Wrapping up

Richard Russo ties up his Fool trilogy nicely with Somebody's Fool (2023), following in the footsteps of Nobody's Fool and Everybody's Fool.

North Bath, N.Y., the small town at the center of the earlier novels, has ceased to exist in the third one, having been swallowed up by its wealthier neighbor, Schuyler Springs. The characters we have come to know, like their town, seem lost. Where do they fit in now?

Doug Raymer, the former North Bath police chief, lost his job when the force was disbanded, while Charice, his girlfriend (or is it former girlfriend?), has been named police chief in Schuyler Springs. Yet because she is both black and female, her new position seems shaky.

Janey lost her abusive husband in the previous novel, but now she has replaced him with an abusive boyfriend, a dirty cop and one of Charise's main foes.

Peter, the son of Sully (the central figure in Nobody's Fool), can't decide whether he wants to leave or stay or whether he wants to continue as a college professor or work with his hands like his late father did. And then one of his estranged sons shows up, gets beaten badly by that dirty cop and gives Peter both a new problem and a possible solution to his other ones.

Jerome, Charice's twin brother, has lost all his swagger. His sister has given up on rescuing him from his depression and turns the job over to Raymer.

Russo, with his usual wit and style, gives direction to these and other lost characters by the time he concludes both the novel and the series. Somehow the everybody-wins ending doesn't destroy the art.

Breathing in, breathing out

Reading is my inhale, and writing is my exhale.

Glennon Doyle, American author

I do my writing in the morning, my reading in the afternoon. It is mostly a matter of energy. I have more of it in the morning, so that is when I write, which takes more energy than reading. In the afternoon I enjoy relaxing with a book and a pot of tea.

Glennon Doyle

I am drawn to Glennon Doyle's observation that reading and writing are both part of the same thing, just as inhaling and exhaling are both parts of breathing.

In my case, that is literally true. In this blog I write mostly about the books I have read. Yet in some sense this is true of everyone who writes. There was a reason our teachers insisted that we cite references in our term papers. What we wrote was supposed to be based on what others had written, not a copy or a paraphrase but rather a digestion of the writing of others into our own thoughts and words. Writing builds on what has been read.

This is true not just of content. It is also true of style and grammar and spelling and punctuation. We learn as we read, and what we learn influences how we write as well as what we write.

Even our letters, texts and emails are often a response to the letters, texts and emails we have received. We breathe in, and then we breathe out.

The burden of untold stories

Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou once said "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

I touched on this topic a couple of weeks ago ("How can stories be bad?" Oct. 4). When you have story, you must tell it to someone. It's like scratching an itch. Sometimes anyone will do. My father used to love to tell his stories. Within a couple minutes of meeting a total stranger he would be off and running with his stories, and he would continue telling them as long as the stranger was willing to listen.

I tried to satisfy my own compulsion to tell my stories by writing my memoirs during Covid, when there wasn't much else to do.

Novelists and short story writers who, in addition to having all those personal stories that all of the rest of us have inside us, have fictional stories bursting to get out. To some extent, they write stories because they must. Stories come to them, and so they write them down and share them with anyone willing to pay money for them. Unlike the rest of us, they get paid for their compulsion.

Angelou uses the word bearing in regard to untold stories, suggesting that an untold story is a burden. One relieves the burden by telling the story. That works for most of us, but not for my father. He needed to tell the same stories over and over again, sometimes to the same audience.

Giving away Sis

As much as Lonnie is impossible — and everyone agrees that she is — she's still my dear, sweet, lumbering big sister, and you can't give away a sister!

Laurie Fox, My Sister from the Black Lagoon

More than a quarter of a century after it was published in 1998, Laurie Fox's novel My Sister from the Black Lagoon may be even more topical now than it was then.

Clearly autobiographical — the subtitle reads "A novel of my life" — the first-person novel tells of Lorna, a girl growing up in the 1960s whose big sister is loud, uncontrollable and driven by dark compulsions. Mostly Lonnie wants to be a boy and hates it when her mother forces her to wear a dress.

Lorna loves her sister, yet resents it that Lonnie gets most of their parents' attention. She also hates it when Lonnie is sent to a home for autistic and mentally ill children.

Sometimes the novel is as funny as its title and cover illustration suggest, yet the story proves ultimately sobering, especially as Lorna matures, goes to college and realizes that she herself has, in effect, given away her sister. She calls Lonnie or visits her only as often as guilt forces her to.

