes a member of the Royal Society, that famous club of scientists back in the day. As such, the Nation embraces its prime location for astronomy (something Pratchett himself was a bit of a proficient at himself), and finds a unique blend of tradition and new knowledge. 

 

Honestly, that is what I wish for my own people - and for my former religious tribe. There is that balance between tradition and science, between mysticism and empiricism. There is much of beauty in tradition that can be retained, while jettisoning its more toxic elements. As the Nation embraces a more egalitarian approach to gender, for example, it can still retain the coming-of-age rituals. It can look to the stars with scientific knowledge, while still speculating about the meaning of the gods. 

 

Our audiobook was narrated by Stephen Briggs, who did most of the later Pratchett audiobooks, and is his usual fabulous self. The voices were good, easily distinguishable from each other, and suited to the characters. The pacing and mixing were also excellent. Also recommended for Pratchett audiobooks are Nigel Planer and Celia Imrie, who each narrate some of the older books. I have not yet experienced the newest recordings, but friends who have say positive things about them. Avoid the Tony Robinson ones, though, as those are abridged editions - which totally misses the point of Terry Pratchett, where the details of each sentence are part of the fun. 

Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

Well, what to say about this book? Like most Franzen novels, it is pretty long (20 discs worth…), a bit sprawling, full of difficult and nuanced people, a good bit of psychological drama, a realistic feel, and a whole lot of things going on at once. 

 

It also hit close to home for me on several fronts, paralleling some past events in my life and also some current issues in my life. 

 

This isn’t my first experience of Franzen, but it is my first exposure to his fiction. I previously read How to Be Alone, which struck me at the time as a truly alien experience - the experience of the cranky old white liberal was a bit different from the cranky old retrogressive white people I grew up with. 

 

When I reviewed that book, in 2016, it was before Il Toupee went from being a punchline to being president to being the instigator of an attempt to overthrow democracy in America, so I still kinda identified as leaning right. (It is always interesting to re-read posts from years ago…) These days, I probably lean further to the left than I did back then, but also the American Right has taken such a strong lurch toward open fascism that I certainly have no wish to be associated with that movement. 

 

It is also interesting to read that post having read a Franzen novel. I am happy to report that some of my worries about his writing have turned out to have been groundless. For example, while Franzen is a Boomer, he isn’t the “white racist old man who votes liberal because he was on that side in the 1960s” sort at all - his grasp of bias and blind spots and the nuance of character are excellent, and it shows in his writing in the best possible way. (Particularly in this book.) Second, his writing feels natural and unpretentious, and quite effective. No “complex sentences to sound literary” stuff going on here, just good, solid plotting, characterization, and description. 

 

One thing that I did notice in one of the essays was the insistence that fiction was where our society has its discussion of nuance - where easy answers and ideology give way to complexity and humanity. And this book is full of this. 

 

I mentioned a bit in the previous post about Franzen’s unfortunate role as poster-person for the question of female and minority representation in publishing, but I thought I would expand just a bit on that in this post, because I think it does relate to the book. 

 

Franzen is white, male, grew up middle class, straight, and is a Boomer. It is entirely fair to point out that this demographic has been over-represented in fiction publishing for many decades. (And white males for centuries.) It is entirely appropriate to desire a more equal representation. Anyone who reads this blog knows that, although I do read plenty of old books, I make an effort to read books by women, minorities, and queer people as well. 

 

The problem as it relates to Franzen is that he has been targeted with the “see how much attention Franzen gets” as the example of what is wrong with publishing. I believe this is unfair. I am sure I could (if you forced me) come up with a list of undeserving white male authors who get published while others languish. But Franzen is plenty deserving - he is a really good writer - and he certainly hasn’t been the driver of the regressive movement in our culture. 

 

And yes, sometimes his writing is a bit of his generation and gender - just like contemporary writers will be recognized as being in a few decades. Alas, perfection did not peak at our present moment. All we can hope is to be part of the process of moving in the right direction. 

 

Okay, so let’s talk about the book. 

 

Crossroads is set in 1971 and 1972, mostly in Chicago, and centers around the Hildebrandt family. Throughout the book, the perspective changes from person to person as the plot unfolds (and as we learn the back stories for the older characters), with both parents and the three older kids having extended sections from their point of view. 

