How the Electoral College Disenfranchises Everyone

 

 

I am sick of presidential politics and how they pit Americans against each other. Only fanatics, madmen, and the greedy can applaud how Trump has cheapened the national discourse, the dignity of the presidency, and America’s standing in the global community. Nor was Richard Nixon called “Tricky Dick” for his magician skills.

 

Democrats also have plenty to answer for. It is hypocritical to ignore that Bill Clinton was every bit as amoral as Trump. Remember the parade of women who revealed his sexual peccadillos? Let’s not forget that several said he harassed them. Though we didn’t talk about such things then, Kennedy’s affairs rivaled Clinton’s.

 

At least Kennedy got more votes than Nixon and assorted small parties, but by the squeakiest of margins: 113,000 votes. In 1968, Nixon turned the table and won the presidency with just 43.4% of the vote. Clinton never got 50% + 1 in either of his elections. In 1992, he garnered just 43% of the popular vote and in 1996, just a tick over 49%. (He probably would have lost in 1996, had not the GOP self-destructed with its boneheaded impeachment for lying about his dalliances with Monica Lewinsky.) Move forward to 2000, and George W. Bush became president, though he got 500,000 fewer votes. Trump took office having decisively lost the popular will, so don’t cry for me Argentina if he ends up losing in 2020 by a Kennedyesque margin.

 

Yet because we have the Electoral College, the books are cooked to look better than they were. In 1960, Kennedy’s victorious Electoral ledger was 303-219; in 1968, Nixon prevailed by 301-191 (with 46 for George Wallace). You could be excused for glancing at the Electoral College and concluding that Bill Clinton was the most popular man in America; 1992 goes down as a 370-168 shellacking of George H. W. Bush, and four years later he spanked Bob Dole by 379-159. In 2016, Trump was trounced by 3 million votes but proclaimed a landslide based on a 304-227 Electoral College victory. Only in the disputed election of 2000 did the Electoral College come close to depicting a true split; George W. Bush took office with a mere 271-266 edge over Al Gore.

 

There is irony in all of this. Conservatives like to invoke the original intent of the Constitution. It’s an absurdity on many levels, but let’s stick to the issue at hand. A major selling point for the Electoral College was that it gave Congress an opportunity to undo an election in which an excited populace chose the “wrong” person, specifically (ahem!) a demagogue. Only once has Congress directly intervened in an election, the 1876 Hayes-Tilden bout, which Tilden clearly won but was shunted aside by a dodgy compromise.

 

My point is to emphasize that the Electoral College is a dinosaur awaiting a comet of doom. If Congress didn’t cast off a demagogue in 2016, there is no point whatsoever in maintaining that theoretical power. Make voters the final arbiters. A case could be made for European-style runoffs in no one gets above 50%, but the electorate should always decide. If you think the 2020 election is over, think again; so-called “faithless electors” could overthrow whatever the count or courts say.

 

Here’s why everyone should push for a Constitutional amendment to trash the Electoral College. For the most part, your vote does not matter. If you are a Republican in California, Massachusetts, or New York, you might as well sleep through presidential elections. The same is true if you’re a Democrat in Deep red states like Alabama, Idaho, or Kansas. Is it any wonder that between half and a third of voters sit out presidential elections?

 

We can pretend it’s the candidates, but it’s simpler: Why vote if it doesn’t matter? And if you’re running for POTUS, why on earth would you bother with rural areas, small towns, or thinly populated counties? The best way to fix this mess is to make sure that each vote counts. Trash the Electoral College now.

 

Rob Weir

  

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead an Unusual Treat

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009/2018/2019)

By Olga Tokarczuk

Riverhead Books, 275 pages.

★★★★

 

 

 

Here’s a book that took a very circuitous path to winning the 2018 Nobel Prize for literature. You’ve probably never heard of it and unless you read Polish, you could not have read it until quite recently. Author Olga Tokarczuk has written nine novels and is one of Poland’s most beloved writers, but this work was originally published in 2009. It wasn’t translated into English until 2017, and there was no U.S. edition until last year. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead­–the title comes from William Blake–is a short book, but not necessarily a quick read. That, as it turns out, is a good thing. You will wish to take your time plumbing the mind of its main protagonist.

