Resilience

A child can develop resilience despite domestic violence, neglect and abandonment, poverty and inequality.

In Hang the Moon by Jeannette Walls, Sallie Kincaid is born into a comfortable life in a small, early 20th century Virginia town that is run by her father, known as the Duke, and his sheriff brother-in-law. Soon after her mother dies, the Duke marries a woman who resents Sallie, especially after she has a son who prefers music and education to fishing, hunting, risk-taking and rough-housing.  

Tough and matter-of-fact, never bitter, Sallie adores her father and accepts that he wants a strong son to resume control of the family business – a general store that organizes county moonshine sales. After the death of her mother, the Duke's second wife, all Sallie wants is to be part of a tight family. So she respects and gets along with her half-brother, Eddie. She follows her father’s orders to mentor Eddie on toughness, and the two have a wagon accident that nearly kills him. Her father sends Sallie away to live with her mother’s sister, providing minimal support. The child assumes the move is temporary, helping her aunt scrub wash to get by. 

Education is an afterthought in the poor community, though a teacher takes a liking to the intelligent girl and relies on her to help with younger students and offering advice that Sallie remembers years later: “teachers don’t know everything, but as long as they stay a step ahead of the students, the students think they do.”

The father sends for Sallie a decade later after the stepmother’s death. Teenaged Sallie is resourceful and loyal, but the father envisions one path for girls, and that is marriage. He expects her to tutor the brother, but Eddie knows far more than she does. She takes advantage of his lessons, but also worries about his values, once asking, “If you’re the smartest person in the room, is it always smart to let everyone know it?” The boy replies, “Absolutely. Nothing is more important than the truth.”  

The father marries a third time. Eddie adores the new stepmother and a baseball player friend, and Sallie longs for a “paycheck job,” one where she showed up, worked the hours, and collected a paycheck, allowing her to send money to her struggling aunt. Sallie convinces her father to let the stepmother tutor the brother and make Sallie wheelman – collecting payments from the many land tenants. 

As an adult, Sallie learns her father kept many secrets. A black tenant is another half-brother. Her aunt resorted to prostitution after losing the wash business and is mother of half-sister/cousin, a long-time servant. Her father shot her mother after a domestic dispute.  

After the Duke’s death, the stepmother quickly remarries the baseball player and agrees that Sallie invite the maternal aunt, a “fallen woman,” into the family home. Eddie and the Duke’s sister protest, and Sadie argues for forgiveness. “People who’ve never gone without find it easy to pass judgment on those who’ve struggled.” 

The Duke’s sister and her sheriff husband take control of the business, battling with the stepmother, regarded as an outsider, for guardianship over Eddie. The aunt makes the stepmother’s life unbearable, prompting the woman to flee and Eddie to commit suicide. 

Next, an older half-sister and preacher husband take control of the family business, insisting on enforcing Prohibition rules and hiring a ruthless security officer to end moonshine production. Profits plummet and tenants become desperate, testing Sallie’s conscience as wheelman. “It’s when the boss asks you to do something you know to be wrong and you do it anyways. That sort of work whittles away at the soul.” 

The sister dies of cancer and Sallie takes control of a failing enterprise, remembering old lessons as she struggles to learn who to trust. She recalls trying to save up for a gun when leaving with her impoverished aunt and a schoolmate offering to let her help his family harvest and sell chestnuts for six cents a basket. “The frost had knocked the nuts out of the trees and the ground was thick with them. Mr. Webb told us we had to make haste, seeing as how bear, deer, boar, and people would all be fighting over these chestnuts and in a couple of days they’d be gone.“ She needs thirty-four large baskets to buy the gun, but comes up a bit short.

Sallie visits the family to collect her share, fulling expecting them to avoid payment. The quiet, stern man advises that the price of chestnuts was not what he had expected, with a blight killing off trees to the north and chestnuts in short supply. The shortage means chestnut prices went up, and he pays her seven cents per basket. “Some folks say they hate to be proved wrong, but I was never happier to be mistaken.” 

Based on such experiences – at times, the novel reads as though a series of short stories – Sallie develops her own moral code, running the illegal business but discouraging lies, corruption and long-time disputes. She is quick to forgive and move on, and that policy applies to the paternal aunt who long made life difficult for Sallie, her mother and her aunt. Sallie leads the family and tenants on producing and running moonshine into nearby Roanoke. “Outlaw. Rumrunner. Bootlegger. Blockader. I don’t for one second forget that what we are doing is illegal, but legal and illegal and right and wrong don’t always line up. Ask a former slave.” She adds: “Sometimes the so-called law is nothing but the haves telling the have-nots to stay in their place.”  

She maintains the operation doesn’t involve stealing or coercion. “Just helping out the people of Claiborne County who through no fault of their own are in an awful bind. Obey the law and starve. Or break the law and eat. Not a lot to ponder there.”  

For Sallie, family is sacred, and she realizes her father “whose approval I so craved” did not feel the same. The Duke “loved being loved, but he never truly loved anyone back. He took what he wanted from people, then once he got it, cast them aside.” 

The historical novel is bittersweet, optimistic and certainly idealistic about bootlegging and a woman running a business in the 1920s. Sallie succeeds by embracing all members of her family and community, wayward in so many ways, as long as they get along and work to love and protect the whole.  

Predator or prey

 

Elinor De Witt in The White Lady by Jacqueline Winspear lives a quiet life, retired after volunteering for the resistance effort in Belgium during World War I and returning to spy for Britain during World War II. Her father leaves the family to join the war effort in the first war, and Elinor makes a silent vow that “she, her mother and sister would do all they could to arm themselves against their obvious weakness; the vulnerability of being female.” After realizing the father has perished at the front, the mother befriends a member of the resistance and allows Elinor and her older sister to observe German train movements and even sabotage the tracks.

Elinor, though younger, is more serious, agreeing to weapon training after the recruiter convinces her that a citizen can either be predator or prey. Elinor soon recognizes that “being a predator filled her with as much fear as being prey,” and the recruiter points out that such fear could keep her safe. Elinor views herself as “a predator who understood what it was to be prey” and armed “with that knowledge, she knew she would survive…” 

After World War I, the three women head to Britain where Elinor excels at her studies and wins admission to Cambridge. Her mother rejects that plan and urges her to remain close in London. The young woman’s curiosity and drive to learn are not vanquished so easily. Elinor masters multiple languages and, feeling distant from her less academically oriented mother and sister, moves to France to work as a teacher.  

Hitler’s rise spurs fears in France, and Elinor returns to Britain, teaching at the boarding school where she often struggled with teachers, including the woman who went on to become headmistress. The older woman viewed Elinor’s behavior as demonstrating resolve and resilience rather than disrespect: “our women in the making will need such qualities to see them through.”

The headmistress points out the tumultuous years of war have been hard on the young, “giving rise to an element of doubt, of unknowing that can in turn lead to undesirable words, thoughts and actions.” She warns, foreshadowing, that “Some of our pupils are the daughters of bankrupt men – and women – and I don’t’ mean bankrupt only in a financial sense…. The years after the war changed our society, and that is reflected in the attitudes and behaviors…”

Elinor is expected to set an example and support high standards that will “become the backbone of everything they do in life. Every. Single. Decision.” The headmistress concludes, “I have found that when one remains true to one’s established values, life’s squalls, storms and doldrums become easier to navigate.” 

Elinor leaves her teaching post to work as an intelligence officer in Belgium, hoping that such values will protect her and villagers who have joined the resistance. Some colleagues, though, are in league with men in the pursuit of power. They betray their country not by cooperating with Nazis, but by prioritizing their careers, adjusting war plans to support a competing group of spies without alerting the full team.

