Candice Millard is already the author of two superb dramatic works of nonfiction: River of Doubt, which tells the tale of Theodore Roosevelt’s expedition to explore Rio da Dúvida deep in the Amazon jungle, and Destiny of the Republic, which takes up the shooting of President James Garfield and his subsequent death at the hands of the medical profession. Both were stirring, revelatory studies in the interaction of character and extreme circumstance, well stocked with lively side stories and material detail. Now Millard trains her inquisitive eye on young Winston Churchill in Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, A Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill, a study in ambition, bravery, luck, recklessness, self-confidence, and swagger.

By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, European colonization of Africa had become a frantic and bloody scramble. With the discovery of diamonds in southern Africa in 1867 and large deposits of gold in the Witwatersrand mountain ridge in 1886, British imperial lust for Transvaal territory, then controlled by the Boers — a group of colonists who were chiefly Dutch with Huguenot and German elements — became uncontainable. (Needless to say, the genuine claim on the land by native peoples was not even considered.) Britain annexed the Transvaal in 1877, but that came to naught when, outmatched by the Boers’ “ungallant and cowardly” guerrilla tactics, superior marksmanship, and battle cunning, the British were defeated with great loss of life in the First Boer War. Waged from December 1880 to March 1881, it was a short, mortifying affair that ended with the Battle of Majuba and “the shocking, sickening sight of British soldiers fleeing in humiliating retreat.”

The British, however, were not to be thwarted: “Imperial troops must curb the insolence of the Boers. There must be no half measures,” wrote Churchill a few years after the disaster. The result was the Second Boer War (1899–1902), the first four months of which brought further misfortune, casualty, and defeat. Finally, at the end of February 1900, British troops managed to win a couple of costly battles and relieved their comrades besieged at Ladysmith. Over the next two years, imperial forces — taking “no half measures” — prevailed by virtue of Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener’s scorched-earth policy, which resulted in the destruction of some 30,000 Boer farms and the incarceration of Boer women, children, and noncombatant men in brutal concentration camps. These disease-ridden, food-deprived, inadequately sheltered enclosures were themselves the cause of tens of thousands of deaths, the great majority of them children. The entire conflict was ugly in every possible way, but it was the making of Winston Churchill’s political career.

The Winston Churchill who arrived in Cape Town in October 1899 as a war correspondent was not yet twenty-five, but he had already served as an observer in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, as a soldier and correspondent in India during the Pashtun revolt of 1897 and in the Sudan in 1898. Earlier in the year, he had lost a by-election in his first attempt to become a member of Parliament, the initial and necessary step toward his goal of becoming prime minister. Churchill, who made no real distinction between civilian correspondent and soldier, came to southern Africa not only to teach the Boers (“a very small and miserable people”) a lesson but, most crucially, to perform heroic deeds. Properly publicized, these would, he was certain, ensure his election to Parliament and propel him onward to his glorious destiny. He had already acted with reckless courage, even foolhardiness, in combat in India, and there was no possibility in his mind that he would die on the battlefield. (“I do not believe the Gods would create so potent a being as myself for so prosaic an ending.”)

Three weeks after the outbreak of war, Churchill — equipped with a servant and a large supply of fine wine and liqueur, plus eighteen bottles of scotch — had made it to Estcourt, some forty miles from besieged Ladysmith, where, under the command of Colonel Charles Long, troops were awaiting the arrival of the main British force. Long, a man of indecision and blunder, sent an armored reconnaissance train bearing soldiers, civilian railway workers, and Winston Churchill right into the teeth of a Boer ambush. In the midst of devastating enemy gunfire, Churchill, notionally a civilian, led a near-suicidal attempt to free the engine, an act of resourcefulness and monstrous bravery. (“Surrounded by screaming shells and deafening explosions, dead and dismembered men, desperation and almost certain failure, Churchill, eyes flashing, cheeks flushed, began shouting orders.”) Eventually, after truly appalling difficulties and setbacks wonderfully described by Millard, the engine was freed and, packed with men, many wounded and dead, managed to make its way back to a British camp. Still, to his infinite disgust, Churchill was captured with many others and marched off to Pretoria to be locked up as a POW. Nonetheless, the main goal was met: News of his valor, leadership, and determination in freeing the train filled the British newspapers.

From the moment of his capture, Churchill thought of little but getting free. He eventually inserted himself into the escape plan hatched by two other men, neither of whom wanted him along. They had good reason: He was out of shape, his now famous person would be quickly missed, and he couldn’t keep his trap shut. The last was immediately borne out as Churchill at once began boasting to his follow prisoners of his intended escape. And he did get away, completely fouling up the original plan and leaving its two originators behind. By what means this impetuous hero made it over more than 300 hundred miles from Pretoria to the British consulate in Portuguese East Africa is for you to discover, as I do not wish to take one excruciating pang of suspense away from you. I will say only that the ordeal involved jumping on and off moving trains, trekking across arid lands surrounded by enemies on high alert, living with rats down a mineshaft, and being smuggled across a border buried in wool. It was an enterprise in which Churchill’s remarkable courage, audacity, and luck played equal parts along with the bravery and willingness of others to put their own lives on the line to aid him.

Millard has enriched this tale of adventure with details of the quiddities and tribulations of late-nineteenth-century British warfare: the change in battle dress from the glorious red tunic to despised khaki; the use of bicycles and hydrogen-filled balloons; the danger of being hit by lightning on the veldt; and the deplorable rations that included Johnston’s Fluid Beef, an unpalatable substance processed into such incorruptibility that the leftovers were served to the troops in World War I.

The book also includes a fine selection of photographs, including one of Churchill at age seven, wearing such a look of haughty disdain that it not only made me laugh but summed up the man as I have always conceived him. And, indeed, until now, a very little of the imperialist, racist, anti-Hibernian snob, money scrounger, and spendthrift Winston Churchill has gone a very long way for me, but I read this book with real pleasure (and pounding heart). It is, quite simply, a thumping good read.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2fwTlNT

 

With Blood at the Root, National Book Award finalist Patrick Phillips has laid bare the history of an American tragedy, over a century old, that speaks volumes to the wounds and prejudices that still divide communities across the nation.  Delving into an outbreak of terror and violence in pre-World War I Georgia that effectively drove all the black residents from a county outside of Atlanta, Phillips found his own childhood memories entangled with the long legacy of racism, which kept Forsyth County an “all-white” region for decades.  Blood at the Root represents his long investigation into both the 1912 spasm of racist terror, and the lives through which it reverberated over generations.

Phillips was joined earlier this fall on stage at Barnes & Noble’s Upper West Side story in Manhattan by Tayari Jones, the author of Silver Sparrow, The Untelling, and Leaving Atlanta, to talk about the astonishing story of Forsyth County, and how it speaks to America in 2016. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Tayari Jones:   First, Patrick, I want to say congratulations to you on this book. You’ve got not one, but two rave reviews in the New York Times. I heard you on NPR. What is it about this story that you think has captured the imagination right now?

Patrick Phillips:  Thank you – and that’s a good question. Blood At the Root took me a large part of the last decade to write. I did a lot of research for a long time. For much of the time that I was working on it, I wasn’t sure whether I could find out the truth about the story. I wasn’t entirely sure where all of the research and everything was leading. But at the same time that I was doing that work, the headlines began to coincide with a lot of the things that I was finding in the archives in Georgia. There was the death of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, all of these episodes that started to take the nation’s attention. I think in some ways there are some inevitable parallels between what’s going on in America right now and the kinds of racial violence and I think some of the issues about equal protection under the law, equal enforcement of the law, that may be resonating.

TJ:   Let’s back up a little and talk about the story. I grew up in Atlanta, born and raised in southwest Atlanta – there’s a saying we have in Atlanta: if you drive 50 miles outside of Atlanta, you end up in Georgia. Atlanta is kind of sophisticated, and also a majority-black city. That was the whole thing. We always stayed in Atlanta. We didn’t go this way, this way or that way. And north was Forsyth County, which we always would call (I don’t know if you know this expression) a sundown town. A sundown town is a town where black people should not be after sundown.

I had never considered how Forsyth County ended up all-white. I thought it just was. Maybe you tell a little bit about the incident that’s at the center of this book, and then we can go from there.

PP:   In 1912, there was a woman named Mae Crow. Mae Crow was an 18-year-old white woman who was found beaten and bloody in the woods of north Georgia, in Forsyth County. This happens to be the place where I grew up. The house where my parents lived in the 1970s was just a few miles from where this incident occurred. All of this, I should say, was murky and kind of legendary and told in mythic terms when I was a kid growing up there.

Mae Crow was found in the woods, and when she was found… She was in a coma for about two weeks and eventually died. I found a letter from a young woman who was 14 at the time who said all hell broke loose in Forsyth County on the night of her funeral. Bands of night-riders set out to punish the entire black community of Forsyth County for this. They used arson, dynamite, gunfire, they posted notices… Their earliest targets were the black churches. There were five black churches burned in the first week of this.

Eventually, over the course of September-October-November of 1912, they succeeded in expelling the entire African-American population of Forsyth, which numbered 1,098 in the census of 1910. While this occurred in other places in America—in Rosewood, Florida, then there was the bombing of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921—there was something unusual about Forsyth, which is: They succeeded and they kept it that way. This was passed down generation to generation.

So when Tayari and I were growing up in Georgia in the 1970s, Forsyth County was still an “all white” county. This was still violently enforced through the ’70s and ’80s.

TJ:   I remember a story about a black couple that was driving through…

PP:   Yes. In 1980, a guy named Miguel Marcelli, who was a city of Atlanta firefighter, was going to a company picnic party in the county. His girlfriend was working for a computer company in Atlanta, and they just happened to have their company picnic up on Lake Lanier, which is a lake inside the county. Miguel Marcelli and his girlfriend were leaving the party, and they were basically ambushed by two white men—descendants, in fact, of Mae Crow. Melvin Crow was one of the people behind this. Miguel Marcelli was shot in the head. He ended up getting shot in the neck and survived it. But this happened in 1980, so at this point we’re 70 years after the fact, and this is still being enforced with an attack like that.

