Category: Books

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, by Claire Dederer (Knopf, 273 pages)

In 2017, the year that the world learned about the sexual predation of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, Claire Dederer published an essay in The Paris Review in which she tried to work out her feelings about bad men and good art.

Dederer came to the topic not through Weinstein, but through another filmmaker, Roman Polanski, who repulsed her because he had been accused of raping a 13-year-old girl. Polanski’s monstrousness, Dederer wrote then, was “monumental, like the Grand Canyon. And yet. When I watched his movies, their beauty was another kind of monument, impervious to my knowledge of his iniquities.”

Dederer is not the first to squirm uncomfortably in this particular space. The question of what we should do with the art of problematic people has come up regularly in recent years, and nobody seems to have a good answer. Dederer didn’t in her Paris Review essay, but she attempts to craft one in Monsters, A Fan’s Dilemma, an elaboration of the ideas put forth in that essay.

You could read just the essay and have a good grasp of the book, but then you’d miss out on the delightful interior wrestling match in which Dederer engages as she tries to reconcile her desire to be “a virtuous consumer” and “a demonstrably good feminist” while consuming the work of troublesome artists. These are mostly men — Polanski, and Woody Allen, and Bill Cosby, and Michael Jackson, and numerous others, dead and alive, who either have been exposed for beastly behavior in recent years, or who have had old behavior newly scrutinized in the light of new standards of conduct. (Polarization alert: She also paints former President Donald Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh with the broad brush of monsters.)

After Weinstein, the floodgates opened, Dederer writes: “A rock had been turned over and revealed a bunch of sex pests, scuttling around in the newly bright light.” The men “did or said something awful, and made something great. The awful thing disrupts the great work; we can’t watch or listen to the great work without remembering the awful thing.”

Dederer turns over a few rocks of her own; unless you’ve paid close attention to the personal lives of some of these men, you may know their names and their contributions to art but nothing of their personal behavior. Be prepared for the pedestals of Pablo Picasso, the Italian painter Caravaggio, composer Richard Wagner, jazz trumpeter Miles Davis and many others to crash down, as Dederer, who lives on a houseboat in Seattle, muses about her existential dilemma.

In the hands of a less capable writer this could get sort of tiresome after a few chapters. But Dederer is like a dinner guest you don’t want to stop talking because she’s so well-read and interesting (you will likely, like me, come away with a list of other books you want to read) and her writing is delightful and fresh. (She describes one person as looking like “a character from a children’s book about plucky pioneers caught in a blizzard.”)

Dederer’s challenge in Monsters was not in the prose or the thinking, but in stretching an essay to book length, and she does this in part by means of a dubious analogy — whether we are all monsters in our own way. This was how she ended the Paris Review piece: “What is to be done about monsters? Can and should we love their work? Are all ambitious artists monsters? Tiny voice: [Am I a monster?]”

Her principal analogy to the everyday monster is that of the female artist who abandons her children to pursue her calling … not necessarily literally, although that has certainly been done.

“The idea of what constitutes abandonment exists on a continuum,” she writes. That continuum includes shutting the studio door to a child, letting another parent do all the child care, putting a child in day care, going out of town for work for days, weeks or months at a time, and so forth. “Please note that none of these behaviors count as abandonment if practiced by men,” she says. “This is extra-true if the men in question are artists.”

Society excused men-monsters for a long time if they were artists and even more so if they were geniuses, Dederer says. In particular, we’ve given a pass to abusive geniuses like Hemingway or Picasso by giving them the ultimate creative license: license to have demons.

Big monsters have equally big demons; the consumers of art have their own, smaller devils that emerge when we sit in judgment on others. For instance, “When you’re having a moral feeling, self-congratulation is never far behind. You are setting your emotion in a bed of ethical language, and you are admiring yourself doing it. … The transmission of our virtue feels extremely important and strangely exciting.”

