Collateral damage

Despite or maybe because of his self-centered ways, an Irish poet attracts female fans in The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright. After the wife falls ill, Phil McDaragh leaves home and two daughters who are left wondering what they did wrong. Pain, distance and a tolerance for abuse reverberate through three generations. The poet leaves the country, conceding his writing is nostalgic. He writes only about Ireland because “You can’t leave a place like that,” Phil said. “It’s always with you.” He travels to Italy, where it’s claimed he abused another poet, and to the United States, where he marries a student. 

Phil disappoints any who admire and support him. His daughter, Carmel, and his only granddaughter, Nell – conceived by a mother with no husband as a means to defeat loneliness – narrate most of the story, with Phil’s poetry scattered in between. Midway in the novel, Phil describes a childhood that includes animal cruelty, an abusive brother, rejection of a neighbor girl whom he once adored and a mentor’s disappointment with his decision to become a poet rather than join the priesthood. “I thought, at twelve years old, that I would never forget the look on the old priest’s face, that I would set my course by it. Now, I now the indelible thing was the glance I exchanged with the badger pup, as he waited for the fatal blow to fall. Nothing in my life, before or since, has matched that connection. It was a peak of understanding from which my whole existence, with its loves and false joys and tedious losses, has slowly fallen away.” Only Phil’s feelings matter, nothing else. Beautiful words cannot compensate for brutal ways.

Despite irregular correspondence with his family, the daughter and his only granddaughter ponder the man's legacy and words, often troubled by sweet words and descriptions of nature masking the lies and suffering of a restrictive community. “Phil's hands shaped the air in front of his rotting chest as he talked of the little Irish wren, and there as just a whisper of alcohol there, softening his tongue and wetting those mischievous, fond eyes. It was so easy to hate this man - the facts spoke for themselves - but it was still hard to dislike him. And it was devastatingly easy to love him. To flock around and keen when he died, because all the words died with him.”

The internet exposes bad behaviors that are far less tolerated decades later. Carmel searches online for an interview with her father broadcast in the early 1980s and discovers the hypocrisies of another era. The interviewer fawns, suggesting that Phil has a great understanding of women and Phil agrees. Laughing, Carmel decides that her father is "slightly creepy” and perhaps she was better off with him removed for so long from her life. Such observations contribute to breaking the family's cycle of adoration and self-abuse. 

Letting go of the past, Carmel welcomes her free-spirited daughter while acknowledging that “She had not been a good mother…. All the love in the world would not make her a good mother. It was always such a wrangle. She could not hold her daughter, and she could not let her go.”  The two women move on from past quarrels and contradictions, misunderstandings and painful memories to regard each other’s emotions and work a bit harder at getting along. 

Meaning

 

Many will give up on Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel for its odd quality, a hodgepodge of observations and facts mostly about Herman Melville, arranged in brief, chatty sentences and paragraphs. Dayswork reads like a combination of documentary and poetry, or perhaps a couple playing six degrees of separation with Melville as base.

 A husband-wife team wrote the book; he’s a novelist and she’s a poet. The title page lists his name first, though strangely, most of the text is poetic with a first-person point of view, a woman chatting back and forth with her husband about her research on Melville during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the course of her research, she discovers other writers who revere Melville’s work, whether Nathaniel Philbrick who called Moby-Dick “the one book that deserves to be called our American bible” or a David Gilbert who suggested it was “bible written in scrimshaw.” According to Bachelder and Habel, Gilbert relies on the book “When in doubt, or simply in need of something,” and "opens the book at random and reads aloud, his voice ‘hauling forth the words like a net full of squirmy fish.’”

The book analyzes Melville’s themes – time, whales, friendships and more – in haphazard ways while embracing Melville’s sentiment that “Life is so short, and so ridiculous and irrational.”

