Category: Books

The Half Known Life, by Pico Iyer (Riverhead, 225 pages)

Pico Iyer is primarily known as a travel writer, but it should not be surprising that he delves into the spiritual in his latest book, given that he spends a part of each year in silent retreat at a hermitage in California. In The Half Known Life, Iyer rummages through his experiences traveling from Iran to Israel to Sri Lanka to North Korea.

The book is a travelog, of sorts, and the subtitle (“In search of paradise”) suggests that he intends to write an examination of how different religious traditions view the afterlife. But Iyer’s purpose is more complex than that.

Our longing for paradise after death is simply an extension of our longing for paradise on Earth, whether it be a place or a state of mind. He quotes Omar Khayyam, “Take care to create your own paradise, here and now on earth.” He is more concerned with how we live together in this realm, on this planet, given our vastly different perspectives on life’s biggest questions. How, he asks, can we “keep faith with even the hope of Paradise when nearly all the paradises I’d seen were, sometimes for that very reason, war zones?”

Ultimately, he offers no prescriptions, only musings, and a wealth of trivia on different cultures’ views of death and what comes after.

In Japan, for example, cemeteries are called “cities of tomorrow,” a hopeful take on human remains. Iyer writes of his Japanese wife’s custom of maintaining an altar in their home dedicated to her deceased parents, of leaving food and tea for them there every morning, and visiting their graves to tell them everything that’s going on in the family. “The doors between the living and the dead are kept open across the land, and at intervals throughout the year, lanterns are lit so the dead can make their way back to earth and look in on their much-missed loved ones.” To some Japanese, the dead are even closer to the living than they were in life.

In Sri Lanka, Iyer retraces the steps of the famed monk Thomas Merton, who was found dead in Bangkok shortly after his travels. Although a Christian, Merton had been moved by a 46-foot Buddha in deathly repose, so much so that he later wrote, “I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for.” Iyer marvels at this, “that a man who had devoted his life to the Christian God had been so stirred by the face of the Buddha, as if heaven was not the private property of any group.”

In Australia, Iyer visits the coastal city of Broome, where he is confronted by hostile Aboriginal people who resent the encroaching tourism. He notes that although a majority of Aboriginals identify as Christians, “they did not understand why Europeans needed to go into a special house to talk to God, eyes closed. For them, the promised land was nowhere but the land around them.”

And in Kashmir, the contested region which has territory that belongs to Pakistan, India and China, he visits the places that once represented earthly paradise to his mother and extended family, and muses on Salman Rushdie’s poignant question, one that can keep you up all night: “Was happiness God’s gift, or the Devil’s? He’d begun his book on Kashmir by quoting the local poet Agha Shahid Ali: ‘I am being rowed through Paradise on a river of hell.’”

And of course, he visits Jerusalem, which he has come to believe is “the place where everyday morality and religion part ways, on grounds of irreconcilable differences.” The constant tussling over holy spaces by Muslims, Jews and Christians (and within Christianity, that tussling between various denominations) renders the city a crowded and harsh cacophony that contradicts the heart of the various faiths. Jerusalem, he writes, is “a riot of views of paradise overlapping at crooked angles.” It is, he writes, “an unusually rooted place … that was always about to go up in flames.”

Iyer is a thoughtful, spiritual man of great intellect who writes beautifully, as in this description of Broome: “Nighttime clouds were illuminated by long, silent flashes, as if the heavens themselves were submitting to an X-ray.” The biographer of the Dalai Lama, he stands outside the biggest Abrahamic faiths — Islam, Judaism and Christianity — yet is reverential to religious faith of all kinds and writes respectfully even as bringing a critical eye to their battles and contradictions.

Still, the book struggled to hold my attention, as it never established a clear storyline other than the author holding forth on the myriad places he has visited; the paradise theme seems thin connective tissue that does not rise to its promise and its usual power. More memorable than Iyer’s own reflections were those of others, such as the Sufi koan about man: “Though drowned in sin / Heaven is his lot.”

