Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well Set Table by Ellen Wayland-Smith (Picador, 2016)

The story of the Oneida community, a Christian utopian dream of John Humphrey Noyes, that transformed itself into a silverware empire, is a fascinating one. When Noyes, who thought that he was a prophet, and who believed in “Bible communism,” the tenets of which included free love, established his upstate New York community in the 1860s, he could not have imagined what it would become: a brand name associated with quality silverware. Given his beliefs on the role of women, he might be even more surprised to find that a descendant of his community, Ellen Wayland-Smith, would be the one to write such a definitive and detailed book about it.

Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well Set Table takes us from Noyes’ early misfit days in Vermont through to the dissolution of the company, which could not survive globalization and cheaper imports from overseas. In each year of the history, Wayland-Smith provides a detailed examination of the overriding ethos of the community, from the belief in the power of sex to communicate with God, to the squeaky-clean messaging in Oneida’s advertisements during the early twentieth century, reinforcing traditional marriage to sell spoons. As in any story told by a person with a close connection, the most interesting parts of the book are when Wayland-Smith hints at her relationship to the community. Besides her last name, which she shares with one of the founders, and her casual reference to her “great-great-grandmothers” when discussing some of the women, she also relies upon interviews conducted by her father with some of confusingly interbred offspring of some of those original members.

In 2019, I toured the Mansion House, the home in which the original families lived. Signs posted in the house warned me away from the upper floors of the grand home because it was still occupied by descendants of the Oneida community. Wayland-Smith did not encounter any such barriers, indeed grew up playing in the house during the summers. Her in-depth history reflects that literal and figurative access, but it does not diminish her objectively thorough research into this fascinating fragment of American history.

• May 30, 2020

The Removes, by Tatjana Soli (Sarah Chrichton Books, 2018)

The Removes is a fictional account of the lives of Americans – immigrant and indigenous – in the American West during and after the Civil War. While the story follows General Custer and his wife, Libbie, through Custer’s military career, from the time he meets Libbie as a heroic Union general to his death at the Battle of Little Big Horn, the most difficult and interesting narrative is the one that follows the fictional Annie Cummins. As a young girl, Native Americans kill her family and take her captive. Through uncommon grit, she survives, and the story follows her torturous journey as the tribe that takes her captive moves, as it has always done, in pursuit of buffalo, but also to outrun the invaders on their land who seek to resettle them in reservations, including Custer.

While the Native Americans of Soli’s fictional work are often brutal to Annie and other captives, the white men in the story are no better, as U.S. Army soldiers murder Native children, rape Native women, and more broadly, seek to destroy an entire civilization.

Soli uses real-life events, quotations, and even photographs of Custer and his wife throughout the story, but she makes clear that The Removes is fiction, as is the life of Annie Cummins (though based on the stories of other women taken captive during that period). If you’re looking for a story to make you feel warm and fuzzy, this is not it. If you want compelling historical fiction that gives a clear-eyed view of the ravages of war and colonialism, I can’t recommend The Removes highly enough.

• April 29, 2020

The Woman Who Married a Bear, by John Straley (Soho, 1992)

The Woman Who Married A Bear is the first of the Cecil Younger novels, written by John Straley. In the preface, the author says that he once heard of a woman who married a bear, and he believed it.

Cecil Younger is the son of a well-known judge in Alaska, but he’s a failure. He has a serious alcohol problem and a wanderlust; in this introduction to the character, he is still mourning his father, who has recently died, as well as mourning the loss of a romance and his six-month’s-long sobriety. After working for – and being fired from – the public defender’s office in Alaska as an investigator, Younger advertises his own investigation services. A Native woman living in an assisted living facility hires him to find out the truth behind her son’s death. She knows the official version – that a mentally unstable man whom her son hired to help with hunting trips that her son guided killed him – but she wants to know the truth.

This story, set in the early 1990s, has everything I want in a mystery. An imperfect investigator/detective (I’m looking at you, Tess Monaghan and, to a lesser extent, Guido Brunetti) who has little regard for the system under which justice is dispensed, even when they work within it. But Straley also brings a mythological element – the possibility that, as you may have guessed, a woman married a bear – that elevates the story to a mystical plane which I seek in fantasy and science fiction more often than in thrillers. The combination, in Straley’s hands, is potent. I look forward to digging into the second book, and hope that Younger takes his time to become a better man.

• March 27, 2020

The Devil That Danced on the Water, by Aminatta Forna (Grove Press, 2002)

I love memoirs. In the right hands, a memoir of an ordinary middle-class existence can be poignant, because each of our lives contain interesting details, and memoirists can describe them better than most.

