Author: Jennifer Graham

Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam (Ecco, 241 pages)

To be human in the 21st century, at least in the comfortable, fleece-lined pockets of the first world, is to suffer a palpable loss: the constant, energizing churn of adrenaline.

It was the consolation prize when we were booted out of Eden, the furious cycle of tension and release that the brain comes to crave when fight or flight is no longer a choice that dictates survival, but more like an aftertaste of road rage. We miss this adrenaline. Its loss helps to explain our fondness for a genre best explained as “apocalypse wow.”

Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind belongs in that genre like Moby-Dick belongs in the genre of animal books, which is to say that it’s technically correct to shelve it there, but that would be an insult to the novel’s grandeur.

Alam has produced a marvelously taut and suspenseful story of two families thrown together as an unspecified calamity unfolds. It flirts with many contemporary themes — racism, climate change, disease, even over-reliance on technology — but not preachily or self-consciously so. At its heart throbs a sophisticated thriller, understated in its telling, which makes the punch it delivers all the more satisfying.

Amanda and Clay are an unremarkable couple: parents of a 13-year-old girl and 15-year-old boy. Amanda is an advertising executive whose reliable thrill is feeling needed on her job; Clay is a professor at a New York City college. When they’re together, he drives the car, “not so new as to be luxurious nor so old as to be bohemian.” They’re the Griswolds, better educated, without the hijinks.

We meet the family en route to a week’s vacation in a secluded Long Island house they rented from Airbnb. (“Step into our beautiful house and leave the world behind,” the listing enticed.)

The house has a pool and is near the ocean; Amanda and Clay have no greater ambition for their vacation than to spend time together before their young teens descend into constant disdain.

It is a testament to Alam’s gorgeous writing that we don’t abandon the couple before their first night in the home, such is their level of ordinariness and the depths to which we are exposed to it. Case in point: Nearly half of Chapter 3 is essentially a shopping list, things that Amanda bought at the supermarket. (“She bought two tumescent zucchini, a bag of snap peas, a bouquet of curling kale so green it was almost black.”)

There is rich detail, however, in the recitation of locally made pickles and unsliced hard salami, and Alam does not trade in superfluous words. It’s rare that he even indulges in concluding dialogue with “said.” By the time Amanda and Clay are startled by an unexpected knock at the door on their second night at the home, we are vaguely fond of them and their well-behaved offspring.

At the knock, Amanda reacts as many mothers unacquainted with firearms would, saying to her husband, “Get a bat.”

Her husband, amiable and clueless, first thinks of a flying mammal. “He understood then, but, where would he get a bat? When had he last held a bat? Did they even have a baseball bat at home, and if they did, had they brought it on vacation?”

The couple finally quiet their alarm enough to open the door to a handsome, well-dressed couple in their 60s, apologetic but quietly insistent on coming in. They explain they are the owners of the home (Amanda had only corresponded with a man using the initials GHW in his email address), and that there has been a widespread power outage in New York and they had nowhere else to go. They are hoping to stay in a basement suite until the next day when they can figure out what has happened and what to do.

There is another detail here, which is that Amanda and Clay are white; the couple at the door, GH and Ruth, are Black. While Amanda and Clay are not overtly racist, there is present the innate fear of “otherness,” the biological impulse that drives tribalism in our constant search for safety.

There is also the heightened sensitivity of parents, whose No. 1 task is to keep their offspring alive. Alam, himself a father, understands this, writing of Clay, “Sometimes, looking at his family, he was flooded with this desire to do for them. I’ll build you a house or knit you a sweater, whatever is required. Pursued by wolves? I’ll make a bridge of my body so you can cross that ravine.”

Amanda and Clay struggle with how to respond to the unusual request, the genesis of which is unconfirmable because the internet and phones are no longer working. It is the first of many encounters in which Alam poses a silent question to the reader: What would you do?

As the story unfolds, the stakes take on a quiet urgency. Something is off in the world right now; that’s clear from the strange behavior of animals, the arrival of unwanted guests, and the disappearance of cell service.

But Amanda and Clay can’t get an answer without leaving the seemingly safe confines of the house, which may seem the obvious thing to do, except for not having GPS, not knowing anything about the area, and not knowing whether there is electricity, gas or even safety beyond the borders of the property. But they’re also not sure if they’re safe at the house, or what sort of catastrophe caused Amanda’s phone to send four breaking news headlines, the last one of which ended with garbled letters.