Commenting on a particular type of film, Iyer writes, “they hold you for two hours with supple and constant swerves, and at the end you’re farther from a clear conclusion than ever.” The same could be said of this book. Paradise is neither lost nor found here; The Half Known Life is more of a purgatory. C+

Wolfish, by Erica Berry (Flatiron, 380 pages)

After Erica Berry was awarded a fellowship to work on a book about wolves, she took a train from Minneapolis to Portland, where she would spend a few weeks alone researching and writing in the delightful paid-for isolation awarded to writers of promise. By the time Berry had settled in her seat, I had already learned something new: that Amtrak cars are segregated into “families/couples” and “singles.” Maybe everyone in the world but me knew this already, but our brains like learning new things, and I discerned that Berry’s book about wolves and fear would be quite a trip. And it was, just not in the way that I expected.

After Berry settled down comfortably in her seat, happy to “watch the prairie buckle into the mountains” and read, she was dismayed to be joined by a somewhat threatening man who was eventually forcibly removed from the train. It was the first, it turns out, of many times that Berry felt threatened by men, causing her to move throughout the world in the emotional state of a rabbit or other small mammal that is always on cusp of being somebody’s dinner.

Enter the wolf.

More than a decade ago, Berry became interested in the politics of wolves in the West, where in some places wolves were being reintroduced to areas where they had gone extinct. (“More wolves, less politics” is actually a slogan for some wolf advocates.) Some of the wolves have been outfitted with tracking collars (despite the fact that some don’t survive the stress of temporary capture), and they had a cult following as they crossed state lines and found mates. Their exploits, and those of the people who follow them, are in fact more fascinating than much of what is found on network TV.

But Berry took it further. She started to think deeply about archetypes of wolves and why they are so embedded in our culture as animals that inspire fear, so much so that we compare terrorists to wolves. (It is a good question — why do we so frequently identify a killer as a “lone wolf” instead of, say, a lone Grizzly bear?) Wolfish is the result. The book is a gorgeously written, deeply researched and smartly plotted examination of animal fear that will be well reviewed and possibly win prestigious awards, but will be read by hardly anyone.

That’s in part because Berry is telling two painfully disparate stories: that of these beautiful, wild, unafraid creatures, and that of the crippling anxiety that seems to be part and parcel of the lives of so many young adults, especially women. In the world that Berry describes, young women are always moving through a terrifying forest with wolves around every tree; it is a story that we’ve been told since childhood, and it’s interesting to learn the origins of “Little Red Riding Hood.” (The oldest version in print dates to 1697; similar stories have long histories in China, Korea and Japan.)

And Berry does not seem to be exaggerating in terms of her own life. She has had a staggering number of threatening encounters with men, to include being surrounded by a silent group of men wearing white T-shirts (with slits for eyes) over their faces, to men who follow her in a park, whistle at her while she runs and murmur obscenities to her on a bus — to the point where she says friends have “suggested I was prone to ‘bad luck,’ as if the encounters I had were mistakes, aberrations, not just blips in the field of female — of human! — life.”

No woman, of course, should have to be subjected to constant threats and harassment, and every woman, whether or not they are as beautiful as Berry as is, has stories about feeling threatened — stories that even years later can leave us, in the language of Emily Dickenson, zero at the bone. But the narrative that Berry employs — interspersing tales of the famous wolf known as OR-7 and his travels, with stories of murdered women and children, and her own crippling fears — makes for unnecessarily dark reading, with just enough light for the occasional eye roll.

Cases in point: her agonizing over the ethics of flying to England for two weeks of wolf-watching paid for with yet another grant (“What could I observe about the wolves to justify two-pickup-truck-beds worth of sea ice melting, the amount the emissions from my round-trip seat will hypothetically finish off?”) and her guilt about calling authorities on another genuinely threatening man who showed up at her home (“It was a story about the power of my white female fear, a fear that could ignite the apparatus of a police state I had long ago come to doubt.”)

And so we go on like this for nearly 400 pages, Berry luring us forward with delectable wolf stories and treats while the reader wishes she had gotten professional help for her fear. Even her mother, it seems, has felt this way; Berry writes, “Whenever I used to tell my mother about being afraid of this or that, she would look worried,” she writes.