 

Russ Hildebrandt is an associate minister in his late 40s (hey, about my age, actually), married to Marian, with four kids. Clem is in college, Becky is about to graduate, Perry is in high school, and Judson is still just a kid. (He is the one who is just kind of there - his perspective isn’t given in this book.) 

 

But don’t let the “minister” title throw you off. Russ is an old-school hippie liberal - he marched with the Civil Rights movement, works in poverty relief with the Navajos, and was a conscientious objector during World War II - arguably the bravest time to do such a thing. 

 

Russ married Marian, a slightly older and far more experienced woman. She has a dark past which comes out during the book. 

 

Clem is off at college, discovers sex, and decides (for morally defensible reasons) to give up his draft deferment. He also has kind of a weirdly close relationship with Becky before he leaves for college - one might call it emotionally incestuous. 

 

Becky is tall, attractive, and popular, but finds herself questioning everything and ending up with a very different life than she envisioned. 

 

Perry is, well, he is perhaps the least likable character in the book. At least for me. In his defense, he has inherited some pretty heavy-duty mental illness from his mother. But he is still an amoral narcissist who gets addicted to drugs, starts selling them, and pretty much blows the family up. 

 

There are the back stories - Marian’s is the most interesting in my opinion, but Russ’s too involves estrangement from their respective families. (That’s one bit that resonated with me a lot.) And there is the subplot of Russ being forced out of Crossroads, the youth group he founded, after things go sideways on him. Rick Ambrose, the young and charming youth minister, takes it over, and the feud between Rick and Russ dominates the emotional landscape of the Hildebrandt family. 

 

That event was fascinating, not least because a lot of the book goes past before Franzen gradually reveals what happened - and does so from multiple perspectives. The core issue is that Russ is older, and not well in touch with younger people. Because of this, when faced with difficult situations, he tends to make bad decisions. From Clem’s point of view, Russ is trying too hard to be cool, and makes enemies. From Rick’s point of view, Russ was inappropriately revealing about his own marital troubles to the group. From Russ’s point of view, he switched assignments on the Navajo mission trip because he was asked to by the Navajos, something never adequately explained to anyone by Rick. The whole thing is really messy, and Franzen makes it clear that none of the perspectives is entirely correct. 

 

The fallout from this is significant. Russ loses his confidence, and feels humiliated. Marian is mostly supportive, but Russ experiences this too as humiliation. His wife has to go to bat for him. Clem has formerly worshiped his dad, but sees his image of him crumble, leading to a really vicious argument. Becky, already irritated at her dad for a number of reasons, decides he is just full of shit generally. 

 

Marian’s past comes back to haunt her too. She has never been honest with Russ about her past. Not that it helped - his Mennonite family disowned him when he married a woman who claimed to be divorced. In reality, Marian had an affair with a married man, became pregnant, got an abortion, and, in order to do so, ended up as practically the sex slave of a really creepy old man. This led to a mental breakdown and a stay in a mental institution. None of which she has ever told Russ. She ends up telling her therapist, who she is seeing on the sly, because the family can’t really afford it. 

 

Already, I have written a lot of plot, but this is just a start. About two thirds of the book take place on a single day, December 23, and can be described as a slow motion meltdown of everyone in the family in some way. The last third is primarily about the Easter break, but some threads are followed a couple of years after that. I hate to spoil too much from there.  I’ll just mention some important stuff and try not to ruin any surprises. 

 

First, and this is apparent early in the book, both Russ and Marian end up seeking out affairs. Marian with her old married flame, and Russ with a young widow at church. It is easy to see why. They are at that age when they feel old, flabby, and boring. To return to a place where someone ardently desires you, admires you, and so on, is very tempting. Franzen is correct, however, that the fantasy is usually a lot better than cold, hard reality. 

 

Second, one driver of the plot is an inheritance. Marian’s older sister (and there is a lot of unpleasant family dynamics here) takes Becky under her wing for a while, before dying of cancer. She leaves Becky her modest fortune, with the instructions to take a tour of Europe like Aunt Shirley had intended to do with her. 

 

Marian and Russ do the absolute worst thing about this they could possibly do: act like the money belongs to them, not Becky. And all the guilt trips and stuff that a teen should never have to endure. I won’t give away exactly what happens, other than to say that whatever Russ and Marian get financially, it comes at the cost of their relationship with Becky and her eventual child. Ouch. 