The difference between Roman Polanski’s sins and Dederer’s (she confesses to worrying whether she’d made the right decisions about child care even now that her children are grown) is vast, and to tenuously connect them Dederer follows a chaotic path. Her conclusions are likewise unkempt, but still ultimately satisfying.

“The heart wants what it wants,” Woody Allen famously said in excusing his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn. Put another way, the heart loves what it loves, and this also applies to art, Dederer says.

“Critical thought must bow its knee to love of the work — if something moves us, whoever we are, we must give that something at least a small degree of fealty.” That is, after all, what we do with our families, which are the “unchosen monsters” that we love. A

Saving Time, by Jenny Odell (Random House, 364 pages)

The quote that opens Jenny Odell’s Saving Time is from the late painter Agnes Martin: “I wish the idea of time would drain out of my cells and leave me quiet even on this shore.”

For anyone who feels that way (and doesn’t everyone feel that way?) Odell proposes to teach us how to discover a life “beyond the clock” — to imagine “a life of identity and source of meaning outside the world of work and profit.” To do so will take up a rather large chunk of your time, which is exquisitely ironic, but Odell showed in her first book, 2019’s How to Do Nothing, that she has a penchant for pithy titles that have little to do with the actual books.

Saving Time offers what Odell calls “conceptual tools” for thinking about time, not time-saving strategies. It is what is commonly called a deep dive into the theme, with Odell leisurely rambling through every rabbit hole to which her observations lead. This is not usually a bad thing, except for the fact that people attracted to a book called Saving Time are likely to be, well, in a hurry for its points to be made. And Odell will not be hurried; she writes with the indolence of someone sprawled in a hammock on a summer day.

Which is kind of her point. Her thesis is this: Our contemporary notion of time is closely (and somewhat bizarrely) tied to work and wages, even while much that surrounds us on the planet unfolds on geologic time. This is not good. Odell rues the state of the modern worker (of which the famously tracked Amazon employee is perhaps the most pitiable example) while tracing the origins of the clock-driven world. Capitalism is an unnamed villain here, even though she points out that until industrialization, human beings stood in for machines, per the slaves of ancient Rome and Egypt.

And for all the blame that has been heaped upon Jeff Bezos, it’s interesting to learn that even the “father of our country,” George Washington, had Bezos-like standards at Mount Vernon, writing to an overseer at one point that slaves should do “as much in 24 hours as their strength, without endangering their health, or constitution will allow of.” That and the Amazon mindset were brilliantly and presciently mocked in a 1936 Charlie Chaplin film called Modern Times, in which a company tries to get more out of its workers by using a machine to quickly feed them their lunch. “The Billows Feeding Machine, a practical device which automatically feeds your men while at work. Don’t stop for lunch! Be ahead of your competitor.”

Of course, the need to get more out of workers wasn’t limited to men. Odell writes, “It is telling, for example, that the owners of the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, tried to argue that longer hours were actually good for the women. Without the ‘wholesome discipline of factory life,’ the women would be left to their own dangerous whims, ‘without a warrant that this time will be well employed.’”

Odell invites us to consider what our employers are buying with the wages they pay us: a specific service or good, or our time? If the latter, what are the boundaries? And in a society in which “discretionary time” is vastly different and often varies by class, what, if anything, do we owe those most deficient in time, which amounts to life itself.

Interestingly, the time problem seems, in many ways, a cruel gift of technology, which expanded the ways in which we can be tethered to a clock. Odell notes the work of German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, who writes of “a hypothetical character named Linda, an overwhelmed professor who rushes through her day, never having enough time to fulfill all her obligations to students, co-workers, family, and friends; expected to be always available, answerable to everyone; with the feeling that she’s always falling short and running behind.”

Linda, Odell writes, “does not have access to Feierabend, the feeling of leisure that peasants and farmers might have had when the cattle and children were in for the night” — the pleasant sense that work is, at least for a couple of hours, concluded. Nor does anyone with a cell phone perpetually turned on, and thus reachable by anyone all the time. (Some countries are trying to address this with legislation colloquially known as “the right to disconnect.”)