Leave the World Behind could be an apocalyptic thriller, or a mystery, or a study in unfounded alarm. Its true genre is not revealed until the final pages. A story that simmers long and eventually boils, it is a delightful respite in a year in which we all long to forget the world, at least for the duration of a book. A+

BOOK NOTES
The biggest publishing event of 2020, we’re told, is the forthcoming memoir of former President Barack Obama. The first of two volumes, A Promised Land, published by Crown, comes out Nov. 17 and is said to be 768 pages. Its website, obamabook.com, promises “a unique and thoughtful exploration of both the awesome reach and the limits of presidential power, as well as singular insights into the dynamics of U.S. partisan politics and international diplomacy.”

While there are no doubt many Americans who are interested in a lengthy, historical treatise on the presidency, it’s unclear whether we’re up for this so soon after an exhausting election.

For anyone who prefers to forget about politics altogether for a while, there is the genre called “speculative fiction,” loosely defined as fantastical writing that transcends reality, science fiction included. (Another way to describe it in two words is “Ray Bradbury.”)

One forthcoming book that is getting some buzz is The Arrest, by Jonathan Lethem (Ecco, 320 pages), which the publisher says is about “what happens when much of what we take for granted — cars, guns, computers and airplanes, for starters — quits working.” It’s set in rural Maine, so extra appeal for New Englanders, and will be released Nov. 10.

Another new title set in New England is Peter Heller’s The Orchard (Scribd Originals, 199 pages). It’s billed as a suspenseful coming-of-age story that takes place in Vermont’s Green Mountains. Curiously, it’s only available on Kindle. For a compelling physical book by the author, check out his 2012 novel, The Dog Stars, chillingly set in a world in which a flu pandemic has killed off much of the population. (Knopf, 336 pages.)

Also out this month is a new Stephanie Plum novel from Janet Evanovich. Fortune and Glory (Atria, 320 pages) is categorized as both humorous fiction and a crime thriller.

Featured photo: Leave the World Behind

The Upswing, by Robert D. Putnam with Shaylyn Romney Garrett (Simon & Schuster, 350 pages)

Robert Putnam, a political scientist at Harvard, promised his wife in 2015 that he was done writing books. (He had 12, including the highly regarded Bowling Alone, which examined the collapse of community within the U.S.)

Then, “tinkering with several obscure datasets — [his] favorite pastime,” Putnam happened upon information that made him change his mind. The information was the startling resemblance of the United States late in the 19th century to what the nation is grappling with today.

It was all there: “Inequality, political polarization, social dislocation, and cultural narcissism prevailed — all accompanied, as they are now, by unprecedented technological advances, prosperity, and material well-being.”

So Putnam dug into the economics, politics, society and culture of what Mark Twain dubbed “the Gilded Age” and tracked how Americans climbed out of their societal morass. It took six decades, but from a low point at the turn of the century, the nation lugged itself to a high point of greater economic equality and a stronger social fabric between the 1960s and 1970s.

America did this, write Putnam and his co-author Shaylyn Romney Garrett, while transforming from an “I” society to a “We” society, becoming the sort of people who would cheer when JFK said we shouldn’t ask what our country could do for us.

But then, having reached this lofty peak, we promptly trudged back down down to the “I” pit. If you put this on a graph, you find an inverted U, something akin to Mount Crumpit, sans the Grinch. The good news, according to Putnam and Garrett, is that our forebears left us a map of how to get out of the problems that now dog us, if we only pay attention to their upswing and how it came about.

To take a measure of a society’s emphasis on individual over community, the authors explore a range of research to include the obvious (use of pronouns in publications) to the strange (how popular baby names reflect individualistic behavior). They then explore potential causes — from prosperity to globalization — and potential villains in the narratives. (Kids, you’re off the hook. “Neither Millennials nor Twitter and Facebook can possibly be blamed for the I-we-I curve,” Putnam and Garrett write.)

For people not eager to don the political label “progressive,” the relentless communitarianism that Putnam and Garrett promote may give pause, as well as their soft swipes at Randian (both Ayn and Paul) individualism. But conservative hearts will gladden at their prescription for a moral awakening, although the authors don’t think that such an awakening necessarily needs God, but revival of civil responsibility. Engineering a 21st-century upswing will involve “immense collaboration” of resources to re-educate the population in what we owe to each other, and a “groundswell of agitation” to force Progressive-era-like change.

They sound a note of caution: This is not an overnight revolution, and the upswing must leave no one out, but instead “appeal to the full range of American values.”

“Progressive reformers quickly learned that in order to succeed they would have to compromise — to find a way to put private property, personal liberty, and economic growth on more equal footing with communitarian ideals and the protections of the weak and vulnerable, and to work within existing systems to bring about change.”

Putnam has said he wrote The Upswing not to make money but to effect change that he can see in his lifetime. He is 79, so he must be convinced that the strategies he and Garrett put forth here work. The pair make a compelling case that America in 1890 was much like it is in 2020 (sans a pandemic); less so that Americans are willing to accept their prescription. It is a scholarly book that will most appeal to policymakers, but accessible to anyone puzzling until their puzzler is sore over how to descend Mount Crumpit.