TJ:   I just can’t quite get over this story because it’s so close to Atlanta. It’s how many miles from Atlanta

PP:   30 miles.

TJ:   I guess right up the street. You can go to the mall. It’s that close to what was considered to be the jewel of the South — what was Atlanta’s motto, ‘the city too busy to hate’?

PP:   That’s right.

TJ:   And this was right up the street. Maybe you all remember when Oprah went there. Did you see when Oprah went there? No? This was in 1987, when Oprah first came on television. It was one of her first shows.

PP:   Oprah came down in 1987. This is the one part of the Forsyth County story that some people may remember. In 1987, there was a march called the Brotherhood March. It was organized by some sympathetic people in the white community in Forsyth who were tired of the intimidation and the fear. They joined forces with people from the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolence in Atlanta. A guy named Hosea Williams, who had been one of King’s real right-hand men — King called Hosea, “My Castro, my wild man.” Hosea led the Selma march in 1965 on the Edmund Pettis Bridge.

So he came to Forsyth County in 1987. My mother and father and my sister were part of this march. It was a group of 75. They were set upon by a white mob on January 17, 1987, and eventually the march had to be stopped because the police started arresting men who had come to the “counter protest” armed. In the wake of that, these images of a sort of gang of white men attacking peace marchers went all over the world. Oprah came down a week later and filmed an episode of her brand-new talk show. This is online; if you Google this, you’ll find it on YouTube.  She filmed a town hall meeting on the square to try to get to the bottom of it and try to find out what was going on.

TJ:   That for me is when I first heard the story about Forsyth County. One thing we do in the South we do in the South is that we keep our history quiet in a certain way, or have a kind of mythological history. I found out that the neighborhood I grew up in in Atlanta, that before my parents moved there, months before, there had been a wall erected to prevent them from moving in. I never knew this until I was an adult. It’s like there was a conspiracy of silence. How did you find out about it and how did you come to write it?

PP:   I had always known the story. My parents moved there when I was 7 years old from north side Atlanta. A new highway was completed. So it first became a bedroom community of Atlanta, and my parents moved there. My parents are both from Birmingham. They had grown up in Birmingham in the ’50s and had a real rift with their families over integration. So my parents had marched in civil rights marches, and they weren’t naive about exactly what you said—what lay just outside of Atlanta. But none of us expected the depth of the hatred that we found there.

So even as a schoolkid, I asked some of my classmates, “Why are there no black people here? Why is everyone so full of hatred when there don’t seem to be any people of color around?” That’s when I first heard this story in its most mythic terms, which was that, a long-long time ago, this girl had been attacked and, in response, the white people had “run out” all of their black neighbors. That’s the version of it I always knew. And exactly as you say, it was always told in very vague, mythic terms. There were never any names or dates or places. It was stripped of all of the detail. So it seemed like this thing that was just lost in the mists of time.

Even in 1987, when people came to try to investigate this after that march, ultimately a lot of the locals in the county put up real roadblocks to anyone finding the details. I actually talked to a guy who helped hide one of the ledgers that contained the tax roll from 1912. So there was a concerted effort to keep this out of the public eye. He didn’t know that the Mormons had microfilmed it in the 1960s, so I found it in the State Archives.

TJ:   How did you go from hearing this story to finding the truth?

PP:   At a certain point, I found a photograph of the prisoners. I was at NYU, in graduate school, and I had been working on all sorts of other things in English literature. One night I was sort of playing hooky from my real work. But I realized I was sitting at a computer terminal that had all of this power to find things out about the past, especially as newspapers had been digitized, as library archives had come on line. I thought, “Well, what do I want to look up?” I typed in “Forsyth County” and “murder” and “1912,” because I knew this was the year it was said to have happened. All of a sudden, all of these newspapers came up, the original images, and there was a photograph of 6 prisoners. These were the very first faces of Black Forsyth I had ever seen, of the community that had once existed there.

Seeing that photograph really changed my life. I suddenly thought this might be knowable, it might be possible to find this out. As it turned out, that involved years of going down to Atlanta, digging in the County Courthouse, a lot of interviews with descendants of the families who were forced out. The pieces were there, but they were scattered all over the place. So it involved a kind of obsessive search for information.

Mae Crow was the daughter of a sharecropper in a place called Oscarville, which is very near where I grew up. A very small community. Her descendants included a lot of people who I went to school with. When I was doing the archival research, almost all of the family names were very familiar to me. I did have a sense that being from the place was an advantage in trying to find out this story. I was able to get some of these people to talk to me, I think, in ways that would have been difficult from someone without a connection.

There were two boys who were accused of raping and killing Mae Crow—Oscar Daniel and Ernest Knox. Ernest Knox was 16. He was an orphan. Worked as a “hired man” from the time he was 14. Oscar Daniel was 18. So the two of them were tried during a one-day trial, and executed in a double hanging that was attended by 5,000 people. The whole county came out, and spread picnic blankets on a hillside (I’ve actually walked the ground where this took place), and it became a real festival day.

I had always been led to believe that the black community in Forsyth were entirely marginal, very poor, with no real hold on the place. There were plenty of people like that. Ernest Knox and Oscar Daniel were, in fact, really poor. But there was this whole other strata of the black community who worked in the houses of wealthy white citizens. There were ministers, teachers… There were property owners, like Joseph Kellogg. He owned 200 acres in the county. He was 21 when he was emancipated. I followed him through the Census rolls and the tax rolls, accumulating a little bit of land every decade, basically taking the profits from one harvest after another. And he came to own that 200 acres of land over the course of 40 years of labor. I found the story heartbreaking when I knew it in its broadest outlines. But when I got done following Joseph Kellogg and his wife Eliza accumulating this land with such labor, it was doubly heartbreaking when I realized what had happened to them.

The County Sheriff was a man named Bill Reid. He’s a future Ku Klux Klansman. I had always also had an understanding that this was unanimous, and that it had been a kind of monolithic white community that did this. In reality, there were people who realized what was going on, who wrote to the Governor, who called for troops to be sent in, who wrote to the Federal judiciary asking for help—and ultimately none of those pleas for help were answered by anyone in government.

I did an event in Atlanta last week. The great-granddaughter of Fred Brown [one of the victims profiled in the book] was at the event. The first question of the Q&A, she stood up, and she said, “I have a comment. That’s my great-grandfather.” She just started crying. It was an amazing event. So getting to know some of the descendants of these people, many of whom I had also been led to think of as kind of vanishing… In reality, a lot of them were in Atlanta, a lot in Paul County, very nearby. Some of these folks were living in communities I’d driven past many times as a high-schooler. So I felt a real sense of loss when I realized that if a single teacher or anyone had ever told me about this, there were people who would have remembered it and could have given first-hand accounts of it when I was living there in the ’80s. But it was so completely erased.

TJ:   Of everything you discovered in your research, what was the thing that surprised you most?

PP: I think the complexity of the two communities and their inter-connectedness surprised me. I talked with many descendants whose grandparents and great-grandparents were open about having white fathers. This was a community of people who were originally brought into the county as slaves. So the people who were expelled from Forsyth were much more deeply enmeshed in the fabric of the community than I had understood, including being genetically connected to some of the people who ran them out.

In general, part of denying this event and part of avoiding dealing with the pain of it for the white community has involved a lot of mythmaking that these people were marginal, that they weren’t very well-known by the people who attacked them—and in reality, the opposite was true. These were neighbors driving out people they had known and worked with all their lives.

TJ:   I’ve read similar work by Diane McWhorter and also Edward Ball. These were white Southerners who investigated the violent past of their home. You came to Forsyth as a 7-year-old, so it’s not quite the same as those two authors who were really finding out literally the sense of their fathers. But how were you changed? How are different now than when you first saw that picture when you were a student at NYU?

PP: I think I’m still figuring out the answer to that in some ways. I didn’t start writing this book until I was in my forties, my late thirties. Now I look back and I’m surprised that I managed to not write about it sooner. I guess I think that had to do with a really pervasive sense of…particularly among liberal white people, which is to try to do no harm, give no offense, essentially stay on the sidelines of our discussions about race. Writing the book has me convinced that one of the ways forward is for white people in America to face their profound involvement in these struggles. So I’ve been changed in that I thought I was being polite by not talking about race, and I think now that was cowardly and no help to anyone.

TJ:   That’s really something to think about. I do agree that we have to understand, like you said, that people in Forsyth were neighbors and even sometimes relatives that our history is a shared history. You and I are both Southerners. We’re both from Georgia. We both live in Brooklyn. Which gives us a bond it may not give us at home. It’s almost like when you travel abroad and you meet other Americans, and you act like you’re cousins.

PP:   It’s true.

TJ:   So, do you still consider yourself to be a Southerner, and what does that mean to you?

PP:   In some ways, yeah. I think I feel more Southern after writing the book than I did before, in that I went home a lot. I hadn’t been home. My parents are from Birmingham — the Birmingham of Bull Connor and George Wallace. So they had a very strong desire for me to get out. For a long time I guess I let that divide me from the place a little bit. Writing the book has been a kind of homecoming, too, to go back and delve into the complexities rather than just turning away from them.

TJ:   It’s really interesting, thinking about Southern identity. I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, but when I tell people I’m from Georgia, they act like I came to Brooklyn on the Underground Railroad. “Are you ok?” “Do you have a roommate?”

PP:   “How did you ever make it?” [LAUGHS]

TJ:   So sometimes, even when I’m looking at these histories, I feel a little bit like I am reinforcing a stereotype about my home.

