Review: Rules for Visiting

Rules for Visiting
By Jessica F. Kane
Literary fiction
May 2019
Penguin Press
ISBN: 978-0525559221

Once again, the truth that a book finds you just when you need it was shown to me when I read Jessica F. Kane's Rules for Visiting. A story of friendship, family and reaching out, plus tree lore, what a lovely gift.

May is a 40-year-old who has been content in her job, working on a grounds crew at a university. Not being married and living in her childhood home, while her father lives in a self-contained apartment downstairs, has been the way she gets through her days.

Midway through my fortieth year, I reached a point where the balance of the past and all it contained seemed to outweigh the future, my mind so full of things said and not said, done and undone, I no longer understood how to move forward.

It is not an accident that she works with plants. The putting down of roots is central to this novel, and to this character.

But when I moved back to Anneville, something changed. Suddenly I wanted a whole garden. Years later it was pointed out to me that guardian and garden share a root meaning “safety, enclosure.”

There is something about gardening that May doesn't yet know that she knows. But she realizes it later on:

Why do I like gardening? Because I worry I’ve inherited a certain hopelessness, a potentially fatal lack of interest, that I’m diseased with reserve. Making a garden runs counter to all that. You can’t garden without thinking about the future.

An unexpected award of a month off at work, as a reward, at first throws May. But as someone who loves to investigate the roots of words as much as she understands and cares the roots of plants, May decides to do the unexpected. She will spend time with her far-flung friends, if they will have her. 

Before the odyssey begins, Kane is an assured enough storyteller that we have a few short, yet meandering-seeming, chapters on May's life. As with all assured storytellers, there are good reasons for letting us know what we do. This format also serves the purpose of easing into Kane's calm narrative style. There is the sense throughout the book that our comfort matters.

This is an interesting contrast to the way May feels. She isn't quite prickly, but she has spent so much time by herself that she doesn't want to impose on others. She is not sure how people act around each other. How did the neighbors make friends so easily? How do people get along with each other?

Love stands apart; love lets you come to it. This isn’t wrong, exactly, but I wanted to learn how to stand closer.

This is what leads to her decision to travel to see her friends. After all:

Consider the word visit. It’s from the Old French visiter, which meant “to inspect, examine, or afflict.” You can visit a neighbor or a friend, but so can plagues and pestilence.

What a wonderful idea to explore in these days of staying apart so that we can support a common goal.

The first friend May visits is a super-busy mother who lives on social media and assuredly an acolyte of Martha Stewart and Joanna Gaines. She is stressed and the visit is slightly strained. She remains good-hearted, but there is not the connection that May seeks.

The next friend is even more distant, and the visit is rather short.

The third friend has a lot of adjustments to her own life going on, but it's obvious she and May want to remain friends even if they don't have the luxury of friendship without time constraints. That was something May sought in deciding to make her pilgrimage, thinking of the visits to country estates that Jane Austen characters make, the friends who stay for a fortnight. Indeed, the hashtag #fortnightfriend arises out of a local story about May's reward that embarasses her, and which she does not fall into taking up.

The fourth friend, living in London, brings it all together. This portion of the book was balm and came at a time when May is coming to better understand the wonderful value in visiting old friends, but also how soothing it can be to know that you care about those around you, and that they care for you.

It's not just people that are around us. Kane also writes with great admiration for the trees:

It seems the trees’ plight is to be always underappreciated by humans while working the hardest of any plant on earth for them. We cut them down, we poison them, we introduce disease and destructive pests. But we also plant them when someone is born, we plant them when someone dies. We want them to measure and commemorate our lives, even as the way we live hurts them.

©2020 All Rights Reserved TheLitForum.com Reviews and reprinted by permission

Review: 'The Night Watchman'

The Night Watchman
By Louise Erdrich
Literary Fiction
March 2020
Harper
ISBN: 978-0062671189

Capturing in words someone important to us, memorializing acts, thoughts and feelings, keeping alive that which inspires us about the past and the present -- all of these ideas are essential parts of why people tell stories. Louise Erdrich demonstrates all of these in her new novel, The Night Watchman. It is both a testament to her grandfather, who inspired the night watchman in the story, and a clear call that what her grandfather fought for is something that needs to be fought for today.