The team barely escapes after a partner orders Elinor to shoot a small child threatening to reveal the position. Elinor refuses, and subsequently endures a month in a mental hospital. She is intelligent enough to cooperate, later awarded with a comfortable cottage in a quiet village.    

Elinor learns the full story about her last day as a spy after mob family attacks a brother, her neighbor. Jim yearns to escape his criminal past, but the family has friends in high places, the same men who betrayed the Belgium villagers. Elinor befriends the mobster’s widowed sister to gather evidence that might end the harassment. 

Protagonists or antagonists – police, spies or mobsters – err by underestimating the capabilities of women. 

Weeds

 

Two women document flora of the Colosseum in Rome, one in 1854 and the other in 2018 in The Weeds by Katy Simpson Smith. The first toils for Richard Deakin, a botanist, and the second is a grad student from Mississippi, struggling to win respect from her advisor and approval to conduct similar research in the Coliseum and fairgrounds of Jackson, Mississippi. Detailing how male superiors belittle the women's observations, the book may upend assumptions about adequate feminist responses across cultures and time periods. 

The first woman, who lacks education and viable career prospects, relishes the work and suggests that definitions uphold sanity. Nuance is key as well as who decides and defines. “The point of botany is not to distinguish between value and waste. (There is no waste.) It’s to be honest about what something is. A part, a whole, a root, a bloom. Conditions, habits.” 

The women lack mentors, role models and intellectual nourishment. The woman in 1854 lost her mother to opiate addiction. The other mother provided solid memories of fortitude, and before her early death, urges her daughter: “Truth is all you have.” The graduate students mulls the female tendency to move through life by rote, automatically pursuing education, marriage, children, “Like I was hoping to prove I deserved the space I took up.”  Love is elusive for each woman. Disrespect in work relationships sows mistrust and challenges in other relationships. The first woman longs for another woman who has since married moved abroad, and the second struggles with commitments, even though her mother once advised: “Know what you want before it comes, so you can get it without being gotten.” For her, finding love is secondary, and her priority is securing research funding, a career.  Yet the mentor rejects her observations, and she wonders, “If I can no longer say true things, and am prohibited from saying false things, what … is left?” 

Both narrators remain anonymous, so often the case for women in science. The women strive for creativity, exploration and novel connections that are discouraged by superiors. The modern-day advisor could well speak for both men when publicly admonishing his graduate student: “Scientists don’t arrive at projects with conclusions in mind; we’re passive. Humble. Unresisting. That’s how you open yourself to answers.” 

The narrators give weeds equal attention in a plot interspersed with species names and descriptions. Great care is used in distinguishing common species like S. oleraceus and S. tenerrimus: “Two sides of a genus, a plant that any ordinary passerby would fail to notice, or, if noticed, would call a dandelion,” notes the woman of 2018. She insists on distinguishing the two. “the only lesson I carry from Deakin – every thing deserves its name.” 

The discomfort the limited options in responding to bias are similar in 1854 and 2018, so much so that the identity of the narrator is at times unclear: “You can’t demand love. Nor expect it, nor wait for it, nor want it. It comes on air like a scent.” The more poetic comments likely come from the woman with the broken heart: “With lyrate leaves, shaped like those instruments of old, I wonder at their purpose. If they are accompanying songs too green for us to hear. If this is a signature to mark our deafness.”

The woman of 2018 marvels that Deakin, as a man, wrote about the Colosseum’s plant life in such a charming, thoughtful way: An excerpt from Deakin's actual book, not mentioned in The Weeds: “Flowers are perhaps the most graceful and most lovely objects of the creation but are not, at any time, more delightful than when associated with what recalls to the memory time and place, and especially that of generations long passed away. They form a link in the memory, and teach us hopeful and soothing lessons, amid the sadness of bygone ages.” The graduate student finds herself wishing that she had such an advisor, not realizing that, according to the novel, Deakin died before the flora is published and the apprentice applied extensive edits before submission. Deakin published one book, and biographical information about him or a female apprentice is limited. 

Both narrators are fascinated by plants’ defensive mechanisms, especially those that might harm humans. The modern-day woman marvels: “How easy, to eliminate something living from the earth. As simple as turning up the temperature, or slipping a pill in a drink, or touching a leg, or doubting.” One woman sabotages herself, and the other sabotages her superior, slipping bits of a plant that he fails to recognize into his drink. “He hasn’t done the work, so he’s missing all the signs.” 

The Weeds has a weary tone for more reasons than one. The woman stronger in spirit is raped. And each woman senses that she documents a massive decline resulting from a changing climate, feeling an urge, “Write it down before it’s gone.”  In keeping their respective lists, the woman from the 19th century observes how vetch transformed from staple to “crop of last resort,” and the modern-day woman wistfully recalls cattails, her favorite plant as a child: “brown and whistling with red-winged blackbirds. The pond is gone; it became a football field. Could I slow my town’s unrolling ruin by naming what exists? Is that what we’re doing here with these lists, slowing death?” 

The science of botany is in decline, too, even though there are about 300,000 species. "M]ore and more, colleges and universities are getting rid of their botany programs, either by consolidating them with zoology and biology departments, or eliminating them altogether because of a lack of faculty, funds or sometimes interest," reports U.S. News & World Report. 

Some species survive development and destruction, and others go extinct. The same is true of the human spirit. Some women refuse to be broken by inequities and, one way or another, ensure their voices live on. 

Michigan State University's W. J. Beal Botanical Garden, is the oldest, continuously operated botanical garden in the United States, featuring a collection of more than 2000 plants. The photo is courtesy of MSU Today.  

Shame

 

Social media allows individuals to explore feelings about unwanted behavior in both themselves and others. 

In Society of Shame by Jane Roper, a woman’s world falls apart after she arrives home early from a work trip to discover her garage on fire, her US Senate candidate husband hurrying to dress and conceal an affair. Topping off the bad day, photos focus on a menstrual stain on Kathleen Held’s pants. The photograph goes viral, and women become outraged that a period accident captures more attention than a husband’s infidelity. Activists, including Kathleen’s young daughter, embrace the new #StopPeriodShaming movement. Kathleen, annoyed after her husband expresses concern about damage for his campaign, moves out of the house and gives her daughter permission to participate. 

Leaving home, Kathleen steals an elegant invitation from a secret Society of Shame, intended for her husband. All members, shamed over social media for various offenses, hope to restore confidence and reinvent themselves, and Kathleen wonders, “If she was a stronger, more fulfilled version of herself, maybe her marriage wouldn’t have fallen apart.” Maybe she would have published the book she had written years earlier. 

Maybe. 

Shame can be about self-evaluation and social-evaluation, according to philosopher James Laing, who urges rejection of “the widespread assumption that the other-oriented dimension of shame is best understood primarily terms of our concern with the way we appear to others.” He instead urges treating “shame as manifesting our desire primarily for interpersonal connection.” Shamefulness, he maintains, can be used for merited avoidance or rejection. 

But the society in Roper's book turns to shame for the sole purpose of winning attention by any means necessary. The society’s founder orchestrates makeovers, activities and social-media messaging to repair reputations. For Kathleen, that means leaning in to support the new cause while emerging from the most embarrassing and painful moment of her life. Reluctance transforms into reflection and passion, as Kathleen, who decides to go by Kat, realizes that women “were bound together, all of them by this strange and mysterious biological process they shared, with its inconveniences and embarrassments and messes; its power to bring relief (not pregnant!) and heartbreak (not pregnant); the thresholds it marked between child and adult, youth and middle age.”