PP:   Yes. Yes.

TJ:   Did you have any trepidation?

PP:   Well, I did. I think you put your finger right on it. Jane Daniel, who is the sister, the 21-year-old sister of Oscar also barely escaped alive from this. She was accused. She ended up testifying against her brother, and my strong sense is that a plea deal was offered when the two boys were dead men walking and there was no hope, and so she ended up telling the story that the white people in the county needed to hear. This is a horrible thing that happened.

I lost track of her — I couldn’t find Jane. I lost her in the archives. Her trail went completely cold. Eventually, I found something on ancestry.com that said that her grand-niece was alive in Gainesville, Georgia. So I flew down there, and at the end of one my research trips, I went to four different nursing homes in Gainesville, and eventually I found Mattie Daniel, 82 years old, the grand-niece of Jane Daniel—and in 15 minutes she solved every mystery that I had been trying to unravel for two years. She told me that Jane went to Detroit. She joined the great northern migration. She settled in Detroit. She married a man named Will. He worked in one of the factories in Detroit, and Jane was a washerwoman in the city. Essentially, I thought I had a kind of happy ending: “One of these people gets out, gets out of Georgia, gets way from the Night Riders and the Klansmen.”

Then, in researching more about where they lived, I found they lived in a part of Detroit called Paradise Valley. Some people may be aware of what happened in Detroit in 1943. Race riots broke out. I don’t know exactly what their experience was, but there is no question they were there in July of 1943. And in their neighborhood in July of 1943, bands of white men, many of them European immigrants, but nonetheless bands of white men with wooden clubs roved through the black neighborhoods of Detroit and beat 30 people to death. Eventually, the State National Guard had to come in to stop this.

I say that in answer to your question, because I think even I had internalized this sense that to escape Georgia was to escape the experience of being African-American in Jim Crow and in the mid-20th Century. But of course, that was not the case. Jane escaped into America.

TJ:   That is so disturbing.

PP: I wanted a happy moment in the book, but it didn’t last.

TJ:   You completely threw me with that. I thought this story was going somewhere else. I guess…

PP:   There is a happy ending, though. If I can

TJ:   Please. I’m begging with you.

PP:   Today one of my friends is a guy named Daniel Blackman, who is a State Senate candidate in Forsyth County, an African-American man running from Forsyth against Donald Trump’s head of campaign in the State of Georgia. Daniel’s three children go to school in Forsyth County. It’s a place that is now 200,000 instead of 30,000, 10% Latino, 8% Asian, and 4% African-American. The place is slowly changing.

 

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2eGyUuf

Just as any seasoned trick-or-treater knows that the accumulation of a range of candies is most desirable come the close of the evening’s efforts, so it goes with horror buffs and their preferred fare. If you go from door to door, you likely admire both the sculpted layers of a Snickers bar and the classic, touching simplicity of a bag of candy corn, and if you pull out a stack of films, you’re apt to go for both a Grand Guignol chiller and a low-rent bloodbath.

The Halloween season is reaping time for fans of terror cinema, when the hopes nurtured throughout the year, as to what might come out on DVD and Blu-ray, are harvested. There are always surprises, and there are always old films to be seen anew, and underappreciated works to be marveled over.

This year’s bumper crop is led by Criterion’s Blu-ray release of 1942’s Cat People, a Val Lewton production that possesses qualities of German Expressionism, noir, and a Middle American haunted house tour, where the simplest sounds become a symphony of the crypt.

Lewton worked with a regular group of film studs — like director Jacques Tourneur, who performs that role here — dubbed the Snake Pit. The studio, RKO, had been hit hard by the aftermath of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, two Orson Welles−helmed pictures that Americans found over-arty. The new promise was that genius was out and showmanship was in, but this was a left-handed compliment for Lewton, who had his own make of genius.

This hinged on subtlety, and if you want to be scared out of your mind – sans fake blood, elaborate costumes, or modern special effects — watch Cat People and marvel over what can be done with a street, an overpass, and a bus, and then later just a plain old YMCA-type swimming pool. Nothing else, save sounds, shadows, and what has been put in the characters’ heads, and in yours.

For Lewton’s pictures to work at their best, he needed either the big screen, or high-def. You must have the full play of shadows, of the primary tonal color of black being crisscrossed, flecked, played against by whiteness. In that regard, this Criterion cleanup job is akin to de-griming a public domain print of Doré. But it speaks to the devotion of the companies that put out these old horror films so lovingly that the same can be said of KINO’s Blu-ray of 1932’s Chandu the Magician.

There was a Chandu serial on the radio that was massive in its time, and it’s something to see such a rangy character arc condensed to seventy-one minutes, but it works largely because of two factors. This is prime-career Bela Lugosi, for starters, in the year after his performance in Dracula, the horror picture that started modern cinematic horror in America. Then we have the cinematography of James Wong Howe. He did for terror cinema what Gregg Toland did for John Ford and Welles, adding a level of artistry that could turn movie stills into works that could hang on museum walls.

Lugosi, who plays the mad scientist villain Roxor — beware the palindrome! — is obsessed with taking over the world with a death ray, because that’s just what mad scientists in the thirties were about. But Lugosi is no standard-issue bad guy: just look into his eyes, which have their own depth of field to them, all the more so in this pristine print. Lugosi would toil away chunks of his career in low-budget affairs where we can freeze the frame and laugh over the string that so clearly has a bat swinging from it, but Chandu was no poverty-row effort. It’s top-grade Lugosi, one of those quirky, underappreciated relics of horror that deserves the renewed attention this edition will hopefully bring.

Starting with Dracula and continuing into the same year’s Frankenstein, Universal proved itself the pacesetter studio for terror. Bride of Frankenstein followed as a masterpiece in 1935, high camp that was also high-grade fear-generating. The Wolf Man, another genius creation, followed in 1941, but it was in the decade of the forties that Universal became interested in the monster mash-style of filmmaking, where they packed a bunch of their ghoulies together and turned them loose on moviegoers.

The Complete Legacy Collection sets of Frankenstein and Wolf Man films have a lot of overlap, but if you are ever jonesing for this kind of stuff, you need both, and if you’re a serious horror student, you certainly do. Both boxes feature House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula, two monster rallies with decent budgets that are somewhat short on soul but nevertheless provide a few chills, a few more laughs, and plenty of popcorn chomping to go along with the scene-chomping.

There are a lot of films spread across the four discs of each package, but you really only need to focus on two, unless you’re a true neophyte, in which case it will be one new terror delight after another. Horror honchos will rejoice over the Blu-ray presentation of 1939’s Son of Frankenstein, the last Frankenstein film to feature Boris Karloff as the monster. It has never rated as high critically as its two epochal predecessors in the series, but it deserves consideration alongside them as a work of similar value. It is high-toned and baroque, maximalist where those earlier films are not, and a work that repays multiple viewings. If you go by the critical history books, you’ve perhaps been waved off of this one, but embrace your inner Linus and hunker down in the pumpkin patch that is your Halloween living room, and let Son rise from the cinematic catacombs.

In a somewhat less obviously artful spirit we also have 1943’s Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. For many genre fans this was at the top of the list of films that they wished to see on Blu-ray, and now they finally have it. This is the original monster rally film, the picture you can thank, or lambaste, every time you watch a trailer for some superhero meeting up with some other superhero at your local multiplex. (And it’s also the moment in pop culture history when the name Frankenstein was permanently transplanted from scientist to monster.) But give this one some love, as it is a flat-out barnburner (or watchtower burner, if you really wish to get into the spirit of things), pure joy, pure large-hearted scarefest, and if you know these films you know that’s not an oxymoron.

Lugosi is the Frankenstein monster, while Lon Chaney, Jr., of course, is his hirsute adversary. Roy William Neil, an underappreciated director who did the bulk of the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes series, oversees all. Consider the early sequence in the crypt. It’s as perfectly paced, as sculptural — with light and shadow — as anything by Lewton or anything in German Expressionist films like Nosferatu or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, for that matter. You will be knocked against the sides of your chair, which will come to feel oddly mausoleum-like in their solidity, and you will wish to remain in that mausoleum after the scene hits its climax and we really get going. So commandeer those undistributed treats you saved for yourself and get to it, lest you miss out on the very best kind of tricks.

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Margaret Sanger was arrested 100 years ago this week for having opened her New York City birth control clinic, America’s first. The illegal clinic was by no means covert, Sanger herself having defiantly alerted city authorities before opening her doors. After monitoring the situation for ten days, during which some 500 women had lined up to learn, as Sanger put it, how “not to have any more children than their health could stand or their husbands could support,” the police moved in on October 26, 1916, charging her with distributing obscene material.

Birth control was a highly debated topic in the early decades of the century, and Sanger was far from its only advocate. In 1915 the activist Mary Ware Dennett had founded the National Birth Control League, and the cause was widely promoted on the lecture circuits. But Sanger had a provocative personality, experience as a maternity nurse, and, says Jean H. Baker in her biography Margaret Sanger, a determination to take the issue to the streets:

Sanger meant her clinics to demonstrate a bold new phase of educating poor women about birth control beyond speeches, meetings and lobbying. Their establishment would mark the first free health clinics for women in the United States, an event, though largely forgotten today, that Sanger properly recognized as “of social significance in the lives of American womanhood.” Additionally, a Margaret Sanger birth control clinic, where self-help techniques were actually demonstrated, would raise her to the national standard bearer the movement required.

Sanger made a point of setting up her first clinic in a poor section of Brooklyn and of making clear, in pamphlets distributed in Yiddish and Italian as well as English, that birth control was a better choice than poverty or abortion:

MOTHERS!

Can you afford to have a large family?

Do you want any more children?

If not, why do you have them?