At the very least it’s an argument for not naming your kid something weird, so future sociologists won’t blame you when the country looks like a Dumpster fire. B

BOOK NOTES
It sounds like the most self-indulgent genre ever, but books on writing — that is, books written for writers by other writers — can be fascinating, even for people who write nothing more than posts on social media. The point is that if you’ve reached the professional point at which a publisher deems you worthy of musing on the craft of writing, you are probably astonishingly good at it.
Case in point: Claire Messud’s new “autobiography in essays,” which is intriguingly titled Kant’s Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons I Write (W.W. Norton, 336 pages). An acclaimed novelist who now lives in Massachusetts, Messud writes gorgeously of her childhood in the sort of rich prose you’d like to bathe in. A sample from her opening chapter, on being asked to explain to a Toronto Sunday school class what it was like to live in Australia:
“I remember the scarlet fury of my cheeks, the twitching misery of that hour, to which I responded with sullenness and a furrowing of the brow, while my sister gamely chatted and revealed snippets of our private, our secret, other life as if it were less real, or of the same reality, as the dingy brick and gray linoleum and folding chairs around us, of the same reality as the brittle, bosomy instructor or the indistinguishable Christian children who were her charges.”
Definitely worth a look.
Other authors who have brilliantly wed life stories with advice and inspiration on the craft of writing include Deborah Levy, whose eloquent The Cost of Living came out in paperback last year (Bloomsbury Publishing, 144 pages) and the Anne Lamott classic Bird by Bird, published in paperback in 1995 (Anchor, 256 pages) but still an Amazon bestseller.
Also check out C.S. Lewis and the Art of Writing, thoughts on writing culled from Lewis’s letters, by Corey Latta (Wipf and Stock, 250 pages).
But for just a fun, motivational read about how to collect your thoughts into an essay, screenplay or book, there’s nothing better than Vermont writing coach Joni B. Cole’s Good Naked (University Press of New England, 208 pages). Mercifully, for a month in which we learned way too much about Jeffrey Toobin and Rudy Guliani, there’s a subtitle: Write More, Write Better and Be Happier.

Cuyahoga, by Pete Beatty (Scribner, 262 pages)

You may know the Cuyahoga to be a river in northeast Ohio. If it’s still not ringing a bell, maybe you remember a river that used to catch on fire in Ohio with alarming regularity. That would be the Cuyahoga.

It’s no Merrimack, but it makes for a good book, even if you care nothing about Ohio. But be aware, Pete Beatty’s Cuyahoga is the sort of novel often described as “inventive,” which is a euphemism for “for at least the first 25 pages, you’ll have no idea what is going on.” Sometimes even after that, you’ll be scratching your head.

Big Son and Medium Son are brothers who’ve been adopted and live in a newly settled portion of Ohio in 1837. They’ve grown up in the care of a couple who had one other adopted child — Cloe — and seven children of their own.

Like many little brothers, Medium Son, who goes by Meed, worships his elder brother, whose Daniel Boone-like feats include domesticating Lake Erie, bear wrestling, hunting 100 rabbits in one day and felling 10,000 trees in two days and one night. At least that’s according to Meed, who not only appears to be an unreliable narrator but is poorly acquainted with grammar and spelling. The language is rough-hewn, exactly how you might expect a modestly educated pioneer kid to talk.

To get us all acquainted, Meed tells several tall tales, creation stories about Ohio and the role his brother played in settling it. “There is nothing like the making of a place,” Meed says. “To bust up creation. To write your name in the very earth. My brother was a professor of such work.”

This was necessary, because Nature, in 19th-century Ohio, was resistant to settlement. “I imagine you are customed to meek and mild trees that do not want correcting. This is a story of the west so it has got western trees. You do not know the manner of our trees,” Meed says, explaining how the trees fought back: “Firewood piles took to disappearing. … Branches were seen to bust into windows and doors and carry off animals and merchandise.”

Similarly, Big Son’s help was required in taming furious Lake Erie, which, according to Meed, was unleashing wild winds on the hapless populace. The solution involved a visit to the underworld where Satan presented as a middle-aged man “unshaved and tired around the eyes” who served “good storebought coffee.”

“Ever since Erie does not misbehave too much — only frowns and dreams of someday drowning us.”

From these introductory stories, Meed moves on to the heart of the story, which is of the two brothers’ love for their adopted sister, Cloe Inches, who has “cheeks perpetually blushed, like the blood inside knew a private joke” yet is more competent and accomplished than either brother.