Seeing the struggles of their parents and grandparents, younger people are resisting their path, choosing to be less ambitious, more protective of their time. There are costs, not only in material goods but in the respect of their elders. For example, the young Chinese factory worker who in 2016 quit his job in order to take a lengthy bike trip — “I have been chilling,” he wrote — started a movement called “lying flat,” but those who participated were widely decried as lazy and shameful. Lie flat if you want, the message is, but don’t talk about it in public.

Time moves differently for people in different circumstances; for prisoners incarcerated for life, of course, time is a construct almost incomprehensible to those who have relative freedom. And the disabled and those who work with them have their own concept of time called “crip time,” which acknowledges, among other things, the extended amount of time it takes to do things relative to the non-disabled population.

Odell wrote this book, or at least some of it, from the privileged position of an artist’s residency in the Puget Sound, which gifted her the opportunity to muse about time in the slow-drip fashion of geologic time. As such, Saving Time often seems something like elitist navel-gazing. Additionally, there are many smart and insightful thinkers whom, for whatever reason, it is a struggle to pay attention to, and Odell is among their class. The topic is important; she makes that much clear. But Saving Time is not a book I would recommend. C

Built to Move, by Kelly Starrett and Juliet Starrett (Knopf, 336 pages)

CrossFit devotees are no doubt familiar with Kelly and Juliet Starrett. Not being one, I was not, and there was nothing in their new book’s title that seems particularly inspiring. In fact, the only thing the book had going for it, I thought, was an endorsement by popular Stanford University podcaster Andrew Huberman.

I was wrong.

The Starretts, co-founders of CrossFit, have written an unusual fitness book in that they address both long-time, hard-core exercisers and the passionate sedentary, those who proudly display 0.0 stickers on the back of their cars in defiance of the 26.2s. They’re not interested in getting you to run a marathon or even 5K. They’re more interested in getting you to be able to get up off the floor for the next couple of decades — literally.

The “sit and rise” test was the subject of research published in 2014. That study showed that the ability to easily drop into a cross-legged position on the floor, and get up again (if possible not using your hands), is reflective of a person’s physical well- being and can be predictive of mortality.

Intuitively, that makes sense. The more limber a person is, the better their health, right? But the Starretts don’t see sitting and rising as simply a measure of wellness and mobility, but a way to achieve it. The average toddler falls down (and gets back up) 17 times an hour, whereas aging adults do all they can to not visit the floor. In fact, we should be getting on the floor, and getting back up, as long as we’re able.

“Sitting on the floor, if you do it regularly, is one of the things that can help you become more proficient at getting down on the floor, and then getting back up again, without using any support,” they write, adding, “Our bodies are built to sit in ground-based positions.”

The Starretts recommend that we spend a total of 30 cumulative minutes a day sitting in various positions on the floor; doing so helps to “rewild” our hip joints and correct the musculoskeletal problems people develop when they sit in chairs (or cars) most of the day.

It is this kind of advice that makes Built to Move a nice surprise and a departure from the typical wellness book that repackages the same old advice. While upending the conventional wisdom, the Starretts argue that anyone, at any age and in any condition, can incorporate a handful of easy practices and see improvements in their condition. But first, they want to destroy the notion that if we exercise aerobically four or five times a week then we’re in some optimal physical condition.

Think you’re OK because you exercise and stretch? The Starretts say that stretching doesn’t work, nor does even yoga, when it comes to improving and preserving range of motion. “In most circumstances, passively pulling on a muscle doesn’t really achieve much, and it certainly doesn’t improve range of motion.” Stretching just releases tension from our muscles. They recommend movements called “mobilizations” that also target ligaments and joints.

Think you’re OK because you run for 45 minutes four times a week? Nope. You need to be walking for a half hour, too, because walking “rewilds” the feet and works the muscles, tendons and ligaments in ways that running doesn’t.