Aunishenaubay Patrick Gorneau, Erdrich's grandfather and chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Advisory Committee during the 1950s, is the inspiration for Thomas Wazhushk. He, too, is a tribal chairman and he, too, works as a night watchman at a jewel bearing plant that has created work for many tribal members. It is a factory where jewel bearings are created for watches, and required close eye work and delicate hands.

In between making his rounds, Thomas writes letters and deconstructs the meaning of a congressional bill to terminate his tribe. It will mean everyone will be removed from their homes, the U.S. government will reclaim the land, there will be no tribal services. The tribe will cease to exist, even though the people will be cast adrift.

In between episodes that recount the battle to take on the federal government, the daily lives of several of Thomas's relatives are chronicled. Whether it's Patrice, formerly known as Pixie, searching in the big city for her lost sister, or the white math teacher and boxing coach who clearly adores her, whether it's Thomas's elderly father Bibbon remembering stories from his youth or Wood Mountain training as a boxer and coming into his own as a man, these stories have depth, breadth and a lot of heart.

Even the characters who have made errors or suffered tragedies are good to know and to have a chance to care about. Thomas's childhood friend, Roderick, who has become a ghost, still has discoveries to make. Patrice's co-workers Valentine and Doris make discoveries about themselves while wondering about how well to get to know boys. In an expansion of why a Mormon senator pushed for tribal termination, two young Mormon missionaries have a lot to learn about what they have been taught, including how they were taught to think of Indians and their religion. The senator in the novel, Arthur V. Watkins, is real and his legacy includes both terminating tribes and standing up to Joseph McCarthy.

Any of these stories could have become a full-length novel by themselves. That they are woven together to tell why the termination battle was, and is, so important makes this book even more heartfelt. Or, as Thomas thinks to himself while spending time with his aged father:

It seemed to Thomas, as they sat in the sinking radiancer, shucking bits of shell from the meats, dropping the nuts into a dishpan, that he should hold on this.

Sharing the little that people have with each other, letting go of grudges, marveling at visitations of owls and other creatures, the joy of observing a leaf or creek or sleeping bear in varying seasons -- these are the heart of The Night Watchman. And sharing these stories shows why the fight against the termination of one's tribe is a fight to retain one's deepest sense of self. It is a fight against those who invaded and took the land, who would force Indians to assimilate and forget everything about themselves. It is a fight against breaking agreements, treaties, that were signed to last "as long as the grass grows and the rivers flow".

It is a fight that continues to this day. Just last month, the Trump administration rescinded the tribal status of the Mashpee Wampanoag people. The tribe planned to build a casino on its reservation land that would compete with casinos with ties to Trump, who famously has fought against tribal casinos since the 1990s.

The layers to the title of the novel show how carefully Erdrich built her book. Thomas watches over his people even as he watches over the factory, which helps manufacture watches and gives his people jobs that they don't have to go to the big city to do. They can stay at home, where their ancestors can watch over them, and where they can watch over the land. Or, as Wood Mountain describes it:

"I feel they're with me, those way-back people. I never talk about it. But they're all around us. I could never leave this place."

Thomas is named Wazhushkag, the muskrat. As Erdrich notes:

Although the wazhushkag were numerous and ordinary, they were also crucial. In the beginning, after the great flood, it was a muskrat who had managed to remake the earth. In that way, as it turned out, Thomas was perfectly named.

The Night Watchman also represents how wise it can be to listen to that inner voice. In an afterward, Erdrich confesses that she couldn't get rolling on any new writing projects and feared she would never write again. "Hours later I was jolted awake by some mysterious flow of information: go back to the beginning." And so she read her grandfather's letters and so we all have this beautiful novel that pays tribute to him, to the way he and his people lived every day and to the way they rose to the occasion when life came at them full speed.

