Millennial Zeitgeist Novels

I like to read “period” novels whenever I teach a U.S. history survey course. I unshelf  Howells and Twain when I teach the Gilded Age, dust off Steinbeck for the 1930s, and dive into Angelou and Walker to get an African-American perspective. With the semester winding down, I’ve been reading about the 1990s.

Recent novels are tricky. Books only evolve from “noteworthy” to “classic” in retrospect; lots of heralded works come off as shopworn or silly a decade later. Even good books take on meanings that eluded the first batch of readers. The latter has certainly happened to A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) and The Corrections (2001). Both were received in their initial runs­ as if they were sociology as well as literature. So they were, but now each also seems an indictment of Baby Boomers and Generation X excesses. Such generational labels are, of course, media inventions. As a historian, I don’t hold much stock in generational interpretations of the past, so I’ll just call these zeitgeist novels.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was and is a genre-defying work that obliterates the line between fiction and autobiography. Its narrator, Dave Eggers, is both author and principal character. It tells of the travails of the Eggers clan. Paterfamilias John, a nasty drunk, died in 1991, followed the next year by the cancer death of the family rock: Heidi. Her death threw the Eggers children upon their own devices. Eldest son William was already living an independent life in Los Angeles, and soon the remaining children–Beth, Dave, and Christopher–depart Illinois for San Francisco. Challenges arose immediately, as youngest child, “Toph,” was just nine and his primary caretakers were Beth (24) and Dave (22). Both cared deeply for Toph, but neither was prepared to be a parent. (Beth played a larger role than assigned in the book, but she had demons of her own and committed suicide in 2001.)

Anyone who has been to San Francisco knows that it’s a tough town in which to be poor. Dave and Toph eek out a living from their inheritance, Social Security, and whatever work Dave can drum up, but he’s more of a slacker/hipster-wannabe than breadwinner. The book purports to recount his on-the-job-training lessons in responsibility and parenthood, but in retrospect it reads like Eggers’ thinly veiled anger at being robbed of his adolescence. He and Toph trash one cheap rental after  another, as neither is very good at adult basics such as wiping up messes, taking out the garbage, or housekeeping. Dave lands a job, but with a magazine that never made a dime; his real talents include prowess at tossing Frisbees and imagining himself in the sack with sexologist Sari Locker.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius remains a very good read, though a title meant to be ironic now feels solipsistic. Like works such as Running with Scissors, it  has a “look at me” quality whose true irony lies in how badly Gen X mangled attempts to emulate what it lampooned. That is to say, for all the Gen X contempt for Baby Boomers, many of them tried to become hippies and simply weren’t very good at it. Blame the “Dream,” or blame Gen X-fueled MTV, hipster mags, and reality TV. Or, as I prefer to do, read Eggers to gain insight into what confused twenty-somethings were thinking in the 1990s.

Jonathan Franzen’s National Book Award-winning The Corrections is the superior novel. Today it seems the ultimate pre-apocalyptic novel as it ends with the Stock Market “correction” of 1999, and was published just months before 9/11/01. The novel tracks the highly dysfunctional Lambert family. Parents Alfred and Enid still live in the prototypical Midwestern town of St. Jude, but their adult children have bolted to the East. Alfred is a retired railroad engineer/inventor who, in his prime, was a tyrant. Parkinson’s and advancing dementia have transformed him from being difficult to being impossible. Enid, his wife of 50 years, realizes time is short, tries to rally Alfred for a few last hurrahs, and harbors the dream of a final family Christmas in St. Jude.

Good luck with that! The kids are to busy making of hash of their lives. Eldest son Gary is a Philadelphia banker obsessed with the Stock Market, all things material, and few things emotional. He has a postcard family, but Gary is either bullied by his equally selfish wife, or is clinically depressed–depending on whose point of view you believe. Middle child Chip, the family intellectual, is a college professor hurtling toward self-destruction by violating the school’s sexual conduct code that he helped write. That avenue leads him to New York, where he fails as a playwright, and to post-Cold War Lithuania, where he falls in with oligarchs. Diane escapes a bad marriage and reinvents herself as a celebrity chef, only to jeopardize it all by having simultaneous affairs with her boss and his wife. Different problems, but each is too mired in imagine a warm-and-fuzzy Christmas in St. Jude.