While showing how the typical modern lifestyle works against the ways our bodies are meant to move, the authors point out the myriad conveniences that might make life easier now but might make it harder for us in old age — like a car’s backup camera. (“Give it a rest sometime and turn around to look behind you when you back up.”)

Then of course, there’s nutrition, not as it relates to our weight, but how it affects our ability to heal from injury. Poor nutrition contributes to inflammation and can slow recovery from injury or illness. They don’t care what sort of eating plan you follow as long as it’s high in protein and contains about 800 grams of fruits and vegetables per day.

Finally, as someone currently dealing with chronic pain from an arm injury, I especially appreciated the Starretts’ section titled “What to do when you hurt.” Apparently a lot of other people will appreciate this, too. When Kelly Starrett speaks to audiences, he often asks people to raise their hands if they’re currently in pain, and about 95 percent of the crowd raises a hand.

“Pain,” the Starretts write, “is a request for change.” But interestingly, they add, that pain “doesn’t always mean that you’re injured or that a tissue is damaged; in fact, most times it doesn’t.” While of course pain caused by obvious injuries (i.e., a twisted ankle or broken arm) requires medical treatment, “most of the musculoskeletal pain people experience these days — sore knees, achy lower backs, throbbing shoulders — is not injury, but rather a reflection of our modern lifestyle,” things that can be corrected with the practices shown in the book, the Starretts say.

Their message is hopeful. “One thing you should know about your body is that it’s not as fragile as you think. You are a pretty bombproof organism, easily designed to last a hundred years. That doesn’t mean your body should hurt.” It just means that you’ve got to address the pain in ways beyond taking fistfuls of ibuprofen; “Follow the breadcrumbs and try to figure it out.”

As for the sit-and-rise test, here’s how it’s done: “Cross one foot in front of the other and sit down on the floor into a cross-legged position without holding onto anything. … Now, from the same cross-legged position, rise up off the floor, if possible, without placing your hands or knees on the floor or using anything for support.”

How’d you do? If you still can’t even figure out how to get down on the floor, let alone get up without holding on for dear life, this book’s for you. And no, I’m not telling you how I did on that test. B+

The Society of Shame, by Jane Roper (Anchor, 360 pages)

The year is young, but it’s hard to imagine that there will be a smarter, sassier takedown of social media this year than The Society of Shame, Jane Roper’s merrily caustic novel about cancel culture.

Roper, who claims to live in Boston, but whose real home is apparently Twitter, has taken pretty much everything that’s happened in social media over the past few years and mocked it so deftly that it’s impossible to be offended, even if you see yourself in it. It’s tempting to compare her to Christopher Buckley, the author of Thank You for Smoking and Florence of Arabia, but she may be better.
The novel is centered around Kathleen Held, a mother, writer and editor who returned home early from a trip to visit her sister in California to find her garage — and soon, her life — in flames.

Held’s husband, Bill, a candidate for the U.S. Senate, was unexpectedly at home, and even more unexpectedly at home with a lissome young staffer with her underwear removed. The taxi driver who brought Kathleen home first rescued the family dog from the house, and then in the chaos of emergency services arriving, snaps a photo of the scene, which includes not just Bill and the staffer, but Kathleen from the rear, with a large menstrual blood stain, “the size of a saucer,” on her capris.

When the picture gets out — the taxi driver turns out to be enterprising — Bill’s campaign and the couple’s marriage are on the brink. But the biggest news turns out to be Kathleen’s stained pants, which, combined with sympathy for the cheated-on wife, turns into a social-media, menstrual-positive movement called #YesWeBleed.

The perimenopausal Kathleen, furious at her husband and mortified about her pants, is faced with a couple of choices: leave or stand by her man, and ignore the movement or join us. Meanwhile, she is dealing with conflicted emotions of her middle-school-age daughter, Aggie, who was away when the incident happened but soon came home to find her life as turned upside down as her parents’.

