Category: Books

The Audacity of Sara Grayson, by Joani Elliott (Post Hill Press, 400 pages)

Imagine if Stephenie Myers had died right after Bella Swan got pregnant.

The Twilight books reached a new peak of tension as Swan, the angsty human who married a vampire, began to swell with a mysterious new life. What would have become of the series if Myers, the author, were no longer around to complete the story? Would fans be satisfied with a finale written by someone else? Or would the final book become a great public unhappiness, like the final season of Game of Thrones?

Utah author Joani Elliott tackles such a quandary, minus the vampires, in her debut novel, The Audacity of Sara Grayson. In it, an enormously successful author — think Myers or J.K. Rowling — dies of pancreatic cancer, just 12 weeks after her family finds out she is sick. Cassandra Bond is almost as famous as the actress who plays Ellery Dawson, the star of a five-book thriller series, of which only four books have been written. She leaves her sizable estate to her two daughters — and the task of writing the fifth book to the youngest, Sara.

Sara is a writer, too, though one with no commercial success. She teaches English at the University of Maryland and supplements her income by writing copy for greeting cards. (“They loved her work and thought she had a real knack for cancer cards, and could she please send more?”)

Sara did write a novel, once, but had given it to her mother’s gruff editor to review, and his savage assessment drained her of ambition. So, too, had her recent divorce from a man who had abruptly left after six years of marriage to go on an Eat, Pray, Love-type journey. She had a good enough relationship with her mom, but as she comes to learn in the months after Cassandra’s death, did not truly know her. She is shocked and dismayed to learn she is the designated author of the final book in the series — even more so because she hasn’t read the four previous books. (“I saw the movie,” she says defensively to her sister, Anna Katherine.)

Sara intends to say no, until she goes into a meeting with lawyers and publishing executives and an editor insults her into changing her mind. She emerges from the meeting with the assignment to write a best-selling book that will explain the series’ biggest mystery, what had become of Ellery Dawson’s father, who was presumed dead and may or may not have been a traitor.

As it turns out, that is a story line that is disturbingly close to Sara’s own life. Her father had died when she was 7, and while she has warm memories of him and a good childhood, her mother’s will left a disturbing hint to doubt the narrative of Sara’s memory: an unusual bequest to a mysterious woman and her daughter in Europe.

This establishes a parallel path that runs along the main track of the story, which is Sara’s struggle to write the book. It adds a nice complexity to a story that could otherwise be too simple, as does Sara’s evolving relationship with her mother’s editor and, eventually, his son.

While The Audacity of Sara Grayson fits nicely within the oft derided genre of “chick lit” — it will appeal primarily to women and also could qualify as a beach read — it also surprisingly morphs into an inspirational book for writers, particularly in the last section, which is primarily set in Maine.

While relationships are at the heart of the story, it is also a novel about the difficulty of writing a novel, and the main characters are all involved in publishing. Elliott begins each chapter with a real-life quote from an author about writing — familiar ones from the likes of Toni Morrison and Stephen King, as well as some from lesser-known writers — and while this felt bothersome at first, the interruption of fiction with reality, I grew to enjoy them. I also liked how the story pulls back the curtains on the writing process and exposes the secrets of inspiration. Especially memorable was when Sara visits Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park to see the sunrise. (It’s the first point of sunlight in the U.S. — Google it and go.)

It was a turning point for Sara, when she realized she had never watched a sunrise. “And to think this happened every day. Everywhere. While people mixed creamer into coffee and ate their cornflakes and checked their email.”

The Audacity of Sara Grayson is not a complicated novel; in fact, the language sometimes seems a bit too simple, too easy, like a knife sliding through butter that’s been sitting out for hours. But it has a gangbuster premise and truly memorable characters and deserves to break through in the noisy throng of summer fiction. A

Featured photo: The Audacity of Sara Grayson

Freedom, by Sebastian Junger (Simon & Schuster, 147 pages)

In 2012 Cheryl Strayed hit publishing paydirt with a memoir of her three-month solo hike on the Pacific Crest Trail. That book, Wild, was an account of how Strayed fought her way through both a literal wilderness and a wilderness of grief after her mother died from a cruelly rapid onset of lung cancer.

In his new book Freedom, Sebastian Junger also takes to the wild, with dramatically different style and intent. Best known for the commercially successful The Perfect Storm (published in 1997 if you want to feel old), Junger set off to walk a long distance along railroad lines, which happens to be illegal. This gives the account a thin tension. Will Junger and his comrades — a photographer, two Afghan War veterans and a dog — be arrested? Run over by a train? Eaten by bears? That is the extent of the mystery in this meandering account that reads at times like the collision of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and the “N” volume of the World Book Encyclopedia — “N” for the emphasis on Native Americans.

Strayed covered 1,100 miles; Junger and his companions, 400, going from Washington, D.C., to Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. He admits in an afterword that the journey was “done in stages and not always with the same people,” which somewhat diminishes the accomplishment. But the slim book is still a surprisingly engrossing reflection of what “freedom” really means in a primitive sense, not the patriotic one, and why there is so much appeal in these stories of people who temporarily cast off the shackles of civilization for the perils and hardships of the wild.