DO NOT KILL, DO NOT TAKE LIFE, BUT PREVENT

Safe, Harmless Information can be obtained at

46 AMBOY STREET.

Recognizing that the birth control methods she could make available in 1916 were largely inconvenient or unreliable, Sanger spent the rest of her life in search of a better option. Jonathan Eig’s The Birth of the Pill begins with the winter evening in 1950 when the seventy-one-year-old Sanger took her hopes for an oral form of contraception to Gregory Goodwin Pincus, a biologist whose work on reproduction had attracted as much controversy as Sanger’s. He also shared, says Eig, her driven and defiant personality:

He looked like a cross between Albert Einstein and Groucho Marx. He would speed into a room, working a Viceroy between his yellowed fingers, and people would huddle close to hear what he had to say. He wasn’t famous. He owned no scientific prizes. No world-changing inventions were filed under his name. In fact, for a long stretch of his career he had been an outcast from the scientific establishment, rejected as a radical by Harvard, humiliated in the press, and left with no choice but to conduct his varied and oftentimes controversial experiments in a converted garage.

Sanger always insisted that her campaign was all about giving women options. In Making Babies, the award-winning Irish author Anne Enright humorously describes exercising hers by, as her subtitle puts it, “Stumbling into Motherhood.” In the passage below, from somewhere in the fourth month aboard the postpartum rollercoaster, both mother and child pause for a mutual look around:

The baby is becoming herself. Every day she is more present to us. A personality rises to the surface of her face, like a slowly developing Polaroid. She frowns for the first time, and it looks quite comical — the deliberate, frowny nature of her frown . . . She gets rounder. Her features begin to look strangely confined, like a too-small mask in the middle of her big, round face.

It is now that babies look like Queen Victoria or Winston Churchill, or anyone fat, and British, and in charge. She is most imperious when her father picks her up. She sits in his arms and looks over at me as if to say, So who are you?

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Raymond Gaspar has done his time: four years for trying to sell a stolen boat and for possession of crystal meth. “He served them at a place in Tracy called the Deuel Vocational Institution . . . The only vocation he learned was making sure the drugs kept moving.” Inside, his boss is Arthur, “the only man in the California Department of Corrections who could make a call to the Black Guerilla Family or the Aryan Brotherhood and get action from either group.” Now Arthur wants Raymond to work for him on the outside by stepping into the ecstasy-selling business that Arthur has going with a Filipina named Gloria. ” ‘Unless you’re planning on going straight or some bullshit? Accepting the Lord into your heart?’ Raymond shook his head.”

Cool and laconic, echoing vintage Elmore Leonard, the early scenes in Patrick Hoffman’s new novel, Every Man a Menace, radiate tension. A complex trap is being set — you can almost hear the pulling back of the spring — and around it Hoffman will construct an intricate fretwork of betrayal, blackmail, murder, and retail economics. “Almost $4,090 a pound,” one ecstasy dealer calculates. “That, times sixty pounds, worked out to around $246,000 a load. They could sell it to one buyer for more than twice that price: half a million a load. It was good.” Even better is the $50 million load snaking its way from Burma to San Francisco, a shipment that explains so many of the novel’s befuddling plot twists.

No wonder, when Raymond first meets Gloria, “it occurred to him that he might already be in over his head.” Gloria buys ecstasy, sells it to weird Shadrack, who sells it on, and Arthur, the dealmaker, gets 10 percent. Now Arthur wants more. He sends Raymond to replace “one of these two parties.” But Raymond’s story is merely the overture to a byzantine drama in five acts that takes us from Southeast Asia and Israel to Miami and California, keeping us guessing until the final confrontation that explains everything: the setups, the side deals, and the ultimate payoff. Even then, as the waters of San Francisco Bay close over a weighted garbage bag containing one of the plot’s loose ends, key scenes remain tantalizingly opaque.

Hoffman is an infernally clever writer. His first novel, The White Van, was a Fabergé egg of a thriller, spring-loaded with revelations, and Every Man a Menace is more intricate still. Yet Hoffman’s puzzles are more human than mechanical. His characters are too complex and his scenes too immediate and engrossing to be diminished by intrigue. Raymond, for instance, is the closest thing to an innocent here, yet far more than a pawn. Fresh out of prison and out of his depth, getting high, sensing danger, he dominates the novel’s first section. Through his eyes, we see an outside world that seems oddly unreal. “Raymond walked up Mission Street and bought himself a prepaid cell phone. The sidewalk was crowded, but he felt tense and lonely. The city had changed. It seemed richer.” When he is taken to the airport and instructed to buy a ticket to Mexico — one he will never use — he thinks that the terminal “looked like a prison for rich people.” Losing sight of him is abrupt and wrenching, but Hoffman is merciless, and he has much more to show us.

So it’s on to Miami. “There were nearly two hundred people inside already,” a nightclub owner observes. “They stood clustered in groups and moved their shoulders to the music like apes; they surrounded the bar like ants.” Semion and Isaak, Israeli army buddies, own the Ground Zero club, but their real business is selling drugs shipped from Southeast Asia through a middleman, Mr. Hong. “Miami was the new Switzerland,” Semion boasts. “Russians were buying property all over the city, and nobody looked at the money. Banks welcomed new customers with champagne.” There are no innocents here. But there are victims, and Semion becomes one, set up by a beautiful grifter but destroyed by somebody far more powerful. “He cracked his eyes open; the bed was covered in black paint . . . He sat up a little more, then reached for the lamp and turned it on. The black became red. The paint became blood.” Another wheel in Hoffman’s elegant clockwork plot starts turning. By the time it winds down, the deadly stratagem behind all the killing, all the lies, will make perfect, terrible sense. This is business, after all, as Gloria tells her new partner: “I moved to America from the Philippines when I was twelve years old. I never went to school . . . And look at me now . . . I own property. I get awards from city hall for my community work. I pay my taxes. You understand what I’m saying?” Hoffman makes sure that we do.

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In Louisiana, there’s a hotel known as the Myrtles Plantation, built about five miles up from a curve in the Mississippi on the edge of formerly Spanish land. Myrtles — a 1796 manse that features upside-down locks to confuse spirits who might otherwise enter through the keyholes — is, it seems, teeming with ghosts. There are the ghosts of Union soldiers shot during the Civil War. There’s the ghost of the plantation owners’ daughter’s husband, who was shot on the front porch. To top it all off there’s the ghost of an enslaved girl named Chloe, who, when spurned in her master’s love, was said to have poisoned his children and wife with one fatal oleander cake. She still roams the halls, supposedly, in a green turban.

This story, is dramatic, and to be honest, more than a bit tacky. What’s more, it’s not even historically true — plantation records show no Chloe, and the records do show that the children  and wife in question died of yellow fever  years apart. Nevertheless, this story has, for several decades, been on sale as a “highlight” of the Myrtles plantations tours. Colin Dickey has chased it and a bevy of other ghost stories down in Ghostland, his sly, entertaining compendium of American haunting. What, he asks, does the story of Chloe show us — not just about ghosts but about ourselves? What is the purpose of wanting to be haunted this way?

After all, Dickey notes, there are surprising numbers of ghosts to be found all over the United States. For such a new country, we do a brisk business in unfinished pasts. Some of our ghosts can be found in brothels. Some – more traditionalist spirits, perhaps –roam graveyards. Some creak old floorboards or appear in tatters in houses that have long since become museums. Many are not picky about settings and will show up in parking lots or strip malls. One even haunts a Toys “R” Us in Sunnyvale, California. In fact, Dickey shows us, American ghosts are remarkably democratic, in the sense that they are willing to haunt almost anywhere that we’ve been. Dickey welcomes them in. Wandering between the Winchester Mystery House and the Stanley Hotel — the inn made famous by The Shining — and voyaging through the old epicenter of slave trading in Richmond Virginia, Dickey keeps asking us: Why do we Americans have so many haunted places? The answer, he suggests, may have to do with the contradictions and deliberate obfuscations in our supposedly settled, daylight history. Ghosts come out to remind us of paradoxes, tensions, omissions. Ghosts reveal our own confusions — although they often glance off them slantwise, hinting at them indirectly.

Each chapter is part tale, part analysis. The stories are good — chains rattle, eerie lights pass by — but often Dickey seems more fascinated than actually spooked. Occasionally, he’s thrown off balance, as in a spectrally afflicted whorehouse in Nevada, where he can’t quite shake an orblike image he sees on the prostitute’s video screen. Other times, even bedding down in the most haunted room of the haunted bed-and-breakfast during the lashing rain of a stormy night, he’s simply worn out by his compendious travels. There may be ghosts around him, but they don’t trouble his sleep.

Instead, what makes the book rich is the way that Dickey consistently narrates a pleasantly chilling tale — of a spurned love, of a series of mysterious deaths, of an unhappy soul left with unfinished work — then reads what lies behind the ghost story. It’s as if he’s lifting the veil to show how one horror stands in for another. Behind our countless stories of haunted Native burial grounds, for instance, may well lie America’s own uneasiness about the fact that we can never wholly belong to a land that has been so brutally stolen. Behind the popular white ghosts that populate Richmond’s Shockoe Bottom are the real horrors of slavery — the kind of deep human nightmares that took place in one of the densest and most horrific nodes of slave trafficking in the United States. “The human capital lost in Shockoe Bottom is staggering. Only New Orleans had a larger column of human beings . . . hired out for temporary work,” Dickey writes. Might it be that we sometimes are haunted to remember and that other times we tell stories to obscure other, more terrible pasts? Sometimes our ghost stories reveal us to ourselves. Sometimes they hide us from ourselves. Often, Dickey argues, they do both.

