You guys

"Who are you examining?"

"You," he whispered to her immensity. In English it could be plural or singular. English was a fine language for prevarication.

Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

When you are sitting in a restaurant with a group of people — perhaps it's a group of men and women, or perhaps a group of men or women, or perhaps just your family — how is your server likely to address you? Chances are, in most restaurants in the United States, what you will hear is "you guys," as in, "Are you guys ready to order?"

There are those, perhaps women of a certain age, who still resent this, but most of us have gotten used to it by now. In an age when it is considered sexist to use a masculine pronoun to refer to someone who may be either male or female, somehow it has become permissible to refer to both men and women as guys. Go figure.

The reason has a lot to do with that oddity in the English language, one of many, that makes the personal pronoun you both singular and plural. We all learned this in school. We understand it. Yet most of us have never felt comfortable using the plural you.  Something always seems to be missing. That's why people down South say "you all" and those in other parts of the county often say something like youse or you'uns. I once had a pastor, raised in eastern Pennsylvania with degrees from Swarthmore and Harvard, who referred to groups as "you all." The word you just seems somehow inadequate when addressing more than one person.

Go back a few hundred years and the English language didn't have this problem. One person was addressed with the pronoun thou. For two or more people, the word was ye. Simple, right? Yet somehow the two words got combined into a single, all-purpose you. After all these centuries we still haven't fully accepted it.

Perhaps it's time to bring back ye.

Love and bowling

There were sawed-off limbs in every direction on the family tree.

Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

Not since The Big Lebowski has bowling been such a delightful background to a wacky, totally unconventional story with endless surprises. I am speaking of Elizabeth McCracken's 2019 novel Bowlaway.

The novel covers decades, during which characters scatter like bowling pins. Some die in outrageous ways. One in a flood of molasses. Another from spontaneous combustion. Some disappear and come back. Others just disappear. Nobody hangs around long enough to become the main character, leaving that role, by default, to the bowling alley in Salford, Mass.

Bertha Truitt, whom McCracken describes as "a matron, jowly, bosomy, bottomy, odd," shows up prostrate one night  in the Salford cemetery, never explaining where she came from or how she got there. A young man named Joe Wear comes to her aid, as does a black doctor named Leviticus Sprague. For Bertha and Dr. Sprague, it is love at first sight. Or as the author describes Bertha's feelings, "She felt a plunk in the pond of her heart." They marry, have a daughter, Minna, and build a large house as odd as Bertha. And she builds a bowling alley.

Most of the story occurs in, around or at least about that bowling alley. Again to quote McCracken, "Our subject is love because our subject is bowling." The novel may not amount to a perfect game, yet still it offers as much fun as any game in any alley.

Bookstore discoveries

On a website we cannot discover anything, we can't bump into the unexpected book, because an algorithm predicts what we're looking for and leads us — yes, mathematically — only to places we already know.

Juan Gabriel Vasquez, Browse

Juan Gabriel Vasquez

Discovery is one of the great joys of visiting a bookstore. (It was still winter when I last stepped into a bookstore, so I am speaking from what seems like a distant memory.)

I recently read a biography of the explorer Christopher Columbus, who on his first voyage across the Atlantic had no idea what he might find or when or where he might find it. That's something like entering a bookstore without a specific objective in mind. Any shelf, any table might just hold that book that makes the whole excursion worthwhile, that book that, like San Salvador, will seem like a discovery worth celebrating.

Colombian author Juan  Gabriel Vasquez has it right. It's difficult to experience that same feeling of discovery when buying books on Amazon or some other online bookseller.

On rare occasions I do buy books online, but only when I know specifically what I am looking for and haven't seen those books in actual bookstores. You can find just about any book on the web, including those no longer in print. What's hard, even next to impossible unless one has all the time in the world, is to find that book you didn't know you were looking for but will cause rejoicing when you find it.

A balanced look at Columbus

Never again may mortal men hope to recapture the amazement, the wonder, the delight of those October days in 1492 when the New World gracefully yielded her virginity to the conquering Castilians.

Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea

So was Christopher Columbus a good guy or a bad guy? To those eager to tear down statues honoring anyone less than perfect according to the holier-than-thou standards of today's left, he was clearly a bad guy. Samuel Eliot Morison, in his classic 1942 study of Columbus Admiral of the Ocean Sea, takes a more balanced approach. To him Columbus was an usually good man for his time — the 15th and 16th centuries — but like everyone else from Adam to Zinn, a flawed man.

He may have never realized what he had discovered, believing until his death that he had found a shorter route to the East Indies instead of what he had actually found, what is now called the West Indies, but he was nevertheless an outstanding sailor, according to Morison. He just believed the world was much smaller than it actually is. The author himself sailed a similar route in a similar kind of ship in order to better appreciate the man's achievement in an age with such primitive instruments for navigation.