The book is divided into three sections, titled “Run,” “Fight” and “Think.” In the first, Junger jumps right into the journey, taking no time for the formalities of explaining why he was doing this, and quickly launching into encyclopedic mode with a discourse on the freedom Native Americans had before Europeans arrived to chase and slaughter them. By the close of the section, we are weeping for the Apaches, even though Junger makes clear that brutality was not unique to the invading Europeans.

As Junger writes about the European settlers, “If you were willing to risk being captured … then you could make your way up the finger valleys of the Juniata and find a secluded spot to build a cabin and get in a quick crop of corn. … The risks were appalling and the hardships unspeakable, but no government official would ever again tell you what to do.”

In taking the journey, Junger attempts to experience not only the travails of Native Americans and the early settlers but the lifestyle of our ancestors, millennia-past. “The poor have always walked and the desperate have always slept outside. We were neither, but we were still doing something that felt ancient and hard.”

He writes vividly of the stresses of the body when moving constantly: “Sometimes you enter a great blank space where a whole hour can seem to go by faster than some of the minutes within it, and the loyal dog of your body trots along as if the entire point of its existence is to expire following your orders.”

For food, the men made fires and grilled meat and vegetables they bought when they ventured into towns, and occasionally wolfed pancakes and eggs at diners where people looked at them with a mixture of suspicion and envy. They carried a single machete, which they stuck in a tree while they slept, counting on Junger’s dog to serve as an alarm if something evil came their way.

In the second section, “Fight,” Junger returns with dismaying insistence to tales of Native American cruelty to settlers. Then he segues into stories about how the railroads were built, with equally horrific random tales of carnage. (The book could have been subtitled “1,000 horrific ways to die in early America.”) The takeaway: Trains and settling a wilderness are dangerous, as was the trip that Junger and his companions were, somewhat inexplicably, taking,

“The towns, the cops, the freight companies — no one wanted us on the lines, which was understandable. In fact, over the course of four hundred miles, we failed to come up with a single moral or legal justification for what we were doing other than the dilute principle that we weren’t causing actual harm so we should be able to keep doing it,” he writes.

In the final section, “Think,” and throughout a frayed thread that runs through the book, Junger wrestles with the perception of freedom and real freedom’s uglier realities. “People love to believe that they’re free,” he says, although flag-waving Americans “depend on a sprawling supply chain that can only function with federal oversight, and most of them pay roughly one-third of their income in taxes for the right to participate in this system.”

In the end, it’s unclear what Junger accomplished other than pulverizing his feet to something the consistency of pink oatmeal. The trip had been an escape of a 51-year-old in the middle of a divorce and was “a temporary injunction against whatever was coming” next. It’s definitely not the triumphant finish of Wild.

Except for one thing: Like Strayed, Junger got a film out of his exceedingly long hike. Called The Last Patrol, the HBO documentary came out in 2014. The book is as uneven as the territory the men crossed, but intriguing enough to make us want to see the footage. B-

BOOK NOTES
When Andy Warhol said that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes, he left something out: that in the future, everyone will write a novel, whether anyone wants to read it or not.
I was reminded of this recently when listening to Four-Hour-Work-Week guru Tim Ferris interview author Steven Pressfield (A Man at Arms, W.W. Norton, 336 pages) on a podcast. Ferris, who has made a ton of money writing nonfiction, mused that he was thinking of writing a novel. Of course he is. Who isn’t?
That is clear from new fiction offerings from former President Bill Clinton and Georgia politician Stacey Abrams, not to mention a forthcoming novel from Empty Nest star Dinah Manoff.
Abrams, to her credit, is dedicated to the craft. She wrote her first novel in law school and has published eight romance novels under the pen name Selena Montgomery. She’s also written two nonfiction books. Her newest is While Justice Sleeps (Doubleday, 384 pages), billed as a thriller set within the U.S. Supreme Court.
Clinton teams up with superstar author James Patterson again for The President’s Daughter (Little, Brown and Co./Knopf), which, at 608 pages, brings to mind Clinton’s 35-minute speech in 1988 and how the crowd went wild when he finally said “In conclusion.” Somewhat predictably, it’s a thriller about the kidnapping of a president’s kid. The previous Patterson-Clinton book was The President is Missing (Little, Brown and Co., 527 pages). Apparently the president goes missing.
Less promising is Manoff’s July release of The Real True Hollywood Story of Jackie Gold, billed as a coming-of-age story set in Hollywood (Star Alley Press, 338 pages). Right now it’s only offered on Kindle and it appears to be the first book published by this company, which may be a cover for self-publishing. If it flops, it doesn’t take away from Manoff’s other talents (she did, after all, win a Tony) but only suggests that maybe, just maybe, everyone doesn’t have a novel in them.
Andy Warhol, by the way, thought he did. Though famous for his pop art, Warhol wrote something that he called a novel — literally. A, a Novel (Grove Press, 451 pages) was not especially well-received in 1968 and, being largely a transcript of recordings, can barely be called a novel, but a first edition is going for $6,500 on Amazon. If you’ve got one somewhere, get thee to a book dealer, fast.