One of the paradoxes of ghosts: telling their stories is comforting. There’s another way that the industry of being scared offers a temporary catharsis that seems to interpose itself at sites where we might really confront and grieve the deeper violence of the American past. Ghosts swirl around our confusions, around wrongs that have not yet been righted. By their very natures, ghosts hover in liminal spaces — between the real and the imaginary, between death and life. But for all their embodiment of the bodiless, for all their supposedly unfinished work, Dickey argues that it’s our own unresolved problems, our own deep restlessness, that we find in the figure of an old soldier or wronged woman who won’t go quietly.

If you’re in the mood to be truly haunted by the paranormal, Dickey may foil you. He may also ask you to think more. But if you’re interested in thinking about the veil behind the veil behind the veil, about the sleight of hand or mind that substitutes one trauma for another, or about why we need to consume ghosts and ghostliness at all, this book is a treat. Dickey is a wise tour guide to the kitsch and also an astute interpreter of the compelling American medium of haunting.

That said, Dickey doesn’t want us to do away with ghosts, even if we could. He seems to think ghosts won’t ever really disappear, because, as he puts it, “we need them too badly.” After all, he argues, they are here for a reason — they lead us towards the unfinished gravesites in our lives. “The language of ghosts is a means of coping with the unfamiliar — and if they sometimes require that we overlook the truth, that may be a price we’re willing to pay,” he writes. It’s real, this haunting. Ghosts know something we don’t. They go ahead of us, pointing on toward something unfinished, gesturing, however indirectly, to something just beyond.

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The dog-rose, that pretty libertine of the hedges . . . is unlucky. Never form any plan while sitting near one, for it will never answer.

*

Rachel, my sister-in-law, was moving from Portland, Oregon, to Los Angeles, California. All her worldly possessions were packed into a sixteen-foot Budget rental truck. I had volunteered to join her on the drive.

We lit out on a Thursday morning, following a route I first mapped five years ago for a short story I was working on about a man who leaves his girlfriend soon after they move to Portland. That story was written by revisiting the most minor character from an even older story, one which eventually became the title story of my collection Flings. For a long time during its development, the story “Flings” bore an epigraph from St. Augustine’s Confessions: “Some memories pour out to crowd the mind and, when one is searching and asking for something quite different, leap forward into the center as if saying ‘Surely we are what you want?’” In “After Ellen,” the story in which the man takes the drive, his destination is the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, where his sister and her husband live — where my sister-in-law would now be living. I wasn’t thinking about any of this when I went to look up the driving directions, but Google Maps remembered that I had plotted this route before.

*

“Memory,” says Plotinus, “is for those who have forgotten.” The gods have no memory because they know no time, have no need to fight against time, have no fragments of what has been lost to recollect, to re-collect. In India, with its vast stretches of time, with its same lives appearing and appearing again, there is no distinction between learning and remembering. You knew it in your past lives, you have always known it, to learn is to re-mind yourself, bring yourself back into the mind of universal knowledge. Says the Jaiminiya Upanishad: “It is the unknown that you should remember.” And more: It is the unknown that makes you remember, and its trigger is smell, the vasana.

The above is the first paragraph of the title essay of Eliot Weinberger’s Karmic Traces, notably not one of the two books whose publication has occasioned this essay. But Weinberger’s style is roundabout. It is sidelong and associative, and in that spirit I don’t mind sharing that it was my own concerns about memory — amplified by my late experience of having been reminded of something I did not know I already knew — that made me think of “Karmic Traces,” an exploration of the ways in which sense, memory, and spirit are interdependent. The essay doubles handily as an introduction to the concept of vasana, and trebly as an ode to the vagaries of New York City traffic. It is peppered throughout with unattributed but easily identifiable borrowings from Proust.

*

Twilight and night-flying white moths are the souls of the dead, who in this form are allowed to take farewell of this earth.

*

The route from Portland to Los Angeles could not be simpler. You take I-5 all the way. We had good weather, light traffic, and Dadrock on the radio. We did not plug in an iPhone until we lost FM signal in the mountains, those long sweet rolling passages of green and brown between the blink-you-missed-it towns of southern Oregon: Canyonville, Three Pines, Rogue River, Starvation Heights.

Rachel played mixtapes our friend Tess had curated, which got me thinking about anthologies, about curation as a discipline and craft and creative act. Tess, the author of the mixtapes (though not the music on them) has heard first about more musicians who have gone on to justified acclaim than any other person I’ve ever known. She always seems to have heard everything that could possibly have been heard in a given time period, gathered up the best of it, and arranged it in such a way that a bunch of songs that do not belong together suddenly belong together. My wife, similarly, curates a book festival, and so every year I watch her bring together 100 or so authors from all over the country, who come to Portland to promote their own latest work in their own particular genre, and the net result is not cacophony, but something that feels panoramic and coherent: uniquely Portland’s, but also uniquely my wife’s. A good curator, like a good artist, is someone who sees more, hears more, notices more — is more generous in the attention she pays, and more greedy in the return she collects on that investment — than other people.

*

Who looks into the nest of an owl will become morose and melancholy for the rest of life. The hooting of a churchyard owl is a positive sign that an unmarried girl of the town has surrendered her chastity.

*

Eliot Weinberger — in his original essays no less than in his work as a translator, editor, and critic — is a masterful curator. He is a restorer, an arranger, a presenter. There does not seem to be any bright line between his practices in the several disciplines and I believe that this is by design. He deals in esoteric marvels such as “Surviving Fragments from Lost Zoroastrian Books,” “Mexican Indigenous Poetry,” or the historical evolution of the theory that the Buddha was an impostor, but his work is hardly limited to fragments. His excavations extend to whole systems of knowledge and modes of knowing. Consider this paragraph from “The City [A few blocks]” from his new collection, The Ghosts of Birds:

Cities were never new. Whether in Mesopotamia or Egypt or China, the ruler justified the construction of the city by stating that the design copied one handed down from the ancestors. In the 5th century BCE, a poem in the first Chinese anthology, the Shi Ching, the Book of Odes or Songs, sings the praises of King Wen, who had built the city of Feng, six hundred years before: “He made Feng according to the ancient plan. / He did not fulfill his own desires, / But worked in pious obedience to the dead.” Creation in cyclical time, is always re-creation. The city — our model of novelty and modernity — was their model of antiquity. The city — our model of unfettered life — was ruled by the dead. In the 1930s, Thomas Wolfe wrote a short story with the matchless title, “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn.”

Impossibly erudite and improbably accessible, Weinberger is the genial docent guiding the grand tour of a Library of Alexandria that he happens to have personally built by hand and stocked with titles. (He has also written the card catalog and funded the endowment.) His voracious range is tempered by a crisp, even epigrammatic style. The books he writes, no less than those he edits, are mixtapes, some organized by their theme and others by their moment; in the latter case the time period appears on the book’s title page, not as a subtitle, exactly, but in the spot where a subtitle would go. Works on Paper: 1980−1986. Outside Stories: 1987−1991. Karmic Traces: 1993−1999.

Chronology becomes a measure of the development of Weinberger’s thinking over time, as well as his thinking about time: What do we come back to? What do we leave behind? Chronology asserts continuity, linking each book to the others of its suit, while in the thematic books there is a whole different gestalt.

19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, for example, is a book of translation that is also a book about translation: theory and poetics, trends and blunders in the checkered history of the literary attention that the West has paid the East. Weinberger believes, “Great poetry lives in a state of perpetual transformation, perpetual translation: the poem dies when it has no place to go.” Each short section of 19 Ways considers a different translation of the same four-line poem from the Tang dynasty: Wang Wei’s “Deer Park” (or “Deer Fence” or “Deer Enclosure” or “Deep in the Mountain Wilderness,” etc.). 19 Ways was first published in 1979 and reissued in 1986 with an afterword by Octavio Paz and a postscript from Weinberger. These pieces now appear toward the middle of the still-pocket-sized volume, which has just been reissued again by New Directions, now “with more ways” of looking (ten of them) and a second postscript, in which it is argued, “A translation of, say, a poem into English is a kind of palimpsest. It is not a poem in English, as it will always be read as a translation: a text written on top of another text. Yet it is appreciated (or not appreciated) in the same ways we respond to an original poem: in awe at the delicacy and intricacy of its manipulation of the language, or disappointed by its clunkiness.”

*

To heal a cut or a wound made by an instrument, clean and polish the instrument, and the wound will heal cleanly.

*

Every year Tess makes a summer mix and a winter mix, but Rachel passed these over for a pair of themed mixes Tess made on the occasion of her own cross-country move. Rachel played the “Breaking Up with New York” mix and then the “Falling in Love with California” mix. When it was my turn to pick the music I chose the Grateful Dead live at the Cow Palace, 12/31/76, and in exchange for this indulgence took an extra shift behind the wheel of the truck.

My favorite thing about the Grateful Dead — in addition to but not separate from my love of their music — is that they themselves are anthologists. They like playing covers at least as much as originals. Some of the covers are played faithfully while others are translated into the Dead’s own language, reimagined as vehicles for vast improvisations that the original songs were never meant to accommodate, that the original authors could have scarcely imagined. From the show I happened to choose: Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land”; Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried”; The Young Rascals’ “Good Lovin’ “; an original arrangement of the traditional “Samson and Delilah”; Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around”; Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away”; Bonnie Dobson’s “(Walk Me Out in the) Morning Dew”; and to close the show, another traditional, one of the world’s great gospel songs, “We Bid You Goodnight.”

*

Holding a dying creature during childhood will leave the offender with trembling hands for life.

*

After twelve hours on the road we stopped in Stockton, California, the setting for Leonard Gardner’s Fat City — a perfect novel, the only one he ever wrote. First published in 1969, Fat City is the story of two amateur boxers and the trainer who works with both of them. Sometimes, to get by, the men do day labor as vegetable pickers in the Central Valley. Their lives are rooming houses and rotgut, swimming vision and aching bones. Denis Johnson called Fat City “a book so precisely written and giving such value to its words that I felt I could almost read it with my fingers, like Braille.”