Franzen’s novel crosses generations—Depression era parents, a Baby Boomer-turned Yuppie eldest son, an idealist-gone-egoist “tweener” middle child, and a Gen X youngest daughter. Each is a metaphor for the hope and greed of the Clinton years. The first brick fell when the dot.com bubble popped in 1999, Nasdaq lost 78% of its value, and its 457 IPOs shrank to just 76 in 18 months. Looming on the horizon: the falling masonry of September 11. Looking back now, The Corrections feels like the warning siren in advance of the tornado.  Rob Weir

Ernest and Celestine a Treat for Kids and Grown-Ups

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ERNEST and CELESTINE (2012 in France; 2014 USA)

Directed by Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, et. al.

La Patri Productions, 80 minutes, G (Dubbed in English)

* * * *

I don’t recall which of my friends recommended the delightful animated film Ernest and Celestine, but if it was anyone reading this review, thank you, thank you, thank you! It is sweet, sentimental, and cute–in all the good ways.

As animated films often do, this one builds an alternative world, one in which bears live above ground and mice below the surface. As everyone knows, bears and mice hate each other—even if they don’t know why. That’s just the way it is. It would take two special beings to break through the walls of prejudice, which is what happens. Ernest is a jazz musician, but he’s really a slacker bear who mooches off others and is too scatter-brained and disorganized to do anything as mundane as planning. Naturally, when he awakes from his winter sleep his bear pantry is bare and because of his shabby musician appearance, he has no luck begging for spare change from the bourgeois bears of the town. Driven by hunger, he impulsively burgles a sweet shop window and consumes everything in sight, which makes him a bear on the run.

The mouse Celestine is a dreamer in her own way, but she’s as assertive as she is idealistic. Her troubles begin when her studies don’t go well. It seems that mice have an underground industry in dentistry! After all, what’s a mouse to do if he or she loses a few incisors? Starve to death? Nope. You go to a dentist’s office for an implant and it’s the job of trainees such as Celestine to secure a supply of replacement teeth. As fortune would have it, castoff bear teeth are the gold standard, as they can be whittled down to make lots of mouse incisors. This, of course, means mice must make risky journeys above ground—a trip that could lead to death by stomping or chomping.

You pretty much know the rest. Through a set of bizarre circumstances Ernest and Celestine are thrown together in an animated riff on It Happened One Night. They eventually become good friends, and find themselves outcasts in their respective worlds (both of which are imaginative and visually appealing). More wacky circumstances lead to direct engagements between the two worlds and confrontations with illogic, bigotry, and rigidity. There will be a happy ending.

If all of this sounds gag-me sweet to you, I can assure you that I shared those reservations. Me? Watch a children’s cartoon made in France? Quelle horreur! Yet I found cynicism impossible to sustain amidst this film’s charms. Ernest is simply a lovable goof and Celestine is an Everywoman underdog. (Okay, undermouse.) Go ahead. Raise your cynical hackles. At some point in this film you’ll find yourself saying, “Awww….” To be sure, it’s a kids’ moral lesson about the value of friendship and the dangers of preconceived prejudice, but the animation, jibes, and spirit of this film will also appeal to discerning adults.

The English-language release of this film features Forest Whitaker’s tone-perfect exclamations for Ernest, as well as cameo voice work from luminaries such as Lauren Bacall, Paul Giamatti, and Jeffrey Wright. Give it a try and be prepared to be awwwwed. 