 

Drive Your Plow takes us to southwest Poland, a stone’s throw from the Czech border. It is there we meet Janina Duszejko and heaven help you if you call her Janina, a name she detests. She is an odd duck on many levels, including the fact that she’d never harm a waterfowl. She was once a construction engineer, but now she’s one of the few year-round residents in the Table Mountains and spends the dark months as a caretaker for summer homes, teaching English and geography a few days a week at the local village, casting horoscopes, and filing complaints with the local police about hunters. She’s a vegetarian, an informal naturalist, an animal rights activist, and a full-time pain in the ass. We hear her voice throughout the novel and, to emphasize her eccentricities, Tokarczuk capitalizes words that wouldn’t require it within the context. Duszejko suffers from “Ailments,” has bouts of “Anger,” and has a “Theory” about everything. She’s the sort that doesn’t bother with formal names–either because she can’t remember them or thinks her nicknames are better. Thus, her neighbors sport handles such as Oddball, the Writer, and the Professor. The young, bald woman at the secondhand shop is Good News and a former student who drops by for help translating Blake is Dizzy (given name Dionizy).

 

She is known to most as simply “Mrs. Duszejko,” though we know nothing about a husband, the only hint of him perhaps being a cryptic remark. When explaining why she, a non-practicing Protestant, doesn’t care much about Catholicism, she remarks, “For some time I shared my bed with a Catholic and nothing good came of it.” Her remarks on a variety of subjects are laughout loud funny. Like her “Theory” on beauty: “The aim of evolution is purely aesthetic–it’s not to do with adaptation at all.” Or why anger is a good thing: “Anger puts things in order and shows you the world in a nutshell. Anger restores Clarity of Vision, which is hard to obtain in any other state.”

 

Mrs. Duszejko is angry a lot. She’s angry that her “Girls,” her two dogs, have disappeared and the police aren’t doing anything about it. She’s angry that a rich neighbor is raising foxes for fur, that quarrying is eating away at the mountain, that the world is divided into “useless and useful,” and above all, that local hunters are blasting away at any animal they see. When she finds the carcasses or bones of the animals they have slaughtered, she collects and buries them. Then she files a formal complaint with the police, though she thinks they are idiots. Then again, the only people she doesn’t think are idiots are Dizzy, an entomologist named Borys, and maybe her Oddball.

 

A bigger problem in the area begins when Big Foot, her name for one of her neighbors in the “idiot” category, is murdered. She is positive the deer have killed him to avenge his butchering of a member of their herd. Her proof? The horoscope she calculates and the presence of hoof prints around the murder site. Crazy, huh? Then how do we explain other victims found under similar circumstances?

 

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a very unusual book. It is very literary, yet Duszejko seems to be–to use another waterfowl reference­–as crazy as a loon. Duszejko may abuse capital letters, but she’s clearly very smart. Maybe her “Theory” on interjections applies: “…every single Person has their own expression which he or she overuses or uses incorrectly. These phrases are the key to their intellect.” Her own intellect begs the question of how she can take seriously her own theories about astrology or murderous animals, or how she doesn’t seem to realize what a crank she is. This is a rare book in which humor, murder, and eccentricity comingle. Perhaps the only thing twistier than how these three elements resolve is the route taken by Olga Tokarczuk on her way to the Nobel Prize.

 

Rob Weir

The Giver of Stars a Departure for Jojo Moyes

 

The Giver of Stars (2019)

By Jojo Moyes

Penguin Random House, 400 pages.

★★★★

 

 

Most American readers know Joyo Moyes from her 2012 bestseller Me Before You and its follow-ups After You (2015) and Still Me (2018). Each way featured Louisa Clark, once the caregiver to a rich quadriplegic. It thus come as a surprise that her latest, The Giver of Stars, is set in Kentucky–in the 1930s. The title is borrowed from an Amy Lowell poem.

 

Its central character, Alice Wright, is English, but she meets a handsome Yank, Bennet Van Cleve, when he and his father visit England. In a whirlwind romance, she agrees to marry him and move to America, a place that sounded like an exotic escape from her hectoring parents. She had something like New York City in mind, but would settle for Lexington once she gets a good look at Baileyville, a coal town in Appalachia where Bennett’s father is something of a law unto himself. He is also a widower and Alice hadn’t planned on him living under the same roof as she and Bennett, or being treated like an intruder.

 

There’s nothing much she likes about Kentucky, a place inhabited by self-righteous prigs that could have plucked from Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street. Alice’s every move is judged and found wanting by everyone from the local pastor, Van Cleve’s housekeeper Annie, and Bennett himself. To make matters worse, her marriage has yet to be consummated; Bennett is a wimpy (and limp) lackey for his old man. To use an old Appalachian expression, Alice’s fate is what happens when you buy a pig in a poke.