What's more, Lorna has become her sister in a sense, a misfit struggling to find her place in the world.

There's much to like about this disturbing novel.

Mysteries galore

Julia Spencer-Fleming's Hid from Our Eyes (2020) begins with one mystery and ends with another. (Don't you hate those mystery series that you must read in order to properly appreciate, when so many of us just read them as we find them?)

Actually there are three mysteries as the novel opens (and at least that many as it ends). The body of a young woman in a party dress is found in the middle of a road, both her identity and cause of death unknown. But an identical unsolved crime also happened in 1972 and earlier in 1952.

Millers Kill police chief Russ van Alstyne, who as a young Vietnam veteran was the initial suspect in the 1972 case, now has his job on the line because of an approaching vote that could disband the small-town police force. The pressure to solve these crimes, or at least the most recent one, and save his department becomes intense.

Meanwhile the chief's wife, Clare, the Episcopal priest, has a new baby to take of while she fights her compulsion for alcohol and/or drugs. Just the same, she gets involved in helping her husband solve this perplexing mystery.

The novel has much more going on, including the chief's mother's longtime relationship with the former police chief and a lawsuit involving one present deputy and a former one.

As for the mysteries Spencer-Fleming leaves us with at the end, they include the disappearance of one of the novel's characters, Russ's future after he is forced to resign and the question of what will happen to Clare after she yields to temptation.

Another mystery, at least to me, is which of her novels I will read next, a later one in the series or one of the earlier ones I missed?

The pride of discovery

Describing his book collecting habits, author Jonathan Lethem said, "I remember pursuing — in a way, what I still do — writers that seemed to me that only I knew about. So collecting them wasn't a matter of spending a lot of money."

Yes, collecting something that nobody else is can be a cheap hobby. Yet Lethem's phrase "writers that seemed to me that only I knew about" suggests something more than just pinching pennies. It hints at pride, the pride of discovery.

Most of us enjoy discovery, something we can tell our friends about. Whether it's a new restaurant, a new movie (or perhaps even an old movie nobody has talked about in years), a new song or that author that nobody else in our group has read, it can give us a sense of satisfaction, even pride.

Perhaps there is even the pride of being something of a rebel: Everybody else is listening to the latest popular songs or reading the latest bestsellers, but you are listening to this obscure singer or reading this obscure author that others haven't found yet.

I was in college when I "discovered" Edward Lewis Wallant. Wallant died in his mid-thirties after writing just four novels, but I devoured all four of them and thought he was something special. I have not read any of these books since then, and I do not know how they hold up. I do know that the general public never did discover Wallant, which in one way was a disappointment to me. Maybe I was totally wrong about him. Or perhaps I was among the few who recognized his genius. Let's go with that one.

Recovering from an introvert hangover

The Powerful Purpose of Introverts (2020) by Holley Gerth may not be the best book for introverts — that might be Quiet by Susan Cain — but it will be helpful for many of those convinced there is something wrong with them.

She includes many useful points. For example, she quotes Dr. Debra Johnson as saying, "We're not slow thinkers; we're deep thinkers." I have often thought of myself as a slow thinker because I don't think of the right thing to say until after it's too late to say it.

Later she quotes a psychologist as saying that introverts would rather find meaning than bliss. In my own experience, meaning produces bliss.

Gerth gives words to feelings introverts know well. Introverts, she says, need to time alone to recover from peopling. She calls this an introvert hangover or being dopamine drunk. Being around other people, especially talkative people, for too long drains energy from introverts. Time alone or time with one special someone relieves this condition.

The author is fond of lists, tests, quizzes and diagrams, and a reader may get tired of checking boxes and filling in blanks. Yet some of these may prove revealing and worthwhile, so don't ignore them all.

In the end, Gerth makes the same points made by Cain and others: If you are an introvert, there is nothing wrong with you. Your mind just works differently than that of an extrovert. There are more of you than you think. You can do some things better than extroverts can. Many of the world's most successful people have been introverts.

One question remains, however. Why don't extroverts need books like this to make them feel better about themselves?

Going to the source

When we read history written by Candice Millard, it is easy to imagine we're watching a movie. Whether she is telling about Theodore Roosevelt nearly dying while exploring the Amazon (The River of Doubt) or the death of President Garfield (Destiny of the Republic), her details are so vivid that we picture them as if on a giant screen.

This happens again in River of the Gods (2022), her book about the attempts by Richard Burton and John Speke to find the source of the Nile. How could someone not want to make a movie about this?