Rob Weir

New April Verch Mines Early Old-Timey Recording Industry

APRIL VERCH

The Newpart

No Depression Music

* * *

The title track of April Verch's new album—her tenth–refers to the family room her parents added in the 1970s, a place where she played music with her father, honed her fiddle skills, danced, and held house parties. It, and a few other tunes such as "Belle Election," are rooted in the rural traditions of the Ontario countryside where she grew up, but this album's true "new part" is that most of the material is more Tin Pan Alley, Appalachian, and Austin than Ottawa Valley. Verch band mates Hayes Griffin (guitar) and Cody Walters (banjo/acoustic bass) have mined early- and mid-20^th century American music for an album that places Griffin's flat-picking on equal par with Verch's fiddling, vocals, and step dancing. Inevitably, a female traditional fiddler who bows less and sings more is going to draw comparisons to Alison Krauss. Fear not; this collection is more Bob Wills than Alison Krauss. That is to say, it's swingier and its tunes are as open as the prairies, though Verch opts for a spare feel rather than the slickness of either Krauss or Wills. For example, she takes a 1925 song, "If You Hadn't Gone Away," and reworks in waltz time to give it a simple, but brighter feel. Texan jazz pianist Seger Ellis popularized another from the same period, "Montana Call," but Verch's controlled theatrical take makes it sound like Cole Porter gone cowboy. She even swings a gospel song, "Dry Bones," and slows and quiets "Cruel Willie," a tune much favored by fretted instrument players, so that Walters' banjo sounds straight out of Stephen Foster. The overall feel is so thoroughly retro her usual material, a Swedish polksa, and step dance interludes seem more out of place more than change of pace. In a similar vein, as much as I thrill to watch Ms. Verch dance in her live shows, recorded solo percussive feet often lack the intended dramatic impact. In my view, this is a good record, but not a great one. Her love of these old songs and tunes is laudable, but I suspect I'm not alone among longtime April Verch fans in longing for more from her traditions than a trip through the early recording industry. Rob Weir

Girl on the Train Overhyped, but a Good Read

THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN (2015)

Paula Hawkins

Riverhead Books, 366 pages, ISBN: 978-1594633669

* * *

There are funny drunks, nasty drunks, and pathetic drunks. File Rachel in the third group. Five years earlier she almost had it all–a job she liked, a nice home, and Tom, a doting husband. The only thing missing was a baby, but when that didn't happen, Rachel started hitting the bottle. Move the clock forward and Tom is still in the dream home, but with his new wife, Anna, and their infant daughter. Rachel has sunk deep into alcohol dependency and it's not a pretty picture. She leaves bitter messages on Tom's phone, stalks him and Anna, gulps gin and tonics as the train clacks past her former home, and wallows in bitterness–when she's not either blacked out or imagining things. Piece by piece her former life falls away: her friends, her job, her looks, her self-confidence, and her dignity. She's become such a loser that about all she has left is fantasy. A trackside pile of crumbled clothing sends her into paroxysms of grief as she imagines a dead child and can't shake the image. Her only solace is "Jess" and "Jason," and they don't exist. They are the invented personae of a couple she observes from the train window–Jess and Jason being a classic transference of the love and suburban idyll she has lost.

Paula Hawkins' debut novel, The Girl on the Train, has drawn comparisons to Gone Girl, though the two are alike mostly in their unreliable narrator structure. Girl on the Train is a murder-mystery whodunit whose drama is sustained by probing Rachel's fragile psyche. Jess and Jason turn out to be Megan and Scott–neighbors of Tom and Anna–and all is not well in Fantasy Land, as Rachel learns when she sees Megan planting a passionate kiss on another man. (And as readers discover in intercalary chapters from Megan's point of view. Later we get a few from Anna as well.) Even worse, Megan disappears on a night in which Rachel has been stalking her ex, gets blind drunk, and has no memory of how she got a nasty bump on her head or blood all over her hands. What's blocking her memory: guilt, terror, or just too much booze? For all she can recall, she might not have even been in the vicinity the night Megan disappeared, but she doesn't help matters by interjecting herself into the effort to unravel the mystery. Drunks, ethics, and police investigations simply aren't good matches.