Chloe is not one to become betrothed to young men with no means to support her, and as the brothers sleep on beds of straw in their adoptive parents’ barn, and Big Son basically exists on adoration, employment must be had. So Big takes to looking for jobs, which ultimately leads him to the wealthy man who is building, at his own expense, a bridge over the Cuyahoga, connecting Ohio City and Cleveland, whether they want to be connected or not. Hilarity ensues. As do disaster and heartache.

Although Cuyahoga has a strong sense of time and place, Beatty intends it to be a universal tale. “Every age and place has got its Big Sons,” he writes “Folks who hang the sky that we shelter under. Stand up the timbers of a place.”

Every place has also got its Meeds, its Cloes and its Mrs. Tabithas, the brothers’ adoptive mom. “Her mothering were almost ferocious. Food were an example. She would get a corncake in your mouth as soon as you come within her reach. Often you did not even mark her approach with the corncake — she struck like a panther.”

It is these comical portraits that ultimately endear Cuyahoga to the reader, as well as its quiet wisdom. “You cannot rely on a day entirely but you know the sun will come up,” Meed says, observing how birds are unpredictable but still have patterns in their “fool behavior.” The novel, too, is unpredictable, but satisfying for the mulish few who will stick with it to the end. A

BOOK NOTES
For all its other dubious gifts, 2020 has not offered much in the way of books by celebrities, and by that I mean that pop singer and soap actor Rick Springfield did not publish a new novel. Also, when I search for “memoirs by celebrities,” the returns give me Glennon Doyle’s Untamed.

Doyle is not a celebrity in the way that most people think of celebrities. What modest celebrity she has derives from her writing, and I was not searching for “books by authors.”

But Mindy Kaling, formerly of The Office, does qualify as a bona fide celebrity, and her chops as a comic have translated nicely to the printed page. Her third essay collection, however, is strangely presented: Nothing Like I Imagined (Except for Sometimes) comprises six comedic essays, all sold separately on Amazon for $1.99 each, under “Amazon Original Stories.” (They’re free for Prime members.)

Here are the all-important opening lines from the first essay, “Kind of Hindu,” as well as a few other celebrity offerings from this year. Some, I warn you, are vastly less promising, so I have taken the liberty of grading the opening lines, based on how much they induce me to read more.

Nothing Like I Imagined (Kind of Hindu) by Mindy Kaling: “Sometimes when I meet people who have seen The Office, they assume that, like Kelly Kapoor, I am only involved in my Indian heritage to the degree that it is fun and convenient. This assumption is pretty much correct. Culturally and religiously, I live my life like a secular American except when I’m out with friends at an Indian restaurant and I feel uniquely qualified to order our meal.” A

The Meaning of Mariah Carey, by Mariah Carey (Andy Cohen Books, 368 pages): “My intention was to keep her safe, but perhaps I have only succeeded in keeping her prisoner.” A

Open Book by Jessica Simpson (Dey Street Books, 416 pages): “The kids are asleep, and my husband is reading in the other room. So it’s just you and me.” B

More Myself by Alicia Keys with Michelle Burford (Flatiron, 272 pages): “I am seven. My mom and I are side by side in the back seat of a yellow taxi, making our way up Eleventh Avenue in Manhattan on a dead-cold day in December. We hardly ever take cabs.” B

A Very Punchable Face by Colin Jost (Crown, 336 pages): “I wasn’t able to speak until I was almost four years old. I didn’t know this at the time, but apparently that’s insane.” C

Me and Sister Bobbie, by Willie Nelson with Bobbie Nelson (Random House, 288 pages): “Nearly nine decades. A long lifetime. Hard to believe that it was sixty years ago I wrote a song called ‘Funny How Time Slips Away.’” C

What Can I Do?, by Jane Fonda (Penguin, 252 pages): “During Labor Day weekend in 2019, I was in Big Sur with my pals Catherine Keener and Rosanna Arquette. I have a history with Big Sur dating back to 1961, when I first ventured there myself in search of Henry Miller.” F

Let Love Rule, by Lenny Kravtiz with David Ritz (Henry Holt and Co., 272 pages): “I can’t breathe. Beneath the ground, the wooden casket I am trapped in is being lowered deeper and deeper into the cold, dark earth.” A

Also, just so you know, I wasn’t kidding about Rick Springfield. His novel Magnificent Vibration, released in 2014 (Touchstone, 288 pages), was shockingly fun.

Want, by Lynn Steger Strong (Henry Holt & Co., 209 pages)

Books, says the protagonist in Lynn Steger Strong’s novel Want, offer “quiet, secret temporary safety,” which is the best argument for reading one, or 10, this month. Whether you’ll want to read this one is dependent on your capacity for patience. It’s a slow burn of a story, the word “plodding” comes to mind more than once, but it’s a thoughtful meditation on American excesses and desires.