©2019 All Rights Reserved TheLitForum.com Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'Conversations with Mark Frost'

Conversations with Mark Frost: Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues, and the Education of a Writer
By David Bushman
Interviews
March 2020
Fayetteville Mafia Press
ISBN: 978-1949024104

Compassion for human frailties, wisdom to respect souls curious about how the universe works in ways great and small, and a talent for creating narrative that brings clarity to visions are among the things that Mark Frost can do, and do well. In wide-ranging interviews conducted by David Bushman, Frost talks about ideas, visions and getting the work done in the book Conversations with Mark Frost.

Frost is the co-creator, with David Lynch, of Twin Peaks. And his contribution to that landmark series is an important part of this book. But Frost has been involved with other projects, and is currently working on his writing. Those also are covered in this comprehensive compilation of several interviews.

The book is arranged chronologically, starting with Frost's childhood as the son of a theater artistic director and actor -- Warren Frost, who played Dr. Hayward on Twin Peaks. In many ways, Frost's life is tied to television. He was born in New York City while his father was working on the Philco Playhouse. As a child, he appeared on an early episode of Art Linklatter's show interviewing kids. Frost's reaction to the business of being coached and knowing the difference between fake and real, even then, is something seen throughout his career.

Readers mainly interested in the television aspect of Mark Frost's career will be delighted with the conversations about two of the seminal shows he worked on, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood and Hill Street Blues. Of his time working on the lightning crew and other production tasks for Fred Rogers, Frost notes:

Fred was a singular man. He’s the kind of figure or role model we need to look to at times like this — somebody with profound decency, honesty and strength of character, his kindness to people. 

While working on the PBS show, Frost met Charles Haid and Steven Bochco, who became important in the next phase of his career. In addition to talking about the studio writing process, Frost describes some of the characters he wrote about most and the development of deepening characterization while writing within the strictures of a network television show. This section provides a good deconstruction of what we watch, and an introduction as to how Frost could work within those confines while laying down a narrative to David Lynch's visions in Twin Peaks.

At Hill Street, Frost wrote often for some of the most memorable characters -- Hill and Renko, Sgt. Esterhaus and his roll call speeches, Lt. Henry Goldblume, and Howard Hunter.

But he didn't stay. Around this time, Frost attended a Hollywood party with big names (one of his roommates was Adam Arkin, son of Alan Arkin). A British film director spoke with him at the party about how they had all sold themselves, and their prices were known to those running the studios. It was an avenue Frost did not want to go down.

As Frost finished his television writing apprenticeship, he realized that one of the strongest aspects to his storytelling is that nothing is as it seems. So, the fit with Lynch to realize the vision that became Twin Peaks makes creative sense.

This part of the book in one in which Frost's talent for collaboration shines. As what basically amounted to being the showrunner, the first and final run-throughs of each week's script went through him, including rewrites he did but did not receive credit for. As he says, in the business, it's the person who writes the first draft who gets the credit. Frost also makes sure the work done by producer and writer Harley Peyton is noted. And, under his showrunning, the various directors who worked on the first two seasons also were able to bring their strengths to the work. That doesn't always happen in episodic television, which can rely on a certain style of storytelling for a series.

In addiiton to his ability to retrofit Lynchian visions into an overall mythology and story arc, Frost notes the influence that Jung has had on his work:

Jung was willing to throw away categorizations and open himself up to the powerful experience of “I have no control about where this is going so I’m going to let it lead me to what I want to know” — not through prescribed procedure, but through open-ended exploration.