Books

Author events

• MEREDITH TATE AND CAMERON LUND Tate presents Shipped. Lund presents Heartbreakers and Fakers. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Virtual, via Zoom. Thurs., May 20, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• GLENN A. KNOBLOCK Author presents Hidden History of Lake Winnipesaukee. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Virtual, via Zoom. Wed., May 26, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• KEVIN KWAN Author presents Sex and Vanity. Hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Thurs., May 27, 7 p.m. Virtual. Tickets cost $5. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

• JAMIE DUCHARME AND JEFFREY KLUGER Ducharme presents Big Vape: The Incendiary Rise of Juul. Kluger presents Holdout. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Virtual, via Zoom. Wed., June 2, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• ANNETTE GORDON-REED Author presents On Juneteenth. Hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Thurs., June 3, 7 p.m. Virtual. Tickets cost $5. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

• LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA, QUIARA ALEGRIA HUDES AND JEREMY MCCARTER Authors present the launch of their new book, In the Heights: Finding Home. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Virtual, via Zoom. Tues., June 15, 8 p.m. Registration and tickets required. Tickets cost $40 to $44. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Call for submissions

• COVID POETRY ANTHOLOGY New Hampshire residents are invited to submit original poems for review and possible publication in COVID Spring Vol. II,an anthology of poetry about the pandemic experience in New Hampshire, to be edited by New Hampshire Poet Laureate Alexandria Peary and published by Hobblebush Books this summer. Youth age 18 and under may also submit original poems to be considered for the anthology’s new youth section. Submit a poem or poems (up to three) by Sun., May 23, through the online submission form at hobblebush.com/anthology-submissions. Poets will be notified of the editor’s decision by June 15.

• NH LITERARY AWARDS The New Hampshire Writers’ Project seeks submissions for its Biennial New Hampshire Literary Awards, which recognize published works written about New Hampshire and works written by New Hampshire natives or residents. Books must have been published between Jan. 1, 2019 and Dec. 31, 2020 and may be nominated in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, children’s picture books, middle grade/young adult books. All entries will be read and evaluated by a panel of judges assembled by the NHWP. Submission deadline is Mon., June 21, 5 p.m. Visit nhwritersproject.org/new-hampshire-literary-awards.

Featured photo: Freedom

The Five Wounds, by Kirstin Valdez Quade (W.W. Norton, 416 pages)

You may think that you have no interest in a story about a troubled family set in New Mexico, a story that, just two pages in, reproaches you for not remembering more of the two years of Spanish you had in high school.

You would be wrong. Not about the fact that you should know more Spanish — this is true — but about not relating to The Five Wounds, Kirstin Valdez Quade’s deeply affective portrait of a family that is likely vastly different from yours, but similar in profound ways. But first you have to get past the crucifixion.

The central character is Amadeo Padilla, an unemployed man who lives with his mother and drinks too much. Padillo is 33, “same as Our Lord, but Amadeo is not a man with ambition.” But when he is chosen to portray Jesus in a re-enactment of the Passion, Padilla suddenly finds hope. It is, he thinks, a role he was born to play, and he throws himself into preparation for the Good Friday ceremony with an energy that he has never before assigned to any task, including parenting.

This is painfully clear when, on Holy Week, he comes home to find his 15-year-old daughter, heavily pregnant, waiting for him. Angel lives with her mother, and he hadn’t seen her in more than a year. To Amadeo, the arrival is supremely ill-timed; he is busy being Jesus, and has neither time nor desire to do the onerous chores of parenting, such as helping his daughter get to school on time. World-weary Angel, who had a fight with her mom, has nowhere else to go, however, and had hoped to get some mothering from her grandmother, if not her father, for whom she has no expectations of competency.

But the grandmother, Yolanda, isn’t there — for her own heart-rending reasons later disclosed. So, for a few days, Angel is thrust into being a parent to herself and to her dad, who has decided that, after the upcoming crucifixion, he will make his fortune with a do-it-yourself windshield repair business with a kit he ordered for $1,199. “Amadeo images windshield repair is a trade Jesus might get behind. It is, essentially, carpentry for the 21st century,” Quade writes.

The novel seamlessly switches perspectives, from Amadeo to Angel to Yolanda, who arrives home (memorably described as “an adobe-style house soiled pink with iron bars on the windows”) on Easter day, planning to break the news of a life-altering diagnosis. Instead, she is plunged into assorted family dramas in which she has to assert matriarchal control: her warring adult children, her soon-to-deliver granddaughter, who has not even had so much as a baby shower, just a load of used baby clothes that haven’t even been washed, “as though [the] home were a Goodwill dumpster.”

“Having children is terrifying, the way they become adults and go out in the world with cars and functioning reproductive systems and credit cards, the way, before they’ve developed any sense or fear, they are equipped to make adult-sized mistakes with adult-sized consequences,” Quade writes.

The novel continues to build on small but volcanic things: Yolanda’s increasingly worsening health, Amadeo’s budding business and relationship with his daughter’s godmother and teacher; and, of course, the birth of the baby, which is the beating heart of the story, in fact, in some ways, of all of life.

The child, “unplanned and unwanted, dreaded and bemoaned,” turns out to be the saving of them all. “No child has ever been as needed, as necessary and beloved,” Amadeo thinks as he desperately tries to navigate a crisis late in the waning pages of the book.

