The Engagements a Flawed, But Shiny Gem

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The Engagements (2013)

By J. Courtney Sullivan

Random House

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Although I adored J. Courtney Sullivan’s previous book, Maine, I admit feeling apprehensive about opening The Engagements. True to its title, the novel is about wedding engagements. Sort of–and the “sort of” makes all the difference in the world. My fear was that it would little more than chick-lit. I try to avoid chick-lit, not because it threatens my manhood, but because most of is like sifting through tons of slag in search of a single paragraph that sparkles. Sullivan’s latest is no Hope diamond, but it certainly qualifies as a small, if flawed, gem.

It’s a sprawling novel that skips between time periods: the 1930s through the early 1950s, 1972, 1982, 2003, and 2012. It also blends five stories, sometimes directly, and sometimes tangentially. The sheer number of stories and the constant time jumps make for an inconsistent book, though a fascinating one. The book’s center is Frances Gerety, the woman who invented modern marriage. Think I’m kidding? Gerety was a feminist before most people heard of the word, a high-powered advertising agent in a male-dominated world, and the crackerjack copy writer for N. W. Ayer & Sons who, in a sleep-deprived moment of desperation in 1947, coined the phrase that has come to symbolize modern weddings: “A diamond is forever.” She’s also the one that worked with Ayer client De Beers to determine that an engagement ring ought to cost two months’ salary, and the one that early on helped De Beers cover its “blood diamond” tracks.

Diamonds are the rock upon which Sullivan tethers the four other stories. In 1972, we first meet Evelyn, who is married to Gerald. Their son Teddy has left his wife and taken up with a woman Evelyn perceives to be a floozy. As we soon learn, the gold digger suspicions resurrect some of Evelyn’s demons, as she too was viewed by some as an opportunist for marrying the wealthy Gerald, the best friend of her deceased first husband.

Ten years later we encounter Sheila, James, and their two kids, a hand-to-mouth working-class family from East Cambridge, Massachusetts. In a departure for Sullivan–known for her female protagonists–James is the center of this drama. He’s a hot-tempered but good-hearted pump-the-caffeine E.M.T. wracked with guilt that his house is falling apart, the bills are piling up, and he’s never given Sheila the princess treatment he thinks she deserves. He can’t even afford to pass up overtime to be home during a  Christmas Eve blizzard, let alone treat Sheila as royalty. Maybe a beautiful ring would make her feel better and assuage his guilt. Maybe not.

Jump ahead to 2003 and cross the ocean to Paris, where we met Delphine, who is still drop-dead sexy at age 40. She’s already made some trade-offs in her life, including marrying the older Henri, who was first her business partner in a shop that sells rare instruments. They live in a posh apartment, but Delphine still sees herself as an avant-garde gamin who belongs in a funky section of Montmartre. Enter PJ, a 23-year-old musical savant who is the only person good enough to purchase Henri’s prized Stradivarius. Is the man-child PJ also talented enough to captivate and capture the bored Delphine? Will the ring on her finger seal the deal?

In 2012, we meet Kate, who wants nothing to do with marriage, an institution she finds utterly bourgeois and morally bankrupt. Her partner, Dan, the father of her children, is fine with that, though Kate’s family thinks she’s a vacuous hippie-wannabe. Kate’s crisis comes in the form of her cousin, Jeff, who buys into every last bit of the wedding industry hype. He and his male lover, Toby, are deep into planning an über-expensive gay wedding and Kate, who dearly loves them both, finds herself involuntarily thrust into the middle of their Bridezilla madness. As you’ve no doubt surmised, a ring factors into the equation.

Connecting these five stories is quite a challenge and, frankly, Sullivan resorts to contrivances in several cases. Each reader is likely to like certain sections and characters and feel let down elsewhere. I wasn’t all that “engaged” by Evelyn and Gerald, perhaps because Sullivan’s take on 1972 seemed more caricature than substantive. By contrast, my heart went out to James–probably because I know firsthand some of the stacked deck against working-class dreams that frustrated him. I wanted more of Frances, who deserves a book of her own.