The book examines the dreamy quality of a writer’s dreams and disappointments, explaining that Melville was fascinated by the sea – endless, masterless – even while spending much of his life on land, often quarreling with his family. The authors quote from the Odyssey: “For I say there is no other thing that is worse than the sea is / for breaking a man, even though he may be a very strong one.” The researcher-protagonist ponders how Melville endured a series of hardships – the death of his oldest son at age 18 and another dead at age 35 as well as a daughter who could not bear her father’s name.

One devastating sentence, albeit from another writer, captures uneven and tragic portioning of luck in life. “‘It’s brutal,’ writes poet Robert Haas, ‘the way some lives / Seem to work and some don’t.’” And the reader understands, though wondering whether Melville would agree that literary greatness is enough. 

The characters yearn for meaning in the midst of forced isolation and the style suggests that the authors set out to play a game with words and plot even as the pandemic had a way of making everything people did seem both more notable and mundane.  At one point, a character notes. “Even a quiet person says a lot in a day, almost all of which is forgotten. Not forgotten, I suppose, but unremembered.”  

We can use more care with our words, whether meant for everyday conversation or destined for posterity.                                                          

Secrets in an unhappy marriage

What We Kept to Ourselves by Nancy Jooyoun Kim starts with a Korean American father discovering a body of a homeless black man in the yard along with a nearby note addressed to his wife who went missing a year earlier. The husband tears the note into pieces, placing them in the trash, but his daughter retrieves it, hoping it offers some clue to finding her mother.

From there, the book delves both into the couple’s background, the reasons for their estrangement and the father’s distance with his children. While John, the father, wants to bury the past, his two children work with the dead man’s daughter to unearth the connection between the dead man and a missing mother. The three adult children suspect a crime has been committed, but police questions are odd. John and the three children lie to the police and one another. 

John and his wife, Sunny were college-educated and upper middle class when they emigrated from South Korea to the United States. Both families fled the North when they were children before the war’s end in 1953, though John did not realize he would never see his mother again. The man abandons his literature studies, assuming a conservative mindset and methodically adapting. In selecting Anglicized names, John rejects his wife’s choice of Anastasia and insists that she become “Sunny.” 

The two children grow up in Pasadena, immersed in American culture. Meanwhile, Sunny, daughter of a famous artist and trained as an artist, struggles with English and finding fulfilling work. John works long hours to ensure their comfort, though memories of the war linger, and joy is missing: “there were so many… disappointments and tragedies in their lives cumulatively, how could you delineate one from the other when they overlapped like watercolors?” Alienated, she becomes increasingly homesick for Korean culture and activist professor who was her mentor. 

John purchases a gas station in South LA without consulting his wife. He works long hours, and she immediately loathes herself for criticizing the location in a black neighborhood: “It was so much easier to be angry at, to blame people we didn’t know, wasn’t it? Because being angry at people whom we knew intimately was like being angry at ourselves. We had some great stake in it.” 

Pregnant with her second child, Sunny begins labor at a bus stop and a black man comforts her until her husband arrives. Touched by the man’s kindness, she names her son Ronald after RJ, but tells her husband that the boy is named after the current president. Arranging for a sitter, she regularly returns to the bus stop and enjoying conversations with RJ who is patient and attentive. She expresses love for him, but he regards her as a sister and has other goals that include finding his estranged daughter in Alabama and researching police corruption. 

RJ and Sunny meet again later years later in a grocery store parking lot. He is homeless and she purchases him a meal, knowing they won't meet again. Sunny cannot invite RJ to her home because her husband simply would not understand. She agrees to keep a box containing RJ's research. 

Losing the friendship is hard for Sunny. Her husband has since purchased a nursery business, but the relationship does not improve, and she determines her children do not need a broken woman.  She “once believed she would literally do anything for her children, until she realized the one thing she would not do is surrender to the prolonged and certain death of living as someone else.” 

She returns to Korea, reuniting with her professor and pondering what it means to be human, deciding it was “not how well they behaved or followed the rules, because even ants in colonies could be tremendously organized and productive, but how much we could contemplate and create beauty for its own sake.” For her, creating beauty was essential for daily life and not limited to art. She concedes that her art was simply a safety net that prevented her from living a good life: “There were artists and there were people like her who viewed art as a hobbyist’s escape.”