 

Alice’s fate brightens when she meets Margery O’Hare, a free spirit who locals also judge, though Margery couldn’t care less. Margery is helping set up a Works Progress Administration program endorsed by Eleanor Roosevelt that seeks to put books and magazines into the hands of rural readers. In this neck of the woods that means saddling up a horse and riding up the ridges and into the hollows. It also means visiting some places where potential clients are more likely to have a rifle in their hands than a welcoming cup of coffee.

 

Margery and her WPA coordinator forge ahead, stock a library, and launch a four-woman delivery crew: Margery, Alice, and two gals barely out of high school: the salty-tongued Beth Pinker and Izzy Brady, who suffers from low esteem because polio left her with a brace, a short leg, and a limp. A Giver of Stars is essentially about feisty women who seek the support of likeminded individuals in a tradition-bound one-company town. Two men play heroic roles: Sven Gustavsson, Margery’s lover, and the ever-helpful Fred Guisler, whose wife left him years before. It’s not easy being unconventional in a hidebound place where elites maintain power by sowing distrust and fear.

 

A Giver of Stars eventually branches off to be a murder mystery, a look at eco-destruction, worker exploitation, family feuds, sexual ignorance, union-busting, cowardice, resilience, dark secrets, romance, and rural poverty. At times the novel is so focused on female power that it slides down anachronistic hills. I really liked the character of Sophia Kenworth, an African American woman with a disabled brother who takes charge of organizing the book collection. Alas, it’s not a believable character. Although Sophia’s role is kept quiet, I doubt that such a secret would hold for long or that it would have been very safe for Sophia to be in said role in Jim Crow Kentucky. (The Ku Klux Klan was active in the state.) Moyes’ logic is especially thin given that everyone connected with the library attracted attention to themselves and Baileyville is presented as gossip-ridden. Some may also take umbrage to the novel’s shift from female independence to the suggestion that most of life’s problems can be overcome by the love of a good man.  

 

This is the historian in me speaking, though, and many readers will probably overlook the unlikelihood of what they read. Like all Moyes novels, A Giver of Stars is an easy read that presents tough subjects in palatable and hopeful ways. In case you’re wondering, the Pack Horse Library Project was a real thing that lasted from 1935-43–back in the days in which the federal government actually made an effort to connect with ordinary people. It eventually served more than 100,000 Kentuckians. So, file this one under historical fiction/non-fiction.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

Admit It: You Need Mr. Rogers Today!

 

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)

Directed by Marielle Heller

Sony Pictures Releasing, 109 minutes, PG

★★★★

 

Tomorrow is Election Day. Anxiety levels are at all-time highs. Need to chill? Here’s a film that will help you do it. In my lifetime, there have only been a handful of people I’d label as WYSIWYG authentic: Pete Seeger, the Dalai Lama, Bernie Sanders, and Fred Rogers. Of these, Rogers might be the only one on which most agree.

 

I dodged A Beautiful day in the Neighborhood in the cinema. I had just seen the 2018 documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor and didn’t think much more could be said. In a sense, that’s correct. Beautiful Day is not a Rogers biopic. Tom Hanks got nominations from various groups including the Oscars, for his portrayal of Rogers, but as a best supporting actor. Hanks was born for the role of Fred Rogers, one he inhabits with eerie ease, but his was indeed a supporting role. Rogers is not the film’s raison d’être.

 

Beautiful Day is based on a 1998 Esquire feature written by Tom Junod, whom the movie fictionalizes as Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys). Junod and Rogers really were friends, though liberties were taken with their relationship. Lloyd is presented as a man so consumed by anger and cynicism that not even his supportive wife Andrea (Susan Kelechi Wilson) or a newborn son can crack his funk. Imagine the hackles raised when Esquire editor Ellen (Christine Lahti) hands Vogel an assignment to write 400 words on Mr. Rogers for a spread on American heroes and makes it sound like she’s tired of his act and that he’d better not screw it up.

 

Lloyd has been mad ever since his father Jerry (Chris Cooper) left his wife as she was dying of cancer, the latest in a string of infidelities. Lloyd hasn’t spoken to him in 15 years, which doesn’t bode well when Jerry plans to show up at his daughter’s wedding. Lloyd wants to stay home on the grounds that Lorraine (Tammy Blanchard) has been married twice before, but Andrea convinces him he must go. Not the best idea! Lloyd ignores his father’s second wife, Dorothy (Wendy Makkena), and gets into a fight with his father that leaves Lloyd with cuts on his nose that are highly visible when he flies from New York to Pittsburgh to interview Rogers.