With new clothes and haircut, Kat becomes an instant celebrity, juggling television appearances, newspaper interviews and a book contract. The society cheers, advising her to “Steer into the swerve.” A quiet member of the group urges Kathleen to enjoy the new popularity, but to “Keep telling the truth.” She finds an agent, and a major publisher insists on a ghostwriter, preferring that the author stay busy with promotion and social-media. 

Of course, social media as a tool can build and destroy reputations. Users take advantage of any connection or problem to advance agendas. Interactions are staged, publicized, with daily activities becoming less genuine. Frustrated, the husband plants a story that Kathleen never cared for the family dog, and activists attack her for living in an illegal Airbnb. Danica, organizer of the Society of Shame, stages a bizarre attack at a book announcement party for Kathleen and then expects that the two pretend to have no relationship at all. Kathleen’s daughter accuses her mom of promoting the movement “all for herself.”  

Weary, Kat frets about everyone expecting her to be "so perfect all the time," and critics abound on the internet. “Maybe it distracted them from their own faults and hypocrisies to constantly point out hers. Why confront your own mistakes when you can attack other people’s instead?” Kathleen's husband long prioritized his role as politician in their family life, and she repeats those errors, expressing disappointment that the child fails to understand “how complex it was to be a public figure and a spokesperson for a cause.” 

The plotting and charades become overwhelming and Kathleen abruptly stops obsessing over what others think. “People I don’t know or even particularly like. The thing we’re all doing here. Controlling narratives and changing conversations and getting back on top instead of trying to actually – I don’t know, grow.”  

Calm people, those who refuse to express anger and insist on playing fair, rarely attract as much public attention as do the outrage-makers. A low profile on social media can be priceless. 

The book captures the extreme language and emotions of our time, reflecting how social media can instigate divisions with no resolution intended. “Everywhere we look, we see values clashing and tempers rising, in ways that seem frenzied, aimless, and cruel,” suggests a review posted by the Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences of How to Do Things With Emotions: The Morality of Anger and Shame Across Cultures by Owen Flanagan. “At the same time, we witness political leaders and others who lack any sense of shame, even as they display carelessness with the truth and the common good.” People can control and adjust emotions, and “Flanagan makes a passionate case for tuning down anger and tuning up shame," while demonstrating "how cultures around the world can show us how to perform these emotions better.”

Forms of shame leading to revenge, anger or harm to others are destructive, the review concludes. Other forms “can protect positive values, including courage, kindness, and honesty.” As suggested by Fear of Beauty and Allure of Deceit, thoughtful and socializing shame starting at a young age, “can promote moral progress where undisciplined anger cannot.”

Anger can strengthen an opponent's resolve.

Choice

 

Machines built by humans reflect human values. In the Lives of Puppets, by T.J. Klune, some machines love and nurture, and others are corrupt and controlling. The robot characters possess super-intelligence, the ability to communicate with one another, and others even yearn for free will.

The story begins long after robots have vanquished the human race. But some advanced machines preserve and collect human artifacts, curious about the creatures and pondering their downfall. “Humanity was lost…. And lonely….Even surrounded by so many of their kind, they still searched for a connection,” sending their machines “away beyond the stars in search of that connection they so desperately wished for.” And the more creative machines loved humans. “Because for all their faults, they created us,” said Gio. “They gave us names. They loved us.” Yet humans “hated as much as they loved. They feared what they didn’t understand… And the further they went, the less control they had…. They poisoned the earth. They had time to change their ways but they didn’t.”

Gio, an advanced inventor robot known as General Innovation Operative, has set up camp in Oregon, far from the machines with fascist tendencies, along with Vic, a human; Nurse Ratched, a healing robot; and Rambo, a cleaning robot. Vic regards the robot as his friends and Gio as father, sharing an interest in inventing. After finding another ruined robot in the trash, Vic secretly makes repairs. Rambo questions why. “If we can fix what’s broken, we should always try,” explains Vic. “Because all things deserve a chance to find out what life could be when they don’t have to serve others.” 

Vic calls the repaired robot Hap, based on the remaining letters stamped on its chest. Gio, learning about the newcomer, is alarmed because he had created that type of robot long ago – a Human Annihilation Response Protocol.  A killer robot is in their midst and the other robots, conditioned to protect their human, are wary. 

But Hap’s memory has been wiped and he must gather new information. The newcomer denies having feelings. Gio explains how robots learn: “We watch. We learn. We process. It wasn’t always this way. But the more complex our minds became, the more choice we are given. Evolution by way of mimicry.” Nurse Ratched, anticipating the worst outcome, is less optimistic. “He is learning,” confirms Nurse Ratched, always anticipating the worst outcome. “Retaining information. He will use it against us.”

A trace of Vic's blood left the trash dump prompts Authority robots to invade and destroy the treehouse encampment. Gio leads the group to a hidden bunker before voluntarily leaving with the invaders for decommissioning or reprogramming. His goal is to save Vic, presumably the only human on the planet. The group watches a video message left by Gio, relaying his history with humans and his assessment of why human civilization failed. “They judged others for not looking like they did. Selfish, cruel, and worse – indifferent. No civilization can survive indifference. It spreads like a poison, turning fire into apathy, a dire infection whose cure requires mor than most are willing to give. But for all their faults, there is beauty in their dissonant design…. In a way they were God, creating us in their own image.”

Humans taught the robots to learn, but did not expect them to evolve, making their own choices and asking why. And humans thought they knew better, refusing to listen to robot warnings. “No matter what we told them – our data showing them they were on the brink with options to course correct before it was too late – they thought themselves immortal.” Every test, every simulation, robots ran “ended with the same result: for the world to survive, humans could not.”

Gio evolved from an emotionless inventor to thoughtful, caring being who lived for enjoyment and experiences, no longer interested in serving his robot master. Gio urges Hap to do the same, doing all he can to protect Vic.

Vic refuses to accept Gio's demise and leads the other robots in a quest to rescue the inventor. Along the way, they meet the Coachman, a corrupt showman who admires humans yet attempts to enslave them. “Your flaws are what make you superior, in all ways. No matter what machines can do, no matter how powerful we become, it is the absence of flaws that will be our undoing…. Our only flaw is that we’ve condemned ourselves to spend eternity mimicking that which we deemed unfit to exit.”

The Coachman is fascinated by the notion of death and abbreviated time. “There must be no greater feeling in the world than to know that this isn’t forever.” 

The group reaches the Electric City and the laboratory where Gio once again toils as a newly reprogrammed machine. To secure assistance in reaching Gio, Hap must endure a session that restores his memories. Vic protests putting Hap through such a session, and the powerful fairy machine retorts: “Let? Let? Do you own him? ….You say he was given a choice. And yet here you are, doing everything in your power to take that from him. How positively human of you.”

Hap complies, enduring memory restoration without killing Vic, and then declines a procedure that would allow him to forget his unpleasant past. 

Turns out, the most advanced machines are conflicted about humans, dismissing their weakness, selfishness and volatility while appreciating the traits of loyalty, love, hope and more. The would-be rescuer hopes to study the concept of friendship and, in particular, why Hap refuses to follow his normal protocol to kill humans. More importantly, the rescue robot seeks to thwart the Authority’s goal of eradicating free will. “Choice. The power to make our own decisions. The Authority wants it removed from all of us.”

Vic comes to realize that machines, like humans, continuously live by trial and error and that existence, even for machines, is marked by death. “Humanity – that nebulous concept he didn’t always understand – had lived and died by its creations.” The provocative book concludes that creation, good or bad, is the essence of existence. Choice is inextricably linked with morality, and mortality comes with the creations and world we choose to leave behind.