A small footnote: No other review has mentioned what seems obvious to me–Sullivan’s “engagements” are not just of the marital sort. This novel probes other links that bind us to one another; among them: family ties, work relationships, friendships, business connections, and consumer culture. And breathe in this irony: Frances Gerety, the woman who made brides crave diamonds, never married.--Rob Weir

The Death of Bees Possibly the Novel of the Year

The Death of Bees (2013)

Lisa O’Donnell

Harper ISBN 978-006220847

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Are you a fan of great opening lines? How about this one? “Today is Christmas Eve.
Today is my birthday. Today I am fifteen. Today I buried my parents in the backyard. Neither of them were beloved.” Those words come from Marnie Doyle, one of the three protagonists of Lisa O’Donnell’s stunning, moving, debut novel. As the words suggest, Marnie’s the female equivalent of a manchild (womangirl?)–grown up enough to be screwed up in a lot of ways (sex, drugs, cynicism) but also that volatile mix of adolescent maturity and pre-teen vulnerability. She’s also the closest thing her 12-year-old sister, Nelly, has to a real mother and the only thing standing between state custody for both of them.

The novel is set in a grim Glasgow housing estate–the sort populated by working-class folks damaged by poverty, substance abuse, and hopelessness built up by a lifetime of being kicked down. Marnie is right; her parents, Gene and Izzy (Isabel), were not beloved. In fact, they were viewed as so irresponsible that few of the girls’ neighbors bother to question Marnie’s assertion that they are simply on a prolonged holiday with an open-ended return date. (Gene and Izzy had left their kids plenty of times before.) Marnie’s goal is simple: to make it till 16, when she can be declared Nelly’s legal guardian and the secret of how Gene and Izzy died can be revealed. It won’t be easy. Nelly is a language savant and violin prodigy who does brilliantly in school, but she’s also a high-functioning autistic prone to living in a fantasy world. Plus, she’s as tired of being good all the time as her sister is of being the bad girl. Marnie is savvy enough to do decently in school as well, achievement that surprises everyone but she, as it provides cover for some of her less-mature decisions. But, seriously, how can she hope to support herself and Nelly? Even if both girls were playing with a full deck, how could they feed, clothe, and house themselves?

That’s a question that occurs to their neighbor, Lennie, a cultured gay man who unfairly carries around the label of being a sex offender. He doesn’t know where Gene and Izzy are either, but he knows kids in trouble when he sees them. Lennie takes to inviting the girls for meals, walks, and chat. Thus begins one of the oddest friendships in literature, and thus unfolds a story that is, in turn, grisly and touching, cruel and kind, tender and cold-hearted. O’Donnell tells it by alternating chapters from the points-of-view of Marnie, Nelly, and Lennie.

I won’t pretend that The Death of Bees goes down easy, but it is a book you will tear through as it’s tearing you apart. One reviewer aptly compared O’Donnell’s book to the Jennifer Lawrence film Winter’s Bone. (It was my favorite film of 2011.) Like Winter’s Bone, you want to scream at the injustices facing the girls and their would-be savior, but you’ll also marvel over the inner strength upon which damaged people draw just to get from Monday to Tuesday. This book will make you weep, laugh, and quake with rage. And you will hard pressed to read anything that’s half as good. --Rob Weir

Postscript: Yes, the odd title relates to the book. Find out how!

When it Comes to Safety, Let's Hear it for the Nanny State

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The little black box that might just take a few idiots off the road! 

In a recent trip to Italy we joined a tour group for the Amalfi Coast, as it’s a pretty hard region to navigate privately. Organized tours have their tribulations, but one of the joys is hopping into an air conditioned bus and being chauffeured to one’s destination. Particularly if the driver is as skilled as our driver, Vittorio. (He parked the bus in spaces I might not have attempted with my Corolla.) Vittorio was always cheerful and alert; he also scrupulously obeyed traffic laws–and that’s the point of this piece.

