Category: Books

The Arrest, by Jonathan Lethem (Ecco, 307 pages)

Despite a vague discomfort with what it says about me, there’s never been an apocalypse I didn’t like. In 1998, when everyone was asking why America needed two asteroid disaster movies released within two months of each other (Deep Impact and Armageddon), I was wondering why we couldn’t have three.
So I was stoked for Jonathan Lethem’s latest, The Arrest, even more because it’s set in New England. Its premise seems the perfect antidote to 2020: a world in which all modern technology has stopped working. No more planes, trains and automobiles, no laptops, no electric blankets, no Googling, no doomscrolling. The doom is already here, and it’s not as bad as predicted. In fact, if you are the type who thinks wistfully about living off the grid on an organic farm one day, this is not the apocalypse, but paradise.
The disappearance of technology, which unfolded slowly, as opposed to one catastrophic event, has been dubbed “The Arrest.” The citizens aren’t sure what happened, but it appears the apex event in a long line of losses to include biodiversity, the melting of polar ice and the drowning of Miami. There were apparently no riots and mass human deaths, however, just a pervasive sadness at the loss of our cellphones. Some built shrines to them; others “needed eventually to be given a mug of herbal tea while someone else hid their inert former playthings.”
Our escort through this world is one Sandy Duplessis, a Hollywood screenwriter whose primary job, pre-Arrest, was to rewrite the work of others, and to enjoy whatever scrap-work was tossed to him by a longtime friend who has been much more successful than he was.
Sandy’s world is much different now. For one thing, he goes by the quaint moniker Journeyman, and his job is to deliver food and other necessities of life around the town in rural Maine where he has settled. He also assists the local butcher and has acquired an unsettling amount of knowledge about how to slaughter ducks.
He has settled in this town because it’s where his sister, Maddy, lives on an organic farm; he had come to visit her when the Arrest occurred. Now, for reasons that are unclear, New England has dealt with its collective loss of smartphones by organizing itself into Walking Dead-esque communities, taking care of their own but keeping their distance from other, threatening communities. Mostly, this works; life has essentially reverted to the 19th century, where all communities need is one everything: one butcher, one fisherman, one seamstress, one mediocre former screenwriter who ferries around homemade sausage.
People may miss their former lives; they certainly miss coffee. They nurse deep sorrow about the relationships they have lost. But they still have hot mulled cider and there’s currently no trauma, no drama, until Journeyman’s old friend, the smooth-talking mogul, shows up in a monstrous, futuristic rocket-ship of a car: a supercar that could decapitate intruders, run on nuclear fuel and make espresso.
The friend, Peter Todbaum, said he’d spent 10 months driving across what was left of the country to find Journeyman, and Journeyman’s sister, with whom he had a complicated history. (When Maddy visited the two men when they were newbies in Hollywood, she and Todbaum shared a weekend together that had apparently shattered her, although he doesn’t know the details. She only told her brother, cryptically, “He didn’t do anything to me that he doesn’t do to you.”)
Todbaum’s arrival sets up the mystery: What is he doing here? Is the supercar real? Is any of this real? In Malibu the friends had been working on a script called Yet Another World, with Maddy’s help. And when Todbaum arrives and Journeyman hoists himself into the vehicle, Lethem writes, “He climbed into surely that most abhorrent of things, a mixed metaphor.”
The unspooling of the answers provides only limited satisfaction, in part because the novel is so strange, and no single character endearing. There is also the matter of Lethem’s self-indulgent musings, which seem like observations he’s jotted in his journal over a lifetime and wants to put to use. Example: his recurring mention of “time averaging,” which he defines as the mental gymnastics in which we reconcile the younger version of people we know with the aged version confronting us today.
Another example: his introductory aside into a quirk of the wintry Northeast, frost heaves, which Lethem describes as “a verb itself frozen.”
“Maybe Frost is in fact a person, that poet we studied in high school. Frost heaves into the mind. His road diverged; ours doesn’t. Thought, really, isn’t any road you could follow in either of two directions divergent enough to begin with?” he writes, losing a third of potential readers from the get-go.
But Lethem, the author of 11 well-regarded novels including Motherless Brooklyn and several collections of short stories, is at the stage of his career where he can write what he wants, unmolested. His latest is not a bad book, just a meandering one that ultimately fails to, well, arrest. C — Jennifer Graham