If this all sounds kind of angsty and icky, yes, it could be. But Roper is a gifted comic writer, who knows how to throw a punchline and to sustain a running gag, or two or 20. The taxi driver, who parlays his fortuitous fare into fame, having been savvy enough to snap a selfie with the Helds’ dog, is one of the recurring jokes.

But it is social media cameos that make the novel so hilarious, the ever-changing, irreverent hashtags (from #YesWeBleed to #YesWeRead to #AllBloodMatters) along with the all-too-familiar tweets, which are fiction here but draw their power from their ubiquitous inspirations in real life. Examples: “Rich white lady bleeds through her organic cotton pants on the lawn of her Gold Coast mansion. Cry me a river, Karen” and “While the internet is falling all over itself to feel sorry for privileged Kathleen Held, more than half of the 37 million Americans living in poverty are women. #Priorities #EqualPayNow #LivingWage #EndPoverty #MedicareForAll.

There are also numerous bad puns in the media coverage that pops up in short chapters throughout the book (e.g., a “Tampon in a Teapot” as one droll commentator put it).

“The Society of Shame” is not a metaphor, but an actual group of people who have experienced cancellation, whether from becoming a shameful meme or by uttering something unfortunate that was caught on a hot mike. Membership is by invitation only, and Kathleen intercepts an invitation meant for her husband, and attends a meeting out of a combination of curiosity and desperation, because her life is becoming unrecognizable due to her overnight notoriety.

The group was formed by a popular romance novelist who was canceled after audio leaked out of her calling her fan base “fat Midwestern housewives and pensioners on cut-rate Caribbean cruises.”) The author had shut down her social media and disappeared from public view after her explanations and apologies hadn’t helped.

But now she coaches a diverse group of people about how to recover from public humiliation. The current group includes “Angry Cereal Mom,” a mother who turned into a GIF after someone filmed her speaking angrily to her son in Whole Foods, after which “an entire cascade of natural and organic cereal boxes from the shelf behind her rained down on her head” and “the Moonabomber,” a college frat boy whose innocent antics on the beach was inadvertently captured in photos of an elderly couple celebrating their anniversary on a balcony up above.

There’s also a famous actor caught saying crude things about a woman on a hot mike, and a woman who became famous because she called the police on a Black man reading the electric meter in her backyard. There are others, and Roper covers all the bases of cancel culture with just the right tone.

The tension in the novel involves the fracturing of the Held family concurrent with Kathleen’s reinvention of herself, with the coaching of Danica, the founder of The Society of Shame. There’s a weak and somewhat tired thread here, about a wife who had set aside her own ambitions to support a rakish husband, and while it’s pretty clear where that is headed, it doesn’t detract from the wicked pleasures of the book, which expand as the #YesWeBleed movement grows and contorts. As Willie Wonka once said, there are “little surprises around every corner but nothing dangerous,” and The Society of Shame proposes to make us both laugh and think.

A

Reading the Glass, by Elliott Rappaport (Dutton, 322 pages)

Have you ever felt the urge to throw everything away for the love of a good boat and a life at sea? Me neither. But there are people who not only feel the urge, but obey it, who consider “life ashore” boring and “hard to reconcile.”

Part-time Maine resident Elliott Rappaport is one of those people and with his new book he promises “a captain’s view of weather, water, and life on ships.” For those whose knowledge of seafaring comes from Carnival cruises and watching The Perfect Storm, Reading the Glass might be a rough slog. Who knew that boat captains, always portrayed as blue-collar and salty, could be so erudite? Who knew that their memoirs would read like high school science books? Reading the Glass is eye-opening in this respect, as modern mariners apparently talk more like learned meteorologists than pirates of the Caribbean.

But Rappaport brings a dry sense of humor to the task and works to break up long professorial descriptions of weather with elegant descriptions of life at sea. “Below the surface,” he writes, “are things seeable only when the sea is calm — the dolphins, grazing whales, sharks, and mola, ocean sunfish as big as car hoods. Once a giant leatherback turtle, four feet across with long triangular flippers and drooping dinosaur eyelids. I’ve seen their babies on a beach in Mexico racing toward the surf, identical but small as silver dollars.”