Now it seems hard to imagine that finding the source of the Nile River was considered so important to mid-19th century explorers. As Millard tells, it was mostly an excuse to explore the interior of Africa, which was then still largely a mystery to those in Western Europe. Europeans went to the coast of Africa to buy slaves, but they didn't know what they might find in the interior of this huge continent.

Burton and Speke began as allies, turned into rivals and eventually became enemies. This was more Speke's doing, than Burton's. Burton was easy going and quick to forgive. Not so Speke.

Burton was a restless British intellectual who spent little time in Britain. He learned languages easily and made most of his money translating dirty books from other cultures. He considered the Nile a worthy challenge, and hired Speke, a dedicated hunter, to go with him on his underfunded expedition in 1856.

Both men were sick from one illness or injury or another for most of the journey. They discovered Lake Tanganyika, which seemed like a good candidate for the source, but Speke alone was healthy enough to make it to Nyanza, which he renamed for Queen Victoria, and decided that was the true source. Burton remained unconvinced, but Speke beat Burton back to London and took all the credit, even though Burton had headed the expedition.

Speke later returned to Africa to better explore Lake Victoria. Back in London, although Speke had the advantage of seeing Lake Victoria and of having more friends and more money, he was a terrible writer and a terrible speaker, skills that Burton possessed in spades. On the night before they were scheduled to debate the subject, Speke, the experienced hunter, "accidentally" killed himself with a shotgun.

There is much more to the story, of course, and Millard tells it well. Even now the question of the source of the Nile may not be entirely answered. After all, there are rivers feeding into Lake Victoria. So where is the true source of the Nile?

Still Popular after all these years

I happened to acquire an April 1949 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine at the same time I had a May/June 2024 issue. So how much has this long-surviving magazine changed in 75 years?

The first obvious change is the size. The magazine has become both larger and smaller. Once 6 1/2 by 9 1/2 inches, Popular Mechanics has grown to 7 by 10. Yet the magazine that had 336 pages in the 1949 edition now has just 76 pages. And this is a magazine that now publishes just six times a year, rather than 12.

The price has jumped from 35 cents to $5.99. Compared to other magazine prices, $5.99 still seems like a bargain.

The difference in pages clearly stems from the fact that the older magazine contains significantly more advertising. It also contains numerous short articles, rather than just a few longer ones.

The covers are strikingly different. The earlier issue shows a man pointing toward a new house and telling a woman, "We built this cabin for $300." The more recent issue shows a circle of moons from our solar system. In the middle are the words "Every. Single. Moon. Ranked." This is Popular Mechanics? It looks more like Popular Science.

Articles in the older issue cover such subjects as how to swing a golf club, fly casting, handmade paper, how debris is removed from New York harbor and, of course, building that $300 cabin.

Other than the main article about moons, which I found to be the most interesting article in either magazine, the contents of the 2024 version of Popular Mechanics are not that unexpected. There are articles about California freeways, a female participant in the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb and the best way to fix foundation cracks.

Popular Mechanics magazine has always covered a lot of ground, something for everybody.  And now it even covers the stars. Or at least the moons.

Second chances

In Carla Buckley's intriguing 2019 novel The Liar's Child, there is so much lying going on that it is never quite clear to whom the title refers. And this proves to be a good thing when truth eventually wins out.

Sara Lennox gets a new life as part of the witness protection program, though she has no intention of staying around to testify. Her father taught her never to cooperate with the authorities. In the meantime she lives in an apartment near North Carolina's Outer Banks and works in a dreary job cleaning places rented by tourists.

Her neighbors are a troubled family. The beautiful wife accidentally left Boon, their preschool son, in a hot car for hours. The child survived, but now a child welfare worker checks up on them frequently. Whit, the husband, seems out of his depth, especially after his wife disappears. Cassie, their daughter just entering her teens, has become rebellious and dependent. She frequently escapes her homelife by dangerously leaping from one balcony to another and exiting through Sara's apartment.

Then comes a hurricane. With their mother missing and their father busy elsewhere, the kids look to Sara as their reluctant rescuer. She can think only of ditching the kids so that she can disappear into another new life.

But then, of course, things happen, and she finds a new life she never expected.

Buckley keeps things moving and the suspense building. Her novel is never quite a thriller and never quite a mystery, although there are elements of each. Mostly it is a novel of second chances and unexpected saviors.

Misery plus poetry

Her father was bigger than the world and a lot less wonderful.