“How much fear should you stoke to stay alive? How much trust can you afford before it kills you?” Berry asks, and they seem to be questions she asks in her own defense. Fear is, of course, an evolutionary tool to keep us alive. It is also, like physical pain, more difficult to control once it gets past a certain point. She quotes from the Robert Browning poem “Ivan Ivanovitch,” which is about wolves attacking a family traveling by sled: “Who can hold fast a boy in a frenzy of fear?”

That poem and other stories Berry tells, such as that of a young Alaskan teacher killed by wolves in 2010, remind us that there are in fact frightening beasts in the world that most of us will spend our lives comfortably distant from, seeking adrenalin elsewhere. Wolfish plumbs the depths of fear in interesting ways, but ultimately suffers from an author too much in its grip. B+

I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai (Viking, 435 pages)

When the protagonist of Rebecca Makkai’s gripping new novel is a teen, she arrives at a boarding school in New Hampshire knowing little about the school or the region.

“I remembered wondering if New Hampshire kids had accents, not understanding how few of my classmates would be from New Hampshire,” she says. Bodie Kane was not headed to Phillips Exeter, but to the fictional Granby School, somewhere deep in the woods in the general vicinity of Manchester, Concord and Peterborough.

It’s now two decades later and Kane, a successful podcaster in Los Angeles, is headed back to her alma mater to teach a two-week “mini-mester” on podcasting and film. The trip is stirring up troubling memories about the death of her beautiful Granby roommate named Thalia Keith, whose body had been found in the school pool.

A Black athletic trainer had been arrested, tried and found guilty of the murder, but enough questions remained that the case had attracted national attention, even being featured on “Dateline.” And with the rising interest in true crime and an attendant rise in internet sleuthing, people were still talking about the case online and pointing out problems with the state’s case against the trainer, even picking through a grainy video of the musical that Thalia had performed in shortly before her death.

Despite their being roommates, Bodie had not been especially close to Thalia, who was one of the “in” crowd. Thalia had the sort of effortless beauty that attracted everyone to her: “She played tennis, and suddenly tennis practice had spectators.” And Thalia had arrived at Granby with an exquisite wardrobe that contained 30 sweaters, while Bodie, whose tuition was paid by kindly members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, wasn’t remotely prepared for cold weather.

But Bodie, whose “Starlet Fever” podcast probed into little-known stories of often troubled Hollywood stars, has a knack for investigation. And so when one of the students in her podcasting mini-course proposes doing her initial podcast on Thalia’s murder — with the premise that Omar Evans had falsely confessed and was innocent — Bodie agrees.

Meanwhile, she seems to have trouble brewing back at home, where the father of her children (to whom she is legally married, but only on paper) is asking nervously if she has read the news and is asking her to stay off Twitter.

It would be reductive to call I Have Some Questions For You a thriller or a whodunit, although it has many components of both. Bodie, the narrator, has her own dark past; both her father and her brother are dead (the father having died because of something her brother did). When her mother fell apart, she was taken in by the Latter-day Saint family who paid for her to escape Indiana by going to Granby. And she brings parts of her own troubled history to her obsession with cases of abused and murdered women across geography and time, even while acknowledging the moral questions about probing into their cases in true-crime shows and podcasts.

“I have opinions about their deaths, ones I’m not entitled to,” Bodie says. “I’m queasy, at the same time, about the way they’ve become public property, subject to the collective imagination. I’m queasy about the fact that the women whose deaths I dwell on are mostly beautiful and well-off. That most were young, as we prefer our sacrificial lambs. That I’m not alone in my fixations.”

Thalia Keith’s murder is, in a sense, a fictional scaffolding on which Makkai builds a serious discussion about abused and murdered women, and how we exploit and fail them. While it’s a page-turner in a practical sense — the reader is carried in the current of wanting to know what really happened to Thalia, and what the role was of the teacher that Bodie keeps addressing in the narrative -— there are frequent mentions of real women who had violent, premature deaths, and the men responsible.

If this sounds like a lot to put on the reader, well, it is; the novel feels mildly oppressive at times, with all it is trying to take on. Plus, we know there is not going to be a happy ending: Thalia is dead when the novel opens; she will be dead when it ends. Meanwhile, we are going to hear about a lot of other dead women, abused women and sexually harassed women. Amazingly, in all of this, New Hampshire comes off just fine except for the repeated insinuations that its winters are cold. Makkai is careful not to suggest that any real-life police departments would force a false confession or that any real-life attorney would have so horribly failed the wrongly convicted man.