 

Vogel is prepared to give free rein to sarcasm, but he badly underestimates Rogers, his cheesy puppets, low-budget props, and silly characters like Lady Aselin and Mr. McFeeley. Each probing question prompts Fred to express concern for Lloyd’s well-being. Lloyd is sure this is part of Rogers’ shtick and wonders why Rogers doesn’t know he’s an investigative journalist who doesn’t do puff pieces. Imagine his surprise when Family Communications CEO Bill Isler (Enrico Colantoni) tells him that Fred has read his work and requested him for the interview. Lloyd is more baffled still when Rogers dismisses all talk of being a hero or a secular saint. A it transpires, Fred likes “broken people” wants to be Lloyd’s neighbor. Well take me to the river and wash me down! A whole lot of healing is about to happen. Vogel’s 400-words became 10,000 and the cover of Esquire.

 

Some of the movie falls into Hallmark TV, territory, but like Lloyd, I found myself being sucked in. Because. Mr. Rogers! He was so genuinely calm, honest, and concerned that one’s private Walls of Jericho crumble. Not everything went down as it’s portrayed on the screen, but Hollywood fiction doesn’t cheapen the fact that Fred Rogers was simply a decent human being.

 

Several other thoughts. My message to all Tom Hanks haters: Get over yourselves. He’s no Orson Welles, but he’s never tried to be. Hanks is what he appears to be: an actor who prefers uplifting roles to guns, hookers, and attitude. I liken Hanks to Starbucks coffee – not the greatest you’ll ever experience, but consistently reliable. A shout-out goes to Chris Cooper, who is one of the most under-appreciated actors of our times. He plays Jerry with the right balance of toughness and search for redemption. Susan Kelechi Wilson is radiant, even when we want her to be less understanding and kick Lloyd in the kiester. Maryann Plunket also does a nice job in her small part as Fred’s wife, Joanne.

 

Some reviewers criticized sequences of car trips, flights, and cityscapes that unfold as if they are sets from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood before toggling to reality. For me, they enhance the simple (though not simplistic) magic of the Mr. Rogers universe. I could have done without Hallmark moments that evoke 1950s family values tableaux. I am also critical that the film gives a drive-by to the fact that Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister. His faith was central to who he was.

 

Couldn’t we all do with a heaping serving of Fred Rogers right now? Bring it. You’ll grin despite yourself.

 

Rob Weir

 

Note: Noah Harpster appears in the film as Lorraine’s new husband, Todd. He also cowrote the script with Micah Fitzerman-Blue.

 

Friends and Strangers a Lackluster Effort

Friends and Strangers: A Novel (2020)

By J. Courtney Sullivan

Knopf, 416 pages.

★★ ½

 

Authors often begin their careers with what they know and have experienced. This is forgivable in early books, but after a while the same ground is trodden bare. For example, do any of us need another John Irving novel into which there’s a bear, wrestling, and Vienna? Enough already!

 

I did not know J. Courtney Sullivan when she was a Smith student, but there is validity to some of the complaints she puts into the mouths of characters in Friends and Strangers. But, she’s 38 now and it’s time to put her undergraduate years behind her. The book has been tagged as “women’s fiction,” a term I intensely dislike and suspect Sullivan did not choose. I would say, though, that it’s not an inviting novel for men despite the fact that one of the major characters is a standup guy–when he’s paying attention.

 

The book centers on Andrew and Elisabeth, a couple that lived in Brooklyn until Elisabeth got pregnant via IVF. She didn’t particularly want children, but Andrew wants several. Much to her surprise, she instantly bonded with her son, Gil. She has not bonded with the idea of leaving Brooklyn and moving to the town where Andrew’s parents, George and Faye, reside. She likes her in-laws and is estranged from her own parents, but she is having adjustment problems to life in a small town. To put it bluntly, she’s a Metro-snob who thinks there is no life outside of Greater New York City. Elisabeth spends her days not writing, moaning there is no coffee shop at her doorstep, worrying about her sister, emailing her best friend Nomi who’s still in Brooklyn, and logging onto BK Mamas, a Facebook group for–you guessed it–new mothers in Brooklyn. Her breasts hurt, she prejudges the people in her neighborhood, and she needs a nanny.