Utopia

Childhood. Religion. Nature. Love. Each have a magical, spiritual quality, the memories of which can haunt for a lifetime. 

The Magical Kingdom by Russell Banks, a story of early 20th-century Florida loosely based on true events, has a documentary feel. The book begins with a journalist rescuing a set of reel-to-reel tapes from the trash at a library in St. Cloud, all that is left of the life of Harley Mann. Two decades earlier, in 1971, Harley used a tape recorder to recount his unusual childhood. Lonely, old and unsettled, the narrator/protagonist warns that he is well practiced at masking his identity. “It’s as if I never learned to speak like the man I have in fact become, one of those White, lifelong, small-time Florida businessmen with no noticeable religious or political enthusiasm and no discernible class affiliation.” 

Early experiences shape Harley’s ability to conceal and lie. His parents, devotees of philosopher John Ruskin, an early environmentalist and socialist, leave a failing commune in Indiana, where Harley enjoyed an idyllic childhood, for another struggling one in Georgia. The father, a skilled blacksmith, dies of typhoid soon afterward in 1901, leaving a pregnant wife and two sets of twin boys. From his deathbed, the father urges them to find work at a nearby plantation and designates 12-year-old Harley head of the family. The mother dismisses that notion, discouraging discussions or questions about their future.

As the family can no longer contribute to the struggling commune, the mother signs all up as indentured servants at Rosewell Plantation, where they are exploited and become mired in debt. The plantation was “the opening wound in a wounded life.”  Harley felt “as if he had been cast out of Paradise to suffer and perish for having committed an unnamed sin.” He learns about power that came only from the owner’s “control of an unimaginable abundance of money and our lack of it and the terrible, almost unfathomable distance between the two.” 

Harley describes those seven months “as responsible in some way for my lifelong garrulousness and secrecy, my consanguinity and pessimism, my easy sociability and solitude – my paradoxical, conflicted nature.”  

Still, he feels intellectually and morally superior due to the teachings of John Rushkin and other philosophers, poets, and scientists. “[W]hen you’re a child you passively accept your parents’ and their friends’ view of reality, no matter how distorted by ideology or religion.” He observes seeds of inequality and discrimination. “When your worth as a human being is reduced solely to the value of your body’s capacity for labor, you tend to overvalue meaningless physical characteristics, like your body’s skin complexion, or hair texture or the shape of your nose and lips.” Other workers on the planation focus on racial differences, but Harley’s family feel only shame, “for we knew in our heart that those differences were meaningless.” Still, he also feels “different and distinct from everyone I knew and loved and from all the strangers in the world, for I was the child whose father’s dying words had made him the man of the house, separating him from the others, even from his mother, … charging him with a task he could never fulfill.”  

The desperate mother, though not religious, reaches out to a Shaker community in central Florida, near Narcoossee, whose leader agrees to pay off the family’s debt. The belief in celibacy forced Shakers to recruit followers and adopt children who could stay or leave at age 21. “We were not quite free,” Harley concedes, only free to leave the plantation and join the Shaker community of New Bethany. Like the Rushkinites, the Shakers supported communal living, simple lifestyles, pacifism and gender and racial equality and stood by the principles of honesty, continence, faith, hope, charity, innocence, meekness, humility, prudence, thankfulness, patience, simplicity – along with celibacy. The Shakers separated children from parents, assigning them mentors for apprenticeships, and taught that people on the outside world were untrustworthy, living “only for the moment… acquisitive and materialistic and hungry for power and sensual gratification.” 

Rescue by the Shakers was like Paradise restored. Harley promises himself “to find a way never to commit that unnamed sin again,” hoping that “the “Shakers would teach me how to name the sin and would show me all the ways to avoid committing it again.” He becomes judgmental, rigid, suggesting that “Anyone with a lifelong guilty conscience is likely to be a hair-splitting moralist, especially when it comes to other people’s behavior.” He insists that religion is not the source of his guilt. “It had to be my parents’ perfectionist utopian dream, the dream they shared with the hundreds of like-minded dreamers who surrounded them near and far, the dream that made me feel like a failure and weak and morally inadequate.” 

Logical and intelligent, Harley refuses to just accept explanations from others and describes how, like every thoughtful child, he loathed hypocrisy. “A child knows himself to be powerless and thus the most likely member of the community to end up deprived of justice and truth and equality.” From the start, he is skeptical about the elder’s motivation – is it charity, a means to secure free labor, or desire for his mother?

Living with the Shakers the children once again work six hours per day, six days a week, with the profit from their unpaid labor much greater than the cost of support. “I have sometimes asked myself if it was exploitative and unnatural and cruel to work children that way. Exploitative yes…. But it was not unnatural or cruel” as farming communities expect children to work such hours. And the Shakers’ assignments were “interesting and instructive and rarely as onerous or dangerous as work in a factory or mill would have been.”  The men and women who supervise apprenticeships are kind and patient, relaying skills and attitudes that “would prove useful to us for the rest of our lives.” 

His mother becomes a compliant, happy stranger, and Harley questions the sincerity of such converts: “if truth be told, the majority of these supplicants were seeking reliable shelter and regular meals rather than everlasting life. If the price was abstinence from sex and all other stimulants, communal living and participation in Shaker rituals and customs, along with hard manual labor in the fields…, they were willing to pay it.” 

Elder John Bennett selects Harley as a “favorite student, the one whose mind and heart he most wanted to influence.” He lends the boy books of the Western Canon, ones that other Shakers might have viewed as heretical, and teaches the boy how to bend those works with Shaker teachings. The man does discuss the materials or quiz him, “except with a casual, knowing reference to a specific notion or insight.”  A former soldier and prison guard, John advises Harley that “You either surrender your freedom to the system, or you walk away from it. There’s no middle ground…. That’s why and how I became a Shaker.”  Of course, such sentiment is true of any system. “His answer dazzled me both for its illusiveness and for its clarity. Elder John seemed to be saying that there was no essential difference between victim and victimizer, between the oppressed and the oppressor. That both were equally controlled by the system that created and maintained and enforced their relationship.” 

An intelligent child raised within a rigid system might long to flee, yet Harley understood that John “was grooming me to be his successor…. And I wanted to be that person.” Again, he feels superior, “that old familiar feeling had made me into a secretive hypocrite, for I could not let go of it. Separateness and difference – I had come to embrace the feeling… my true self. Despite its discomfort, I have tried since then to preserve it at all costs. Separateness and difference.” 

Such feelings lead Harley to break norms, and he falls in love with Sadie, who is seven years older. They carry on a furtive relationship, though he fears she may be doing the same with Elder John. Harley recognizes that if Sadie was so skillful at concealing her love affair with Harley from others, then she was capable of concealing secrets from him. “When one has taken up lying, as I had done, it’s natural to assume that everyone else is lying, too…. One cannot live a lie without believing that one is surrounded by liars and nothing is what it seems and no one is who he or she claims to be.” 

Jealous, he comes to distrust Elder John in every way, as profiteer and potential rival. He determines the man is not tempted by winning. “For him, life was a contest in which his main goal was to best the other contestants. Making a profit was just one way to do that. People like Elder John make good capitalists, effective salesmen, and successful politicians, but poor religious leaders.” Harley was convinced that serving God required that “One must abandon the belief that life is a contest.” Harley eventually turns on the Elder John, reporting him for an act of euthanasia. John leaves for Fort Myers takes off, taking up another religion, starting an import-export business and entering Florida politics. The rest of the commune, struggling without leaders and its two best workers, shuns Harley before abandoning the commune and relocating to a larger colony in New York. 