“New Hampshire’s public defenders are apparently excellent, and know everyone in the legal system of what is, after all, a very small state. They know the culture, and they don’t overdress for court,” she writes in what seems a bit of overkill. (In her acknowledgements, Makkai also credits Portsmouth public defender Stephanie Hausman, “who course-corrected and fine-tuned the legal parts of the book.”)

As such, while it’s not a novel that New Hampshire’s chambers of commerce will want to use for marketing, it’s not a bad one for the Granite State. And every good book is made better when it’s set in familiar environs. Look for this one when the lists of the best books of 2023 emerge later this year. A

Maame, by Jessica George (St. Martin’s Press, 320 pages)

There’s a lot to like about 25-year-old Maddie Wright, the main character in Jessica George’s debut novel. Born in Ghana and living in London, Maddie is navigating her unique brand of young adulthood struggles, from low-key workplace racism to familial responsibilities and expectations. She is sweet and kind and very innocent, at times frustratingly so. But watching Maddie grow up and figure out who she is and who she wants to be is what Maame is all about, and it’s a charming journey.

In some ways, Maddie is forced to be more of an adult than many 25-year-olds; she’s taking care of her dad, who has Parkinson’s disease, and her mom, though still married to her dad, spends most of her time in Ghana running a hostel while Maddie and her dad live in London. Her mom is critical of Maddie and the fact that she isn’t as engaged in her Ghanaian heritage and customs as her mother would like her to be — yet Maddie is the one paying all the bills at home and sending money to her mom in Ghana, while her brother does little to help.

In other ways, though, Maddie seems younger than most women her age, and she knows it. That’s why she sets a goal to transform herself into “The New Maddie.” She makes a list of who she wants to be, which includes “drinks alcohol when offered, always says yes to social events, tries weed or cigarettes at least once (but don’t get addicted!), goes on dates, is not a virgin,” and so on.

Maddie gets the chance to work on these goals when her mom returns to London for a year to take over the care of her husband. Maddie moves out and into a flatshare with two women her age, both very different and seemingly more worldly than she is, which gives her a whole new opportunity to live her own life. At the same time, she starts a new job at a publishing house, and, of course, there’s suddenly a new guy hanging around. (Happily, though, romance is not a central plotline but rather a nonintrusive piece of Maddie’s coming-of-age puzzle.)

George expertly depicts both Maddie’s Gen Z traits and her innocence through her frequent Google searches. She Googles random things like “back pain in your mid-twenties” and gets mostly-useless answers from random people: “CC: ‘It’s all linked to the Government. … From a young age we’re told office jobs are the goal. Then you sit at a desk hunched over 9-5, 5 days a week for most of your younger years.’ LG: ‘Why would the government want a nation suffering from back pain?’ CC: ‘So we don’t take over.’”

Many of her questions show her uncertainty and lack of confidence, particularly in the social domain. Waiting to hear back from a potential love interest, she Googles “How long do guys wait before asking a girl out on a date?” (Some very realistic Google answers range from: “I spent four months getting to know my now-girlfriend before I asked her out on a date” to “One hour.”) George incorporates these searches sparingly enough that they’re not annoying and they add some relatability to Maddie’s character no matter how different she is from the reader. We can all relate to the frustration of such drastically diverse search results with no definitive answer from a source — the almighty internet — that is supposed to have all the answers. (Honestly, who hasn’t Googled “weird rash” and been led to believe it’s either totally normal or a sign of impending death?)

Maame covers all the bases of growing up with cultural barriers, without being heavy-handed or preachy. Despite Maddie’s sometimes cringy naivete, I was rooting for her all along. Her story is often funny, and always heartfelt and engaging. A

Hidden Mountains, by Michael Wejchert (Ecco, 256 pages)

Granite State residents are used to hearing about rescues — from the 180 or so people who have to be rescued from outside adventures gone wrong each year, to the seven loons trapped in lake ice in February. As such, there is an underlying debate about assumed risk and the escalating costs of rescue — not so much the financial cost, but the potential of injury and loss of life of those doing the rescue.