The Five Wounds is a novel that builds slowly, set in a region of the United States that does not get a lot of literary attention. Nor, it could be argued, do the novel’s themes. The book takes seriously an unusual expression of religious faith — the live Passion plays that are popular in Mexico and in other places heavily influenced by Hispanic culture.

It begins and ends on Holy Week, one year apart, and as Amadeo reflects on his successor in the role of Jesus, he observes that the suffering of a man 2,000 years ago, “suffering that was newly astonishing, but also just like the suffering of the men crucified beside him, just like the suffering of every person before and after.” So, too, this strangely absorbing story. A

BOOK NOTES
In January a widely publicized open letter dubbed “No book deals for traitors” demanded that no current or former member of Donald Trump’s team find a home in mainstream publishing. The effectiveness of that effort was recently revealed in news that Kellyanne Conway, Mike Pence and William Barr all have book deals. (Pence got a two-book deal from Simon & Schuster, also Conway’s future publisher.)

Right now, however, the political book that is getting all the attention is Elizabeth Warren’s Persist (Metropolitan Books, 320 pages), despite lackluster reviews. NPR drubs it as “a series of stories, then plans,” and, equally damning, “campaign-trail Warren, in book form,” nothing Warren will want to use as a jacket blurb.

Then again, it seems unfair to demand that politicians also be compelling writers.

Meanwhile, for an examination of why one of our most compelling authors was successful, check out The Artful Dickens, by John Mullan (Bloomsbury, 448 pages). Mullan promises to reveal “the tricks and ploys” of the beloved author. One is that to fully embrace Dickens’ genius, you need to read his writing out loud. A literary critic and English professor in London, Mullan organizes his thoughts into 13 essays. Dickens fans will be especially interested to learn the specifics of how the author arrived at the memorable names of his characters, such as Scrooge and Pecksniffian.

After that, check out last year’s The Mystery of Charles Dickens, by A.N. Wilson (Harper, 368 pages), published in conjunction with the 150th anniversary of his death at age 58. Part literary analysis, part biography, the book is also the author’s personal reflection of what Dickens meant to him. Wilson maintains that of all the great novelists, Dickens was the most mysterious, then does his best to open the veil.

Books

Author events

• SUZANNE KOVEN Author presents Letter to a Young Female Physician, in conversation with author Andrew Solomon. Hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Tues., May 18, 7 p.m. Virtual. Tickets cost $5. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

• MEREDITH TATE AND CAMERON LUND Tate presents Shipped. Lund presents Heartbreakers and Fakers. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Virtual, via Zoom. Thurs., May 20, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• KEVIN KWAN Author presents Sex and Vanity. Hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Thurs., May 27, 7 p.m. Virtual. Tickets cost $5. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

• ANNETTE GORDON-REED Author presents On Juneteenth. Hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Thurs., June 3, 7 p.m. Virtual. Tickets cost $5. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

Call for submissions

• NH LITERARY AWARDS The New Hampshire Writers’ Project seeks submissions for its Biennial New Hampshire Literary Awards, which recognize published works written about New Hampshire and works written by New Hampshire natives or residents. Books must have been published between Jan. 1, 2019 and Dec. 31, 2020 and may be nominated in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, children’s picture books, middle grade/young adult books. All entries will be read and evaluated by a panel of judges assembled by the NHWP. Submission deadline is Mon., June 21, 5 p.m. Visit nhwritersproject.org/new-hampshire-literary-awards.

• COVID POETRY ANTHOLOGY New Hampshire residents are invited to submit original poems for review and possible publication in COVID Spring Vol. II,an anthology of poetry about the pandemic experience in New Hampshire, to be edited by New Hampshire Poet Laureate Alexandria Peary and published by Hobblebush Books this summer. Youth age 18 and under may also submit original poems to be considered for the anthology’s new youth section. Submit a poem or poems (up to three) by Sun., May 23, through the online submission form at hobblebush.com/anthology-submissions. Poets will be notified of the editor’s decision by June 15.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email [email protected] or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email [email protected].

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email [email protected] or visit nashualibrary.org.

Featured photo: The Five Wounds

Face, by Justine Bateman (Akashic Books, 272 pages)

In 2018 former Family Ties star Justine Bateman had a tantrum in the form of a book. That book was Fame, a 208-page rant against stardom that was hilariously oblivious to the fact that Bateman’s fame gave her the platform to spew expletives and call them literature.

Fittingly, she was enabled by having a publisher whose collection includes Go the F*** to Sleep, a parody children’s book, and which launched with a novel called The F***-Up. Expletives may not be required by this publisher, but they are warmly received.

The children’s book was genuinely funny. Fame was poorly written and angry, although it enjoyed warm reviews from a few actors who have enjoyed some success as writers, most notably Michael J. Fox and David Duchovny.

Now Bateman is back, enjoying success that does not stem from the quality of her writing, which can be found in any honors 11th-grade English class, but from her choice of topic: the savagery inflicted on the aging female face, both by its owner and by society. It’s a topic that Bateman addressed in Fame, when she wrote of her discovery that people on the internet were making cruel comments about her looks. She was 43, and people were saying she had not aged well. That she looked like a sea hag or a meth addict. Like someone who was — gasp — 55.