 

And yes, this is one bit that deeply affected me. The facts aren’t the same, of course. Nobody ever left me shit as an inheritance (and my parents will undoubtedly disinherit me.) And my estrangement with my parents didn’t become complete until my mid-40s. But there are some rhymes, so to speak.

 

Like Becky, I was expected to sacrifice for my parents. Their self-indulgence in joining Bill Gothard’s cult cost me a lot - meaningful access to a normal higher education, the ability to choose my career, and eventually acceptance of my wife and children. And, like Russ and Marian, my parents considered this sacrifice to be my duty to them, not generosity. 

 

Oh, and just like Perry gets coddled throughout the book, my sister got to go to regular college, do absolutely nothing with her degree, and get unconditional acceptance by my parents, something I have never experienced. 

 

Of course, I can tell you that I have a different personality than Becky. For one thing, I have never had the experience of popularity, so I had few actual options during my teens other than going along with whatever my parents decided for me. And also, I started out deeply religious, then deconstructed - Becky starts off atheist, then becomes increasingly Fundamentalist. I myself would likely have told my parents no if they wanted my money. But, again, never had that option. 

 

The thing about Becky’s eventual estrangement from her parents is that I can understand exactly why she ended up there. As horrible as it was to take the money, what was worst was that Russ and Marian completely disrespect Becky’s dreams, her desires, her personhood. I hesitate to say they do not understand her, because, although that is very true, the reason they do not understand her is that they do not really wish to. They have their picture of what and who she should be, and expect her to just be that person. Even though she clearly isn’t. I think Becky ends up making unwise choices, but I can see why she did - in significant part, she was proving to herself she wasn’t who her parents planned her to be. 

 

I feel a lot of the same feelings, although I didn’t choose to, for example, give up my education for parenthood. (That’s very gendered too, of course…) I am not who my parents fantasized I would be. And my wife is very definitely not the woman they fantasized I would marry. But no woman could ever have been that. And children are their own selves, not clay to be molded, or (god I hate this term!) “arrows in the quiver.” Children are not weapons to be turned against others, nor are they extensions of ourselves. They exist as themselves and do not owe us fealty. 

 

I want to circle back to the religious stuff in the book too. 

 

Franzen apparently spent his teens in a youth group like Crossroads. So did I - kind of. The early 1970s were different than the early 90s. 

 

It is nearly impossible to imagine now - particularly those of us of a certain age - but American Christianity wasn’t always a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party. It wasn’t always retrogressive culture wars, anti-LGBTQ hate, and xenophobia. 

 

There was a genuinely religious progressive movement back in the day. Russ’s church is active in poverty relief, leans liberal, preaches non-violence. And, in the context of Crossroads, is less a religious group than one practicing radical transparency and mutual vulnerability. 

 

Some of this was present in the youth group I was a part of from 8th through 10th grade. 

 

We were part of a multi-cultural church near where I lived in the San Fernando Valley. The founding pastor, the late Jack Stiles, literally built the place with his own hands back when the area still had orange groves. With time, the neighborhood changed from a white suburb to a mostly minority working-class neighborhood. Where others would have packed up and followed the white flight to the new exburbs, Pastor Stiles went with the changing demographics, embracing new music, new ideas, and multiculturalism. 

 

In the time I was there, the youth group was trying some of the things that are in Crossroads - relationships with inner city churches and drug recovery groups, service trips to the Navajo Reservation and Mexico, neighborhood block parties, and the sort of radical intimacy that was a breath of fresh air after the phony posturing that was encouraged when we went to John MacArthur’s church (and later a small clone church led by a Master’s Seminary graduate.) (Note: not everyone, obviously. Some of my most influential people were from that era.) 

 

In retrospect, that brief youth group experience affected me profoundly. The seeds of my eventual rejection of the Religious Right were planted then. Seeing others and listening to their experiences has a way of creating empathy in the right soil, and I feel that my frame of reference expanded dramatically during those years. 

 

Also in retrospect, it is interesting to see what happened later. I still have friends from that church, although a lot of us have moved away to other places. From those who still know those who stayed, I learned that the church went pretty hard toward Q Anon after Pastor Stiles died and the guy who took over for him retired. That makes me sad, because there was something real there. 

 

The youth minister who pushed the group to do all of those great things - with the personality of a Rick Ambrose - unfortunately got sideways with church leadership (in some cases, for good reason), and ended up leaving a year or so later. The sad thing to me is that he ended up getting into Christian Nationalism really heavily, went into politics, and last I saw had a minor role in the Trump administration, doing the “special privileges for christian organizations” thing. 