 

About the town. It’s said there are three colleges within a few miles radius and is home to a women’s college that is Smith-not Smith. In other words, she subtracted two schools for her Northampton-not-Northampton “fictional” setting. Andrew gets to work with student interns on an idiotic-not-idiotic project at an offbeat school that is Hampshire-not-Hampshire. She can’t find good coffee in a town renowned for its coffee. And if there is a genre that is as tired as a glue factory horse, it’s one about writers complaining about writing. These opening parts tempted me to toss the book aside with a for-heaven’s sake-get-over-yourself flick of the wrist.

 

The novel improves when Elisabeth hires Sam, a not-Smith senior, to watch Gil so she can go to a rented office and not write. Sam has her own issues, not the least of which are her student loans and what she’ll do with an English/studio arts degree, but she’s a godsend who is amazing with Gil. Soon Elisabeth considers her to be a member of the family and perhaps her only friend in not-Northampton. At best, that’s creepy. Friends and Strangers takes a qualitative leap when it begins to explore boundaries of all sorts–employer/employee, appropriate/inappropriate boyfriends, youthful exuberance/stupid decisions, help/meddling, non-privilege/delusion….  Sullivan backloads her novel with subplots such as a wayward sister who drains Elisabeth’s bank account in her quest to be a social media influencer, Sam’s attempt to help the Latina college dining hall workers with whom she works, George’s critique of wealth and power, Elisabeth’s contempt for her father, Sam’s romance, and twists on  what constitutes cheating and when helping does more harm than butting out.

 

The book is set during the years 2014-15, with a coda in 2024-25, when Sam returns to not-Northampton for her not-Smith 10^th reunion. The novel's first part will raise eyebrows for those familiar with not-Smith. Sullivan slips in an African American college president, Shirley Washington, who is a fraud on several levels. This is a thinly veiled slam on Ruth Simmons who was president of Smith-actual-Smith from 1995-2001. Although I sometimes taught at Smith during those years, I only knew Simmons through secondhand reports. Apparently, students loved her, faculty was split, much of the support staff disliked her, and she left behind staggering financial challenges. Or so I’m told.

 

Smithies (of whom I am very fond) will have to make up their own minds about Sullivan’s take on their (and Sullivan’s) alma mater. However these matters are parsed, Friends and Strangers is problematic. Elisabeth is exceedingly difficult to like, Sullivan’s tone is frequently whiny, and it takes too long to get to the meat of the narrative, which means it feels overstuffed. Sullivan’s searing Commencement was published in 2010. A decade later, it’s time to move on.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

Letitia VanSant: October Artist of the Month

Letitia VanSant

Circadian

 

 

Letitia VanSant comes at us from Baltimore with her sophomore release Circadian. Though you could mistakenly peg her as just another singer with a pretty voice, stop and listen carefully. First, there’s a bit of upper palate growl, but it’s not half as (if I might) biting as some of her lyrics. But let’s start with something sweet, the title trackCircadian. It opens with some high-range warbling that’s almost Japanese in melody and tone, but its theme is indeed the daily cycles of light fluctuation, though with a twist. She tells us that firefly mating and bird migrations get confused by the “halo” of city lights, and then adds a kicker: And they’re lost and lonely as I am. Without getting preachy, VanSant asks us to notice how our gadgets, machines, and noise make us deaf to the music of the world made before me and how it might be a good idea if lives leaned more toward natural circadian places and paces. Yep. That’s the kind of peace we feel on summer nights by a campfire with fireflies illuminating the woods.

 

VanSant has created an album that is very personal, but also one that balances light and dark. “You Can’t Put My Fire Out” is about her survival from sexual abuse and her arrangement is one that toggles between rising anger and a defiant determination to move on: I’m taking back my apologies/For every time that you hurt me/Your red hands I can plainly see/You can’t put my fire out. One might think of this song as the companion to “Tin Man,” which is melodically softer but is a takedown of society’s views of manliness. It’s not an original idea that men who buy into stereotypes damage themselves, but VanSant thinks that that deep down they know it: Even the tin man was searching for a heart. “Rising Tide,” another tough song, explores her father’s exposure to Agent Orange and she’s not in a forgiving mood: They pour all this money down the hole in your side/All the money on Wall Street, these tears can’t dry/They’ve got plans for our pockets, cigarettes for our lungs/Poison for our babies and bullets for our guns.