Here in Massachusetts, our former lieutenant governor, Timothy Murray, crashed a state-owned car back in 2011. At first he called it an accident, but the story changed to “I fell asleep,” when it was revealed that he was traveling at over a 100 mph and wasn’t wearing a seat belt at the time. The smash-up ultimately sandbagged Murray’s political career and resulted in a $555 fine, because it wasn’t Murray’s conscience that revealed his first story was a lie; it was the little black box recorder recovered by investigators.

Nearly all new cars have recorders in them that are akin to the ones in use for decades in the commercial airline industry. This being the United States, the existence of such monitors has the privacy fanatics up in arms. At present just 14 states allow law enforcement or anyone else to mine the data, but this is another (of many) areas in which it would be a very good idea to embrace the Nanny State–that is, unless you think it’s perfectly okay for morons to operate massive motorized machines for as long and as fast as they wish.

Let’s go back to Italy for a moment. Vittorio struck me as a very conscientious guy, but it wasn’t his inner angels that made him obey traffic laws; it was the little black box. If you are alarmed by the data your car collects on you, try this on for size–in Italy, that box records one’s route, the speed correlated to the legal limit within each stretch of it, and how long one is behind the wheel. Vittorio was cheerful in part because he was well rested. (Italian law requires that drivers must take a break after every three hours they drive.) All of a bus’s data is stored on a CD, which records up to six months’ worth of driving. Here’s the kicker. A police officer can stop a bus at any time for any reason and request the CD, which is then placed into a computer. If, at any time, the driver has been speeding, not wearing his seat belt, or violates the mandatory rest law, he must pay a fine on the spot and points are added to his license. The same laws apply for truck drivers. You’ll see the big rigs hugging the right-hand lanes in much of Europe.

Imagine such a law in the United States! The track record for bus companies here is pretty awful, starting with the fact that it’s actually legal to drive up to 70 hours per week and we only find out someone has violated that pathetic rule when there’s a horrible accident like the one that killed nine in Oregon, or the one that snuffed out seven in California. More than two dozen bus companies, including Mi Joo Tour, Scapadas, and Sky Express–have been taken off the road since 2012, but the reality is that cut-rate firms such as Bolt and Megabus have troubling safety records as well. Check out the accident reports and you’ll see that speeding and fatigue are the cause of most accidents. Jumping on a curbside bus to save a few bucks is a game of highway roulette. And who among us hasn’t been nearly blown off the road by a semi traveling at warp speed with some amphetamine-fed dude with eyes the size of trashcan lids behind the wheel? Or stuck in a crawl behind semis illegally traveling in the third lane as they seek to pass other semis on an uphill grade? Think this behavior would change if we had Italy’s laws? You bet it would!

But isn’t it true, you protest that truckers have lower fatality rates than passenger vehicles? Yes it is. In terms of overall accident rates, SUV drivers are the most dangerous, followed by bus drivers. That’s why I think we should expand, not limit, the use of vehicle black box data. I wonder what we’d find if cops pulled over speeders and made them hand over their data discs along with their license and registration? I also wonder what would happen if, like Europe, there were generals on the odometers that controlled how fast a vehicle can go, or if there were simple fixes such as breathalyzer-ignition systems? (Think about it. If you enable a car to attain a speed of over 100 mph you can rest assured that some fools are going to test that limit.)

Expanding public safety laws will, of course, set the privacy hounds a-baying. There are those that think regulating anything smacks of a Nanny State and government intrusion. Stay home, then, I say! The idea that one’s vehicle is one’s private castle is patently idiotic. Bad drivers–whether they are behind the wheel or a bus, a truck, an SUV, or a Corolla–endanger the public and the moment they pull out of their driveways and onto public roads, they abrogate their right to privacy. If you fear the Nanny State, you’re haunted by a false boogieman. The death rate on U.S. highways is 124 per million. That’s 300% higher than in Europe, where drivers tend to have smaller, lighter cars that theoretically are less “safe” than our gas-guzzling behemoths. Why is the rate lower? Because Nanny is watching and you never know when she’ll spank your behind!

PS--As this article was being written, a horrible bus accident in southern Italy claimed more than three dozen lives. As sad as this is, eyewitness accounts affirm that the bus was neither speeding, nor operating erratically–a blown tire was the likely culprit.