 

On the other hand, the worship leader for the group has remained a really good guy. We have reconnected online, and keep in touch. He, more than anyone else, made me who I am as a worship musician. I really wish it were possible to still be doing that, but the political state of American Christianity means I remain on the sidelines as a conscientious objector. 

 

Other stuff that was interesting: the Navajo trips. Russ’s formative experience was on the reservation as a young man. I too remember doing these trips, with building projects and stuff. And, like Russ, I had the unsolvable tension between doing the good you can and being in the role of white savior. While I would certainly not mistake Franzen’s perspective here with that of the Indigenous, he does capture white discomfort pretty well. That level of self-awareness isn’t always (or even often) seen in most church-based charity work. Particularly now, with the culture wars insisting that only the white perspective matters. 

 

There was another scene that really haunted me. Clem has come home for Christmas, in part to announce that he is quitting college and letting himself be drafted. He goes looking for Becky, who, as I mentioned, he has a really close relationship with, only to run into his dad, who is alone with the young widow. Clem pretty much tells him off in brutal fashion. It’s an ugly scene, and you even feel bad for Russ, who is in the wrong, because of how harsh Clem is. At one point, Clem asks Russ if he even realizes how embarrassing it is to be his son. 

 

Wow. 

 

But as much as I worry about losing the respect and love of my kids (and I think all parents do), I felt some definite emotions along with Clem. The thing is, like Clem, I used to love and admire my parents. A lot. And back in the day, just like Russ, they were good, well meaning, decent people. As I have said multiple times on this blog, if you had asked 16 year old me, I would have said they were the best parents in the world. But, well Gothard, and stuff, and I find myself 30 years later estranged from them, and unable to respect who they have chosen to become in their old age. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, and I sure didn’t expect to find myself the son of Archie Bunker and Sister Bertha-better-than-you. 

 

So, just like Clem, discovering his father is a hypocrite who is cheating on his mom, loses his respect; I, having discovered that the parents who taught me antiracist values have chosen to go down the white christian nationalism path. It’s disheartening and embarrassing. And there is nothing I can do about it. 

 

Although there is a lot of drama in the book, there is also plenty of humor. Poor Russ is in over his head when it comes to life. He was raised as a Mennonite, loses his relationship with his parents, has no idea how to fit in with normal culture, and gets blindsided by the blowup at Crossroads. He has no idea how to rekindle things with his wife, and doesn’t even know her history. He bumbles with his kids, saying the wrong things, and always making things worse. The obstacles he faces, while realistic, are a bit over the top sometimes, and you feel terrible for him, even though he isn’t that likable. 

 

Being inside Perry’s head is interesting too. The whole scene at the Christmas party where Perry gets drunk, and can’t filter what he says, is pretty hilarious. It is also about the last time that he even tries to be a decent person - by the end, his mental illness and raging cocaine addiction have made him unable to see much beyond the next hit. 

 

The best drawn character, in my opinion, is Marian. She isn’t anyone I would particularly like to be around - I don’t do well with people who are self-loathing in general, and particularly not with ones who are deeply religious. It is its own variety of narcissism, perhaps as self-medication. Her traumatic story is pretty engrossing, and definitely explains who she is and how she reacts. 

 

At the risk of spoilers, I thought that the scene near the end where she reunites with her old flame, only to realize that he doesn’t come close to matching the fantasy she had, was excellent. It didn’t feel contrived, either. I have seen enough in my law practice to realize that this is often the case. That’s the thing about fantasies - they can never really come true. If you realize that, and just enjoy the fantasy, then it can be a good thing. But expectations will disappoint us all. Never meet your heroes, and don’t expect an affair to measure up to the fantasy. 

 

In listening to the book, I thought of a whole lot more to say. It would be fun to discuss this book with others who have read it, so if you run across this post, feel free to chime in in the comments. There is a lot going on in the book, and so much to discuss. 

 

The audiobook was excellent. David Pittu was the narrator, and I thought he distinguished the voices really well. Perry in particular, with his faux English accent was spot on and unmistakable. 

