6/26/20

The Glass Hotel Too Ambitious


The Glass Hotel (2020)
By Emily St. John Mandel
Alfred A. Knopf, 320 pages
★★★

Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven was one of my favorite books of 2014, hence I was excited to score a copy of her latest, The Glass Hotel. Mandel is an imaginative writer, but if I might toss a few pebbles at her glass domicile, imagination alone can’t carry a novel. The Glass Hotel has sublime moments, but it’s also one of those books that the more you think about it, the more its holes become apparent.

The book’s central characters are Vincent Smith, a woman named for poet Edna St. Vincent Millay; Paul, her half-brother; and investor Jonathan Alkaitis, who is patterned on Bernie Madoff.  Each is, in his or her own way, a person adrift. Vincent is beautiful, smart, and adaptive, but also impulsive and, in many ways, carries her blue-haired 13-year-old rebellious self into adulthood. Paul is a composer/musician who might have some talent, but he’s seldom off drugs long enough for it to shine for more than a brief moment.  If you recall Bernie Madoff, you can probably sketch Alkaitis’ character—a smooth operator who can be charming and persuasive, but has the morality of a carrion crow.

The three paths cross at the Hotel Caiette, a glass jewel tucked away in a section of British Columbia so remote that it’s a half hour boat ride to the nearest village. (It is apparently based on Quatsino on Vancouver Island.) Why build a luxury hotel in such an out-of-the-way place? That’s what the first owner ended up thinking before selling it to Alkaitis. If you recall the days after Y2K (which makes a cameo in the novel), high-powered executives occasionally sought solace from their workaholic drudgery in Robert Bly camps, golf vacations, and private retreats. Paul has gone there to escape trouble, Vincent because she sort of drifted there, and assorted guests because they are, hope to be, or keep their distance from Alkaitis.

Paul manages to screw things up, as he always does, but when we move the clock ahead to 2005, Vincent is living with Jonathan, who divorced his wife Suzanne. Business associates assume that the 28-year-old Vincent is Jonathan’s trophy wife, because that’s what older men like he collected. Vincent sees no reason to disabuse them of that notion, as she’s in the phase of her life she calls “a fairy tale.” And so it is—sort of. She meets Mirella, who also has a sugar daddy for a season, a Saudi prince who invests with Alkaitis; and Leon Prevant, an older gentleman, and his wife Miranda. Either at the hotel or later, readers also meet others who circle around Jonathan: painter Olivia Collins, who knew his late brother, also a painter; loud mouthed Lenny Xavier, his largest client; and a swath of others. There are also several who don’t fall for Jonathan’s pitch, psychic Clarissa, and Chicago business woman Ella Kaspersky, who finds the numbers she’s seeing on Jonathan’s investments too good to be true. She’s right, of course; it was all a Ponzi scheme. If this all sounds a bit like a Tom Wolfe or Jonathan Frazen novel, it’s a bit more than that—sometimes in good ways and sometimes not.

Once the house of cards tumbles, the resulting wreckage takes its toll on both investors and Alkaitis associates such as Oskar, Harvey, Joelle, and Enrico. Some will fall by the wayside and others adjust from luxury to life among the lower working class. Vincent takes everything in stride, so for her it’s merely an exchange of a fairy tale for life aboard a container ship—owned by a firm Leon used to control—a job as ship’s cook, and a new lover. As he’s serving an impossible sentence of 170s years in jail, Jonathan begins to imagine his “counterlife,” as do several other characters. At key moments in the book, ghosts appear. Are they actual ghosts, or metaphorical ones?

The answer to that question is left to the reader. It’s fair for an imaginative novelist to offer fodder for imaginative readers. I’m less inclined, though, to overlook other lacunae. There is, for instance, a digressive chapter in which the book jumps ahead to the year 2029, where we find Simone—who, as a newly hired secretary, helped Alkaitis shred documents—tell her secretary about her role in saving documents that brought down her boss. There is also a side tale involving Leon’s temp job: as a consultant investigating Vincent’s disappearance. If you’re keeping score, you’ve surmised that there are a lot of characters in the book. Add a bunch more I’ve not mentioned, the details of various lives in different time periods, ghosts, and explorations of those who invent and reinvent themselves and you have a book with an epic sprawl crammed into around 300 pages.