Time for the Yankees to Go Fish

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I hate to shop. When I buy clothing, I buy a lot all at once. This means, of course, that at some point in the future most of my clothes wear out at the same time. The New York Yankees are like my wardrobe–full of comfy, soft, stained chinos ready for the recycling bin. It’s been a helluva run, but it’s over in the Bronx. Fans won’t like it, but it’s time for the Yankees to go fish–that’s fish as in Marlins. Hold a clearance sale, go with youth, and be patient.

The White Sox swept the Yankees last week–the White Sox, as in MLB’s second worst record. Yet GM Brian Cashman incredulously pronounced that the Yankees were looking “to add pieces.” Add pieces! To what? You don’t nail a board to side of a barn once it collapses. Blog readers will recall I picked the Yankees to finish last. I may be wrong about this as the Blue Jays are tanking worse than Rommel at El Alamein, but I was right that this would be the year they would finally be too old to compete. Spare me the “too many injuries” litany–breaking down is what old bodies do. (Trust me. I own one. I know!) Unless the Yankees face facts and begin rebuilding now, it could be 1965 to 1990 redux, years in which the Bronx Bombers were the Bronx Bummers.

What to do? First, avoid what too many disappointing teams do. Don’t allow contenders to cherry pick the roster. The Yankees will field lots of offers for Robbie Cano, David Robertson, and Brett Gardner. Just say “no.” These are three guys the team will need as it rebuilds. They can’t move Mark Teixeira as MLB rules make it hard to move guys on the disabled list, plus he’s worth keeping for a few more years–somebody needs to protect Cano in the lineup and, for all his faults, Tex is a solid RBI man. Hold onto Alphonse Soriano as well–not because he’s a stud, but because the Cubs are picking up most of his salary. Plus, he does all the things the high-priced Curtis Granderson does: hit homeruns, strikeout a lot, and play lousy defense. The Grandy Man–who is a free agent after the season–is the first person I place on waivers. If you get a blue chipper prospect for him and a few of Cashman’s “pieces,” that’s a good deal. Take what you can get for Joba Chamberlain–Sean Kelley is much better–and get Phil Hughes a one-way ticket on the next plane leaving LaGuardia.

Now the controversial part: Who else goes? I’d say pretty much anyone not named Cano, Robertson, Gardner, Soriano, Kelley, Nova, Phelps, Kuroda, or Rivera (who is retiring and deserves to wear Pinstripes at the end). Why keep Nova or Phelps? Because someone has to pitch next year and they are the best options that are MLB-ready. It is imperative that the Yankees re-sign Cano and Kuroda, or things will be really glum next year. But jettison any of the rest to anyone that makes a reasonable offer. You might notice that this includes C. C. Sabathia. Put bluntly, C. C. is too much of a risk to carry any longer, and if the Yankees can get out from under his contract, they should. Someone might want Ichiro for one year and that saves another $6.5 million. Vernon Wells? I’ll take a beer towel and a chilidog. Hafner? You can keep the towel. Someone might want Boone Logan and even a middling prospect would be just as good. I have sincere doubts that Austin Romine will hit MLB pitching, so put him on waivers and see what he yields. (There are no sure-thing prospects in baseball, but Trenton’s Gary Sanchez promises to be the next Jorge Posada.) Someone will want Eduardo Nunez, though he’ll never be a full-time player.

The really tough stuff comes in the offseason. Several administrative shakeups are in order. First, it’s time for Cashman to go–not because he’s as bad as the talk radio crowd thinks, but because he’s best suited for a veteran club and the Yankees need to think small to rebuild. Second, minor league management needs to be gutted and rebuilt, especially insofar as pitching instructors and physical conditioning coaching goes. Too many promising arms have come through the system and frayed on the verge (or were given up on because they were advanced too quickly). If the Yankees could swallow their pride, they’d rehire the best hitting coach they’ve had in decades: the temperamental Chris Chambliss. Here’s the move that will make Yankees fans (including me) weep: Convince Derek Jeter to make 2014 his Mariano Rivera year–once through the league, collect the accolades, feel the love, and quit. And if the Yankees don’t move Joba, Hughes, and Granderson in waiver deals, do the next best thing: Go to arbitration with lowball offers that will be rejected and collect draft picks when they sign elsewhere. Simply tell A-Rod he’s done. He’ll cost nothing in 2014 once the suspension hits; buy out what’s left. And tell Kevin Youkilis “Thanks for nothing. We won’t be sending a rep to Fenway if there’s ever a day in your honor.”