 

VanSant is often labeled as a folk artist, but she’s also in a honkytonk band. You can hear some of her cowgirl chops on “Spilt Milk,” where she turns her critical eye onto herself for the times in which she should have seen she was letting love spill away but, I was too careless to know. There’s also a bit of country to “Something Real,” a reflection on the death of Jimmy LaFave (1955-2017). She didn’t know LaFave, though his impact resonates in lines such as Someone give me a song to sing that sounds like something real…. Mostly, VanSant recognizes that life offers no magic wand to make things as we want them to be. That’s the theme of a song whose title says it all, “Most of Our Dreams Don’t Come True.”

 

Circadian features well-written songs. One of VanSant’s smarter moves was to work with Mary Gauthier’s producer Neilson Hubbard (who is also a guest drummer on the album). Hubbard should offer seminars on how to fill spaces without drowning the artist in echoey soup that highlights the session players instead of the headliner. His is a case of less is more. VanSant’s voice may sound a tad too sweet at times, but to come full circle, listen carefully.   

 

Rob Weir

Dear Edward Affecting though not Deep

 

Dear Edward (2020)

By Anne Napolitano

Dial Press, 352 pages.

★★★

 

 

 

Dear Edward isn’t the most complex novel on the market, but its story is very affecting. Its namesake hero (of sorts) is Edward Adler, a 12-year-old boy who boards an airplane bound from Newark to Los Angeles with his parents, Bruce and Jane, and his older brother, 15-year-old Jordan, whom Edward admires.

 

The boys have been homeschooled by their father, who didn’t get tenure at Columbia, which means mom, a writer for the TV show Law and Order is the main breadwinner. They don’t really want to leave New York, but are West Coast bound because Jane has been offered a ridiculous amount of money to write for Hollywood. Alas, their plane crashes in Colorado and 191 people are killed; Edward is the only survivor and no one can quite figure out how that happened. At 12, he is bears two heavy burdens, the loss of his family and the tag “Miracle Boy.”

 

Napolitano’s organization is one of flip-flopping chapters in which she does in-flight observations through Edward’s eyes, followed by post-crash ones in which Edward tries to adjust to a new life with his aunt Lacey, age 39, and his uncle John Curtis, 42. They tried unsuccessfully to have children and are now raising Edward in a suburban New Jersey town. Needless to say, Edward has plenty of healing to do, both physically and psychologically. Food has lost its allure and he can’t sleep in the Curtis home and begins to do so next door, in a home populated by Besa, a single Latina mom, and her daughter Shay, who is quirky enough to become Edward’s only real friend.

 

Napolitano via Edward does a nice job of providing backstories of some of those who perished: slightly pudgy Linda, on her way to move in with the Mr. Right she’s finally found; Veronica, a beautiful flight attendant; egotistical bond trader Mark; Florida, a large and flamboyant Filipino woman who believes in past lives; the wealthy but unhealthy Crispin; wounded Army officer Benjamin, who is also gay; and others. They haunt Edward, as do memories of his parents and Jordan. Edward even wears Jordan’s oversized clothes, which doesn’t help him adjust to junior high school, where some of the kids think he’s a curiosity item, others a freak, and still others privileged, as they know the airline has put a million dollars in escrow for him. Shay, Besa, a plant-loving principal, an offbeat therapist, and the Curtises try to help Edward move from grief to healing.

 

A few years pass before Edward and Shay discover bags in the garage containing letters from friends and relatives of those who perished. As if Eddie needed one more thing to shoulder, these are full of requests to honor the memories of the lost by becoming what they would have had their lives not been cut short. So how does a teenaged boy become a photographer, a philosopher, a poet, a paramedic, a civil rights activist, travel to Alabama to hug a bedridden mother, and walk the Great Wall of China? With Shay’s help, Edward tries to decide which letters to answer and which are best left alone. Harder still, how does Edward decide who he is and what he wants to be? How does one get beyond being the Miracle Boy?

 

Dear Edward is heartbreaking, mostly in good ways, though Napolitano does sometimes trip over sentimentality. One might also accuse the author of being manipulative by making a 12-year-old the crash survivor. Would our emotions have been aroused the same way if Mark had survived? Likewise, as suggested, the novel’s structure is mechanistic. The airplane chapters are a time signature countdown, but since we know things don’t end well, the drama is removed and only the horror remains. Some readers might also find the book’s big revelation improbable and its resolution forced. Napolitano’s strength lies with character development, though, and it’s hard not to root for Edward. I’d put Dear Edward in the breezy read category. It’s just weighty enough that you need not feel guilty as you zoom through it. I would, however, recommend not reading it the next time you fly.a

 

Rob Weir