Hawkins does a superb job in crafting Rachel's character. She is, by turns, pitiful, sympathetic, and skin crawling creepy. As readers, we don't trust her any more than the police looking for Megan. Hawkins has fashioned a good old-fashioned page-turner, though I'd stop short of heaping hyperbolic praise on this book. Though Rachel and Megan are vivid characters, the same cannot be said for several of the secondary characters. Both Scott and Kemal (Megan's therapist) are more paste-up than fleshed out, and much of the book's dramatic tension is adapted from Hitchcock's Rear Window. Hawkins' writing style is also reminiscent of Hitchcock in that the cinematic tone tries to obscure implausible twists one would question if not so caught up in the story. She didn't fool me; I ferreted out the villain long before the culprit was revealed–largely, in my view, because it was too easy to identify the red herrings. I enjoyed this book quite a lot, but mainly because it was a diverting, non-taxing read. I'm not willing to rank it with Gone Girl (or Rear Window). T'is a gripping story, but one hopes Hawkins will take a few more chances in her next book and give us more characters with Rachel's depth. Rob Weir

PS: This book has been optioned, but Hawkins' story should not be confused with either a 2013 film of the same name directed by Larry Brand, or the 2013 French film La fille du RER which is often translated as The Girl on the Train. To complicate matters more, there's also a 1982 adaptation of an Agatha Christie story titled The Girl in the Train! DreamWorks will create the film version of Hawkins' book, but it's not yet in production.

Boston Should Steer Clear of Olympics folly

Athens: This is what the Olympics look like when they end.

In architecture, a “folly” is a structure whose main purpose is to assuage the ego of the person who built it. They are physical representations of metaphorical castles in the air. The egoistic castles, temples, and faux ruins of yesteryear have given way to a new folly: the Olympics. Unless Massachusetts residents put a stop to the madness, Boston will be the next city to lose its shirt on the Olympics.

Boston is slated to host the 2024 summer games, though skeptics hope to waylay those plans. Let’s hope they do. Boosters insist the game will cost just $4.7 billion and that revenues will recoup them. Both projections are either blind optimism or a filthy lie. The 2000 Sydney Olympics cost $6.6 billion, Athens shelled out $15 billion in 2004, Beijing $44 billion in 2008, and London $10.4 billion in 2012, despite having the most games-ready existing structures since Los Angeles in 1984. It hasn’t escaped notice in Massachusetts that even if the optimistic estimates are remotely correct—and $13.7 billion is more realistic—even a thrifty Olympics is double the commonwealth’s current budget deficit.

Boosters insist that holding the Olympics will make Boston a global tourism destination. Huh? It already is. Of the top ten most-visited North American destinations Boston ranks number eight and it’s the smallest city on the list. Of the top ten, just three—Los Angeles, Montreal, and Vancouver—have ever hosted an Olympics. Each year over 19 million tourists visit Boston, of whom nearly 5 million are foreign travelers. If you’re flying from Europe, there are basically five airports at which you’ll land: New York, Boston, Atlanta, Montreal, or Philadelphia. Nobody can compete with New York, but Boston doesn’t need the Olympics to boost its profile. Young people come to investigate its educational opportunities, families for a brush with its rich Colonial history, and foodies for culinary delights. Very few visit a city once the games finish and point to a venue to exclaim, “There’s where the Olympic rowing events took place.”  

The Olympics are like world’s fairs—a relic from another age. Both were noble ideals and, at one time, truly showcased cities seeking to boost their global profiles. That was before the jet age made it possible to spend a long weekend in London or Paris, if one has the inclination and the cash. But mainly they are relics of the pre-globalism age—back before global capitalism homogenized cities. Tourists used to go to Boston to shop at Filene’s or Jordan Marsh, but now every city’s shopping precincts are pretty much the same. I was in Beijing recently and the only thing unique about its shopping precincts or its glass-and-steel inner core is that Asian faces are poking about the same stores you can find in any city: Prado, Jimmy Choo, Gucci, Hermes for the upper crust; McDonald’s, Walmart, Apple, and Old Navy for the rest. (Homogenization, by the way, is why Boston’s Newbury Street is struggling—the wealthy don’t have to venture into the city; they can order the same Chinese-made goods online!)