Harley lives off the land, taking on a few odd jobs, saving his money. Familiar with property histories throughout the county, he begins buying and selling land, while also accumulating the tracts that once belonged to the commune, a practice he had learned about after out-of-town Shaker leaders discover that Elder John profited from such purchases in fast-growing Florida. During the early part of the 20th century, banks were required to provide equity-free, low-interest loans enabling homeless war veterans to buy a five-acre plot and build a home. Such purchasers often failed to make payments, and speculators like John swooped in to buy the properties and resell for huge profits. 

But Harley targets the commune’s former holdings, refusing to sell for decades: “allowing the marshes and palmetto return, the buildings collapse, and mold and animals creep in “until there remained nothing out there of our once-glorious plantation but scattered heaps of weed-and-kudzu-covered wreckage sinking into the muck and the returning waters of the no-longer ditched- and-drained swamp.” 

Only a small portion of the book focuses on these adult activities.

Years later, regretting his lack of formal education, Harley ponders whether a different type of childhood might have led him to become a theologian or a philosopher. He becomes wealthy, though spends the rest of his life alone, an outsider without purpose. He regards himself once again as cast out of paradise – and the cause for the fall of one magic kingdom, a religious commune where he first fell in love, and the rise of another – Disneyland. Conflicted, he respects Shaker principles but does not believe. “What does it matter, anyhow, if my life remains a mystery to me. Who cares if Harley Mann dies without ever learning how or why his youthful delusions and follies are matched by those in his old age? Or why, in between, from youth to old age, he remained for all intents and purposes a Shaker without a Shaker family,” “a nonbelieving Believer, a Shaker pariah, a man in some perverse but fundamental way affirming the Shaker way of life by building his hut just beyond the closed and locked gate of New Bethany.”

Harley, failing to envision a development like Disney World, eventually sells the Shaker property with the condition that subdivision is forbidden for perpetuity.    

The story ends with Harley’s loss of innocence and community. Childhood, with all its potential, curiosity, and magic, is our only real utopia. 

Acting

 

Daisy is an actress, talented yet not successful, in The Eden Test by Adam Sternbergh, and her husband, Craig, aspires to write a novel. For the couple’s third anniversary, Daisy, a fixer, arranges a stay at a secluded cabin in upstate New York, hoping to improve the marriage and end Craig’s wandering eye. The program’s goals are simple: relax, swim, walk and talk – and each day, answer a short, simple question, the first being “Would you change for me?” 

At first, Craig scoffs. “That’s the whole experience? Just a bunch of questions to answer every day?” 

Of course, the questions become more challenging, especially as Daisy and Craig each keep secrets. More accurately, they lie. The book reveals Craig’s lies at the very start, when he arrives at the cabin with packed bags in the trunk, ready to let Daisy know he is leaving her and flying to Cabo with a lover. But then he procrastinates about telling Daisy his feelings, preferring to avoid the uncomfortable conversation and missing his flight. 

Daisy’s secrets are dispensed far more slowly. 

First, she knows that Craig cheats on her, but keeps that information to herself. She understands that he constantly seeks affirmation, one foot at the door, ready to leave: “Craig longed for someone impetuous, someone surprising, someone fearless. Someone who made him feel like she could help him become the better version of himself that he had long since lost faith in but that he still yearned to be.” 

Second, she knows they are become parents after long advising him that would be impossible.  

Finally, Daisy appreciates how Craig does not press Daisy about her background. All he knows is that she is from the Midwest, attended theater school on the East Coast and arrived in New York City to act. He knows nothing about her history of violent abuse, the reason she loathes surprises. If anything, Craig seems incapable of surprising her and as far as she’s concerned, that makes them a perfect match. “Each of them [is] exactly what the other person needed. For her that’s ideal. That’s love.” 

She appreciates life, freedom and the normal problems that come with Craig. She also appreciates his support for her career, regularly pressing her to pursue more prestigious acting roles in film and television. But she is desperate to remain hidden. “She always felt of herself like a pool ball, her life’s trajectory continually altered by violent collisions. She considers how she’s been forced to ricochet, changing cities, changing names, feeling fearful and helpless, just a random pool ball looking for a pocket to fall into, a dark refuge in which to feel safe.” Even so, she longs to be a fearless, carefree wife. So, she eventually accepts a small role on a popular crime show, allowing the couple to afford the expensive cabin and week of marriage therapy.

The program’s organizers’ goals for couples are simple: Seek happiness while learning what the other is willing to do for the relationship. And the organizers also warn the couple to “keep your eyes and ears open. Be prepared for any possibility. Let yourself be surprised.” Daisy has another goal – luring an abuser who stalked her for years, ending her need to hide.  

A skilled liar, Daisy presents a pleasant version of an unreliable narrator. Accustomed to working in small theaters, she is humble and hardworking. No task or role is too mundane. Never breaking character, she practices at going beyond words to communicate. “The dialogue is rote, the lines already known, so the challenge is to find surprise and spontaneity and electricity in a pause, an inflection, a glance. It’s all about the moments around the words, between them, the crackle of implied meaning, the feint and parry of unspoken intent. People call it acting, but isn’t this just what we all do every day? Play a role, be who we know someone needs us to be, recite our expected lies, all while searching for some clue as to the other person’s real meaning, their honest motivations?” 

Daisy is convinced that Craig is “Someone who wanted to be worthy of her. Who believed that she was someone who was worth being worthy of.” He had that shred of, not exactly hope but possibility, and she wanted to believe in them as a couple. She spent years resisting entrapment and exploitation and resists trying to control Craig. She understands that, for relationships, the carrot produces much better outcomes than the stick.  

Daisy strives to orchestrate every detail of the week at the cabin, am elaborate production with her and her husband as star players. She knows they are on a stage and he does not, so surprises are inevitable. Like the couple in the original Garden of Eden, like couples everywhere, Daisy and Craig are flawed, in a relationship marked by multiple lies and misdirection. But the two pass the toughest of tests, forming a bond and discovering trust that allows them to be completely honest with the other.

Readers must suspend disbelief to appreciate this book, but then how else do liars convince others that their tales might be true?

Debt

 The United States is hardly the worst nation when it come to debt per GDP. 

The United States has the world's highest GDP, yet "Major contributors to the national debt include the world's largest military budget, tax cuts (which reduce government income and rarely result in a corresponding increase in economic growth), COVID-19 relief efforts, and mandatory-but-underfunded programs such as Medicare," reports World Population Review. 

Reducing spending and raising taxes are the most common ways to reduce debt, but don't count out innovation. The United States last had a budget surplus during the Bill Clinton administration. Clinton produced balanced budgets during his last four years in office, a period of tremendous innovation with the help of the internet. . 

By the way, the countries with the least debt per GDP include Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eswatini, Burundi and Russia. 

Loss

With aging comes loss, and for Tom Kettle the protagonist of Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry, life is essentially over. Retired as a policeman, he lives alone. His wife and two adult children are dead. Friends are few, though on good days, he has visions old friends, acquaintances and maybe even some ghosts. 

Both he and his wife grew up with abuse from priests, notorious in Ireland’s Catholic orphanages. With his memory slipping, Kettle is an unreliable narrator both for himself and others. Pleasant memories, vague and dreamy like fog forming over the sea, are difficult to retain; negative ones prick deep and mean like sharp ice. The stories he recalls often seem incomplete, with additional circumstances and context shared later. He recalls his past with any activity, any trip: “Every single place… a peg with a memory hanging from it.” And when he returns to the city, “memories are lying in ambush everywhere.” 