All of this means that more than ghosts are ambiguous. Credit goes to Mandel for making the book as tight as it can be, but leaks invariably spring along the way. To pick just one missing element, morality gets but a wink and a nod. Perhaps Mandel thinks that it can be assumed, but I’m not sure she really addresses the question by showing angry investors one moment and selected fallout the next. One might, for example, feel some sympathy for post-crash Alkaitis. I came away thinking that Mandel needed either to pare the story or write another 150 pages. This glass hotel exposes frauds like Alkaitis and Paul, but draws the curtains on deeper questions.   

Rob Weir

6/25/20

Valentine One of Best Novels of 2020

Valentine: A Novel
By Elizabeth Wetmore
HarperCollins, 320 pages
★★★★★

Move aside Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurty, there’s a new gun in town and she looks at Texas with her rose-colored glasses left in the glove compartment. Elizabeth Wetmore’s Valentine is a stunning debut about hard truths and hard living in the unforgiving Permian Basin of West Texas. As one character describes it, it’s “eighty thousand square miles of the same old, same old….”

Lord Byron once wrote, “Love will find a way through paths where wolves fear to prey.” Okay, how does he feel about snakes? Wetmore’s West Texas is a place where everything thing that slithers can be found—often curled up by your kid’s bicycle—and three of ‘em are poisonous. Or five if we add Gila monsters and scorpions. Only pumpjacks and dusty towns break the monotony of a landscape whose human population is dominated by roughnecks, rednecks, sexual predators, drunks, and the desperate. Wetmore sets most of her story on or around Valentine’s Day. The year is 1976; oil and football are about the only reasons anyone would wish to be living in the recession-blasted town of Penwell, a strip of nothing southwest of Odessa and Midland.

The story unfolds when 14-year-old Gloria Ramirez gets in a truck with Dale Strickland. Before the evening is out, he brutalizes and rapes her. When he falls asleep, Gloria sneaks out and walks across several miles of desert scrubland to the nearest house, that of Mary Rose Whitehead. Mary Rose has a small daughter and another on the way. At first she doesn’t want to get involved, as her husband Robert is away tending their cattle and their home is remote. But when she sees what has been done to Gloria, she relents, calls the police, and even pulls a rifle on Dale when he comes looking for his “girlfriend.” Little does she know that her reluctant act of decency will tear apart her life and community.

The men of the area–including Robert–will themselves to believe Gloria deserved her fate; she willingly got in the truck, after all, and everyone knows that Mexican girls are promiscuous. They are sure that she simply had a bad case of buyer’s regret, and that Dale should apologize and everyone should move on. Even women at Mary Rose’s church feel this way. But Mary Rose knows better and isn’t going to play along. Things get so hot for her that she has to move into town as it’s unsafe on the ranch, a decision that leaves her further estranged from Robert.

Mary Rose’s neighbors are an interesting lot. There’s Corrine, a retired school teacher, grieving over her husband Potter’s death by pickling herself with booze; busybody Suzanne who leaves Corrine casseroles that she dumps in the garbage; and 11-year-old Debra Ann “D.A.” Pierce whose mother Ginny took off a few years ago–around Valentine’s Day, natch. D.A.’s dad works long hours in the oil fields and D.A. is practically feral, though she befriends and tries to help Jesse Belden. He is a Vietnam vet from Tennessee who is “skinny as ocotillo branches” and down on his luck. He lives in a drain pipe and appreciates the small gifts D.A. brings him.

To say that West Texas is hard on women–and this is very much a book told from a woman’s perspective–is an understatement. There are snakes, chiggers, tornadoes, sexism, and way too much religion. It’s a place where a girl considers herself lucky if she makes to 12 “before some man or boy, or well-intentioned woman” informs her why she was “put on this earth.” Violence is all around and those who can follow Ginny’s example and get out. Karla, a young waitress with a daughter, poses a riddle with a distressing answer: “What do you call a single mother who has to be up early in the morning? A sophomore.”