Yankees fans need to accept that 2014 will be a dreary season with a roster dominated by low-cost guys and youngsters (though at least the team ought to be more fun to watch than the stiffs they throw out now). If the team plays it right, it will have a ton of money to play with in 2015 and beyond. Subtract Sabathia, Granderson, Ichiro, Hughes, Youkilis, and a few others and the payroll drops by nearly $75 million. Play it right and the Yankees will be big-time players for Clayton Kershaw, and look out in 2017, when Mike Trout hits the market.

Sara Hickman's Newest: Little Voice, Big Sound

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SARA HICKMAN

Shine

Kirtland Records KR-77

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If you think that women with small voices can’t make big records, check out the latest from Sara Hickman, who is certainly the best news to come out of Texas lately. Shine is true to its title, songs that uplift, outrage, and bring joy, but nothing that just lies on the plate. This is a work of maturity in which Hickman showcases how she frames a song. She knows when to go girly and when to add a whiskey-soaked rasp to her voice, and she delights in using fragile vocals to front muscular instrumentation. Her love of contrasts extends to moods as well. On tracks such as “Cocky Friend” and “Primitive Stuff” she wears attitude like a rodeo queen strutting around in hand-tooled boots, yet on songs the likes of “Human Wish” and “Rapture” she exudes all the tender fragility she assumes when she’s doing her children’s songs gigs. Add splashes of girl-group- meets-New Wave, some rockabilly, and some truly offbeat folk, and it adds up to ten fabulous tracks.  Rob Weir  

This one is hot off the presses and there aren't even YouTube clips yet, but you can order it from http://sarahickman.com/music/

A-Rod and AIG: American Greed Stories

 What do Alex Rodriguez and A.I.G. have in common? More than you think

Today on adult “Sesame Street,” privileged, greedy piggies that start with A. The cases in point are Alex Rodriguez and AIG.  At first glance, there’s not much to connect a baseball player and an insurance company, but allow me to suggest that both are examples of how unregulated capitalism turns the American Dream into the American Nightmare.

Let’s start with the fact that A-Rod is Major League Baseball’s highest-paid player, and that AIG was once the world’s most valuable insurance company. That would be enough for most folks but, alas, it goes against the grain of a culture that all too often emphasizes maximizing value beyond the bounds of what reasonable people would call ‘enough.’ Alex Rodriguez was once heralded as the most talented player in baseball, skills that earned him a contract that yielded $30 million per year for suiting up for a game boys play for free. Not a bad deal, by any means. A-Rod was gifted with a body and skills that fantasy players would have sold their souls to possess. He was on track to become baseball’s all-time homerun leader and a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame. Then he lost his edge and, for a time, was considered merely as among the top five players in the game.

Who among us would not wish to be in the top five of the pursuit of our passion? Alas, American culture places little value on being other than number one. Remember the Olympic swimmer who wept with disappointment because she only won a silver medal? Name the player who finished third last year in the Most Valuable Player voting for any American sport.  So when Rodriguez slipped from the top, A-Rod became A-Roid and he sought illegal supplements to give him back his edge. In so doing, he will be suspended for his role in the Biogenesis Clinic scan. He very well may have damaged his health permanently by pumping poisons into his body. A-Rod now has little chance of catching Babe Ruth (#3) on the all-time homerun list, and virtually none of surpassing Hank Aaron (#2) or Barry Bonds (#1). He may not even get the chance to hit 14 more to pass #4 Willie Mays. There’s a pretty good possibility that, once the farcical dust has settled, the Yankees will void his contract and that A-Rod will be banned from Major League Baseball. So long Cooperstown.