Elizabeth is, in many ways, a thoroughly modern Lizzie. A child of affluence in the 1980s, she has arrived at age 34 with a Ph.D., a husband, two children (girls, 2 and 4) and a teaching job she cares about intermittently. But she is unable to enjoy any of this because of debt that has driven the couple to bankruptcy and troubled relationships with her parents and former best friend.

The debt began with $30,000 owed to a hospital for a C-section, then grew to include emergency dental work, household expenses and $100,000 in student loans. “My body almost single-handedly bankrupted us,” Elizabeth muses. That could be one reason that she punishes it, getting up before dawn every morning for double-digit runs on icy streets in Manhattan.

Strangely, it is 2017 but Elizabeth somehow dwells in a world that is unmolested by the Trump presidency or anything political. (There’s that “quiet, secret temporary safety” perhaps.)

But otherwise, the book is, in many ways, a rumination on American culture, although it’s unclear what part of it, if any, the author seeks to indict. Elizabeth and her husband were “eighties babies, born of plenty, cloistered by our whiteness and the place we were raised in … we were both brought up to think that if we checked off certain boxes we’d be fine.”

After the Great Recession, they floundered psychologically: “We had principles or something, made up almost wholly out of things we knew we didn’t want to be or have a part in more than in any concrete plans for what we’d be instead. … We were galvanized in this way, smug and stupid. It felt athletic and exciting, this misguided, blind self-righteousness.” She wanted a life that revolved around books; he, despite the $100,000 in student loans, decides he prefers working with his hands, and so leaves finance to build custom furniture.

Elizabeth moves numbly through her days, leaving work early occasionally to wander through a museum or read in a coffee shop. She occasionally checks Twitter and Facebook, largely to stalk her former best friend, Sasha, who has vanished from her life, for reasons that are slowly unspooled. When her husband, the primary caregiver of their daughters, is away, she speaks of “watching” her children, as if she is a detached babysitter.

Meanwhile there are the sundry indignities of wheeling through a moneyed world with $72 in their checking account. One day, for example, the girls had a birthday party to attend, so Elizabeth wraps two books her daughters don’t like (plus “a toy they haven’t played with much”) in printer paper she has the children decorate. The gift is stapled shut because they are out of tape. (The 4-year-old, of course, announces as soon as they arrive, “My mom didn’t have time to get a gift so she made us wrap up our own toys.”)

Equally important to the story is Elizabeth’s fraught relationship with her mother, “the only person in the world who can say my name and make it mean.” Elizabeth has all sorts of psychological scars from her childhood, yet her parents — both attorneys — are blind to their inadvertent cruelties and genuinely don’t comprehend why their relationship is broken.

In one searing scene the parents insist that Elizabeth watch a video of her cavorting happily with family members as a child and demand that she explain why she is so angry with them. “Is this the childhood that made you do such awful things to us?” her father demands.

We are meant, of course, to side with Elizabeth, who gathers her children and leaves. But this is a novel of nuance, and Elizabeth is not always entirely likeable herself; her ennui is infectious. Maybe the parents had a point. They have wants, too, after all.

At the birthday party, Elizabeth listens as the other moms talk about the health spas where they go for self-care; she is not resentful, but her desire, and her inability to have these things, is palpable. But there are people who want the things she has; for example, the wife of her husband’s associate who has been trying for two years to have a child. “I see her want in the way her eyes dip closer to her nose; I smell it, desperate and sour, on her breath and her lips,” Elizabeth observes.

We all have currency of some kind, but not all currency involves money. For some it’s family, for others health. This is a rich, mineable theme. Want nibbles around the edges of what it could be but ultimately suffers from the narrator’s own lethargy and an ending of dubious resolution.
B