That Frost is able to write this way proved beneficial myriad times during the collaboration with Lynch, as he discusses here:

[Bushman:] He was making his contributions on set as he was directing?
[Frost:] He would do that, absolutely. Like the white horse that appeared. That’s a good example of an image Lynch came up with. He didn’t know what it meant, but it was powerful. Then it fell to me to ask, “How do we incorporate this—in a larger, Jungian sense—into what it means in the narrative without becoming too literal?” I wanted things to have a grounding in logic that made sense, even if it’s dream logic. When I talk about finding connective tissue within the mythology, that’s what I’m referring to.

The section of the book in which Frost discusses Joseph Campbell, the hero's journey and Agent Cooper is very well done, and bringing up the concept of the law of unintended consequences shows the complexity of the storytelling within the world of Twin Peaks.

The book also covers the books Frost has written, plus projects that didn't succeed as well as they might have, and some that didn't get off the ground. Those stories are as compelling as the ones about the famous projects, and their inclusion makes this book even more worthwhile. Bushman does a terrific job of providing background and context for this as well as every other chapter in the book.

Conversations with Mark Frost covers a wide range of ideas and experience regarding writing in television, movies, the theater, fiction and nonfiction. The conversations themselves show a generous spirit who can create independently or in collaboration.

The book also includes detailed conversations about Frost's philosophy, including his research into the 19th century religion Theosophy, and the work of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung. Although much of Frost's work centers on the idea that not everything is what is seems, it also is grounded in one of his final statements in this book:

Believe in the good.

©2020 All Rights Reserved TheLitForum.com Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'Dig' by A.S. King

Dig
By A.S. King
YA Contemporary Fiction
March 2019
Dutton Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 978-1101994917

Family secrets and the sins of the preceding generation, unrolled as lives unravel, are the basis of Dig by A.S. King. The novel focuses on the youngest generation to face the repercussions of hatred, both bigotry and self-loathing. It is a fascinating, layered, enthralling tale.

The narrative rotates among a group of teens who turn out to be cousins. One boy finds that carrying a snow shovel everywhere gives him a sense of comfort. One girl, called Can I Help You, makes a killing selling drugs through a fast-food drive-through window. Another girl is a self-named Freak who flickers in and out of places. Loretta trains fleas. Malcolm's father is dying of cancer, and they both have found a measure of solace on the beaches of Jamaica.

But the story opens with Marla and Gottfried, a couple who have been married forever. She's amping up the pressure to get the annual family Easter dinner just right, including hiding plastic eggs for grown grandchildren. He's alternating between bemused irritation at her ritual search for perfection, and sorrow for a destroyed nest of robin's eggs.

They are the grandparents of the teens, and those baby birds who never came to be turn out to be a strong metaphor for the spirits of Marla and Gottfried's progeny.

These are the damaged children of damaged parents who were damaged by their own parents. The sins of the father, or in this case, the grandparents, are shown by the way they have affected the children.

One thing that appears in the stories of most characters is the potato. It is a source of both strength and sorrow to every character. It also serves a purpose not only in the actual circumstances of the characters, but in the characterization of the family:

A potato plant. Leaves up top, potatoes down below. All those stems and roots joining the two -- like veins and arteries. His father always said that families were the same. Everything was connected, everything worked in synchronicity.

Gottfried got to see the sun and he got to flower. His kids were harvested from shallow soil. His grandkids, accidental plants for the most part, would eventually mature and one day they, too, would rise from the dirt, their brittle roots still connected.

For King to be able to wrangle such a large cast, with the characters remaining clear, and to bring that cast together, is a grand achievement. How the darkness has entwined each character, and what the future holds for them, are as worthy of praise as any novel written for adults. It's easy to see why Dig was honored as the Printz winner for YA fiction by the American Library Association's Young Adult Library Services Association this year.

The idea of family and how it shapes and supports individuals is portrayed strongly. The sin that stains every family member is stated plainly, but how and why it gained such a stronghold is the novel's biggest weakness. That this sin would stain a family, affecting generations, is uncontested, however.

For the younger members of the family to reach understandings about the important, not just of the sin, but how the stain affects them and whether it should overwhelm them, is conveyed very well. So is a tragedy hanging over the youngest generation:

Taking things for granted is the privilege of existence. The living don't even think about it, same as boys aren't scared to go missing at the mall. Sam as her white cousins can drive over the speed limit across state lines to New Jersey.