Rachel and I checked into a Hilton and set off on foot to find something to eat. We ended up at a Mexican place that was clearly about to close as we walked in but seemed glad for the business and let us sit. We ordered dinner, drank margaritas, debated what time to leave town in the morning. A man at the bar — the only other customer left in the place — declared loudly and to no one in particular, “Whatever it costs you, don’t let your daughters grow up.”

The next day we drove through the Central Valley, where some fields were flourishing with tomatoes, pistachios, almonds, corn, and cattle, while others sat dry and abandoned and there were roadside signs in the dead fields that said STOP BOXER’S CONGRESS-CREATED DUSTBOWL and IS GROWING FOOD WASTING WATER? and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.

Like most of Denis Johnson’s novels, Fat City might be said to be a book about people who do not know they are already in Hell.

*

Shrikes and plovers are known to contain the souls of those who assisted at the crucifixion; persons who hear the cries of these “Wandering Souls” are sure to meet mischance.

*

The first section of The Ghosts of Birds is described as “a continuation” of Weinberger’s “serial essay” An Elemental Thing, a collection published in 2007 and described as “open-ended” even in its original jacket copy. At first I thought this was an odd choice, this patch update. Why not revise and reissue, as with the 19 Ways? But then I saw that there had been an earlier “continuation” of the essay in his 2009 collection, Oranges & Peanuts for Sale, which also contains a continuation of What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles, accounting for the time from that book’s 2005 publication to the end of the second Bush presidency and on into the Obama years.

Weinberger loves a good literary life project, a work so grand in its ambition that it would probably go on forever if death and publishing did not intervene. Pound’s Cantos, Zukofsky’s “A,” Olson‘s Maximus Poems, Reznikoff’s Testimony. But this is not about mere Modernist (male) monumentalism (though it’s certainly not not about that either). Weinberger loves the Icelandic sagas, the Upanishads, the Yogavasistha — a Kashmiri poem “composed sometime between the sixth and twelfth centuries, consisting of things left out of the Ramayana.” He loves the Ramayana.

In an encomium for the contemporary poet Jeffrey Yang (first published as an introduction to the German edition of Yang’s collection An Aquarium), Weinberger delineates the epic and lyric functions of poetry. The epic is “a storehouse of information, of what a culture knows about itself and the natural world, about the gods and about other humans.” The lyric is “both celebration and excoriation, wonder at the world and rage at how it often is.”

Weinberger prefers creation stories to apocalypses. He takes apocrypha and heresy seriously, viewing them as way stations through which ideas and beliefs pass on their journey from myth into truth — and perhaps back again. From the essay (nominally, in its original form, a book review) “That Imposter Known as the Buddha”: “It’s a Modernist tale: A true (or presumably true) story turns into fiction, travels through many centuries and many languages and ends up almost where it began, still more or less the same while simultaneously having turned into its opposite. And even stranger, the fiction has become real.”

This reprises a theme from “Genuine Fakes,” an essay from Karmic Traces about Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird and the art forger Hans van Meegeren: “A forgery is an object without a creator, and human nature cannot bear anything without a narrative of its origin . . . Forgery is based on authenticity, and both of them are jokes. But it is authenticity, not forgery, that is the cruelest joke of all.” Surely Weinberger is such an able translator and explicator of Borges because he is himself so thoroughly Borgesian.

Neither the Buddha essay nor the Yang essay nor “Genuine Fakes” is designated part of An Elemental Thing, but one gets the sense they could be, or may eventually be understood to have been. Weinberger’s “continuations,” then, are gestures meant to remind his readers that all boundaries are porous, all limits arbitrary and — just maybe — illusory. Each book makes its reader aware (and itself self-aware) of its simultaneous completeness and incompleteness. The book is ambivalent toward its status as a book. At the same time, the declaration of a definitive incompleteness is only provisionally definitive. The book was written. It was begun and revised and completed, submitted and sold. It has covers, a barcode. At the store they won’t give you the next one gratis just because you tell them that as far as the author is concerned it’s all one big book, and you’ve already paid for it. These are the realities of death and publishing. Eventually the project, however potentially limitless, will actually end, and this end will be ordained by its author — by his fate, if not his will.

*

Plato’s doctrine of the transmigration of souls holds that the souls of sober quiet people, untinctured by philosophy, come to life as bees. Later than Plato comes Mahomet, who admitted bees, as souls, to paradise and Porphyry said of fountains, “They are adapted to the nymphs, or those souls which the Ancients call bees.”

*

Rachel drove us over “The Grapevine,” a forty-mile span of highway dreaded for its steepness and curves, as well as for the way it leaves motorists exposed to the Santa Ana winds. Signs warn drivers to shut their air conditioners to reduce the risk of overheated engines. Trucks are subject to a reduced speed limit and at times consigned to the right lane, while most big rigs choose to go slower yet and take the breakdown lane as their dedicated space in which to do so, only to have to maneuver back into traffic to pass those rigs that have broken down. Our friend Caroline, via Twitter, said she was worried about us. She lives in Minnesota now but had been a Californian for a time, and she shared vivid, miserable memories of trips she’d taken on the Grapevine in “a Jeep with a lawn mower engine.” She promised to “press a phantom gas pedal” for us for our inclines. I played Dolly Parton, Rilo Kiley, Gram Parsons. We were fine.

The truck was parked in front of Rachel’s place by two o’clock. We got lunch around the corner, cleaned up and changed our clothing, went downtown to surprise our friend Regina at her art opening. Regina works in many media but is, to me anyway, primarily a photographer. Her show depicted landscapes, many of them fogbound, taken at the sites of former utopian communities. The show was called “Unfortunately, It Was Paradise.” You should have seen the look on her face when we walked in.

The next day we went to In ‘N’ Out Burger, a chain that prints Bible citations on all its disposable food wrappers. My double cheeseburger said Nahum 1:7, which baffled me. I’ve read the Bible, as well as Abraham Heschel’s The Prophets, but it took Google to remind me that Nahum is in the Old Testament, right there in the Book of the Twelve, tucked between Micah and Habakkuk. In the King James translation: “The LORD is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble; and he knoweth them that trust in him.”

There was just enough time left before my flight back to Portland for Rachel to show me her favorite place in Los Angeles: the Museum of Jurassic Technology, conveniently located two doors down from the In ‘N’ Out.

I don’t know how to describe this place other than to say it feels like something Eliot Weinberger might have dreamed up. (Possibly an alternate-universe Eliot Weinberger with an enhanced tolerance for hokum and kitsch, but never mind that now.) We walked through the low-lit warren of rooms, browsing displays, dioramas, reproductions, diagrams, taxidermies, filmstrips, artworks, artifacts, explanatory wall text. There are two rooms dedicated to the life and work of the seventeenth-century German Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher. There is a cutaway model of Noah’s Ark. There are depictions of folk remedies for various ailments, a history of the mobile home, oil portraits of the dogs sent by the USSR into outer space. The roof is a dove aviary; the tea and cookies served there are included in the price of admission.

At the gift shop, on our way out, I bought a chapbook called “Tell the Bees . . . Belief, Knowledge, and Symbolic Hypercognition.” It is from this volume, published by the museum itself, that all unattributed text in my essay has been drawn.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology’s motto comes from Charles Willson Peale, who lived from 1741 to 1827 and was one of those guys who did a bit of everything: scientist, inventor, naturalist, etc., though he’s best remembered now as a major portrait painter of the Revolutionary War era. He said, “The Learner must be led always from familiar objects toward the unfamiliar, guided along, as it were, a chain of flowers into the mysteries of life.”

I hope Eliot Weinberger will visit this place the next time he is in Los Angeles. If he wants company, maybe Rachel can take him. During the hour we spent there she was as happy as I’ve ever seen her. Her joy was so palpable, so infectious, that as we left I did not so much decide as realize — or, better still, remember — that my wife and I were going to get her a membership for a housewarming gift.

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A few weeks ago, at Barnes & Noble on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Robin MacArthur and Anna Noyes, authors of the 2016 Discover New Writers selections Half Wild and Goodnight, Beautiful Women, sat down with award-winning memoirist and Oprah.com books editor Leigh Newman to talk about the art of the short story, and how their two brilliant collections take the New England territory well known by these writers and expose a side of it only seen by those who are there past Labor Day. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.– Miwa Messer

Leigh Newman: I have a love affair with the short story that is almost embarrassing. I feel that perhaps it separated me from my children and my husband several times. Other people get in trouble for being an Instagram husband. My husband is probably a short story husband.. It was so exciting to read these two books together. Of course, they are absolutely different; every artist creates a different kind of collection. But these two writers have so many points of complicity, even if they are creating very different, distinctive voices and very different and distinctive takes on the life of a female, life in rural America, class, gender, love, heartbreak, disappointment, loss, confusion, and maybe some slight glimmer of grace.

Half Wild is Robin MacArthur’s brilliant, wonderful book about rural Vermont. A lot of the stories—although they come in different perspectives, from men, from women, from old women, from young girls, different time periods—do reflect on the female experience in sort of a…I wouldn’t call it a hardscrabble Vermont, but I would call it not the Vermont of the beautiful NPR commercial with the Volvo station wagon careening through a green grass with cows. It’s a Vermont, the people that live in it, in all of its complicated socioeconomic levels, and all of its utopian dreams maybe not quite as realized as the dreamers wanted them to be.

Anna Noyes’ collection, Goodnight, Beautiful Women, all takes place in Maine. It similarly shows a side of Maine and reveals it in a beautiful way—a Maine landscape that could be harsh and confusing and… I hate to go back to the word “beautiful.” Once you put “beautiful” in the title and then you read her prose, you realize it actually belongs there. But it’s a land that isn’t the Maine where you go and you crack lobsters, and you eat them, and you have your corn, and you stay in your beautiful white-shuttered house on your windswept coast. It’s a Maine where there’s poverty and there’s drug use, and there’s love, and there’s very-very complicated women who live in all of these stories.