Valentine’s Day is harrowing and unforgettable. It is also unusual in that it has several endings, not just one. I’m usually unmoved by book jackets, but that of Valentine’s Day is perfect: sage brush, oil derricks, leaning telephone poles, ominous skies, and vast nothingness. Coyotes dare to prey in the desert, but they are the sinewy, skinny poor cousins of the kind of wolves Bryon had in mind. Wetmore’s West Texas is like a suburb of hell. I ran that metaphor past a good friend who lived in Texas. Her response: “You have no idea. That might be overly kind.”

I will take her at her word rather than checking out the area for myself. I will, however, heartily recommend that you check out Valentine. It is one of the best novels of 2020.

Rob Weir







6/24/20

Valentine One of Best Novels of 2020


Valentine: A Novel
By Elizabeth Wetmore
HarperCollins, 320 pages
★★★★★

Move aside Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurty, there’s a new gun in town and she looks at Texas with her rose-colored glasses left in the glove compartment. Elizabeth Wetmore’s Valentine is a stunning debut about hard truths and hard living in the unforgiving Permian Basin of West Texas. As one character describes it, it’s “eighty thousand square miles of the same old, same old….”

Lord Byron once wrote, “Love will find a way through paths where wolves fear to prey.” Okay, how does he feel about snakes? Wetmore’s West Texas is a place where everything thing that slithers can be found—often curled up by your kid’s bicycle—and three of ‘em are poisonous. Or five if we add Gila monsters and scorpions. Only pumpjacks and dusty towns break the monotony of a landscape whose human population is dominated by roughnecks, rednecks, sexual predators, drunks, and the desperate. Wetmore sets most of her story on or around Valentine’s Day. The year is 1976; oil and football are about the only reasons anyone would wish to be living in the recession-blasted town of Penwell, a strip of nothing southwest of Odessa and Midland.

The story unfolds when 14-year-old Gloria Ramirez gets in a truck with Dale Strickland. Before the evening is out, he brutalizes and rapes her. When he falls asleep, Gloria sneaks out and walks across several miles of desert scrubland to the nearest house, that of Mary Rose Whitehead. Mary Rose has a small daughter and another on the way. At first she doesn’t want to get involved, as her husband Robert is away tending their cattle and their home is remote. But when she sees what has been done to Gloria, she relents, calls the police, and even pulls a rifle on Dale when he comes looking for his “girlfriend.” Little does she know that her reluctant act of decency will tear apart her life and community.

The men of the area–including Robert–will themselves to believe Gloria deserved her fate; she willingly got in the truck, after all, and everyone knows that Mexican girls are promiscuous. They are sure that she simply had a bad case of buyer’s regret, and that Dale should apologize and everyone should move on. Even women at Mary Rose’s church feel this way. But Mary Rose knows better and isn’t going to play along. Things get so hot for her that she has to move into town as it’s unsafe on the ranch, a decision that leaves her further estranged from Robert.

Mary Rose’s neighbors are an interesting lot. There’s Corrine, a retired school teacher, grieving over her husband Potter’s death by pickling herself with booze; busybody Suzanne who leaves Corrine casseroles that she dumps in the garbage; and 11-year-old Debra Ann “D.A.” Pierce whose mother Ginny took off a few years ago–around Valentine’s Day, natch. D.A.’s dad works long hours in the oil fields and D.A. is practically feral, though she befriends and tries to help Jesse Belden. He is a Vietnam vet from Tennessee who is “skinny as ocotillo branches” and down on his luck. He lives in a drain pipe and appreciates the small gifts D.A. brings him.