Bateman now is 55. And to her credit, she admitted in Fame that this was the first time she had ever been criticized for her looks. “I’ve always been pretty,” she wrote. This explains her initial bewilderment, later shame and eventual rage over not being considered one of the beautiful ones anymore. It’s a progression that is experienced by many women, whether they’ve ever been famous or not, and one that is accelerating in the Zoom age, since even women who have not “always been pretty” are being thrust into video. Plus, they are told that they can correct any imperfections, as long as they have plenty of disposable income and no qualms about injecting paralyzing toxins into the face.

Bateman wants none of that. She writes that she has always admired the aging face, even the dark circles, slack skin and crow’s feet. “To me, these facial markings were the hallmarks of complex and exotic women, women with confidence and attitude and style, women who had no use for whatever you might think of them,” she writes. She says that when she was younger, she looked forward to becoming this sort of distinguished, stylish older woman. So she was shocked when, after confronting criticism of her looks, she slumped into a period of feeling ashamed, and she says she recognizes this in other women she encounters.

“Averting the eyes when looked at, holding the mouth vin a defeated angle, and even presenting a resigned posture appeared to be common” in women, she writes. “… I was disturbed that not only had I bought into other people’s critical idea of my appearance, but also that many women around me seemed to have done the same thing.” She came to be interested in two questions: Why does society think older women’s faces need to be “fixed” and what does it think that “fixing” them will accomplish?

To explore these questions, Bateman decided to interview a variety of women about their experiences regarding their appearance and how people respond to it, and to present their stories, one per chapter. It was a great idea, if only someone else had written the book.

Bateman may well be a great thinker, a visionary, a champion of women, but her prose plods like a pair of exhausted mules. There is, upon occasion, a sentence or paragraph or two that stands out and makes you want to reconsider, but then the prose picks up a knife and starts torturing you again. Consider this opening to a chapter:

“‘Ha ha ha, ha ha ha!!!’

Their laughter splashed through the jetway as Jenny and her friends stepped off the plane into the long white tunnel to the gate. Like a basket of freshly cut flowers, still warm from the garden; like a barely unwrapped candy, glassy and colorful; like new cars, with just enough mileage on them to have gotten them to the dealership, these three women walked.”

These are the words of someone who so wants to be taken seriously as a writer that they forget the reader. These are the words of someone who has never read Strunk and White.

Using unnecessarily elaborate construction, Bateman shares vignettes from 45 women, some of whom have interesting stories to tell, some not. Among them are Nina, the 24-year-old hairdresser who, while traveling in France, was entranced by the style of confident, older woman who gave her an image of aging to which she could aspire; Hannah, the 51-year-old dental assistant whose enjoyment of a party died when someone said to her, “you were so beautiful then”; and Talia, the 46-year-old musical act booker who was getting attention from a man at a ball game until his friend said, “Dude, she’s like your mother or your grandmother.”

These are stories with which many older women can empathize, and which many young women fear. In fact, Bateman is equally concerned about young women with smooth faces and the “special terror” that they feel about the oncoming train. She wants women to stop caring about being awarded the title of “pretty girl” by society, but to claim its reward — “the confidence, the fearlessness that everything will go my way, eventually.” It is, she writes, a confidence that others notice, but is self-cultivated.

It’s a worthy idea, the sort of wisdom that might be handed out by a monk on a mountaintop. Unfortunately, for the reader, it’s a painful trek to get to the top of this hill. D

BOOK NOTES
With Mother’s Day upon us, it’s time for reflecting on the importance of moms, not just as Hallmark describes them, but also in ways that are more honest.
For everyone who has a Hallmark mom, there is someone whose relationship with their mother is more, well, complicated.
The most biting book in the complicated-mom genre has to be Mommy Dearest, the 1978 dissection of Joan Crawford by her adopted daughter Christina. The memoir was published a year after the actress’s death, which gave her no chance to tell her side of the story. This may help to explain why there are relatively few honest books about difficult relationships with mothers — to publish one while the mother is still alive seems cruel; when she’s dead, unfair.
For my money, the best fiction book about troubled mom relationships was Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells, published in 1978 (HarperCollins, 356 pages). Like Mommy Dearest, it involved alcoholism and abuse, while also presenting a sympathetic portrait of the mother.
The nonfiction offerings are sparse, but here are two that look promising:
Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty by Jacqueline Rose (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pages, also in paperback) is a reflection on why mothers are seen as both saints and villains.
Discovering the Inner Mother, by Bethany Webster (William Morrow, 304 pages) promises to be a guide “healing the mother wound and finding your personal power.”
For a more conventional look at motherhood through the lens of science, check out Mom Genes (Gallery, 336 pages), a new book by Abigail Tucker, who is the wife of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. Tucker examines the evolutionary development of the maternal instinct and how “maternal aggression makes females the world’s most formidable creatures.”
And for a feel-good mother-daughter story, there’s My Mother’s Daughter, a Memoir of Struggle and Triumph by Perdita Felicien (Doubleday Canada, 320 pages). Felicien is a track-and-field star turned broadcaster who writes about her hardscrabble upbringing with a mother who was determined to make good for her children.