Rappaport has been a ship’s captain for 30 years and teaches at the Maine Maritime Academy, a small public college in Castine, Maine, that trains ships’ officers and engineers. (If you have a driftless kid, send them there — the school says 90 percent of its graduates have jobs within three months of graduation.)

Whatever the seafaring equivalent of a public intellectual is, that’s what Rappaport is. He can wax eloquently about where New England’s summer air originates (“the subtropics, carried along by the southerly winds at the the edge of the Bermuda-Azores High and moistened by the warm waters of the Gulf Stream”) and about atolls, the “recipe for shipwreck” created by submerged islands that present “an opportunity to run aground without ever seeing land.”

He can smartly and simply explain weather phenomena we so often hear about in forecasts, such as jet streams, El Nino and the ever popular polar vortex. And you will learn so much about clouds that you didn’t retain from middle school. “There’s a lot going on inside a cloud, most of it poorly understood by the average person,” Rappoport writes. “Or, fairer to say, it’s not a priority for most people to understand.” For example, one misconception is that most people think clouds are composed only of water vapor, which can’t be true since water vapor is invisible. “Clouds are in fact clusters of of water droplets and ice crystals spawned by condensation or deposition the process whereby water vapor converts directly to ice.”

That’s clear enough, but many of his explanations aren’t quite as simple; it would have taken me two years to finish the book if I’d looked up every word I didn’t know (“Taxonomically the bora and mistral are katabatic (downhill) winds….”) and it is not by coincidence that the first glowing Amazon review I saw for this book was written by someone who included at the end of his name “Ph.D.”

For those of us with B.A.s, it’s more of a struggle to enjoy this book, but it’s possible if you focus on Rappaport’s stories, which are wide-ranging like his travels, and vividly memorable. He’s sailed all over the world, and for every place he hasn’t been, he’s seemingly talked to someone who has. He can tell you about the port in Tahiti where the tattoo artists are so good that the crew requires time off for appointments, and explain the origins of a microburst from a personal encounter with one at sea.

For those interested in maritime disasters, he is an encyclopedia of knowledge, not only of long-ago tragedies with no survivors, but also of contemporary battles of human vs. sea. Describing the type of offshore cyclone that can suddenly roil the ocean without warning, he writes of a discussion he had with a friend about a storm in 1990: “‘A giant hole opened up in the ocean,’ he told me, ‘and the ship fell in.’”

It was, Rappaport writes, “an image I have not forgotten,” and neither will we.

Nor will we forget his funny description of the Beaufort scale of wind force (which includes “Force 6: Umbrellas ruined” and “Force 10: Don’t go out”) or the image he paints of himself making his way through suburban Washington, as off-kilter as most of us would be at sea.

“It is May, the trees already a deep summer green and the sky boiling with clouds that would alarm me if I were at sea.” He vaguely knows the direction of the Metro station, but the battery has died on his phone, and “I have no chartroom to visit, no swarm of seabirds flying helpfully in the right direction.” He is wearing the orange rain slicker he wears at sea, its pockets filled with “old bits of twine and candy wrappers.” Finally he finds something by which he can navigate: a Starbucks in the distance, where the well-dressed professionals are “mysteriously dry.” Perhaps they’ve read the forecast, he quips.

It’s that kind of writing and imagery that makes Reading the Glass pleasurable for those without Ph.D.s.

But truthfully, a Ph.D. would help. B+

The Promise of a Normal Life, by Rebecca Kaiser Gibson (Arcade, 266 pages)

The pantheon of bad mothers is crowded, from Medea to Mommy Dearest. The latest inductee is Polina, a Jewish physician and mother of two who dabbles in motherhood the way some people dabble in a hobby that they are only vaguely interested in.