Above all, the Olympics leave behind little of value. There are few things sadder than a Olympics venue once the two-week games are gone. (At least world’s fairs have the sense to build most venues of plaster and lath.) I have walked among the detritus of several past Olympics. I watched Montreal’s dreams come down piece by piece until only the Olympic Stadium remained­—an antiseptically awful venue not actually completed until 1987 (at an additional $1.6 billion cost) and was abandoned by both the Canadian Football League and Major League Baseball. I strolled what was supposed to be a vibrant new neighborhood near venues in Barcelona, but isn’t. I took one of the longest urban train rides of my life to the middle-of-nowhere Newington section of Sydney (2000) to stroll amidst a collection of concrete ghosts, and have witnessed crumbling graffiti-filled sites in Athens (2004) and Beijing (2008). Even London has had issues. The Millennium Dome (now the O2 Arena) is the site of massive concerts, though most take the Tube to the site rather than live in the lonely North Greenwich precincts that abut it. The Olympic Stadium closed in 2013 and is being re-outfitted as a much-too-large soccer stadium. The former Olympic Village is officially “still under development.”

All of these problems persist even if you aren’t troubled that the Olympic amateur ideal has been dead for decades, or that the games are more about commerce than sports. The Olympics remain good spectacle, but they are best viewed on TV. Boston needs to say no to this folly. Let the Olympics be held at a specially purposed permanent site and televise them—that’s where the real money is.

Rob Weir

Read The Story of Edgar Sawtelle before a Film is Made

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THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE (2009)

David Wrobleski

Ecco, 608 pp. ISBN: 978-0061374234

* * * * *

Have you ever loved a pet so much that you imagined that it understood you better than most people? Do you recall your first childhood dog and how you felt safe and affirmed in its presence. If so, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle will be your kind of novel. David Wrobleski’s debut novel first appeared in 2008 and immediately went into reprint. Movie rights were recently optioned to two powerful producers with the resources to bring it to the screen: Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey.  

The first third of this book is truly a boy and his dog story. The boy in question is the titular Edgar Sawtelle, the miracle child born to Gar and Trudy Sawtelle after a series of miscarriages that would have left a woman less determined than Trudy to stop trying. The Sawtelles are dog breeders in northern Wisconsin near the Chequamegon National Forest (which factors into the narrative). Edgar is everything his parents could want—bright, dutiful, kind—with one exception: he cannot speak. Doctors are baffled as he hears just fine, learns quickly, and has no discernible damage to his vocal cords. Nonetheless, Edgar’s is a world is which he communicates by sign language and written notes.

That’s fine by Gar and Trudy, as they’re already accustomed to signing—in their dog training. Sawtelle dogs are special. Forget Charles Darwin and think Gregor Mendel. Thanks to breeding methods developed by Gar’s father, Sawtelle dogs are not purebred show dogs, but something even better: independent animals that intuit human needs, but which also respond to visual commands with unfailing obedience. Nobody can buy a Sawtelle puppy; it takes 18 months of exacting training to create such a dog. Edgar’s first experience with a Sawtelle dog is through his faithful companion, Almondine. If you’ve ever owned a dog, the novel’s few chapters that see through Almondine’s eyes will seem so “right” to you that you may tear up in remembrance of when you first felt that human/canine bond. In Edgar’s case, that bond is exceptionally intense as he communicates as much on Almondine’s level as that of “normal” human interaction. He is, in essence, a bipedal Sawtelle dog.

Wroblewski takes us inside the dog-training barn, the meticulous recordkeeping required to run a breeding program, and the human dynamics of the Sawtelle nuclear family unit.  The nostalgic feel of the book’s first third is interrupted when Gar’s brother, Claude, shows up. The brothers also have a bond, but not necessarily a good one; Claude is the rogue of the Sawtelle human litter. The books middle section plays on fraternal tensions, and the last third takes a more tragic/sinister turn. Parts of it are evocative of Hamlet, but I don’t wish to give anything away.