To say that West Texas is hard on women–and this is very much a book told from a woman’s perspective–is an understatement. There are snakes, chiggers, tornadoes, sexism, and way too much religion. It’s a place where a girl considers herself lucky if she makes to 12 “before some man or boy, or well-intentioned woman” informs her why she was “put on this earth.” Violence is all around and those who can follow Ginny’s example and get out. Karla, a young waitress with a daughter, poses a riddle with a distressing answer: “What do you call a single mother who has to be up early in the morning? A sophomore.”

Valentine’s Day is harrowing and unforgettable. It is also unusual in that it has several endings, not just one. I’m usually unmoved by book jackets, but that of Valentine’s Day is perfect: sage brush, oil derricks, leaning telephone poles, ominous skies, and vast nothingness. Coyotes dare to prey in the desert, but they are the sinewy, skinny poor cousins of the kind of wolves Bryon had in mind. Wetmore’s West Texas is like a suburb of hell. I ran that metaphor past a good friend who lived in Texas. Her response: “You have no idea. That might be overly kind.”

I will take her at her word rather than checking out the area for myself. I will, however, heartily recommend that you check out Valentine. It is one of the best novels of 2020.

Rob Weir







6/22/20

Pushing the Envelope--in a Good Way


Pushing the Envelope: Art in the Time of Pandemic

PULP Gallery (Holyoke, MA)





Michael Manlese
 

These days, two things strike me. The first is the way creative people find ways to keep their creative juices flowing and (hopefully) make a little money in the process. Actors offer online lessons, musicians hold house concerts for tips, and writers have taken to social media to publicize their works.



I’ve also noticed how I have begun to pay increased attention to small things. To get to the point at hand, I recall that in the 1970s a Montana company called the Wretched Mess News used to sell whimsical envelopes that resonated with countercultural values. Of course, folks also made their own mailers out of glossy magazines and proceeded to decorate them or illustrate a conventional envelope.

Maryanne Benns
These two threads come together in the perfect little exhibit for our times. The PULP Art Gallery in Holyoke has a wonderful display of envelope-sized art—some of it sent under separate cover and others that are literal envelopes delivered via U.S. Mail. COVID-19 has sent us scurrying into isolation, but the PULP Website (address above) is actually a very good way to see the works if you can’t get to Holyoke or are nervous about public spaces. (Holyoke infection rates remain high, so count me among those not ready to venture to PULP’s Race Street gallery.)

Let me return to why online is perhaps a better way to “see” the art. When gallery co-owner Dean Brown announced the idea for the exhibit, he was swamped with submissions from both locals and artists spread across North America. Seeing this much small art cheek-by-jowl in one space runs the risk of overwhelming viewers. It can produce what I call the kaleidoscope effect—bright swirls and shapes that meld into each other in an oh-wow fashion, but which also become indistinguishable. Viewing them online slows us down in good ways. Each work—in alphabetical categories though not alphabetical within them—displays individually. You can linger over those you particularly like, blow them up for detail, and move on if the style isn’t your cup of tea.

Gail G
Scooter fein
As for style, you name it and it’s in evidence. There are plenty that evoke the psychedelia vibe of the 60s and 70s. These (gulp!) project a throwback feel that makes them the “vintage” selections of the exhibit. Others are absurdist, surrealistic, architectural, representational, abstract, geometric, and cartoonish; themes include nature, cityscapes, still life, animals, home–you name it. Quite a few embody themes for the pandemic such as fear and hope; others are literally the work of children with all their charm and naivete. Media include ink, watercolor, crayon, collage, pencil, and more. Locals might see similarity between the work at PULP and that in Northampton’s Anchor House of Arts. Likewise, they might recognize names such as Mark Brown, Amy Johnquest, Tekla McInerney, and Michael Tillyer. (Full disclosure: Tekla is a friend.) But another great thing about an online exhibit is that you need not know a soul to discover those with whom you share aesthetic kinship.

I have posted a few images—mostly chosen at random—to whet your appetite. Enough from me; log on, dive in, and enjoy. If you see something you like, just $70 buys it and all proceeds go to the artist.

Rob Weir

Tekla McInenery 






 
Eliza Lanzi