Books

Author events

• SUZANNE KOVEN Author presents Letter to a Young Female Physician, in conversation with author Andrew Solomon. Hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Tues., May 18, 7 p.m. Virtual. Tickets cost $5. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

• KEVIN KWAN Author presents Sex and Vanity. Hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Thurs., May 27, 7 p.m. Virtual. Tickets cost $5. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

• ANNETTE GORDON-REED Author presents On Juneteenth. Hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Thurs., June 3, 7 p.m. Virtual. Tickets cost $5. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

Call for submissions

• NH LITERARY AWARDS CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS The New Hampshire Writers’ Project seeks submissions for its Biennial New Hampshire Literary Awards, which recognize published works written about New Hampshire and works written by New Hampshire natives or residents. Books must have been published between Jan. 1, 2019 and Dec. 31, 2020 and may be nominated in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, children’s picture books, middle grade/young adult books. All entries will be read and evaluated by a panel of judges assembled by the NHWP. Submission deadline is Mon., June 21, 5 p.m. Visit nhwritersproject.org/new-hampshire-literary-awards.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email [email protected] or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email [email protected].

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email [email protected] or visit nashualibrary.org.

Language

• FRENCH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE CLASSES

Offered remotely by the Franco-American Centre. Six-week session with classes held Thursdays from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. $225. Visit facnh.com/education or call 623-1093.

Poetry

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Featured photo: Face

Effortless, by Greg McKeown (Currency, 256 pages)

In some ways, Boxer the horse is a symbol for the American worker. One of the most memorable characters in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Boxer was the loyal draft horse whose response to any setback was “I will work harder.” In a country steeped in the Puritan work ethic, where the typical two weeks of vacation pales in comparison with Europe’s generous holidays, it’s hard to not admire Boxer’s attitude, even knowing how it turns out for him.

Hard work is good, right? It demonstrates commitment, perseverance, toughness.

Wrong, says Greg McKeown in Effortless, the followup to his Essentialism, published in 2014. Emulating Boxer gets you sent to the slaughterhouse, essentially. The better way to work is to find a way to do it more easily, not in the Tim Ferriss pie-in-the-sky model of working four hours a week (as if) but changing the long-running soundtrack that informs the belief that the harder we work, the luckier we get.

McKeown believes that this mindset creates a fog that obscures a truth: that in those moments that we actually feel inspired, when the work seems to flow, as if poured from heaven, what we are doing is not hard, but feels effortless. This is the essence of what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote about in Flow in 1991 — and who hasn’t heard the platitude “work smarter, not harder”? But McKeown’s take on the subject feels fresh and relevant. And interestingly, he begins by admitting to a failure of his previous book.

In Essentialism, McKeown argues that we suffer from the misuse of the word “priority,” which used to mean the singular thing that matters but has been pulled and stretched into “priorities,” which shouldn’t exist. Running around tending to priorities, as if they were errant chickens, means that the essential stuff of life doesn’t get done. To be effective, he said, we must ruthlessly cull “the trivial many from the vital few” and, intentionally and guiltlessly, build a life around them.

But as McKeown built a career as the leader of Essentialism, he realized, from what other people told him and what he saw in his own family life, that some people can peel away all the unessentials and still have too much to do. In short, for most of us, there are multiple priorities, multiple essentials. Struggling with that, he realized that people in this situation can either let priorities slide or find a way to make everything easier and take less time. He recommends the latter. And in keeping with the Effortless theme, they’re not hard to do.

McKeown believes that the transition from Boxer to Secretariat (the analogy is mine — Secretariat made everything look easy) begins with understanding the tired old template of platitudes like “It won’t be easy but it’s worth it” and replacing it with a new mantra: How can I make this task easy and sometimes even fun?

Sometimes, answers appear when we just take the time to think about the question. But McKeown has devised a series of exercises to help people make progress on their essential goals with relative ease. For example, he says that one thing that slows people down is that they don’t take time to think about what it looks like when a project, goal or idea is actually done; instead, they spend all their time thinking about the beginning and only vaguely seeing a nebulous end. Define what “done” means at the start and the steps leading there will be easier, he says. Another idea is to set goals that are malleable — low-end daily targets that represent the minimum amount of action you can take and still feel that there is momentum, high-end targets that are more ambitious but limited enough to protect you from burnout. Part of the “effortless” mindset, McKeown writes, is protective. Hard workers can sabotage themselves into paralysis by overthinking or working to exhaustion, thus needing extra time to recover and losing momentum. The effortless way is not so we can lie in hammocks in Thailand with Tim Ferriss, but so we can do our best work.

If this all sounds a bit like “work smarter, not harder,” well, it is. But McKeown is an engaging writer who peppers his own experience with research and anecdotes of achievement, from how Elon Musk got into rocket science to why Reed Hastings started Netflix. He gets extra points for never using anonymous people with only first names, like so many authors of business and self-help books do when telling anecdotes, leaving the reader to wonder if the people really exist at all. If there’s anything to criticize, it’s that the writing of this book seems a bit too effortless; at 217 pages of new material, it feels short, and including an excerpt from Essentialism at the end feels like padding. Was that really essential? B

BOOK NOTES
A few months ago, The New York Times reported that an editor at Hachette Book Group, one of the “big five” in publishing, had been fired. The editor, Kate Hartson, headed up Center Street, the conservative imprint within Hachette, and she said she’d been fired over politics. Apparently, she was open to books from Trump supporters and associates, and according to the Times, the big five are resistant to MAGA authors and themes.