The novel’s tonal shifts failed to charm some critics, though Wroblewski won several first-novel prizes. It’s a long book that occasionally rambles but, to my eyes, in the way that a noble beast might amble across a field. Several critics also found dramatic turns to rest upon too many contrivances—a critique I do not share. Unforgettable characters more than compensate for whatever literary graces the novel lacks. You will feel as if you know the Sawtelles and Almondine, but an especially deft touch is the manner in which Wroblewski makes secondary characters vivid. Appropriately, each dog also has a discernible and distinct personality.

I adored this book. Again, I won’t elaborate, but there’s a very subtle scene in this book that tugged on my heartstrings in a way nothing has since I saw Old Yeller as a kid. Yes, it’s that kind of book—not one for cynics, literary snobs, or those with a low tolerance for sentimentality. The rest of you can gobble this like a hungry dog in front of a fresh bag of kibble.  Rob Weir

Recycling for Real

 I don’t understand the crowd that thinks the Environmental Protection Agency ought to be dismantled. I remember a childhood in which people took whatever they didn’t want and just tossed it into creeks and rivers: old tires, wrecked cars, dead appliances, box springs, garbage… even chemicals. Every few months there would be a fish kill on about a quarter of mile of the stream that flowed through my Pennsylvania town—courtesy of discharge from a creek-side dry cleaning plant.

As I got older I recall flying into cities that weren’t visible until the plane pierced the yellow smog that hovered above. You didn’t need to be an M.D. to figure out that it probably wasn’t healthy to breathe that air. I also remember taking parts of Pittsburgh home with me—in the form of grime and soot that clung to my clothing and exposed skin. Or driving through places like Latrobe and Butler as fast as I could because the stench of paper mills watered my eyes and constricted my throat. These memories make me testy when I hear business-at-any-cost advocates talk about emasculating the EPA. Don’t get me started on idiots like Mitch “Burn as Much Coal as Possible” McConnell.

Pre-Earth Day American imagery came flooding back last week when I took a train from western Massachusetts to Philadelphia. Amtrak isn’t known for its scenic journeys, especially not in the Northeastern megalopolis. You get a great view of postindustrial America as you whiz (or crawl) through Holyoke, Springfield, New Haven, Bridgeport, Yonkers, Newark, and Trenton. It also seems as if trackside is the new dumping ground for the detritus of the American Dream gone wrong. Flat out ugly would be another way of expressing it.

Those old enough will recall the difference Lady Bird Johnson’s Highway Beautification Act made to American highways and byways. It made me wonder what a modern version of it would look like. We pat ourselves on the back when we recycle cans, glass, and paper, but the data is pretty clear that these things make just a dent in improving the environment. I’ll take and support that dent, but there’s so much more that could be done to make America a more pleasant and ecologically sound land. Why not start with the trackside?

What if we tried to convert squalor to dollars? (I like that phrase for a campaign!) When I look out the train window at abandoned factories, ghost parking lots, rusting heaps of metal, and cast off junk, I envision the following: real estate, recycling, repurposing, and reinvigorating local economies. First, local governments should seize these blighted and abandoned places by eminent domain and subdivide them into real estate parcels. Second, offer free land to any developer but with the stipulations that the site must be cleared and cleaned before anything else is done, and that all usable materials must be salvaged and either used on site or sold. Those old buildings are eyesores, but think of the number of reusable bricks, concrete blocks, sheets of tin, steel I-beams, cables, and pieces of wood contained therein.  them.

In like fashion, imagine how much rubber could be chopped and reused from those old tires, how much asphalt could be crushed and made into new, how much glass could be re-fired, and how much metal could be re-smelted. Imagine, if you can, taking a train through a corridor of new developments, parks, or just good old Mother Nature reclaiming land where bric-a-brac and rubbish once collected. Imagine too the number of jobs that would result if we hired people to carefully recycle rather than sending in wrecking balls, bulldozers, or worse: waiting for he ravages of time to undo the ravages of humankind. Too expensive? Compared to what? What is our landscape worth? How much is it worth to put the American Dream on display rather than dying a slow death before our eyes? And while we’re at it, let’s give the EPA the power to make sure we don’t make these mistakes again.  

Rob Weir