BOOK NOTES
When I was a kid, the next best thing to Halloween was checking out books about Halloween at the school library. There couldn’t have been that many, but there were always histories of holidays, and sometimes I would score a book on costumes or holiday parties that would have Halloween chapters. October is a long month, even longer when you’re in third or fourth grade; reading about Halloween helped me hang on until the 31st finally arrived.
Then I grew up, and … nothing.
I can’t remember reading anything about Halloween in ages. This seems strange, given that I own two dozen Christmas-themed books. So I set out to find some Halloween books for adults — and by that I mean books specifically about the celebration of Halloween and its assorted characters, not just books that are spooky. For that, all you need is Stephen King.
There aren’t a lot. Even though adults have effectively taken over Halloween, most Halloween books are for kids. But here are a few witchy titles I found for grown-ups:
Ghostland, An American History in Haunted Places, by Colin Dickey (Penguin, 336 pages)
The History and Haunting of Salem by Rebecca Pittman (Wonderland Productions, 647 pages)
For people who loved the film Halloween, there’s a book about the making of it: Taking Shape, Developing Halloween from Script to Screen, by Dustin McNeill and Travis Mullins (Harker Press, 378 pages).
Roald Dahl compiled an anthology of ghost stories — who knew? Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 235 pages.)
This book makes me tired just reading about it, but for the creative cooks among us: Tricky Treats, Halloween Delights for Appetizers, Snacks, Dinner and Dessert, by Vincent Amiel (Skyhorse, 96 pages).
More promising: The Spell Book for New Witches, Essential Spells to Change Your Life by Ambrosia Hawthorn (Rockridge Press, 244 pages). Don’t laugh; she’s the editor of Witchology magazine and says she has been a practicing witch for 15 years.
For the thirsty: WitchCraft Cocktails: 70 Seasonal Drinks Infused with Magic and Ritual by Julia Halina Hadas (Adams Media, 224 pages).
Finally, for those of you who are obsessed with Walt Disney, there is Vault of Walt 9: Halloween Edition by Jim Korkis (Theme Park Press, 256 pages), released this month. This is not a joke. Theme Park Press exclusively publishes books about Disney parks, and Korkis found enough anecdotes about Walt Disney, the man and his theme park to fill a paperback book. (Even more incredible, he’s written 28 other books, all about Disney, including Vault of Walt, Christmas Edition.)
And of course there are plenty of Halloween coloring books for adults, something I would normally grumble about, but 2020 being what it is … sure, bring out the orange and black crayons.

Welcome to the United States of Anxiety, by Jen Lancaster (Little A, 239 pages)

Jen Lancaster, self-described reforming neurotic, is a little anxious these days. Specifically, she is “a bundle of nerves, swaddled in a blanket of panic.”

You might find this surprising, given that she is a wildly successful author (15 previous books) with TSA PreCheck and enough disposable income and time to routinely buy kale salad at a Whole Foods two towns away. Or maybe all that explains why she is so anxious.

Regardless, the author of Such a Pretty Fat and Bitter is the New Black is here to help the rest of us dissolve our pre-election nerves and be more like her father, a man so unaffected by encroaching disaster that he calmly kept reading the sports pages in the middle of a flight in which the plane lost an engine and the oxygen bags descended. (Which recalls a book by another Jen — Jen Sincero of You are a Badass fame.)

Lancaster didn’t learn about her father’s nearly catastrophic fight until decades later, in part because he’s not the sort of man to obsessively worry about things that might happen (“We had my mother for that,” she says), and in part because he didn’t live in age in which people had outsized reactions to virtually everything. By almost every measure, the world is a safer place than it’s ever been for large swaths of people. “So … why the hell does it feel like the ends of days?” Lancaster asks. “Why does it seem like it’s about to rain locusts? Why am I cuffing my pants for the coming rivers of blood?”

There is a short answer, of course: social media. But that doesn’t make for a book. And so Lancaster dusts off the late Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” to serve as a sort of intellectual scaffolding on which to hang a collection of comical riffs about the state of American culture today.

Maslow, you may recall from high school, believed that human beings have to fulfill their most elemental needs, such as shelter and safety, before advancing to first-world accomplishments like self-esteem and self-actualization. In other words, you can’t worry about safety and security if you’re starving and cold; you can’t worry about love and accomplishment until you are safe. So, yes, this kind of fits into a conversation about anxiety. And it’s useful for dividing the book into five parts. But the structure seems a bit contrived and distracts from Lancaster’s comic gifts. We are force-fed Maslow when all we really want is vintage Jen, master of the bon mot.

After establishing her neurotic credentials (she says she is “actively afraid of bread”), Lancaster embarks on a tour of America the anxious, beginning with our obsession with having ethically grown, nutritionally complete and Instagram-worthy cuisine. Her grandparents, Italian immigrants, would scoff. They ate “whatever washed up on the shore in Italy” and later, “once they settled in Boston, their culinary repertoire expanded to include weeds they picked in the yard and the small animals they trapped in their attic.”

On the subject of clothes, another of Maslow’s first-tier needs, she brings us to an improv class she took at Chicago’s famous Second City comedy school, where she was told that clothes are a nonverbal announcement of identity. “My skirted leggings, tunic sweater, and matching scarf announced ‘I had a 20 percent off coupon at the Eileen Fisher outlet.’”

And so she goes, spinning through her own world and current events with a caustic tongue and just enough winsome deprecation to soften the edges.

One of her stories is one she’s told before, in another, shorter version in HuffPost eight years ago.

She was waiting in line for that kale salad at Whole Foods when a mother and child “cut in front of me with such grace and sense of purpose that I felt compelled to apologize for having arrived first.”