This could explain why conservative media companies, sensing a profit to be made, have quietly started publishing books. Both Fox News and Newsmax have started publishing arms, respectively Fox News Books and Humanix.

You’ve probably never heard of Humanix, and most of its titles look pretty obscure and/or peculiar, but Fox, which launched its imprint in November, has already a splash. Its first book, Modern Warriors: Real Stories from Real Heroes by Pete Hegseth, made the bestseller lists at the end of last year.

The second book, The Women of the Bible Speak, by Shannon Bream, has been No. 1 on the Times bestseller list under “advice, how-to and miscellaneous” for three weeks.

But the real surprise in conservative publishing has to be how well former Speaker of the House John Boehner’s book is performing. In On the House, A Washington Memoir (St. Martin’s, 288 pages) Boehner promises a story of how a “regular guy” went from working in a bar to “holding a pretty big job,” and says that Congress didn’t change him: “I walked out of the Capitol the same jackass I was when I walked in 25 years earlier.” In early reviews, it looks like a slash-and-burn, which may be why it’s doing so well.

Released April 13, Boehner’s memoir was No. 1 in nonfiction last week but now has competition.

Susan Page’s Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power (Twelve, 448 pages) seems like a conflict of interest for the author, given that she is the Washington bureau chief for USA Today, but it’s getting good reviews.

Interestingly, the Washington Post review notes that Pelosi felt slighted because Time magazine never put her on the cover during her first term as speaker but put Boehner on the cover shortly after the 2010 midterms. Booting him off the bestseller list would probably help resolve some of that sting.

Books

Author events

• SUZANNE KOVEN Author presents Letter to a Young Female Physician, in conversation with author Andrew Solomon. Hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Tues., May 18, 7 p.m. Virtual. Tickets cost $5. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email [email protected] or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email [email protected].

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email [email protected] or visit nashualibrary.org.

Language

• FRENCH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE CLASSES

Offered remotely by the Franco-American Centre. Six-week session with classes held Thursdays from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. $225. Visit facnh.com/education or call 623-1093.

Poetry

• JENNIFER MILITELLO Poet presents her newest volume of verse, The Pact. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Virtual, via Zoom. Thurs., April 29, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Featured photo: Effortless

First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami (Knopf, 256 pages)

Type “Haruki Murakami” into the Google search engine, and one of the questions that comes up is “Why is Harukami Murakami so popular?,” which elicits a laugh. Sometimes, wading through his matter-of-fact, beige-to-gray prose, one does have to ask.

Murakami’s characters often seem aimless, their wanderings pointless, and in his longer works, such as 2017’s Killing Commendatore, so can his writing. One scornful critic has called him “the Forrest Gump of global literature.” But it’s not hyperbole to call the Japanese writer a sensation, so for people who would like to sample Murakami without a month-long commitment, there’s an opportunity in First Person Singular, a collection of eight stories that coalesce around love, death, aging and reality.

I think.

Murakami reminds me of the children’s book Nothing Ever Happens on My Block (by Ellen Raskin), in which a glum child sits on a stoop and complains about how boring his life is, while fire trucks zoom by and witches pop up in windows. Surely there’s more going on here than I’m seeing?

But then Murakami has one of his characters, a writer, say to an editor: “Theme? Can’t say there is one,” which seems like a sly confession befitting the owner of a jazz bar who famously decided he would become a novelist one day while watching a baseball game.

I digress, but so does he. That said, after a slow start, First Person Singular is a wonderfully quirky foray into the world of Murakami, the strongest stories being “Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova” and “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey.”

In “Charlie Parker,” the narrator begins by recounting a story he wrote in college about the American jazz legend experimenting with bossa nova, a type of music that is an alchemy of jazz and samba. The thing is, Parker died before bossa nova was invented, so the narrator envisions a recording that is fantasy. But one day, browsing through a music store, he comes across a crudely produced recording called “Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova” that lists exactly the same tracks that he had invented. Instead of buying the album ($35 seems a bit much), he leaves the store, but then regrets the decision and returns to the store the next day. What happens next is equally fanciful but compelling, and as with much of Murakami’s work, instructive in music.

“Confessions” is a story that could come from the pen of Stephen King, had King grown up in Japan instead of Maine.

The narrator, yet another trademark Murakami wanderer, checks into a ramshackle inn, where everything is old and decrepit, to include the cat sleeping in the foyer. The inn does have one nice feature, two if you count the vending machine that dispenses beer. (Who knew that such things existed?) It has a glorious hot-springs bath, in which the narrator soaks blissfully for a while. This is where he meets the titular monkey, a grizzled creature that shows up and, in perfect English (actually Japanese, as this, like Murakami’s other work, is a translation), offers to scrub the narrator’s back. Naturally, the narrator wants to learn more, so he invites the monkey to come to his room later for conversation and beer.