I came across Aminatta Forna’s 2002 memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water, after finishing her novel, The Hired Man, which is now one of my favorite books. After reading Forna’s short bio in the back of the book, I wondered how she wrote so powerfully about the Balkans when she did not have a history there, and after some quick searching, came across a 2015 piece in The Guardian about her.

I’m giving more description to this journey than I usually would because Forna’s fascinating history, the child of a Scottish mother and a father from Sierra Leone, featured only in the briefest of ways in both of the novels I’d read. In Happiness, which I listened to as an audiobook and reviewed for Sound Commentary, an African character speaks about the ways in which trauma victims rebound from their experiences; in The Hired Man, which takes place in the Balkans, an endless civil war challenges the characters’ willingness to tolerate, without complaint, the disappearances of their neighbors. Clearly Forna’s own history influenced these events and the responses of her characters, but I needed to know how.

Aminatta Forna’s father, Mohamed Sorie Forna, was a British-trained doctor who returned to Sierra Leone in the late 1960s with his new family – a wife and three young children – at a time when it appeared that independence from colonial rule could bring democracy and stability to the country. Dr. Forna made it to the head of that promising movement, winning a local election under a newly formed party and becoming Minister of Finance. The ideas his daughter describes – ferreting out corruption, refusing foreign loans that were tied to exploitative practices, stabilizing the country’s economy – are so hopeful and could have made such a difference if they had been implemented. Instead, the new Prime Minister, Siaka Stevens, was a leader in the old manner who was perfectly happy to exploit and ruin his people if it meant more loot. When Dr. Forna and others protested his amassing of power, and reintroduction of corrupt practices, Stevens had them imprisoned on false charges and eventually hung for treason in a sham trial.

His daughter was only ten when her father was murdered by the state. As a journalist living in London, Aminatta Forna decided to piece together the truth of his death, a long journey that required digging into stories that many of the participants would rather keep buried, especially those who helped Stevens kill her father through bogus testimony (much of which was given after torture).

But Forna’s own childhood experiences are mixed into these tumultuous times, including the breakup of her parents’ marriage, confusing trips back and forth between Sierra Leone and the UK, including the racism she encountered as a biracial child, and the imprisonment, trial, and execution of her father, which she understood so little of at the time. Her memories of Sierra Leone as she knew it then, coupled with her experiences returning, after twenty-five years away, to a Sierra Leone that has known the most brutal of civil wars, are told so well, combining her talent for language as a novelist and her concern for the truth acquired as a journalist.

The Devil That Danced on the Water challenged me, forcing me to look at the injustice, the curves and twists of fate that led Sierra Leone down its present path, even though I wanted to look away.

• February 23, 2020

Maigret and the Old People, by Georges Simenon (1960)

In Maigret and the Old People, Georges Simenon’s multi-faceted, fascinating Inspector Maigret investigates the shooting death of a former ambassador, Count de St.-Hilaire, who was leading a quiet life and completing his memoirs. The death requires Maigret to delve into Paris’ upper crust, peopled with ambassadors, counts, and even princesses. Written in 1960, Simenon depicts a world that was aging in every sense: its inhabitants were mostly old, but the importance connected to nobility, centuries’-old wealth, and arranged marriages also feels ancient, stiff, and unreal in comparison to the rest of modern society. Indeed, Maigret, who featured in over a hundred novels and short stories by Georges Simenon, is impatient with all of this crusty upper class, from the diplomats who seek to hide inconvenient secrets about the ambassador, to the deceased’s servant, who will protect his reputation at any cost.

Shaun Whiteside’s translation, published by Penguin as part of a renaissance of all of the Inspector Maigret novels, maintains the economy of language that makes Simenon’s work so powerful. Maigret and the Old People alludes to the Maigret canon – including Maigret’s connection to French elite through his childhood – but could be a worthwhile introduction to a newcomer to Simenon.

(Edition translated by Shaun Whitehead (2018) (Penguin Classics, 2018)).

• January 27, 2020

Another One Goes Tonight, by Peter Lovesey (Soho Crime, 2017).