Polina curdles the childhood and adolescence of the unnamed narrator of The Promise of a Normal Life, a debut novel from Marlborough resident Rebecca Kaiser Gibson. She is a perfectly coiffed, upwardly mobile chain-smoking pseudo-villain who, in her perpetual self-absorption, is unaware of how she is failing at her most important job. Her oldest daughter, sensitive and unusually perceptive, sees all.

The novel, told in first person, opens in 1967 with the narrator at age 18 en route to Israel on a ship. It is an impromptu trip during a break from the University of Sussex and marks the first time she feels the promise of the freedom of adulthood, of the glamor and adventure that might await away from the stifling control of Polina and Leonard, the narrator’s father. This is where I belong, she thinks. As it so often does in real life, reality soon rudely barges in. She is sexually assaulted by a hairdresser on the ship in an encounter that she can only fuzzily remember, having been asleep at the time.

Her meekly passive response turns out to be a pattern of her life, seemingly the result of growing up with a larger-than-life mother who had provided for her children in material things but did not bestow any emotional gifts. The reason was evident, not only in her behavior but in her words.

“Polina told me once that she’d decided, when she was in Scotland talking to some women about how they would treat the children they would have, that the most important thing was to keep your own life first. The children should stay in their place,” the narrator remembers.

That hands-off philosophy was enhanced by Polina’s employment of a housekeeper, who prepared most of the meals, did the housework and did much of the work of tending the children. When Polina did mother, she did it brusquely, as when she would bring consomme to a sick child in bed, command them to drink lots of liquids, and then depart.

Even once her daughters are young adults, they are people to command, not to enjoy. When the narrator meets the parents of the man she will marry, she is surprised by their relationship. “When I actually met her, I was struck by how much Tom’s mother seemed to admire her son. I didn’t know how to understand a mother who made room for her child’s maturity.”

And it wasn’t just Polina. When her daughter and Tom decide to get married, Leonard and Polina could not let go of their roles. “My father could barely look at me, his own child, could hardly stand to see my green eyes doting on those blue ones. Leonard could not prevent me, but he could take over,” pushing the couple to marry on the parents’ timetable.

While the narrator is a thoughtful, intelligent and self-aware young woman who finishes college and starts a career, she struggles to see how she is taken advantage of by men. The reader, as well, is not easily able to see the next trainwreck coming as the narrator navigates adulthood.

In my own family lore, there is a story we tell about my then-5-year-old son who, during an apparently uneventful movie, leaned over to his great-grandmother and said “If they don’t start blowing up stuff soon, I’m outta here.”

There will be that temptation at times for readers who grew up on Dan Brown or James Patterson, those who expect something explosive to happen in the last paragraph of every chapter, which will then yank them into the next.

The Promise of a Normal Life moves slowly; there’s not much in the way of TNT. It is a quietly revealing character study that wields its power in lyricism and detail. Gibson, a widely published poet who taught creative writing at Tufts University for 23 years, endows her narrator with her own gifts of observation and wisdom. At one point, when the narrator and her husband move to Los Angeles, she joins a synagogue having suddenly felt attached to Jewish heritage. (“Suddenly it seemed interesting, instead of ordinary and assumed. The desert dry air had given me room to imagine.”) A rabbi later tells her, “You are a mystic, a true Jewish mystic,” which in the context felt like something of a come-on, but still resembled truth.

Without spoilers it’s difficult to discuss the last quarter of the novel, but it extends to the end of Polina’s life, when her daughter, for the first time, addresses her mother by something other than her first name.

For much of the novel it is unclear just how damaging Polina was — there are hints that there might be something more than just garden-variety bad parenting involved. At the same time, the narrator is at times so fragile that it also seems possible that the hard-driving Polina will eventually be vindicated — that she wasn’t the problem, but something else was. It’s a thin mystery within the complex tapestry of this family, but it works. The Promise of a Normal Life offers anyone with a — how to put it? — challenging mother a compelling sense of solidarity. A