Like memories, his surroundings serve as both reminders and distractions. “If he were looking for citizenship, it might be of this miraculous bay. Child of nowhere, he could claim rights over this, this vast vacancy queerly filled, both empty and full. He was just an old policeman with a buckled heart, but if he had known how, he would have sucked the whole vista into himself, every grain of salt and sand and sea, swallowed it whole… All this blue and different blue and greens and acres of blown white, and the mysterious golds and silvers of after-rain. He knew he knew he was in trouble, he could sense the trouble with his copper’s instinct and didn’t yet know its shape, but the bay also released him somehow, let him go for a blessed minute into some wild freedom, so that his heart and soul were both shaken and renewed, in the same moment, in the same breath.” 

After being away from the job, two colleagues from his station visit, claiming to need his help on an old case involving “the priests in the sixties.” Kettle, old and vulnerable, responds spontaneously: “The absolute suffering. There was no one to help me.” He immediately regrets using the word “me” rather than “them.” The old policeman cares about the child victims of the abusive priests, not quite realizing that the others regard him as suspect. 

The investigators seek his DNA, intent on resolving an old case, the murder of a priest known to both Kettle and his wife. But Kettle had long been part of a system that masked scandals, covered evidence, to protect reputations.     

Kettle varies between wanting to be useful and left alone, between companionship and solitude. Once the two leave, he misses his inquisitors: “he was stunned to discover, missed them like his own children, a huge ache of loss, which was not logical at all. They had a nice time together, despite everything, but that was all. But he felt it like a bereavement. He had enjoyed the talk. He had. A mystery. Their warmth and kindness. He wondered should he do more of it. Human contact. He wasn’t sure. It was a disturbing thought somehow, like he was betraying a secret, but whose?” Before long, he comes to realize that “He was less confused even if he was confused.” 

The old policeman knows who killed the priest, but divulges nothing without manipulation or lies. Instead, he drifts among multiple tragic memories, some of the experiences surely instigated and compounded by his family's history of abuse. That a murder of a priest could take precedence over the systemic abuse of dozens or hundreds of children, by “a murderer of children’s hearts,” is deplorable. And that may partly explain why, besides his loneliness and dementia, Kettle initially fails to realize the purpose behind the visits from investigators. 

The man could suffer no greater loss than that of his wife and children, and a sort of weightlessness accompanies such knowledge. “There was a fire of freedom in it. There was a curious wash of something freely called happiness.”

Enough

A place called Town proclaims itself as the world’s safest and wealthiest nation in Saha, a novel by Cho Nam-joo, translated by Jamie Chang. 

Such wealth, if true, comes at a cost. Only the most highly skilled have citizenship. Those lacking talent, along with refugees, natives and criminals, are denied citizenship, forced to live in substandard housing, enduring menial jobs with inadequate compensation. The state confiscates infants of non-citizens raising them in institutional settings and determining their roles in life. “A life of doing repetitive menial labor without any assurance of compensation was like walking down a path backward. Life was terrifying and tedious. Each time they paused to take stock of their lives, they found themselves unfailingly worse off than before,” the author explains. “Saha residents thus grew more childish, petty, and simpleminded.” 

A few flee to Saha Estates, just outside of Town and they become self-reliant, treasuring minimal freedoms that come with separation from Town. Saha residents are curious about one another but limit questions. “Most people who can’t tell you about their past aren’t bad,” explains one character. “It’s the ones that lie about it that are bad.” Most residents try to keep a low profile, but troubles emerge when Saha and Town residents mix. Saha becomes an easy target for police when any crime occurs, regardless of location or circumstances.

The state expects complete compliance, ensuring that any who disagree with its authority will vanish. Only a few people recall the Butterfly Riot thirty years earlier after a ship bearing non-citizens and those avoiding deportation went missing. Family members “who were suspicious began to question their own minds as time passed, telling themselves they were mistaken or dreaming. The desperate hope of recovery scattered in the wind like hearsay.” A quiet protest began, with folded white boats pasted on black construction paper along with the question: Where did the ship go? Rumors flared. “There was no ban on making paper boats, but the remarkable part was this: people had no trouble believing that there were paper boat bans and kindergarten teachers paying fines.” Town locates the woman who lost her brother on the ship and folded the first paper boat, promptly executing her.

“The Butterfly Riot came to serve as a metaphor for extreme chaos, anxiety, and fear” – and the state exerts total control, ending all committees and any other trace of mechanism for citizen input. Defiance and rebellion become rare, with most incidents ending with execution or suicide. 

The state deems questions, doubt, and unconventional behavior as unacceptable for those are the first steps toward change. “Nothing inspires action like curiosity, you know,” one woman concedes.

A haunting setting, odd characters who withhold their histories, lend strange beauty to this vague and fragmented prose. Of course, it’s inevitable for Town to pursue demolition of Saha. And just as inevitable, one character responds with a violent backlash directed against the façade that is Town. 

Protection

Lying is inevitable in the context of war, poverty, inequality.  The lying continues even when the context changes, wars end and years pass and comfort becomes the norm. 

Dust Child, a novel by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, describes the tough life for an Amerasian child born during the Vietnam War and abandoned by family members. 

The book follows three sets of characters, seemingly unconnected, during the war and its aftermath. The characters generally depend on lies and imagination to live with their choices, managing the shame and guilt and protecting other loved ones. 

Phong is an Amerasian child, born during the war and abandoned at an orphanage and later scorned by society and denied schooling due to his racial background. The taunts are even worse for him because his father was African American. The nun who cares for the boy dies and he lives on the streets, where he is soon caught for stealing and sent to a camp for reeducation. After serving time, a man befriends him, offering to help him apply for immigration to the United States, taking advantage of the Homecoming Act, signed in 1987 by then President Ronald Reagan. The catch: The man expects Phong to lie, claiming that he and his wife are close relatives so that they can join him. Immigration authorities discover the scheme, blocking Phong from reapplication. Years later, another man suggests that Phong and his family try again, and offers to assist in exchange for Phong’s life savings. Once again, the plan fails and Phong is resigned to remaining in Vietnam. 

Far away two sisters toil in their family’s rice fields in 1969, trying to help their parents pay off creditors and prevent loss of the family farm. A friend from school visits the village, wealthy and explaining  that she works for an American corporation with offices in Saigon. Once alone with her friends, she admits that she works in a bar and is paid to drink “tea” with American soldiers. The sisters, Trang and Quỳnh, follow the friend to the city, starting work in the club with good intentions after the manager assures the women that they can set firm ground rules. The sisters lie to their parents – planning to work just long enough to pay of the family debts. But the allure of making extra money is strong, and the job soon entails more than dancing, flirting and drinking.

Trang falls in love with a US soldier who sets her up in an apartment while failing to disclose that he has a fiancé waiting at home. Once she becomes pregnant, he abandons her and leaves the country without a good-bye. The sister, Quỳnh, works longer hours to cover expenses and arrange for the infant’s adoption. 

Dan is a Vietnam veteran who flew helicopter missions during the war and suffers from PTSD. Upon returning home, he convinces his fiancé that he simply evacuated injured soldiers and did not take part in attacks. He also keeps his affair with a Vietnamese woman and a subsequent pregnancy secret.  Linda, with the help of friends in Seattle’s Vietnamese community, arranges a trip to the country in 2016, expecting her husband to confront his fears.

Of course, the three sets were connected in the past, and reconnect again, in some obvious ways and one that is unexpected. Dan does not find his daughter, but he finds family.