The girl, Margot, was about 6 and was wearing $300 jeans and carrying a Burberry purse. The mother was wearing jodhpurs and riding boots, “coated with a thin sheen of dust after she’d doubtless whiled away the day jumping rails in an indoor arena.” The child then proceeded to whisper questions that the mother relayed to the chef as if she was interpreting for a queen … about the quality of the sushi. Lancaster tells the story not with a keyboard, but a machete, and it is just perfect.

Less perfect are her many entreaties for us to live better, to reduce our paralyzing anxiety via platitude. Worst offense: “If your closet’s too overloaded to make choices, be ruthless. Purge and donate.” (May I suggest: if your editor lets you publish sentences like this when you’re a brilliant cultural critic, be ruthless. Find another.)

Toward the end, Lancaster pivots to an unexpected place: her fraught relationship with her mother, which has resulted in her having no contact with either parent. To use one of Lancaster’s own favorite terms, “spoiler alert” — at one point her mother threatened to sue her for libel. It is an unexpected airing of dirty laundry that, like David Sedaris writing about his sister’s suicide, is shocking and seems out of place, even as she explains, “While I was growing up, my mother’s behavior was so mercurial, I never knew what to expect, thus setting me on a course for a lifetime of anxiety.”

So, maybe it isn’t social media to blame after all. Maybe it’s our mothers.

Welcome to the United States of Anxiety is the perfect title for 2020, just not the perfect book. But it’s still a much better investment of your time than two hours on Twitter or another presidential debate. B

BOOK NOTES
Much is made of Amazon’s impact on bookstores, less of the company’s impact on publishing itself. But of course, Jeff Bezos would eventually get into publishing; he was married to a novelist, after all, and before it sold everything, Amazon sold only books.

Still, it’s a little surprising to learn that Amazon has been in publishing for more than a decade, not self-publishing as in CreateSpace or BookBaby, but publishing to compete with legacy players like Hatchette or HarperCollins. And it landed a big name in Jen Lancaster (United States of Anxiety, reviewed above.)
Lancaster’s new book, curiously billed as “observational comedy,” is published by Little A, one of 16 imprints that Amazon has established since starting a publishing arm in 2009. Its other imprints include Montlake, Thomas & Mercer, Lake Union, 47North and Grand Harbor Press.

Even more surprising, so far, the reach of Amazon Publishing seems relatively modest, at least compared to its outsized influence in so many other parts of American life. On its website, the company touts a handful of awards and says it has helped 36 authors reach more than one million readers. Note the word “readers.” It doesn’t say 36 authors sold more than 1 million books. One reviewer of Lancaster’s book on Amazon, that is marked a “verified purchase,” said she’d read it because she accidentally downloaded it as a free book she got through her Prime membership.

All this is to say, Amazon may be the largest seller of books in the U.S., but it’s clearly not decimating legacy publishers as it did bookstores. Not yet, anyway. But its website does one thing pretty cool: Each imprint, when listing current books, credits the title’s agent, agency and editor. For example, Hell’s Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men by Harold Schechter (you know you want to read this) was sold by David Patterson of the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency and its editor was Vivian Lee (334 pages, Little A). That’s wonky publishing tea that is usually reserved for subscribers to Publishers Weekly, but it’s nice to see credit given, since so many people besides the author are responsible for bringing us books.

The biggest Amazon Publishing successes so far, at least when it comes to literary prizes, appear to be a collection of stories, Godforsaken Idaho by Shawn Vestal (210 pages, Little A), and the children’s book You Are (Not) Small by Ann Kang and illustrator Christopher Weyant (32 pages, Two Lions).

Billion Dollar Burger, by Chase Purdy (Portfolio/Penguin, 236 pages)

You don’t have to be vegan, or an animal-rights zealot, to be deeply uncomfortable about what is required to keep the meat shelves at your local supermarket stocked with ground beef and pork tenderloins.

In about the time it took to read the previous paragraph, about 10,000 animals in the U.S. were slaughtered to meet the insatiable demands of a population that is already dangerously obese. (Statistic via the website Animalclock.org, which tracks slaughter numbers in the U.S.) Obscenely, many of the animals died so their flesh could be thrown away; an estimated one-quarter of meat produced is discarded.

Marry atrocity and capitalism, and you get cell-cultured burgers. Or you would get them, if the companies racing to produce lab-grown meat could figure out how to produce them economically. Quartz reporter Chase Purdy has been following the companies’ quest for two years and brings a skeptical eye to how the products will be received on America’s dinner tables, if they ever get to America’s dinner tables. Or he does so for part of the book, anyway. He also seems a fanboy of Josh Tetrick, cofounder of the cell-cultured meat venture JUST, one of nine that Purdy has studied.

First, a primer: Cell-cultured meat (which has also been dubbed Frankenmeat) is meat grown from animal cells, not the pseudo-meat that is plant based, such as Burger King’s Impossible Burger.