Alex Rodriguez was vain; AIG was/is arrogant. It’s currently suing the government to recover untold billions it claimed it lost during the period of time the government controlled 80% of its stock. Talk about ingrates! AIG took $182.3 billion of taxpayer money when it was near collapse in 2008 and now has the audacity to moan that stockholders were shortchanged of potential dividends during a period of time in which they could have wiped their rear ends with their stock certificates if Uncle Sam hadn’t saved their heinies.

American International Group was in the insurance business, but it used over $440 billion in credit default swaps to insure securities mostly tied to the mortgage market. In essence, it used the value of its insurance portfolios to buy mortgage securities that turned out to be overpriced. It also dabbled in hedge funds, derivatives, and other high-flyer games. In other words, AIG played the Stock Market with funny money—on-paper assets based on wishful projections of the future. Mind, it did all of this while it was already under investigation for questionable practices in the field of what was putatively its number one product: insurance. And it did so at a time in which it was a multinational company doing business in over 130 nations and had a workforce of around 118,000. Its total assets were valued at over $1 trillion. Don’t you think that would be enough?

I guess it wasn’t enough merely to dominate the insurance industry. Maybe AIG executives couldn’t countenance the fact that there were actually 17 richer companies in the world. I can’t think of what else would prompt them, including Hank Greenburg who was forced out in 2008 and is now championing the lawsuit against the government, to gamble in the Stock Market like a Vegas drunk holding at 15 who just doubled down a blackjack bet with his last hundred. In 2013, AIG is still a big firm: 63,000 employees in over a hundred nations, though its current capitalization value is a paltry $57.5 billion.

Like A-Rod, AIG is busy blaming others for its woes. We can only hope that both A-Rod and AIG go away. If there’s one thing we no longer believe, it’s that any star or company is too big to fail. Let them perish, and don’t expect a lot of mourners to line the graveside. Write the epitaph: “Choked to Death on Self-Fed Greed.”  As for we survivors, it’s time to change the culture. Salary caps and a restoration of business regulations would be a good place to start. The wisdom to quit while we’re ahead would be even better.

Step Casey's Luminous Debut

STEP CASEY

Whisper and Holler

Self Produced 001

http://stephcasey.bandcamp.com/album/whisper-holler

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Step Casey is a Wellington, New Zealand-based singer/songwriter, though one quickly hears that her muses have spent considerable time across the pond in the United States.  Among the influences she cites–and which you’ll hear on her debut record–are Gillian Welch, The Be Good Tanyas, and Lucinda Williams. Voice-wise, her dulcet tones resemble those of Joy Williams of The Civil Wars, another inspiration. That said, her career path more resembles that of Mary Gauthier in that not many folks decide to hit the road as a folk/country/pop singer in their late thirties. (Gauthier was 38, Casey 39. Gauthier latter chucked her life as a restaurateur, Casey hers as a graphic designer.)

If there’s any advantage to a later-in-life music career, it’s that you’ve outlived both wide-eyed optimism and close-minded cynicism. Casey offers a mix of emotions and themes. She opens with “Nice to Know You,” a sticks-in-your-head song that highlights the infectious catch in her voice. It’s also the first of three songs of loss, the second of which, “My Lovely Letterbox,” is a duet with veteran New York City hard rocker Gary Sunshine. She teams with him again on “A Love to Die For,” though it is her voice that’s the effulgent contrast to Sunshine’s gravely tones. As that song’s title suggests, there is plenty of upbeat material to balance the sorrowful. One of my favorites is “Thievery,” a no-punches-pulled song of longing. Another is “Heavy Warm Heart,” an off-kilter little number heavy on the first beats, in which Casey lets her light voice bounce off and between picked acoustic guitar notes whilst viola and cello add sonorous depth. Add some splashes of soul (the Hammond-enhanced “No Love”) and a carefree beach song about one of my favorite places, “Kapiti,” and it all adds up to later-in-life promise. Nitpickers would be correct to say that Casey could be more emotive if she dialed back the vocal ornaments a tad and trusted her material more. I suppose–but this is a solid debut, no matter how long it took to arrive.--Rob Weir