A deeply religious man, Columbus made prayer a daily part of the routine aboard his three ships and did his best to keep his men in line when they mixed with the naked natives they found on the islands. Yet Columbus himself viewed these peaceful people as potential slaves and captured a few to take back to Spain. Trading trinkets for gold was a major objective of his travels about the islands. Morison writes, "If gold or something else of great and immediate value had not been discovered, the conquest of the New World might have been a brighter page in the history of Christianity."

For some reason Columbus chose the slowest of his three ships, the Santa Maria, as his flag ship, meaning that the Nina and Pinta had to deliberately show their pace going west so that Columbus could keep up. The leader of the expedition was usually the follower. The Santa Maria went aground in the Indies, so Columbus moved to the speedier Nina, yet still managed to be aboard the second ship to return to Spain with the news of the discovery. The jealous Portuguese twice slowed his progress on the return, and briefly he feared for his life at their hands. Yet he did return to Spain, was honored by the king and queen and led two more voyages of discovery.

On the way west, mutiny was his greatest danger, and Morison suggests that had land not been spotted when it was, Oct. 12, 1492, Columbus might have had real problems with his impatient men.

Columbus was a controversial figure even in 1942, and Morison does his best to sort through the conflicting claims to get to the truth. If only he were alive today to defend his besieged, imperfect hero.

Pirates on land

Even on land, Spider John can't escape the pirate life. In A Bottle of Rum, the third installment in Steve Goble's Spider John mystery series, our hero keeps telling himself and Odin, his aging comrade, that they are ex-pirates. That life is behind them. Spider just wants to return to his wife, Em, and their son, whom he hasn't seen in years. But then there's a murder in an inn where they are drinking, and if there's one thing more of a lure for Spider than Em it is a mystery. He discovers that the murder weapon is a knife that he made himself and had given to Hob, a young pirate who in previous novels has become something of a stand-in for his son.

Spider John quickly determines Hob is not the killer. For him the larger mystery is to find his young friend, and if necessary rescue him. The search leads him and Odin to join a gang of cutthroats hired to protect a compound where an odd doctor named Oates is supposedly treating mentally ill patients while, at the same time, conducting strange experiments on them. Might Hob be one of those "patients"? And why would a hospital need so many armed guards?

Goble gives us plenty of pirate-style action, even if on dry land, as Spider and Odin draw closer to the truth about Oates and, eventually, about Hob. Spider John may think of himself as an ex-pirate, but he must think like a pirate and fight like one to get out of this mess and one step closer to Em.

The wound of individuality

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.

C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

C.S. Lewis

Stories allow us to experience another person's pain, joy, love, struggles, passions, whatever. This is true of stories of all kinds, including those we find in movies, TV shows and even in conversations with friends or strangers. C.S. Lewis is speaking specifically of the stories found in great literature, offering us a clue as to why we study literature in high school and college classes. All stories work, but great stories work best.

What does Lewis mean when he says literature "heals the wound" of individuality? To be too self-absorbed really is something of a wound. Those who think only of themselves, their own wants and needs, do seem somehow unhealthy, somehow out of balance. Feeling compassion for fictional people isn't quite the same as feeling compassion for real people, but it is a start. However briefly, stories take us out of ourselves, while making ourselves better.

Lewis amplifies this idea in sentences that follow in the same paragraph.

But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.

I can be a boy wondering if he is bound for hell by taking a runaway slave downriver on a raft. Or a runaway slave wondering if he is making a terrible mistake by going downriver on a raft with an unreliable boy. I can be a girl wondering if the spooky, unseen man next door, whom she calls Boo, might cause her harm. Or the timid man next door wondering if that little girl might be worth venturing outside to save. And then I'm back appreciating what Lewis calls the privilege of being myself.

Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see.

Literature allows us to eavesdrop on countless other lives, while viewing everything from our own unique perspective.

Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

Love for a lifetime

One must read far into the 2016 Sebastian Faulks novel Where My Heart Used to Beat before realizing it is a love story.

In 1980 Robert Hendricks is an aging man who has become something of a cliche in fiction: a psychiatrist with psychological problems of his own. He receives a letter from an elderly neurologist living on an island off the French coast who says he knew his father during the First World War. Hendricks does not remember his father, who died in that war, and decides to visit Dr. Alexander Pereira.

Instead of telling Hendricks anything about his father, however, Pereira asks him to tell his own war story, from World War II. At the heart of this story is a young woman named Luisa, whom he meets in Italy while recovering from a wound. They spend weeks together and fall in love, but then Luisa disappears. Hendricks learns she has left to care for her husband, a wounded Italian soldier. Hendricks never knew she  was married. In the decades since, Hendricks says, "Luisa was every woman to me." He has never been able to form a lasting relationship with any other woman.

After his time on Pereira's couch, so to speak, the psychiatrist is better able to make sense of his own life, better prepared to learn the truth about his father and finally willing to look up old friends from the war, the best friends he has ever had, he realizes. And this leads him back to Luisa.

Where My Heart Used to Beat is a powerful novel, yet one that may frustrate impatient readers hoping for a more conventional love story, war story or whatever. Faulks is the author of Birdsong, another wartime love story that has become a classic.