I thought we’d talk first, actually, about writing against geographic stereotype. Because both of you come from New England. I’m from Alaska, so I’m the last person who would know about New England. I don’t know anything about New England! I’ve been learning, because I’ve been living in New York for 15 years. But this is not the New England you read about. I wanted you to talk about why you felt so compelled to write this way, and how it was received, and what you were thinking about, writing against geographical stereotype.

Robin MacArthur: I thought a lot about that. I grew up in a small town in Vermont, where my dad also grew up, so I kind of had this perspective of 67 years of class and economic disparity in Vermont, and knew… I went to public schools. I knew these kind of backwater, backwoods lives that were not represented at all in our cultural utopian vision of what Vermont is. Vermont and Maine both are such tourism destinations and second-home destinations… I went to Brown after public high school, where everybody I met said, “Oh, I love Vermont; I have a second home there” or “I have a ski house there” or “I love Ben and Jerry’s.” I just felt this gut-wrenching need to say, “Actually, that’s not at all the Vermont that I know, and it’s a much more complex picture.” Even people who live there, I think it’s easy to see the surface beauty and not see the poverty and the hardship, and just disparity of…the nuance of place that, if you’ve been there for one of more generations, you get access to.

Anna Noyes: Yeah, I totally relate to that. The funny thing for me is I actually didn’t intend to write a book about Maine, even though this is clearly a book that is very geographically rooted. But my thoughts on what a book about Maine was, was based on narratives I’d seen and I’d read that felt overly romanticized, and I had this dread of having a book marketed or sort of brought out into the world with, like, a woman on a lobster boat, like, zooming into the sunset on the cover…

LN:   Just her back would be to you.

AN:   Yes, exactly. Gazing out at the waves and stuff. I didn’t want to identify my book as that kind of a book. So it took me sort of a process of coming to terms with the fact that, in fact, it really was a book rooted in Maine.

I didn’t intentionally go about writing stories that illuminated the place in a particular way. I was just drawing on the weft of my real life. People keep talking about what a class book it is, and the disparity between classes. My grandparents were summer people. They winterized their home. My parents were the first ones to live there year-round. Then I was there year-round, and grew up with my friends, and lived a very different sort of life. So I think I sort of had a foot in both those camps. The sort of telling exemplary details of place and class and unromanticized Maine are just born from me trying to be true to what I’ve seen there.

LN:   Was there some nervousness, just because… Whether or not, when you’re writing about a place, in some way you’re representing your place. Right? Whether you want to or not. Was there some hesitation about portraying this place in this way? I mean, veering off the postcard? Or were you like, “I’m doing it,” and everybody was behind you.

AN:   I wanted to be sensitive to was summer people. I don’t want to isolate them. Not just as readers, but they are very near and dear to me, and I know a lot of summer people. In my community, in the winter it’s 250 people and in the summer it’s 1,000. So through all my life, I’ve had a pretty complex relationship with them, where they’re my family, some of them, but then they sort of didn’t quite let me in, and I got very bitter, and now I’m like with them again in an intimate way. I know that is an experience of Maine that is very dear to people, and to readers, editors, people that read this book, like, they resonate with it—and they summer there, too. I didn’t want to diminish the intensity or poignancy of that connection to the state either, because I think for them it’s very true. I just don’t think it’s the whole picture.

RM:   I’d say that I felt kind of feisty about it. Like, “Here! Here’s my Vermont. Here’s my real Vermont.” That “real” in quotation marks, because everybody has their sense of place.

I also try to write from a variety of perspectives, including the daughter of a woman who moved to Vermont in the 1960s as a hippie and started a commune. So these are not all third and fourth generation Vermonters. I tried to create as many perspectives as I could.

LN:   That was a conscious choice?

RM:   That was a conscious choice, to come at it from as many different angles… I love short stories also. My kids, I think they feel the threat of short stories in their lives, like, “Oh, no! My Mom is reading them again and writing them again.”

LN:   Many of the stories seem to talk to each other. That’s one thing I noticed in both collections. Whether it was intentional or not, people talk about a linked story collection, and I think nobody knows what that means. Honestly, nobody does. It could mean anything from everyone might use the word “broccoli” in every story (and I have seen that collection), or it could mean that the same characters appear in different stories. In these stories, you wouldn’t necessarily call them a linked collection, but they are definitely talking to each other. They are definitely in conversation with each other. Why would you choose that instead of the easier route of writing a novel in terms of success and glamor?

AN: I will say that I’m writing a novel, and it’s not easier. It’s so much harder!

I love collections that are set in place, and they have this inherent structure built in that you can just write on. If you are doing stories set in one places, it’s facets, it’s different angles, different perspectives, and the place can be a main character. So I never had to question what the collection was about. I had to figure out the heart of every story individually. But the book had an inherent built-in structure that I never had to second guess like I have to wonder about my novel on a daily basis.

LN:    I felt, too, that your collection had a very painterly touch, where you felt you were lighting on one life and then lighting on another life. It was very impressionistic, the way these things were running. Your stories felt more individuated.

AN: Yeah, I think their linked elements are more due to the fact that I’m just obsessed with the same things, and I cannot run from them, and I just tell the same sort of emotional story again and again in different masks and in different ways. But I think I’m naturally definitely a short story writer. I think at the heart of each story, I’m trying to touch on something that I don’t want to unveil really in my own life, something uniquely vulnerable or some sort of secret or secret tale that I don’t particularly want to tell. So I think each of them has its own singular shame of that sort, that I don’t think you combine them all into one huge, shameful novel, because it might defuse the emotional risk and potency and of it. And also, I write really, really quickly. I wrote these all over the course of maybe two days, or one overnight. So I could really, like, confess what I needed to confess in one, like, dictatorial moment without having all the self-doubt and fear come out that happens when you try to write a novel, which I am trying to do now, too. But it’s a lot harder to keep the faith, like, day-in and day-out, to risk things in that way.

LN:   For me, that’s amazing that you wrote them in one to two days.

AN: Well, I gestated them for like ten years, you know, then I…

RM:   It took me about 8 years to write these, but I was also writing a lot of them at 4 a.m. because I had a young baby or that was the only hour that my kids were not awake. I wrote some of them while nursing my kids and trying to type. But I’m wildly impressed.

AN:   I think that’s the best time, though. 4 a.m.. Now I’m a seasoned 28-year-old, and I can’t stay up past midnight without getting weird.

LN:   I think this leads us to another point that I was thinking about. There were a lot of interesting perspectives on female life in rural America. I want to mention one story where a young woman in Anna’s collection gets pregnant, and is deciding whether not to have the baby or have the baby with the mother of her boyfriend, without the boyfriend knowing. It’s kind of one of those flinching hard moments that are so confusing but so true to how things, as a woman, kind of unroll.

It did feel like you guys were grabbing hold of experiences in a woman’s life, in all kinds of different ways, even if it came from a different perspective, even if it came, you know, from a grandmother or a boyfriend. Could you talk a little bit about that?

AN:   There was a nice, sort of defining moment that I’ve talked about a few times, where I’ve been writing these stories for a while, but in college I had a class where they assigned a story, where they had us read a story called Bactine by Molly McNett, and it was about a 10-year-old girl’s sort of emerging sexuality, and grappling with all these adult ideas and a threatening sexual world through her 10-year-old’s body. She has these sort of strange fantasies. It seemed to me like a very true representation of how a child might deal with an external threat that she doesn’t quite understand, and how it is sort of manifested in a girl’s body. I hadn’t really read anything quite like that before, and it felt really fresh and exciting. I got to class, and the class was completely silent. I remember there was just this deluge of disgust and dismay, and everybody was like, “This was so gross, I couldn’t even talk about it, I couldn’t read it, I had to put it down.” It was an illuminating moment of how often we read stories of women’s bodies and girls’ bodies, which I think is not that often… We see a lot of narratives of sort of disembodied women and girls, or violence upon women and girls, or sexualization. But to have a narrative from that perspective seems to me a lot more rare and a lot more troubling for readers. And I’ve seen that echoed again and again, these narratives that have an inhabited experience of womanhood, people really recoil from or think are remarkably edgy or something… So then I sort of thought: Why don’t I try to tell stories that have an inhabited female experience? So that led to the rest of the collection in the back of my mind.

RM: I would say that similarly it was a hunger for the kind of stories that I was craving and I wasn’t seeing. I read so much rural fiction written by men, about men’s experiences in the natural world and their relation to the natural world. That’s a huge genre of men go out into the woods and have these encounters and these experiences. And I do… My mother knows how to wield a shotgun, and she rides a motorcycle, and she’s a farmer—she works 14 hours a day out in her berry fields and vegetable gardens. I grew up surrounded by these reallytough, original, intrepid kind of wonderfully solitary women in the woods, and I never saw them portrayed in fiction. So it was this hunger. I went looking for it. I think if I had found your stories, I would have been so gratified, when I was 28 especially, and just looking to find myself on the page and my mother on the page. So then I decided that I just had to write those women into my own fiction. That experience is inherently…includes sexuality and desire and our physical bodies. So that just naturally came in.

LN: Yeah. I saw that these are women who do have sex, and they do think about men, in the most natural, in the most understandable in motive of ways as a reader. I also felt exactly what you were talking about, most especially in the last story, which is called “The Women Where I’m From” and your story “Goodnight, Beautiful Women.” You see these women who are very flawed. Many of them are very flawed. They have drinking problems. They are living alone on a property. They are not the best mothers. They go through some men. Occasionally they fall on an opiate or take it, or take a lot of them—or maybe it’s not even occasional. But somehow, all of these women come off as heroines to me in some way, or alter-egos, and I felt very full as a woman reading these stories. I felt very excited to be a woman. Can we talk about that a little bit more? You mentioned it a little bit, but I think it’s a super-important point to see… We often read stories where men are flawed, like they abandon their kids, they lose their job, they move to Florida, they’re trying to pull it together but they’re still comically or flawedly heroic. But we don’t really see the women who bust it up, get fired, end up alone because they’ve wrecked it all, you know what I mean, but are still wonderful human beings and we love them. I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit.