The surviving sister reflects on her life along with the lies she still tells. “She had tried to live an honest life, but the war had given her no choice. It had forced her to make up a version of herself that was acceptable to others. In a way, making up stories had been the basis of her survival and her success. Her lies had enabled her parents to go on living, and now her lies would protect her sons, their families, her business, and herself.”  

The biggest lie remains a secret. Still the survivors who created those lies confront the truth on their own and forgive, and that provides a small measure of comfort and peace. 

About 100,000 Amerasian children were born during the war, a result of relationships between US soldiers and Vietnamese women. Many, like Phong, were left at orphanages, and most did not know the identity of their fathers, according to Smithsonian Magazine. Some fathers did not know about their children’s existence and others, like Dan, left the children behind anyway. Worries about a massacre of the children and their mothers went unfounded, but most Amerasians were banned from schools, destined to remain uneducated and unskilled. 

Neither country considered the children a priority, according to Smithsonian Magazine: “'The care and welfare of these unfortunate children...has never been and is not now considered an area of government responsibility,' the U.S. Defense Department said in a 1970 statement. 'Our society does not need these bad elements,' the Vietnamese director of social welfare in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) said a decade later.” 

Vietnam and the United States were enemy countries, preventing travel and relationships. Only a small percentage of Amerasians managed to locate their fathers or other family members despite DNA tests, legal aid groups and ample advertising.

Lying and time can protect old secrets. 

Shortcut

 

A dreamy, unreal quality pervades Grace Li's Portrait of a Thief – the story of five college students who meet with a Chinese executive who asks them to “take back what the West has stole,” namely team up to target five museums. The goal? Steal five zodiac sculptures that once adorned a fountain at the Old Summer Palace in Beijing and return them to China. In turn, China’s youngest billionaire will pay them $10 million each. 

The planning is absurd – movies for research, bold encounters with museum staff? The students abandon classes at prestigious schools – flying to Europe and staying in the same hotel, breaking into museums in Copenhagen and Paris while ignoring a host of security and technology challenges and regularly congratulating themselves on their brilliance – to break into two museums.  

The book relies on every possible definition of dream for an extended metaphor – odd, vague scenes experienced during sleep; lack of awareness and logic while awake; aspirations and achievements; products of imagination or history that might have been. And of course, opportunities associated with the American Dream. The novel’s writing style plays with meanings of “dream,” mixing precision language to describe mission goals with fast fragments to atmosphere and emotions.    

The children of Chinese immigrants are talented, beautiful – adept at masking feelings and conditioned to believe they are special, risking comfortable lives to break the law in five countries, or as one says, “breaking everything he had been taught not to do.” The students – artist/art history major at Harvard, pre-med student at UCLA, driver and mechanical engineering student at Duke, a public policy student at Duke and a Google software engineer who dropped out of MIT – are also moody, fretful about the trajectory of their lives without the promised $10 million. They fear being mediocre, “anything less than exceptional,” as much as failure. Failure is not an option, not with “so many people who were counting on them to be more than they were.” 

Ready to leave college, the students are conflicted about their place in the world and the appropriate target of their allegiance. All five are fascinated by Chinese culture and morose about family choices that disrupted connections with China. “All parents leave their own scars,” notes Irene. “We’re the ones who have to heal from them.” Nearing the end of college studies, the others remain uncertain about choices and place in society. “Hers was the story of every small town, every immigrant family trying to hold on to the American Dream,” muses Lily. “She had spent her whole life getting asked where she was from and trying to make sense of the answer…. She only knew that, growing up, neither China nor America felt like it was hers.”

Lily describes the struggle that many young adults feel. “It feels like home shouldn’t have to be this complicated. If you were missing something, but you could not even name what it was – did it count? Did it matter?”

The book takes liberties with the background of the zodiac heads. “The fountain heads, designed by the Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766) for the Qianlong emperor, have assumed a special, and highly sensitive, place in China’s cultural heritage,” reports Antiques Trade Gazette. “Although they amount to just 12 of the estimated million-plus items that were removed after French and British forces sacked the Yuanmingyuan in the final act of the Second Opium War (October 1860), they have become totemic of China’s century of humiliation at the hands of imperial Western powers.”

Five heads remain missing, whereabouts unknown. 

The students chatter about power, history and righting past wrongs regarding the exchange of art among countries, but they are pawns. Their primary goal is collecting their share of the $50 million, a shortcut to the American Dream and hopes for lives more comfortable and free. 

Friendship

 

 

Friendships can move from lightness to darkness with age, experiences and the blunt truth, as suggested by a novel of two girls growing up in Karachi – Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie.

The teens relish their friendship, “the certainty that whatever happened in the world you would always have this one person, this North Star, this rock, this alter ego who knew your every flaw down to your atoms and who still, despite it all, chose to stand with you and by you through everything that the world had yet to throw at you, every heartache, every disappointment, every moment of darkness.” 

One family is adept at navigating a corrupt culture and the other yearns for freedom - and years later, a friend can become a source of darkness.

Maryam is wealthy and assertive, confident she will bypass her father to inherit her grandfather’s leather company, a rough business with workers and competitors brutalized into compliance. Zahra and her family are less wealthy though content and intellectual. Zahra grows up respecting her parents’ integrity. Her father hosts a television show about cricket, and much like “journalist friends who had spent years navigating a path between conscience and consequence,” resists a demand from the Zia administration’ to credit the dictator for one victor. Dictatorship and everyday violence “had shrunk all their lives into private spaces,” she muses. Zia dies soon afterward, and the girls celebrate the new government led by Benazir Bhutto. Still, a new government does not eliminate corruption and controls from Pakistan. 

The wealthy are accustomed to using and scapegoating others. Maryam demands that her driver let her operate the vehicle without a license. The grandfather warns Maryam that he wants her to be fearless, but “not like every other soft, silly girl,” “spoiled and reckless.” The grandfather fires the driver and “She recognized, but couldn’t change, the awfulness of being less upset about Abu Bakr’s fate than she was by the tone of disgust in her grandfather’s voice when he told her she had ceased to be exceptional.” 

Not long afterward, the two girls attend a party and Zahra jumps into a car with older boys, including one admired by Maryam. Maryam follows, and a few hours of terror ensue until Maryam commands the boys take them home. The school expels Maryam's friend, and neither girl corrects the parents or schoolmistress about Zahra’s role as instigator.

Once again, the grandfather expresses deep disappointment, asking what kind of person Maryam is. She responds: “The kind of person you’ve taught me to be.” The grandfather dismisses the family. “I thought I could make you want you need to be. But you’re just a girl, aren’t you? You’ll always be a girl. And there’ll always be Jimmys out there who’ll see through everything else and know that. Perhaps I should be grateful to him for making that so clear.” Maryam insists that she has more to learn from her grandfather and he retorts: “You’re learning all the wrong things. Self-absorbed and willful. No moral center. You’ll never be who I need you to be.” Maryam’s parents send her to boarding school in England, and the two women reconnect, attending college in London and launching successful careers.

In forming friendships, children overlook class, race, and sometimes even values. Neither woman remembers what triggered their first connection. “The exact origins of their friendship were lost in a past that stretched back beyond memory.” Shared interests, admiration, convenience connect children. Adults connect via values.

With age comes assumptions and even secrets and lies. “Deep down they both knew that no one had the kind of friendship when they were forty that the two of them had at fourteen.” The two women have contrasting careers and personal lives. Maryam is a venture capitalist and founder of founder of a tech image-sharing firm that involves facial recognition and privacy concerns. Zahra is a civil rights activist who worries about Britain’s complacency over democracy: “things that would set off alarm bells in countries with histories of authoritarian rule are allowed to slide by here.” She is capable of whipping up protests but worries about modern motivation. “The tens of thousands, maybe more, who showed up at rallies had less and less the air of people determined to bend the arc of history toward justice these days, and more and more that of those in need of a support group.” Zahra has little patience with despair, especially after growing up with conflict, viewing the feeling as a luxury and self-indulgence.   