Into this conversation comes a compelling book by North Conway resident Michael Wejchert. Hidden Mountains — subtitled “Survival and Reckoning After a Climb Gone Wrong” — is a deep dive into a 2018 climbing accident in a remote part of Alaska, and its aftermath.

The people involved — two couples from Boston, ranging in age from 29 to 40 — were experienced climbers; the accident that befell Emmett Lyman was apparently just freakish bad luck. (In one analysis, “loose rock” was deemed the cause.) Out of the sight of his partner, Lauren, he fell about 30 to 40 feet, hitting his head so hard that his helmet came off.

Wejchert describes how Lauren intuited what happened: “She felt the rope [that connected them] come tight and knew that on the other side Emmett was falling, though she couldn’t see him. Rock and debris flushed down the snow gully to her left so forcefully that it caused a small avalanche. … Somewhere in this, ‘I heard a human sound,’ she recalled. ‘It wasn’t words. It was just a sound of … maybe surprise and dismay.’”

Although the couples had been trained in what to do in emergencies and were well-prepared and well-equipped, the situation was precarious, not just for Lyman but for all of them. Lauren, Lyman’s girlfriend, was still attached to him with a rope; they were on steep rock in a national park 90 miles from civilization, in territory not accessible by road. That was one reason they were there. The Hidden Mountains of Lake Clark National Park and Preserve are one of the most inaccessible places for climbers in the world; they expected to be the first humans to have climbed this particular mountain, which they dubbed Mount Sauron after the tower in The Lord of the Rings.

Lauren was able to text the other couple for help, and they immediately set out to find their friends, but they had to endanger themselves by descending laterally in emotional turmoil. The story of how they got to this point is harrowing enough; then comes the rescue by helicopter nine hours later — all the while, without knowing whether Lyman was alive or dead.

While there was news coverage of the accident at the time it happened, for those who are unfamiliar with the story Wejchert smartly structured Hidden Mountains as a thriller, and I won’t betray his efforts by saying what happened during and after the rescue. Suffice it to say the story raises challenging questions and endeavors to answer what for me is the biggest one: Why anyone would take up a sport that required (literally, for Lauren) a 10-page contingency plan that listed potential dangers (e.g. river crossing, sliding snow, falling rock, bears) for each day of the trip, based on the forecast and where they would be, and specialized insurance from a company that swoops in and rescues the likes of journalists caught in war zones. (That company, Global Rescue, is based in Lebanon, N.H.)

Wejchert, a climber himself, tries to make clear the allure of the sport, which draws so many adventurers to the White Mountains and elsewhere. He writes of “dreamy summits” and moving along “perfect alpine granite, thousands of feet of snow and ice and quiet looming beneath us,” of “plumbing the depths” of our personal limits. But just as honestly he writes of a friend who was nearly killed by an avalanche, of being asked if the risk of climbing is worth it and answering “no.”

Rock and ice climbing — “vertical movement” — doesn’t seem to be something people casually fall into, but more of an urgent calling. After going to a New York climbing area called “the Gunks” as a newbie, Emmett had said, “Oh my God. This is where I want to live. This is what I want to do with my life. And we just started climbing all the time.”

And one of his climbing partners, Alissa Doherty, had vowed to become a mountaineer — while she was in a convent — after reading Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air. That book was about a 1996 climbing disaster on Mount Everest, so for people without the mountaineering gene, it’s hard to see how reading that would attract anyone to the sport.

And of course, Krakauer’s other masterpiece, Into the Wild, was about Chris McCandless dying alone in the Alaskan wilderness. It’s a certain kind of person who says “sign me up!” for both Alaska wilderness and remote climbing, and it doesn’t appear to be me. But the people who do sign up are fascinating people whose stories make for fascinating reading. And Wejchert, who is chair of the all-volunteer Mountain Rescue Service in North Conway and knew Emmett before the accident, was exactly the person to tell it. He does so with expertise and with heart. B+

Weightless, by Evette Dionne (Ecco, 245 pages)

Are doctors who lecture their patients about their weight “fat shaming” them or “following the science”?

That’s the question at the heart of Evette Dionne’s Weightless, an account of her life as a Black woman with obesity who has had multiple health problems over the course of her often size 22 life and is now diagnosed with heart failure.