There, he learns how the monkey came to learn to speak more eloquently than many human beings and to appreciate opera. He also learned that it’s hard being an educated monkey — one is not accepted by his own kind, nor by the humans that he more closely resembles. And one has a particularly hard time finding love.

So the monkey, over time, developed an oddly touching way of experiencing love without having physical contact with the human women he desired. The method did, however, take something from the women, making it unethical. And when the narrator later meets a woman that he suspects had encountered the monkey, he has his own ethical test, of whether to tell her what had transpired. If, of course, it transpired at all and wasn’t just the fevered imagination of a tired man soaking in a hot spring.

This story was published last year in The New Yorker,as was “With the Beatles,” a rambling recollection of a man remembering his first girlfriend and her older brother, whom he had only met once while he was dating the girl, but then encountered decades later by chance. He had broken up with the girl, who did not “ring my bell,” and both had married someone else, and he was unaware of the shocking turn her life had taken until running into the brother.

The repurposing of previously published stories into a book seems vaguely like cheating, although it is done frequently by authors of stature. So, pro tip: You can find some of these stories by searching the table of contents on Amazon and then searching for them online.

“Carnaval” is built around the composition by Robert Schumann and involves a music-centered relationship with the ugliest woman the narrator has ever known, “the result of a unique force that compressed unattractive elements of all shape and sizes and assembled them together in one place.”

“The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection,” which appears to be pure memoir (but who knows?), is a man reflecting on his love for baseball, and how he scribbles poetry in a notebook in between action. (“Let’s face it — baseball is a sport done at a leisurely pace.”)

Reading Murakami is also best done at a leisurely pace, lest you feel out of touch with an author who is never in a hurry to get where he is going, and often seems not to know where he is going, which may be the truth. (Theme? What theme?) But it is a singular experience, which is sometimes rewarded with an unexpected jolt of humor, as when Murakami (or his narrator, hard to tell the difference), reflecting on his habits of dressing, says that when looking in his closet of unworn dress shirts, still in the dry-cleaner’s plastic, starts to feel apologetic toward the clothes and tries them on out of kindness. Or when a character flatly intones, “Loving someone is like having a mental illness that’s not covered by health insurance.”

Murakami could be one of the greatest writers of understatement the modern world has known or, equally plausible, an imaginative jazz bar owner who stumbled into literary acclaim. Either way, Murakami fans will thrill to this collection, even though they’ve likely already read much of it. Others will Google “Why is Haruki Murakami so popular?” B-

BOOK NOTES
The demise of physical books was supposed to be e-books; the end of physical bookstores, Amazon. But what if the extinction-level event turned out to be vending machines?

Probably not, but I did do a double take upon learning this week about a nonprofit called Short Edition, which has installed more than 300 “Short Story Dispensers” at locations around the world. Users can choose the length of what they want to read —one minute, three minutes or five — and the machine prints it out, looking scarily like a CVS receipt. (See a demonstration at short-edition.com.)

There don’t appear to be any in New Hampshire, but a map of locations shows a variety of locations, to include airports, universities, wineries and, somewhat disturbingly, libraries. There’s lots to unpack here, including the shrinking American attention span, but this could be an interesting way to expose people to new writers.

Meanwhile, for short reads that don’t come on a receipt, check out:

Spilt Milk by Courtney Zoffness, a two-time resident of Peterborough’s MacDowell Colony, (McSweeney’s, 211 pages) offers essays on motherhood, family connections and Judaism.

Of Color, by Jaswinder Bolina (McSweeney’s, 129 pages), poignant essays on race and identity from a poet who writes that he looks more like the 9/11 hijackers than the firefighters who responded that day.

Love Like That by Emma Duffy-Comparone (Henry Holt and Co., 224 pages). The publisher says these stories are about “brilliant, broken women that are just the right amount of wrong.”

The Glorious American Essay, edited by Phillip Lopate (Pantheon, 928 pages), collects 100 classic essays from colonial America to the present, including luminaries such as E.B. White, Rachel Carson, David Foster Wallace, Lewis Thomas and James Thurber.

Books

Author events

• ERIN BOWMAN Author presents Dustborn. Outside Gibson’s Bookstore (45 S. Main St., Concord). Sat., April 24, 1 to 2:30 p.m. Call 224-0562 or visit gibsonsbookstore.com.

• PADDY DONNELLY Author presents The Vanishing Lake. Presented by The Toadstool Bookshop of Nashua, Peterborough and Keene. Virtual, via Zoom. Sat., April 24, 1 p.m. Call 352-8815 or visit toadbooks.com

• LITERARY COCKTAIL HOUR Presented by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Featuring authors Kat Howard, Kelly Braffet, Cat Valente, and Freya Marskem in conversation with bookstore staff. Virtual, via Zoom. Sat., April 24, 5 p.m. Call 224-0562 or visit gibsonsbookstore.com.

• BILL BUFORD Author presents Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking. Hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Virtual. Wed., April 28, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $5. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

• SUZANNE KOVEN Author presents Letter to a Young Female Physician, in conversation with author Andrew Solomon. Hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Tues., May 18, 7 p.m. Virtual. Tickets cost $5. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

Featured photo: First Person Singular