The children mistrust one another yet work together, risking their lives while asking questions about their parents’ relationship. At one point Sunny’s and John’s daughter, Ana, determines that the entire country, not just their backyard, is a crime scene: “She had always thought of herself as an activist, but how had she also been an accomplice, complicit in a society that actively harmed, erased, killed those who challenged its mythologies of fairness, meritocracy, exceptionalism?” A librarian is most helpful while the police are not. RJ’s former co-worker urges them to give up, suggesting that people “want a story that makes the, feel safe so they can sleep at night. They’ll take any story they can, even if it’s a total lie.”  

Relationships are doomed for those who cannot be honest. In this book, more intriguing than mysterious, death ends problematic relationships – between father and son, wife and husband, father and child. Only with death can others move on. 

Free thought

In The Invisible Hour by Alice Hoffman, Ivy Jacob grows up in Boston, beautiful and wild, spoiled yet neglected. An unintended pregnancy prompts her to rebel against her parents' plan to send her away and put the child up for adoption. Instead, Ivy runs away with an acquaintance to a farming commune in rural Western Massachusetts, where she gives birth to a daughter, Mia, and marries the cult leader, Joel. The cult separates mother and daughter and Ivy’s life becomes small, hard and contained. Members of the secretive Community keep close watch on one another to prevent escapes or infractions. “Ivy had begun to think that life was made up of a series of accidents and drastic errors. The unexpected became the expected, you made the right turn or the wrong turn and all of it added up to the path you were on. Happiness was there and then gone, impossible to hold on to.” 

The commune educates the children just enough to follow Joel's directions and produce goods sold in the nearby town. Joel forbids contact with the outside world, whether chatting with strangers or reading books. While selling goods at a community farmstand, Mia discovers the library and begins removing books, including a first edition of The Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne. 

Of course, cult leaders resent and fear free thought. Ivy warns her daughter to be careful, while the librarian pities anyone living in a place that outlaws reading, musing “In a place where books were banned there could be no personal freedom, no hope, and no dreams for the future.” The librarian’s philosophy: “Turn someone into a reader and you turn the world around.” And reading enthralls Mia. “Take one risk and you’ll soon take more. It’s an addiction, or it’s bravery, it’s foolishness or it’s desperation.”

After her mother’s death, Mia understands she has lost her only ally in the world. Ivy had long warned the girl to avoid picking a fight with Joel due to his unwillingness to back down. Mia tries to fade into the background, recalling a line from Shakespeare’s Henry IV: “We have the receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible.” Invisibility was the only way to control her life and resist the Community’s rules: “Her life was in her own hands, to do with as she pleased, the one thing that belonged to her, the only thing she could claim for herself.” 

She considers running away, the night before Joel plans to brand her as punishment. “Sometimes walking away is the bravest thing you can do.” The librarian assists, delivering Mia to a close friend who lives in Concord, where Mia attends school and thrives, even as Joel continues to follow and threaten her.

The second half the book takes a strange and surreal turn as Mia travels into the past for an encounter with Nathanial Hawthorne. The writer is handsome, philosophical and ambitious, coddled by his two sisters yet he also anxious about failure, injustice, and his struggle to write. Nathanial and Mia first meet in the forest and he wonders if she she is dream, perhaps even a ghost, a witch or an angel. “In his writings, women were often principal characters, independent, with minds of their own, often truer to their emotions and to the natural world than the men around them.” 

Mia carries her copy of The Scarlet Letter, a book that Nathanial has yet to write, and she becomes both lover and muse for the author.  Mia is forthright about her journey while recognizing the danger of becoming too close, thinking “how one person could save another’s life or ruin it without meaning to. She had already said too much….” Mia returns from the past, suggesting that an unmarried Hawthorne writes his famous novel soon afterward. Such details do not mesh with Hawthorne's biography, considering that Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter in 1850. As a scholar, Mia describes a loving, supportive relationship between Hawthorne and his wife, Sophie, yet the woman does not enter Hoffman's plot. The actual couple married in 1842 after a long courtship. Oddly enough, Hawthorne spent time on a farm run by the Transcendentalists, where he met Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. He took a political job soon after marrying and, after being fired in1849, only then did he have time to write The Scarlet Letter. 