Part memoir, part journalism, Weightless explores Dionne’s struggles to fit into a society that prizes thinness even as it now demonizes “fatphobia” to the point of purging the word “fat” from Roald Dahl books.

In many ways, America has gone all in on what is commonly called “body acceptance.” Plus-size models are a thing, even making the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated. Most fashion designers offer extended sizes. There’s even a movement to help overweight women avoid being weighed at doctors’ offices (you can present a card that says “Don’t weigh me unless medically necessary”).

Despite all this, our culture “hates fat people,” Dionne says. “Whether it’s Netflix greenlighting a television show that glorifies losing weight as a form of revenge or airlines enacting policies that purposefully discriminate against fat people, the world believes that we must assimilate and become smaller — not that it should become bigger to accommodate us.”

Proclaiming “Fat people aren’t a problem that needs to be solved,” she catalogs a long list of problems that fat people need to be solved. These include the indignity of flying (needing seat belt extenders and sometimes having to purchase two tickets), the unceasing rudeness of strangers (on one flight she confronts someone who was texting insults about her) and the tendency of those in the medical profession to brusquely dismiss anything that’s wrong with an obese person as something that can be solved by losing weight.

“There’s a running joke around fat people that if you go to the doctor for a sore throat, they’re going to ask you to take a blood sugar test to make sure you’re not diabetic,” she writes. (I can confirm that happens even after death, having recently heard of a case in which “obesity” was put as the cause of death of a woman in her 60s who unexpectedly died at home.)

Dionne says she set out to write the book as a way of shining a light on the biases of the culture, to “shift how we individually and collectively understand the fat experience.” She says that fat people “want, need and deserve new stories.”

That may be true, but the experiences that Dionne describes here are in fact old stories. Anyone who has grown up overweight has stories about bullies; any obese adult has stories about not being able to fit in a carnival ride, or being rejected by a potential lover because of their weight, or getting an underhanded “compliment” about weight loss that feels like a punch.

Dionne writes movingly about her assorted embarrassments and outrage in ways that could theoretically help other people be more compassionate, but the reality is, the cruel people she describes aren’t the ones who would read this sort of book, unless it was assigned. Her audience, her tribe, are those who have walked in her shoes.

As much as I empathize with Dionne, having lived through some versions of experiences she describes, I found it difficult to embrace her premise, which is that “Weight discrimination is as serious and widespread as the issue of ‘obesity’ itself.”

The bulk of medical research suggests otherwise.

There are those who have argued that overweight people can be just as metabolically healthy as those who are of what doctors deem “normal” weight, or those who are underweight, especially if they exercise. But Dionne is not making this argument. In fact, from her opening page, in which she declares “I am in heart failure,” she establishes that she is not a healthy person, and her problems are not only physical; she also has battled extreme anxiety and depression.

She writes, in a chapter about wanting to become a mother, “There’s no doubt I will be a fat mother, just as my mother was a fat mother” and also, “I will be a chronically ill mother, who will often have to prioritize my own health needs above the immediate needs of my children.”

She also acknowledges the ways in which her life became easier after she lost some weight after becoming ill, but says that in some ways this made her sad.

“Whenever I discuss what heart failure has done and continues to do to my body … my feelings are cast aside as people gush about how good I look. ‘You’re beautiful now’ is a common refrain. ‘You’re so small’ is another. What I also hear is: heart failure might have cost you, but sickness has also granted you something more important than your aches and pains.”

There is heart-rending truth here, and much pain bravely revealed.

But the book would have benefited from a chapter in which Dionne considered the ways in which the doctors she dismisses might be right — that obesity, not weight discrimination, is the biggest problem for people who are seriously overweight, that in fact, her obesity might have been responsible, at least in part, for many of her problems.

That is not to say that cruelty is ever justified, and I personally think she should have “accidentally” spilled a cup of water or coffee on the texting guy’s phone. And no, no one needs a diabetes test when they visit a doctor for a sore throat. But there is some reasonable middle ground when the subject is obesity, or at least there needs to be. Right now, it’s all finger-pointing and name-calling even as Americans keep getting larger and sicker.

As likable as Dionne is (but for some revelations that are truly TMI), disappointingly, Weightless breaks no new ground. B-