©2020 All Rights Reserved TheLitForum.com Reviews and posted with permission

Review: 'Beating About the Bush'

Beating About the Bush
By M.C. Beaton
Mystery
December 2019
Minotaur Books
ISBN: 978-1250157720

In December 1992, a prickly, fierce woman sold her successful public relations firm and went to the Cotswolds to live a quiet life that never seemed to materialize. That was Quiche of Death, the first Agatha Raisin mystery.

In Beating About the Bush, Agatha's 30th outing, the late M.C. Beaton portrays a character who realizes time has carried on but who usually changes course rather than face hard truths about herself. It's her way of not giving in or giving up. Over the years, there are times it has made her selfish, shallow and irritating. But she has never been boring.

Both traits of not giving in or giving up come in handy during the course of the mystery in this book. Agatha and her private detective agency have been hired to look into a possible case of industrial espionage. But the company, which manufactures batteries, is an odd place. There doesn't seem to be much staff. There doesn't seem to be much actual manufacturing going on. There are unqualified people all over the place.

While leaving the facility, Agatha and her assistant Toni think they see a dead body when a leg is spotted, wearing a brogue like the one the company's receptionist wears. It's a false leg, and the police are not amused. It's pretty obvious this is part of a set-up to attack Agatha's credibility. And that such a set-up is just the kind of attack she will take head on.

Of course, a murder does occur. The purported killer is a cantankerous mule that Agatha previously encountered, and which takes a liking to her. On top of investigating the murder, Agatha inspires a national campaign to save the mule. Things go exactly as those who have read Agatha's books before imagine.

Apparently there will be one more Agatha Raisin book, with Hot to Trot due to be released next fall. But if this was the last book in the series, it would end at an interesting place for Agatha. There are some things she has come to terms with, something that rarely occurs. That the book ends with her in a good spot was a treat to see.


©2020 All Rights Reserved TheLitForum.com Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'The Watergate Girl'

The Watergate Girl: My Fight for Truth and Justice Against a Criminal President
By Jill Wine-Banks
Memoir
February 2020
Henry Holt and Co.
ISBN: 978-1250244321

A young prosecutor in 1973 prepares for the most important questions she has ever presented in court. The witness is angry at being forced to testify. But her information is essential to the case, to try to make sense of what happened.

It's Rose Mary Woods, Richard Nixon's secretary, on the stand to testify about the infamous 18 1/2-minute gap in a crucial tape recorded by Nixon. Getting ready to question her is Jill Wine-Banks. Woods is even more unhappy when she is caught lying as she demonstrates what supposedly happened to create the gap in the tape.

As Wine-Banks recounts in her memoir, The Watergate Girl, the crowd in the courtroom was stunned. Even more stunning to her, when she proposed that Woods demonstrate how she said the gap was created in her office, because what she said did not happen in the courtroom demonstration, attorneys for Woods and Nixon did not object.

Wine-Banks was one of three trial lawyers, and the only woman, on the Watergate special prosecutor task force for obstruction of justice and cover-ups.

As she recounts how she got to this moment, and how complex her feelings were about dealing with Woods, Wine-Banks also describes what life was like for a professional woman in the early 1970s. She shows how being hard-working and smart could pay off, but also the drawbacks to outshining any man who couldn't handle it. Unfortunately, one of those men was her first husband.

Whether it's personal or professional, Wine-Banks demonstrates that her first love was writing. She went to law school to gain gravitas in what she would be considered as eligible in covering in journalism. When she stayed with the law, journalism lost a powerful voice. But her background does show that she is a natural for what she is doing now as a television commentator.