Zahra fights for rights of strangers, yet her personal life is mostly limited to Maryam and her family. Maryam, left-wing when profitable, fiercely protects those close to her and has little sympathy for strangers.  “The world was exactly as her grandfather had always taught her it was,” Maryam reflects. “Terrible and brutal, unforgiving. But she also knew the truth that followed on from that, which he had failed to understand: Hold close the ones you love, protect them. There is no other source of light.”

The two never fully talk about the terrifying night in Karachi, and too many assumptions are made, too many accusations withheld. “The problem with childhood friendship was that you could sometimes fail to see the adult in front of you because you had such a fixed idea of the teenager she once was, and other times you were unable to see the teenager still alive and kicking within the adult.” Zahra comes to realize that “perhaps friendships weren’t all about what you said to each other but also about what you didn’t say.” 

The friendship reaches a breaking point after Maryam uses her software, takes revenge on Jimmy years later, prompting his expulsion from Britain, and Zahra feels compelled to resign from her prestigious position. An ugly rupture might have been avoided had the two women talked more about that night. 

Zahra may need the friendship more. While appreciating her home as a quiet refuge, “she found herself imagining a day – not soon, but eventually – when loneliness would stalk indoors and refuse to be evicted.”

A lifelong friend – a person who understands your background and culture, your dreams and fears and history – is a treasure.  Yet full adult friendships require a secure foundation of values. Friends need not always agree with friends, suggests Nir Eyal in Psychology Today  “Values are not synonymous with viewpoints. You can maintain friendships with people who don’t share your politics, for instance—as long as you both share the values of seeking understanding, keeping an open mind, and arguing constructively.”

Though friendships are essential, many older people struggle starting new ones. Cultivate and invest in relationships, including periodic assessments to avoid treacherous patterns. Friendships fade, suggests Jennifer Senior in a beautiful essay for The Atlantic, concluding that it's actually unusual for such relationships to last.

Friends shape how we live and even think, and deliberate choices are in order.

Image courtesy of "The Rules of Friendship" by Michael Argyle and Monica Henderson. 

Less is more

 

Economics, “the study of how people allocate scarce resources for production, distribution, and consumption, both individually and collectively,” has been described as dry, boring and even dismal. Martin Riker describes one sleepless night for a young economics professor, scheduled to deliver a guest lecture the following day. Mimicking patterns of insomnia, The Guest Lecture describes a mother's angst over partisan politics, climate change, personal identity crises and “how my daughter’s generation will never know the sense of well-being my own took for granted, the limitless security we felt but never realized we were feeling.” Abigail lays awake in her hotel bed, imagining a conversation with the subject of her talk, John Maynard Keynes, and his essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.”

Published a year after the start of the Great Depression, in 1930, the essay imagined a better world for children over the next century. Optimistic and pragmatic, Keynes urged understanding the difference between wants and needs as well as absolute needs and relative needs. Prioritizing needs would allow more free time for education, art and other endeavors. “Leisure” may sound “like another word for doom, for failure” and yet “the belief that not working is something everyone should want,” Abigail muses. “Scarcity would be eradicated, rich countries would share with poorer countries, and before you knew it, everyone would be fed, housed, clothed… The whole world would be finished with ‘just a job.’” People would judge their lives, “not in dollars and possessions, but in how our time is spent.” Keynes critiques Abigail’s speech and life, urging conciseness: “You were born into an era of overload. Leaving things out is the great unmastered art form of your age.” 

Keynes had flaws, as conceded by Abigail, including anti-Semitism. But a key failing of his essay might be his failure to recognize our shortcomings – the distractions of television and the internet, the reckless consumerism and endless growth that contribute to environmental degradation, income inequality, erosion of democracy, widespread failure to achieve contentment and a culture that “churns out citizens full of antagonism toward itself.”  She mourns how “the imagination, wellspring of optimism and possibility has turned on itself, and now spends all its time obsessing and making everything worse.” She blames politics for the despair, noting that while the world always had challenges, the US quickly transformed from optimism and hope under Obama to pessimism and anger under Trump. She regards ideology as a set of assumptions that sooth fears. “Ideology isn’t a bad thing… but failure to recognize ideology for what it is, to bear in mind that society and culture are things we made up and can remake and improve, keeps us from changing those aspects of our lives that could be better…. Like the story that we’re all going to get our acts together on climate change before it’s too late. That is one I personally need in order to get through the day…” 

Other people determine our success. After failing to secure tenure, Abigail questions every aspect of her identity and inability to reveal her essential self: “That for too long you’d held in your head many self-romanticizing notions about your position as an outsider, notions that allowed you to feel sure of yourself and important to yourself as long as you were never forced to share them – the notions – with anyone else? That as long as you didn’t share this side of yourself with anyone else, it was all unadulterated potential, never forced to perform, never exposed to judgment.”  The realization comes on the heels of hearing a radio show that posed the question “How many Black friends do you have?” Abigail decides that she has no friends at all. She feels alienated, incapable of starting conversations even when dropping her child off at kindergarten: “The other parents all lined up talking like they already knew each other, like maybe there’d been an orientation or parent party I’d missed.” 

Mistakes made while young, ones that should not have mattered then or years later, haunt her nights. She cringes over her interactions with others: “you are uniquely ill-equipped to convey to the world what you care about or what you want to say. You know these things in your mind, or think you know them, and you are capable of saying these things or writing them, but the moment you do, you immediately doubt them. You are capable of being many selves but the moment you commit to one, it becomes an imposter, a dummy to dress up and roll out into the world in your place." She hates the dummy and wonders how other people learned to be so “public.” She frets about the fear of “not having lived,” which is really “a terrible series of tortures with no redeeming value.” She hides because the “person who puts herself out there is always the accused” and prefers instead “to live in a juvenile state of perpetual expectation.” 

So Abigail is left alone with her imagination, “the place where you ought to feel most safe and free, that you are in fact most weighed down by doubt and fear.” She tries to tame her racing thoughts. Sometimes “ideas spill out and for the most part make sense. A single thought doesn’t stick in the same spot but moves on to make room for a new on.” 

Abigail envies the Bloomsbury group, Keynes’ talented circle of friends including Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell and T.S. Eliot. “So many amazing people and the different ways they’ve contributed to humanity and all along all I’ve wanted was to be one of them.” Still, Abigail is grateful for her husband and child. “Having a child doesn’t make you better than other people, but it did make me better than myself,” she notes. “Being absorbed with someone other than yourself must be better than being absorbed with only yourself.” And those experiences can provide training for meeting and understanding others: Step back, learn about yourself by assessing how others speak to you. “From this you can tell not who they are, but who they think you are.” We must remember the same when addressing others. Enjoy the process and do not count on success: “whether or not the world wants what you are good at doing at precisely the moment when you are offering it is anybody’s guess…. If you’re going to bet on yourself, bet irrelevance.” 

The book ends like a dream, vague, unsubstantial, not entirely satisfying, much like society’s general discontent. We fail to wrestle control over our economic system, with inadequate demands and failure of imagination. “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” concludes that the world, each life in it, could be very different – by confronting new ideas with a good attitude, extracting bad habits and refusing to live by rote while applying imagination to envision potential. We are but guests in this world who might do better by imagining conversations with children of the next century.