Anne Enright, The Wren, the Wren

Beauty and ugliness often seem to come together, as if in a package. That is true in the world we live in, in the people we know, in our own lives and even in the novels we read. That may be the message in The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright (2023).

The novel tells of the broken lives of three women in the family of Phil McDaragh, an admired Irish poet whose poems are sprinkled throughout the novel. McDaragh writes poetry about romantic love, and for inspiration he thinks he needs a succession of young lovers. He abandons his wife when she becomes seriously ill. His daughter, Carmel, and his granddaughter, Nell, feel the same abandonment as they lead their confused, often aimless lives. Their own love affairs are no more meaningful or lasting than McDaragh's. They just lack the poetry, which may be why they return again and again to his.

Enright does not deny us the ugly details of these relationships in language that is sometimes beautiful and often vulgar. The contrast seems to be important.

My favorite line in the novel comes early: "We don't walk down the same street as the person walking beside us." How true. We see different things even when looking at the same thing. How we perceive what we see depends upon our different backgrounds, different experiences, different ways of thinking. Carmel and Nell may walk down the same streets as those next to them, yet as the offspring of this famous poet they see different streets.

How can stories be bad?

Before I leave the book The Last Unknowns, edited by John Brockman, I must comment on what, to me, seems like the oddest question posed in this book of questions:

Jonathan Gottschall

"Are stories bad for us?" This question is posed by Jonathan Gottschall, who teaches in the English department at Washington & Jefferson College.

How could stories be bad for us? And how could someone who teaches stories for a living suggest such a thing? I would be interested in hearing Gottschall's argument. I'll bet there's a story there.

Everyone tells stories. Some are true. Some are embellished. Some are entirely fiction. Yet we all tell stories. And we all listen to them or read them or even dream them, usually with pleasure, which is itself a good.

When you experience a funny incident or perhaps have a near-collision on the highway or an unexpected surgery, one of your first impulses is the tell your story to someone. Somehow you don't feel fulfilled until you can tell your story. The better the story, the more often you will tell it.

We learn from stories. That is why literature is taught at Washington & Jefferson and most other colleges. Stories teach us how other people live and how other people think. They teach us about good decisions and bad ones. They help us practice empathy. They excite our imaginations.

History, at its best, is a series of stories. And so we learn history through stories. In fact, a good many disciplines, from art to zoology, are taught, in part, through stories.

Our entertainment, whether we read novels, watch movies or listen to popular songs, is often story-based. Even a TV reality show usually takes the form of a story. A baseball game tells a story. We stick around to the ninth inning to see how it turns out.

Religions are also usually story-based. The Bible is a collection of stories.

The articles we read in magazines and newspapers are often called stories.

There are bad stories, certainly, but stories are vital and basic to human existence. How can that be bad?

Challenging questions

John Brockman

In my last post I wrote about some of the lame questions I found in the book edited by John Brockman, The Last Unknowns. Now I want to give equal time to some of the questions I consider more challenging.

"Why is the world so beautiful?" If there is no God and no purpose to the universe, how does one explain sunsets and rainbows and spring mornings?

"Where were the laws of physics written before the universe was born?" asks a physicist. Because the laws of physics are themselves beautiful, this sounds very much like the last question.

"Why do we experience feelings of meaning in a universe without purpose?" Here we go again. Aren't "feelings of meaning" also beautiful? So maybe there is a purpose after all.

"Are people who cheat vital to driving progress in human societies?" That may seem like an odd question, but it is an interesting one. Consider that the Jewish people trace their origins back to Jacob, who cheated his brother out of his rightful inheritance. We have a system of justice, a good thing, in part to protect people from those who cheat. How many advanced human societies are built on land won by cheating native peoples? I'm sure we could find many other examples.

"What will be the use of 99 percent of humanity for the 1 percent?" This frightening question is rapidly coming close to a frightening answer. As artificial intelligence makes human workers obsolete, what good are they? Increasingly the masses just become a burden and a danger for the few who are in charge.

Talking about scary questions, how about this one: "Will we pass our audition as planetary managers?" And if we don't pass the audition, who is going to say so? Those who rush us toward global government surely must realize that dictatorship is the only possible result. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and all that.

"Is the brain a computer or an antenna?" I don't know what that means, but it sounds profound.

"Is scientific knowledge the most valuable possession of humanity?" I like the fact that this question was posed by a philosopher, not a scientist. That suggests what the questioner believes.