Although her memoir does touch on these other things, and she gives a quick rundown of what she has been doing in the corporate world since the Watergate era, it is that period that is the focus of this book. The larger-than-life characters in the prosecutor's office and the political world, the suspense in not knowing what was going to happen next -- especially after the Saturday Night Massacre -- the relentless work schedule and the pressure to make sure all i's were dotted and t's crossed are all recounted vividly.

Wine-Banks has written a timely memoir that brings back the Watergate days for those who lived through that time, and provides an elegant primer to those who don't know what all the fuss was about.

©2019 All Rights Reserved TheLitForum.com Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'The Starless Sea'

The Starless Sea
By Erin Morgenstern
Fantasy
November 2019
Doubleday
ISBN: 978-0385541213

A story about stories, about lovers meeting in different guises and different settings, trying to destroy fate to keep it from away from time, a paradise for every book lover and a sea without stars in the depths of the world -- they are all in Erin Morgenstern's second novel, The Starless Sea.

It has been eight years since Morgenstern's first novel, The Night Circus, was published to acclaim. The new novel is another gift in world-building in which everything is created with grace, beauty and magic. Love of story and of the arts of creating and reading are sprinkled on every page:

Passionate love stories were manipulated into the vacancies between raindrops and vanished with the end of the storm. Tragedies intricately poured from bottles of wine and sipped thoughtfully with melancholy and fine cheeses. Fairy tales shaped from sand and seashells on shorelines slowly swept away by softly lapping waves.

This is what is contained in the world created by Morgenstern that exists in another dimension, another time, or in endless caverns under the ground of the world. There are those who look after the world, who have suffered much for the honor of doing so, and those who are granted access to that world whether by chance or design, who fall through doors or stumble upon them.

Zachary Ezra Rawlins stumbled upon this world. He nearly found it as a child when he came upon a beautiful door that didn't fit its surroundings. But he didn't turn the doorknob and walk through. Now a graduate student, he comes across an uncatalogued book, titled Sweet Sorrows, and that incident is in the book.

He is soon drawn into an adventure by people who seem to know him, although they are strangers to him. Doors that lead to this world of books and stories are involved. So is a storytelling pirate, a woman who fell into that world as a child, a dollhouse and the symbols of a sword, bees and keys. And an owl king. And lovers that search for each other over the years, as Time and Fate search for each other after they are separated forcibly. Tropes and stories circle back to older stories. Or perhaps later stories not yet told, but foreshadowed.

Because in the midst of the derring-do adventures, it is stories, how they are told and what they mean to those who hear or read them that are the heart of The Starless Sea.

Early on, in a gathering of students, the importance of story (in both written and gaming versions) is savored:

"Isn't that what anyone wants, though?" the girl with the cat-eye glasses asks in response. "To be able to make your own choices and decisions but to have it be part of a story? You want that narrative there to trust in, even if you want to maintain your own free will." "You want to decide where to go and what to do and which door to open but you still want to win the game," ponytail guy adds. "Even if winning the game is just ending the story." "Especially if a game allows for multiple possible endings" Zachary says, touching on the subject of a paper he'd written two years previously. "Wanting to co-write the story, not dictate it yourself, so it's collaborative."

And, later:

"Everyone is part of a story, what they want is to be part of something worth recording."

It's the same with stars, according to one tale within this tale about a man who sells stars:

"Everyone wants the stars. Everyone wishes to grasp that which exists out of reach. To hold the extraordinary in their hands and keep the remarkable in their pockets."

Also, when likening a story to an egg:

"You want to be in the story, not observing it from the outside. You want to be under its shell. The only way to do that is to break it. But if it breaks, it is gone."

To have one's life matter, to be cherished, to be known by someone else -- whether reader or lover or both -- these are the things that matter in The Starless Sea.

This novel is a faerie-blessed mythical tale of spun magic. But it also is a serious meditation on how a person matters to oneself and to at least one other person who learns of that person.

This is the stuff of "only connect" and Joan Didion's admonition for us to tell ourselves stories in order to live.

©2020 All Rights Reserved TheLitForum.com Reviews and reprinted with permission