AN:   I am moved to hear you say that. Because there is a certain response to the book of people who really don’t want to see themselves in the book at all, or say “It’s so dark, I can’t relate to any of these people.” Then about one in five women, like a 70-year-old woman, will be like, “It is dark, but you just might see yourself. I did.” Yes! It’s like I found you. I’m so happy to make that connection with you.

To me, it was important that there be an element of tenderness in these stories, even with characters that are…some might see them as being bad mothers, or bad partners or daughters… That may be true. But my hope was at the end there’s some sort of redemption, and throughout that there is great strength and some humor.

I think that’s true of the people of Maine in particular, and of Vermont, too, I think. You’re showing an underbelly, I guess, but it’s not like it’s void of these beautiful qualities and really remarkable presences, and I hope that comes through. In your stories, it definitely does.

RM:   I would say alongside the genre of men who go out into the wilderness is rural women who are victimized, or who are victims of their circumstances. Which is a very real thing, and that’s a wonderful thing to write about. But I didn’t want to write about women who are victims. I wanted to write about women who are choosing their flawed lives, are choosing to live alone, are choosing solitude, are choosing those edges, and they crave it—just like I crave it. Somebody was saying… I feel like my mother is half of the mothers in these books, and I am the other half. I am the mother who is always heading out to the garden with the wine and trying to disappear into the woods. As a mother and a daughter, I seek that wildness. I seek that escape and that edge, and I wanted to write about that hunger and that desire, because I’m sure a lot of people feel it. I hope.

LN: In both of your cases there’s stories about mothers and sisters. Yours take place in a quarry, not the first story, but the second story with the two sisters in the quarry, and then Creek Dippers with the mother. I know this sounds crazy, and not even really specific, but I think there’s some relationship with water, or why you’re saying these stories about women and water, and what it somehow means. It means some kind of freedom in both cases. There’s people that want to swim and there’s people that don’t want to swim.

AN:   The genesis of that for me was that I lived beside a rock quarry when I was 4 years old with my mom in an Airstream trailer for like two months, and I was absolutely forbidden to go anywhere near the edge, because, of course, quarries are very, very dangerous places and they really do have all kinds of old machinery, and old cars, and hypodermic needles on the cliffs, and all this threat is really real. Even when I was older, my mom would never let me swim there, and would say I would catch a yeast infection if I even dared to swim there. And I still haven’t swam in one.

So I think it built this very mythological depth and resonance in my mind of this place, because it was this sort of forbidden locale. Of course, it’s very rich like other forbidden things, and mothers trying to protect their daughters from certain things. So it seemed like a very evocative place to set stories.

LN: We always had lakes. I felt the same way about your creeks, that somehow this is what people did. You had a couple of glasses of wine and you went swimming in the creek.

RM:   My parents’ house is set right above a creek, and I spent a lot of time by the creek when I was young, and now my house is on the other side of that creek, so I have this creek reference. But I also read an academic essay at one point about water in Eudora Welty’s stories, and the symbolism of water and how it connects to female sexuality. I never thought of that…

AN:   Nobody thinks of that when you’re writing.

 

 

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Here — she meditated — is the newest empire of the world; the Northern Middlewest; a land of dairy herds and exquisite lakes, of new automobiles and tar–paper shanties and silos like red towers, of clumsy speech and a hope that is boundless. An empire which feeds a quarter of the world — yet its work is merely begun. They are pioneers, these sweaty wayfarers, for all their telephones and bank–accounts and automatic pianos and co–operative leagues. And for all its fat richness, theirs is a pioneer land. What is its future? she wondered.

Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street was published on October 23, 1920. Lewis’s satiric portrayal of middle-class Midwestern life in Main Street and its sequel, Babbitt (1922), is the cornerstone of his Nobel Prize-winning career  — and of his embattled relationship to his hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota.

Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, the fictional setting of Main Street, is inspired by Sauk Centre, but Lewis saw his hometown as representative of the kind of Middle America that in the early decades of the century could be found in “ten thousand towns from Albany to San Diego.” When Lewis’s protagonist, the city-born Carol Kennicott, arrives to Gopher Prairie, she is appalled by its blinkered, small-minded ways and unable to find many encouraging answers to her question about the Midwest’s future. Viewed throughout the region not as a challenge but a condemnation, Lewis’s novel was banned by some libraries, but after his rise to fame, and after small-town life was treated reverentially by others — in the paintings of Norman Rockwell, for example, and the movie It’s a Wonderful Life — views began to change. Outside the Sauk Centre library today, a plaque describes how the book that had at first brought ridicule, making Sauk Centre “synonymous with narrow-minded, small-town provincialism,” eventually conferred on the town “a special dignity” as an embodiment of Middle America’s “virtues and simplicity.”

Almost 100 years after Main Street, with small-town America now besieged on all sides, many are again asking, “What is its future?” In Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism, Richard C. Longworth returns from an 11,000-mile tour of Iowa, his home state, with a discouraging answer:

I found dying farm villages and crumbling old factory towns, which may not survive. I found once great cities that have become empty shells, and I found displaced farmers and workers, adrift in communities consumed by denial and bitterness and a real political anger. I found inadequate schools and a political system that seems almost designed to fail. I found people left behind by a new economy for which nothing prepared them.

Longworth is adamant that the current instability and bitterness throughout the Midwest must be channeled toward a new future rather than allowed to retrace a simplified, make-America-great-again past: “The first era of Midwestern history is over. The next one has begun. We can make of it what we will.” In Remaking the Heartland, the eminent Princeton sociologist (and small-town Kansas native) Robert Wuthnow says that Middle America’s midcentury golden years are a myth anyway, and that an improved Midwest, one better adapted economically and socially to an inevitable future, is already in sight:

Thirty miles from where I was raised, a massive wind farm has emerged with more than a hundred towering machines that produce energy free of ill effects to the environment. Nearby is a new ethanol plant that has weathered uncertain government policies and is bringing new jobs to the area. My hometown recently celebrated the construction of a new hospital that dramatically improves its medical capabilities. There is a small industrial park and a new community center. At the high school, where nearly 100 percent of the students used to be white Anglos, 30 percent are now Hispanic.

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A family falls apart and comes back together Jade Chang’s debut novel, The Wangs vs. the World. this sparkling — and sharp — debut novel reminiscent of the rollicking comedy of The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, and the warmth of the equally funny Where’d You Go Bernadette. An impulsive decision by a self-made cosmetics mogul rocks his family, but what happens next surprises all of them in this witty story of money and manners, identity and the American Dream.

We asked the author to take us behind the scenes of The Wangs vs. the World, and she shared the following essay with us — The Editors.

 

When I was an editor at Goodreads, one of my jobs was to gather member questions for author Q&As. After sorting through thousands of queries I can say with a certain amount of authority that readers want to know one thing about fiction: Did any of it actually happen?

When it comes to The Wangs vs. the World, my first impulse was to say that all of it is emotionally true, and none of it actually happened. But that’s not quite accurate, either.

In a way, every page is full of things that actually happened. There are small moments that I witnessed — like the man on a skateboard pushing another man in a wheelchair down the sidewalk — that became things the family sees on their road trip, and ideas that I discussed with my friends that became part of the Wang siblings’ discussions.

And though my father never made (or lost!) a cosmetics fortune, my parents’ shared backgrounds are the same as the one that I’ve given the Wangs. They come from families who for generations owned vast swathes of land, then lost it all during the Japanese invasion and the rise of Communism. That loss is the driving force of this story — it’s a desire to recover his family’s lost ancestral land that keeps Charles going after the collapse of his company.

But in many ways it wasn’t my family’s distant past that influenced the story as much as the just-departed present. When I’m asked about the three Wang children, and why they experience so little angst in pursuit of their artistic dreams — Saina is an artist, Andrew is an aspiring stand-up comic, Grace is a style blogger — I usually say that it’s because I grew up in a San Fernando Valley that was very mixed, where a strong percentage of my classmates were Korean, Indian, Persian, where many of the people who were not recent immigrants from Asia or the Middle East were Jewish or Mormon or Jehovah’s Witnesses. When everyone’s an outsider, the term no longer carries any weight.

But it’s equally true that I was able to write the characters that I did because of the lives that my parents modeled. There’s a checklist for what we think of as typical Asian parents, and in some ways they filled a lot of the boxes — straight A’s were expected, as were high SAT scores and college attendance, at home only Mandarin was spoken — but that was the extent of it. When we were kids, my sister and I joked that there should be a warning sign on our front door: “You Are Now Entering an Absurdist Household.” Until very recently I thought that every family that didn’t hate each other spent most dinners trying to make each other laugh. Turns out, they don’t.

My parents were hippies who came to America in the ’70s because it seemed like an adventure — my father had shoulder-length hair and a corresponding mustache and a purple dashiki-style shirt that made an appearance in almost every photograph. His favorite band at the time was Creedence Clearwater Revival, and he was getting a graduate degree in mass communications, back when that was still a thing. My mother somehow ended up with a degree in nuclear medicine, but she is also a pianist and a painter.

The thing is, this story seems atypical only because it does not get told to a wider audience; I can think of countless examples of immigrant parents whose interests were equally varied. To me, one of the essential truths of The Wangs vs. the World is that it is about immigrants who see themselves as being central to the story of America. And I was able to write it because that is the life that I have lived.

So did any of it actually happen? No. And yet, yes.

 

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