Entrepreneurs like Tetrick envision a future barbecue in which people can honestly say “no animals were harmed” because the “donor cells” are taken from living animals, then grown in a lab into something called “clean meat.” The few people who have eaten it, to include Purdy, say that it’s decent and point out that everything we eat is a collection of cells. Plus, people who protest that it’s unnatural are forgetting what’s already on supermarket shelves.

“Just look at margarine, frozen pizza, Big Macs and deli meats; potato chips, soda, and every other now ubiquitous food product that is packaged for our convenience and enveloped in a carnival of sugar, salt, fats, and a laundry list of unpronounceable ingredients. They are objectively bad for us,” Purdy writes. And they are unnatural.

More people have gone into space than have eaten clean meat, a JUST worker tells Purdy as he sits down to sample a pate made of cell-cultured duck at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco. He later goes on to eat chicken tenders at Memphis Meats and thin-sliced steak at Aleph Farms, and to to interview a range of people with a dog in this fight, to include Bruce Friedrich of the Good Food Institute and Peter Singer, the renowned philosopher and champion of animal rights.

All downplay the “unnatural” factor, which is a huge hurdle the industry faces in a time in which consumers are newly enthralled with farm-to-table restaurants and humanely produced meat and eggs. Singer said, “I don’t think nature is in any way a gold standard.” Similarly, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, a former Nestle executive, told him, “The reason why Homo sapiens have become what we are is because we learned to overcome nature.”

And even the “real” meat we see in supermarkets is divorced from its origin, pounded as it is into unrecognizable forms, and whatever else is done to it before we buy it. Purdy’s grandmother, who lives in Kentucky, told him that she has noticed that the smell of ground beef has changed over the years. “It smells like chemicals,” she said. She’s started buying bison instead.

Some people who are vegans because of animal suffering have said they would consider eating meat again when cell-cultured meat can be mass produced. Don’t look for it in the bins at Walmart anytime soon, though. The billion-dollar burger isn’t hyperbole. When one lab-grown burger was unveiled in London in 2013, it was said that the five-ounce patty cost $330,000 to produce, Purdy wrote. That year, cell-cultured meat amounted to $1.2 million a pound. By last year, it had dropped to a mere $1,000 a pound. In other words, one JUST chicken nugget cost $50.

In writing Billion Dollar Burger, Purdy is not the first to take on the topic. Paul Shapiro, co-founder of The Better Meat Co., wrote Clean Meat two years ago, and Kathy Freston and Bruce Friedrich addressed the subject that same year in Clean Protein.

Purdy’s take is a little more updated, albeit rather thin. Billion Dollar Burger has the feel of a Quartz article on steroids; one gets the sense that it took every line in Purdy’s notebooks to expand the manuscript to book length. And given his apparent regard for Tetrick, and his concern about factory farming and its effect on climate change, he is not an impartial observer. Nor does he delve deeply into the ethical issues of factory farming and cell-cultured meat; his style is observation and musing. As such, Billion Dollar Burger is an easy read on a complex subject and will likely need updating in a year. B-

Book notes
Now that the Emmys are over, we can move on to the awards that really matter: book awards.

Two big ones are coming up: the Booker Prize and the National Book Award, both announced in November.

If you’re like me and always bewildered that some books deemed the best of the year escaped your radar screen, there’s still time. The finalists for the National Book Award will be announced Oct. 6, giving you six weeks to read them before the awards ceremony Nov. 18.

The short list for the Booker Prize is out, and it includes three American authors: Diane Cook, Brandon Taylor and Maaza Mengiste. A fourth, Douglas Stuart, is a citizen of both Scotland and America. (A widely expected nomination for Anne Tyler for Redhead by the Side of the Road, given a B+ here, did not materialize.)

The Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world, used to be given exclusively to an author writing in English from the U.K. The Man Booker Foundation expanded its reach in 2014, allowing writers of any nationality to be included, so long as the books are written in English and published in the U.K. There has been much howling and gnashing of teeth in certain quarters over this.

Regardless, the diligent reader can read one nominated book each week and be finished in time to complain about the winner, which will be announced Nov. 17. Here they are:
The New Wilderness, Diane Cook (Harper, 416 pages)
This Mournable Body, Tsitsi Dangarembga (Faber & Faber, 304 pages)
Burnt Sugar, Avni Doshi (The Overlook Press, 240 pages)
The Shadow King, Maaza Mengiste (W.W. Norton, 448 pages)
Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stuart (Grove Press, 448 pages)
Real Life, Brandon Taylor (Riverhead, 336 pages)
But while making your pick, don’t assume that just one will win. Last year the Bookman judges threw a curveball, choosing two winners: Margaret Atwood for The Testaments and Bernadine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other.

Featured photo: Billion Dollar Burger, by Chase Purdy