Take My Hand, by Dolen Perkins-Valdez: Ignorant of this novel’s publishing date, I was initially incensed that I had heard so little about it in the past…and then I realized it’s a very new addition to the world, published in April of this year. Set in the 1970s and 2016 (I assume so as not to…have to deal with Trump), it’s the story of medical ethics, good intentions gone wrong (and bad intentions gone worse), complicity, and control. There’s a bit of…almost obsessive justifying/qualifying/disclaiming that appears suddenly and that feels like it comes more from the author than the narrator, but I sympathize with the compulsion. Highly compelling.
The Overstory, by Richard Powers: Not to make myself look out of touch in two entries in a row, but I hadn’t heard of Richard Powers until The Overstory came out. And I don’t think that’s terribly unusual, even though it seems wild to me that I wouldn’t have heard of an author who had already won a National Book Award and published a dozen novels. There are so many books every year, so many authors, and if you aren’t following the major awards (which, until about 2018, I wasn’t) you could miss an incredibly prominent name. The upside is that now I have an entire back catalog of Richard Powers to read. A third of the way into The Overstory I was ready to declare it genius. The first 150 pages are the slow growth of a network of people whose lives will eventually overlap, in sections long enough to be memorable but brief enough to leave you wishing for more time with each character. Each explores, directly or obliquely, the character’s relationship to trees. Eventually, the human characters collide with one another. Occasionally I had quibbles about plot points or sentences, and I sometimes wished for less sudden violence – I felt like an open nerve as I read – but when I finished the novel my verdict was still: genius. Extraordinary.
The Fourth Man, by Robert Baer: Am I truly about to read a book about a spy who has not yet been caught, which by definition will have no neat resolution? Yes, because it went so quickly once I started, and because – as I told myself – perhaps the publication of the book (a nonfiction search for a KGB spy within the CIA) would lead to the case being finally solved, the way I’ll Be Gone in the Dark nudged along the Golden State Killer’s capture (or maybe it didn’t really have much of an impact but I read it after he was arrested?). I found myself losing interest in this because it was so focused on logistics at the expense of narrative. And – spoiler not spoiler – you never find out who the spy was! What a disappointment. It could have worked if it were written in a way that was interesting beyond the question of who the double agent was, but it was not.
Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel: At long last! I loved Station Eleven, very much enjoyed The Glass Hotel, and have been waiting for this for years (in my heart) and months (on the library waitlist). This was a thoroughly delightful read, but I have to admit that as I read I kept thinking “these sound like the musings of a very talented writer while she’s on tour” (granted one of the main characters is a writer on tour, so fair enough, but…listen, if I could write a great book that way believe me I would). I was further delighted by the realization that St. John Mandel must live in my neighborhood, because in one scene she describes the park and restaurant around the block from me (later, when the story briefly stops in my hometown of Cincinnati, I felt even more special!). Still wished it were longer, as it was so cozy (in spite of all the world-ending) inside of it.
The Meritocracy Trap, by Daniel Markovits: Much of this theory – that the “merit-based” social structure many perceive as an antidote to the prior system of leisurely aristocratic landowners is actually nearly as destructive – rang true for me, in particular the frenzied panic with which parents invest in their children’s educational scaffolding (I say this because that’s what the frenzied panic is – it’s about the outcome, the competitiveness, the going on to more and more elite institutions, not about the actual education itself (though many parents are also invested in that; it does not generally cause panic), especially since, as a tutor, I’m part of and complicit in that scaffolding). That said, I had questions throughout about where the author was really deriving his conclusions. For example, he discusses in great detail a community in the suburbs of Detroit where everyone makes more or less the same income (or, rather, the difference between the richest and poorest is vastly less than elsewhere in the country) and can afford the typical mid-century middle-class aspirations like a comfortably-sized home, the ability to buy necessities and non-necessities, etc. Markovits sees this not as a boon but as a problem, because he associates it with stagnation and feels that the people of the community have no ability to join “the elite.” But…he doesn’t include any quotes from members of the community that speak to what seems to be his fear alone. The quotes he does include give the impression of satisfaction with life. So – is it really a problem? He’s focused on how the poor have gotten closer to a middle-class lifestyle while the divide between middle-class and elite widens, but I feel it’s worth saying that, although I agree that the insane divide between the .1% or the 1% or whatever top stratum and “the rest” is Very Bad, it would be worse if the middle class had grown closer to the elite while the worst off had fallen further behind in terms of money and opportunity. No?? He also laments the loss of “middle managers” and trades like tool and die cutting, in which someone could make a comfortable living without a college degree or without aspirations to enter “elite fields,” but later seems depressed by the way even management jobs have been splintered and stratified…but aren’t the lower offerings of the management jobs similar to, you know, a middle manager?
This was written in 2019. What about influencers, Patreons, etc? Definitely a provocative and engaging read – though felt repetitive at times – but I did have to laugh a little when the section on “so, what should we do about this?” was basically a 10-page epilogue. I kept thinking about this book as a companion piece to This Life by Martin Hagglund, in which the answer is “socialism” – I don’t know that that would be Markovits’s answer (though it seems like a European model would do quite a bit to alleviate the exaggerated disparity); it struck me that he might want more of a return to mid-century focus on what he calls mid-skill workers, which is an interesting idea that leads to questions about what society values – “progress”? General happiness and well-being? Equality? I think I’ll revisit this text in a few years – much to digest.