It’s a tricky balance to write a detective series that continues to engage its followers while being welcoming to new readers. When I began Donna Leon’s Brunetti series someplace in the middle, I was inspired to read every single preceding one (ditto with Ruth Rendell’s memorable Inspector Wexford). Without knowing their pasts, I was enchanted by Brunetti and Wexford, who, although occasionally grumpy, are intelligent, empathic people. I wanted to know how they became the detectives they are, flaws and all. Peter Lovesey’s Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond has featured in sixteen novels, and like many bookstore browsers, I happened to pick up the most recent, number 16. As with Brunetti and Wexford, I felt the weight of Diamond’s earlier, documented experiences as I read: the death of Diamond’s wife by shooting, and the complex relationship between Diamond and his colleagues. The book is interspersed with excerpts from a diary, which hint at motivations and plans for murder. When the story opens, two police officers working the night shift in Bath, Somerset, England, try unsuccessfully to ticket an old man on a motorized tricycle. A terrible car accident follows, and Diamond embarks on an unauthorized investigation of the deaths of many senior citizens who were acquainted with the old man on his trike. Lovesey cleverly drives us down a series of dead ends, even calling into question whether the victims had been murdered at all. If I knew more of Diamond’s back story, I likely would have been more charmed by his narrow-minded rudeness as he starts down the correct path towards the murderer, but without those fifteen prior novels, I found him wholly unlikeable, and his rudeness towards his inferiors distasteful. Although I must respect Lovesey’s twists and turns, I will be leaving Diamond behind.

• December 24, 2019

The Only Story, by Julian Barnes (Knopf, 2018).

During summer vacation from college, Paul is bored enough agree to his mother’s suggestion that he play tennis at the village club. He is paired with Susan MacLoed, unhappily married mother of two daughters who is breezily irreverent and entirely different from the tedious “Carolines” that Paul has met before. Their age difference (he’s nineteen, she’s forty-eight) is important, especially in their small English town in the 1960s, but, during that first summer and for a little while longer, their love supersedes considerations like societal expectations and familial obligations. Looking back, Paul struggles to tell this story, both to shape it in his own mind and to add it to the thousands of love stories that have been told before it, and he is hindered further by a struggling memory and the palpable pain its outlines bring to him. Only as we learn, piecemeal, how the story ends – and how Susan’s life unravels – we see why Paul and Susan’s romance is truly Paul’s only story. Julian Barnes is one of the few storytellers that can take a seemingly simple proposition like first love and bend it into an exploration of maturity, memory, and our endless searching for meaning in life.

• November 27, 2019

Normal People, by Sally Rooney (Hogarth, 2019).

Thankfully, one expression rarely heard anymore is “chick lit.” It was used to disparage novels thought to be written for women, in which the central question is whether the girl will get the guy, the presumption being that, if we’re going to bother to read, the story better be about romance (and, possibly, shopping). In Sally Rooney’s lovely, subdued novel, Normal People, the relationship between Marianne and Connell is central, but, as in much other fiction in which a romantic relationship is central to the story, it is about so much more.

Marianne and Connell are classmates in a small town in Sligo, but theirs is a more complicated relationship, because Connell’s mother, whose wit is so dry it is like a desert, is Marianne’s family’s housekeeper. Marianne does not fit in at their small high school: she argues with the teachers about politics, reads novels alone at lunch, and seems unconcerned with the opinions of her peers. Connell is well-liked: he plays soccer, dates the cool girls, and knows how to please without drawing too much attention to himself. But when Marianne very frankly tells Connell that she likes him, they start having sex in secret, with all the hurt feelings that always go along with that arrangement.

So begins a friendship and romance of years, told cleverly by Rooney through jumps ahead in time, from a few weeks to many months (and, in one tension-filled scene, just five minutes). While we learn some of what went on in the interim through the characters’ recollections, what is not explicitly told remains fuzzy, a fitting analogue for the way in which our memories of young adulthood begin to fade as we grow up.

Normal People begins in 2011 and ends in 2014, and it is a novel squarely set in this time, from a Kanye West album playing at a party to Marianne and Connell’s friends-with-benefits relationship that baffles the older generation. (At one point, Connell’s mother expresses shock that they are having sex but Marianne is not considered Connell’s girlfriend. My sentiments exactly, Lorraine). Rooney’s characters talk about the Gaza strip at parties, earnestly advocate for socialism in a way that only privileged college kids can, and self-consciously evaluate their own biases when it comes to gender and class. They are both intensely interested in world events but simultaneously fascinated by how their interest in world events appears to their friends. Rooney’s understated style, and her anguished depiction of the mental gymnastics Marianne and Connell go through as they develop into adults, rightfully brings the question of “will they or won’t they?” into pride of place. After all, relationships are central to all of our lives, and they enrich our experience of life. Why should it be any different in fiction?

• October 30, 2019