 

There is an interview at the end with both Pittu and Franzen (it must have been over video, during the pandemic, judging from some audio artifacts) and that was quite enlightening. Hearing Franzen talk about the book is a real view into what he was trying to do with the book. And also the scenes he felt were a bit unrealistic (but necessary for the plot, so…) and which he felt he did best. Pittu had plenty of opinions about the book too, and it was fascinating to see where he and Franzen disagreed about how to interpret ambiguities. Franzen himself is surprised that the ambiguous ending has been interpreted multiple ways by different people. He thinks it is obvious what choice was made, but I myself could see it going either way. 

 

I would say that the audiobook is a good way to go for this book, just because it is excellently done, and adds to the experience. Franzen’s writing also lends itself to the audiobook form, because it doesn’t jump around much, and when it does, it is clear where we are in time and place. It is good old-fashioned linear writing, and I wish a few more modern authors would use it, rather than trying to be cute with the out-of-sequence narratives. 

Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West

Source of book: I own this.

 

This is one of the darkest books I have read, although it is a comedy in its own way. The level of despair and hopelessness is almost painful. This is not to imply it is not worth reading - it definitely is. 

 Those 1930s mustaches, from Groucho Marx on down...

But first, a bit about Nathanael West. West was one of those authors who was fairly unknown during his short lifetime, but gained in reputation afterward. He was part of a group of authors during the 1930s, who were all connected by friendship (and in some cases by family ties), including William Carlos Williams, Edmund Wilson, Dashiell Hammett, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Oh, and also S. J. Perelman, who married West’s sister. 

 

West is primarily known for two novels, The Day of the Locust, and this one, Miss Lonelyhearts. He also wrote screenplays, mostly for forgettable B movies. This and the slow sales of his novels meant he was in constant financial difficulty. Ironically, his novels became successful movies later. 

 

Miss Lonelyhearts was adapted to the screen three times. The first, in 1933, was a very loose adaptation, seeming to borrow the name and idea but not the plot. The 1958 version, starring Montgomory Clift, also changed a lot, including the ending. Sigh. But it sold. The 1983 TV movie version was apparently so unmemorable as to warrant a mere sentence of description. There was also a Broadway play that didn’t go anywhere, and an opera commissioned by Julliard, of all things. 

 

The book is a brief novella, consisting of a series of episodes in the life of the titular character. Miss Lonelyhearts is a man who writes a newspaper column by that name, and expected to give helpful (or at least acceptable) advice to his readers when they write in. 

 

The problem is that the letters are so incredibly sad, and the dilemmas so unsolvable, that Miss Lonelyhearts finds himself depressed and in despair. The woman who has had 12 children and is in ill health, but whose husband forces himself on her anyway. The teen whose disabled sister has been raped. The teen girl who is bullied for being ugly. And so on. This leads to a mental health crisis, and a spiral into increasing hopelessness. 

 

Miss Lonelyhearts tries different approaches to feeling better. He attempts to recapture the religion of his youth, but finds that he cannot believe in a god who allows such incredible suffering to happen to innocent people. He spends the weekend in the country with his supportive (but puzzled) girlfriend. While nature makes her feel better, he feels nothing from it. He has an affair with his boss’ wife, and then with a married reader. But he feels nothing and ends up striking out violently instead. Nothing works. 

 

At the end, with his girlfriend pregnant, he seems almost resigned to marry her and find a job that isn’t killing his soul, but the husband of the woman he slept with shows up with a gun, and…

 

Well, actually, that is the ending that the movies couldn’t handle. The result is ambiguous. Who dies? Miss Lonelyhearts? The husband? Both? Neither? We never know, but are left with the existential despair that pervades the narrative. 

 

There is a cutting, vicious, black sort of humor throughout. Everything is a bit over the top, and sometimes you want to laugh but also look away, because it is so horrible. 

 

For example, in the opening scene, Miss Lonelyhearts is trying hard to come up with a socially acceptable reply to a letter. 

 

“Life is worthwhile, for it is full of dreams and peace, gentleness and ecstacy, and faith that burns like a clear white flame on a grim dark altar.” 

 

I mean, that is both hilarious and sad at the same time. It is an exaggeration of the cheap platitudes so often offered in the face of suffering, isn’t it? ML is just better at it than average. 

 

The newspaper editor, Shrike, is a rather vulgar, unpleasant sort, but he has a weird kind of insight into the culture. Here is my favorite of his lines:

 

“The Susan Chesters, the Beatrice Fairfaxes and the Miss Lonelyhearts are the priests of twentieth-century America.” 