The transition between modern and 19th century settings is rough and not just because the historical issues. The ending is abrupt, rushed and confusing much like the end of a strange dream. An inscription in the first-edition cherished by Mia reinforces this notion: “To Mia, If it was a dream, it was ours alone and you were mine.” Readers are justified in wondering if everything about Mia’s life is a figment of her imagination, that she is free only because of the books she had read.

Hunt for a happy ending

Hardy Reed, nicknamed Hardly, in Dark Ride by Lou Berney, is content to slacker. Stuck in a Midwest town, he gets high with friends and watches television, living in a garage while working a minimum wage job as a scare character at an amusement park. Hardy grows up with an indifferent foster family after losing a loving and supportive mother, not an easy childhood, but he is happy. And he is also kind. While paying off a parking ticket at city hall, he notices two quiet children with signs of abuse and he refuses to rationalize the injuries and just move on. Instead, he figures out the family’s name and address to reach out to Child Protective Services. 

But the agency is overwhelmed, and Hardy keeps investigating. The more he learns, the more he knows that Pearl, 7, and Jack, 6, are enduring hellish treatment, and Hardy is frustrated by “every other person in the world who sees a problem and just wants to walk the other way.”    

He asks questions, tracks the parents and makes new friends along the way. An amateur, he also makes mistakes and becomes a target, falling for a trap. After a vicious attack, Hardy wonders why he "stupidly believed." Knowing his limitations, he reflects, “I’m the kid in the back row, moving his lips and just pretending to sing. I’m the dude with a fake badge and a toy gun. The dumbest thing you can do if you’re like me, is believe you can be more than you are. Don’t ask for anything and you won’t be disappointed. I should have listened to my foster father.”

But the mission to save two children transforms and motivates Hardy, so much so he hardly recognizes himself.  “The previous me would waffle, would let doubt wish and wash him back and forth. And then finally he’d do nothing. He’d keep on keeping on. But that’s not me anymore.” 

During a fast-paced plot over the course of a few days, Hardy finds courage, comradery, love and satisfaction, and readers must decide for themselves if Dark Ride has a happy ending.   

Breakable

Oliva Denaro in 1960 is on the cusp of adolescence, adhering to the numerous rules imposed on girls in her Sicilian village, but the rigidity only underscores the arbitrariness. She loves to draw and help her father gather snails to eat. She is a good student who enjoys competing and playing with her friend, Liliana, the daughter of a communist activist who encourages his daughter to pursue an education and dream of a career in politics. Oliva helps her parents, longs for more freedom, and chides the chickens: “You love a cage more than your freedom.”

 She understands that her limited freedoms will end with adolescence. The Unbreakable Heart of Oliva Denaro by Viola Ardone is based on a true story and Oliva worries. “My body didn’t want to mature into a woman’s but the outside world already saw me as such. I was no longer invisible: I could be watched and judged.”  

The family struggles to get by with a small patch of land. The father is lackadaisical, yet loving. The mother, a newcomer to the village as a young bride years earlier, constantly frets about what others think – and serves as a constant critic to her family, especially after Oliva's older sister was forced into an unhappy marriage. The prize for obedience is a mother’s love. 

Gossip is cruel in the small village, and Oliva concedes that words are weapons. “Even everyday words can be hurtful when they rattle around in the mouths of the ignorant.”

Her mother insists that girls must suffer for beauty, and Oliva muses: “Beauty is always in the eye of the beholder. Maybe that’s why we love eyes.”

Protecting a beautiful daughter is challenging for the poor, and a wealthier young man in the village takes a liking to Oliva, kidnapping and raping her to force a marriage. She reports the crime to authorities who are dumbfounded that the family rejects the marriage offer. An officer who is a family friend advises, “The law is for people with money.”