 

The problem for Miss Lonelyhearts, though, is that he is a priest who cannot get a response from God. He explains the problem to his sympathetic girlfriend.

 

“Perhaps I can make you understand. Let’s start from the beginning. A man is hired to give advice to the readers of a newspaper. The job is a circulation stunt and the whole staff considers it a joke. He welcomes the job, for it might lead to a gossip column, and anyway he’s tired of being a leg man. He too considers the job a joke, but after several months at it, the joke begins to escape him. He sees that the majority of the letters are profoundly humble pleas for moral and spiritual advice, that they are inarticulate expressions of genuine suffering. He also discovers that his correspondents take him seriously. For the first time in his life, he is forced to examine the values by which he lives. This examination shows him that he is the victim of the joke and not its perpetrator.”

 

I was struck by that particular line, that one has to examine the values by which one lives. I was significantly changed by the two years I spent working at Legal Aid early in my career. You start to see things, that there is a lot of undeserved suffering, often made worse by heartless political policies. It is also a lot harder to just believe that God will somehow fix all of it.  

 

Miss Lonelyhearts went home in a taxi. He lived by himself in a room that was as full as an old steel engraving. It held a bed, a table, and two chairs. The walls were bare except for an ivory Christ that hung opposite the foot of the bed. He had removed the figure from the cross to which it had been fastened, and had nailed it to the wall with large spikes. But the desired effect had not been obtained. Instead of writhing, the Christ remained calmly decorative. 

 

Dark humor for sure. Another example of that is a scene in a bar, where a bunch of guys are complaining about women writers. And the fact they all seem to have three names. It goes badly downhill from there. 

 

Then someone started a train of stories by suggesting that what they all needed was a good rape. 

 

The stories themselves are almost certainly not true, but they are the kind of “gee I wish all the uppity women got gang raped” sort of nastiness. I wish I could say this has gone away, but there seem to be men like this still. Miss Lonelyhearts doesn’t partake in this, but essentially dissociates and gets drunk. 

 

It is hard to know entirely what to make of Shrike. He appears to know that his wife is sleeping around on him, and it doesn’t really bother him. Not that he likes her much anyway, but he has no interest in dumping her either. 

 

“She’s selfish. She’s a damned selfish bitch. She was a virgin when I married her and has been fighting ever since to remain one. Sleeping with her is like sleeping with a knife in one’s groin.”

 

As far as that goes, the affairs she has are implied to stop just short of sex. Miss Lonelyhearts’ other affair is no better. He is unable to numb his pain, and instead ends up sick for a few weeks. In his delirium, he imagines being in a pawn shop. 

 

He found himself in the window of a pawnshop full of fur coats, diamond rings, watches, shotguns, fishing tackle, mandolins. All these things were the paraphernalia of suffering. A tortured high light twisted on the blade of a gift knife, a battered horn grunting with pain.

 

I’ll mention one last thing in this book. There are the occasional racial slurs, as you tend to find often in books from this era. However, West isn’t the one using them. The characters are the ones using them, and I don’t mean Miss Lonelyhearts. The boors in the bar use the n word because that is a way of making a gang rape even more humiliating. Or, the guy working the gas station out in the country says that it isn’t the hunters who drove the deer from the woods, but the Jewish people. (Insert a racial slur for Jewish people…) How this was supposed to happen, he never explains. I imagine that for West, of Jewish heritage himself, with the original surname of Weinstein, this was part of the senselessness of American society, just another example of its incurable stupidity and cruelty. 

 

Ultimately, Miss Lonelyhearts faces the same dilemma all of us compassionate sorts have had to wrestle with:

 

There are no personal solutions to what are systemic problems in our society. There is nothing I personally can do to end school shootings, for example. My vote in a blue state means little. The Supreme Court has been packed with extremists from the Federalist Society, so change seems unlikely to come in my lifetime. And God isn’t sending any thunderbolts to strike down Alito and Trump. And so West puts Miss Lonelyhearts into a surreal world, with no solutions, and nowhere to turn for answers. 

 

As a footnote to the book, West himself died young and tragically, although not, like so many of his contemporaries, of alcoholism. Rather, he and his wife were killed in a car accident the day after Fitzgerald died of a heart attack. Both were younger than I am now. 

 

I am curious if all of West’s writings are as pessimistic and dark as this one, but I do intend to read the others in my collection eventually.