That incident ends Oliva's childhood and dreams of being an artist, and many readers will take issue with the book's title. The girl endures a humiliating trial, during which she feels more like defendant than victim. Activists, teachers and Liliana support her during the trial and years later, helping her bear the shame of injustice. Oliva’s mother questions a teacher's involvement in the politics of women's rights, and the woman replies, “We’re all involved in politics, one way or another…. Everything is politics: our choices, what we are willing or unwilling to do for ourselves and for others.”

Two decades later, Italy criminalizes rape marriages and honor killings. Taking no action on such matters is tacit approval. 

Oliva eventually returns to the village to teach and she holds her head high. “Home is where you hope one day to return, I think to myself, even if it has rejected you. Home is where you want to escape from, even though it taught you to walk and talk.”

Quest

The Trackers by Charles Frazier has a dual personality – the story’s beginning is slow as a young, ambivalent protagonist arrives in Dawes, Wyoming, in 1937 to paint a WPA mural for the post office. The artist, Valentine Welch, stays on the expansive ranch of John Long and his wife, Eve. John holds ambitions for a US Senate seat, though soon after Val’s arrival, Eve takes off, presumably to take up her old life of singing with traveling Western bands. John asks Val to pause the mural project and discreetly track Eve to figure out whether she is still married to a previous husband and if she plans to return. 

The search goes from Seattle to Florida to San Francisco. The three major characters are unlikable and impulsive, each oscillating between fascination and disdain for wealth and power while accusing the others of holding similar motives. The men make assumptions that hinder the search. 

Eve relishes her background, having left home as a teen, riding the rails, surviving and keeping old secrets with a network of loose connections. She knows what it's like "Being pushed out of the house as a teenager.... to be a burden to your family, more trouble than they think you're worth." 

Val questions one of her old friends who advises, “On the road one of the things you learn to do without is certainty.” John warns that Eve lies whenever it’s convenient.  “She tells whatever story suits her at that minute. I don’t know whether she convinces herself it’s the truth or not.” Still, the wealthy rancher wants her back. 

John, uncertain if Eve ever married or divorced, does not want embarrassing disclosures disrupting his Senate bid. Val travels to FL to question her threatening and ignorant in-laws. Val worries whether “Estafa County might be the bellwether of the entire country. If the Depression never ends, if everything keeps falling apart, crumbling like watching the geometry of the Pyramids dissolve grain by grain into smooth humps of sand dune, then maybe Estafa is already one step further into the future than the rest of us. Maybe its purpose is to demonstrate how foolish we’ve been to put so much effort into all the [WPA] physical work and the airy ideas of building the nation, all the swat and science and poetry and philosophy gone back to dust and mud.”

Over the course of his travels, Val falls for Eve and loses interest in the mural. “With creative work, surely doubt and disappoint are inevitable. If you have ambitions, the thing you create will always fall short of what you intended.” 

The end of the book picks up pace once Val finds Eve and gradually secures more answers. He readily agrees after Eve asks if Val wants to join her for a brief love story, despite the warning that “Every love story has an end.” 

Still, dialogue throughout is evasive and cryptic, as the characters withhold details and tell outright lies. One ranch hand points out that people regularly make up stuff, expecting others to take their words for truth. 

The characters stoically embrace a tough, lonely form of realism. When an optimistic immigrant cab driver describes his goals in life, Val goes off on a rant. “Part of me wanted to press on, to set him straight about his land of dreams, but the other part of me decided against it. After all, the nation’s big, beautiful strength had always been dreaming forward against the brutal, ugly undertow of reality, the violence in the heart of the human animal, the gluttony and greed.”    

A cowboy who works on Long’s ranch rescues Val and Eve from two violent husbands and helps preserve Eve’s new secrets. During the Depression, many had good reason to doubt whether others told the truth. Even more had no desire to hear the truth.  

Paintings capture a moment while stories shift with time.