BOOK NOTES
If the No.1 measure of success in America is the amount of money you make, No. 2 might be that people want to know what you read. Consider Oprah. A longstanding feature of her magazine (which ends next month, at least in paper form) is what she’s reading.
But after Oprah, Americans care passionately about what Bill Gates reads.
It seems there’s always some new breathless recommendation emanating from the Microsoft founder, the latest of which I came across on Medium under the headline “Bill Gates Just Declared This Optimistic Read His New Favorite Book of All Time.”
Gates declared this his “new” favorite book of all time in 2018. But if you are wondering, it was Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now (Penguin, 576 pages), which replaced Gates’ previous favorite book, also by Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (Penguin, 832 pages).
For something more recent, Gates recommended a handful of other books on his blog earlier this year. (Why has no one started Bill’s Book Club? He is said to read 50 books a year, by reading a minimum of an hour at a sitting.) A sampling of his recommendations this year:
Good Economics for Hard Times, by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee (Public Affairs, 432 pages), the case for “intelligent interventionism” in public policy to solve inequality.
The Ride of a Lifetime, Lessons Learned from 15 years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company, by Robert Iger (Random House, 272 pages). “One of the best business books I’ve read in several years,” Gates says.
The Headspace Guide to Meditation and Mindfulness, by Andy Puddicombe (St. Martin’s Griffin, 224 pages). Gates says he started to meditate after reading this book.
The Choice, by Dr. Edith Eva Eger, a memoir and guide to processing trauma (Scribner, 320 pages). Added bonus for this title: It’s also endorsed by Winfrey, who has said, “I’ll be forever changed by Dr. Eger’s story.”

Featured photo: The Arrest

How to Write One Song, by Jeff Tweedy (Dutton, 159 pages)

Of all the implausible goals on my bucket list, writing a song is not one of them. Although I possess both a guitar and a piano, and regularly abuse a vintage iPod, I have always been a consumer of music, not a creator, and it never even crossed my mind to try birthing a song. I’ll venture to say that’s probably true of you, too.

So Jeff Tweedy’s How to Write One Song should have no value to people like us, but as it turns out, the book is a quirky little pep talk that’s more about creativity in general than about songwriting in specific. Imagine Julia Cameron (The Artist’s Way) or Steven Pressfield (The War of Art) in a cowboy hat. Like these creativity coaches, Tweedy proposes to wrest people from tedium — of jobs, lives, dinner choices — by inviting a daily visit from the muse. But he believes that anyone can write a song that is meaningful to them, even without music education or even owning an instrument.

Tweedy, recently described in Rolling Stone magazine as “one of today’s greatest songwriters,” leads the Grammy-winning rock band Wilco and was co-founder of the group Uncle Tupelo. He begins with an interesting assessment of how songs differ from other art forms, like novels or paintings. “They’re hard to hold on to — airlike and ephemeral. They pass through time. They’re here, then gone … Yet they’re portable, they can linger as a memory, and even crazier, they can just pop into our minds for no discernable reason.”

If people think at all about the craft of songwriting, Tweedy says, they’re likely to assume that songs are conjured, not written. He concedes that there is some sort of partnership between the conscious mind and the unconscious, but doesn’t subscribe to the magical “the universe gave me this work, I am but a lowly conduit” mindset. Instead his is a practical method that benefits from timers, schedules and, amusingly, theft.

“Everyone who you could possibly steal from at this point in human evolution is a thief. Even innovators seemingly without any historical precedence are found to be building on someone else’s foundation, upon deeper investigation,” Tweedy writes.

That doesn’t mean he endorses presenting someone else’s work as your own, but seeing the work of others in the context of a “shared ability to create,” and thus allowing for inspiration and integration into your own work. “I believe that writing your own lyrics to an existent melody is a damn fine thing to do if you don’t have much of handle on the music side of things and you really need to get something off your chest in song.”

In fact, one of his suggested exercises is to steal words from a book. Think of a melody, and then “Open up a book anywhere, any page, and keep humming the melody to yourself as you scan. Don’t really try to comprehend what you’re reading; just let your mind skim over the surface of the words on the page and focus your attention on the melody.”

The goal is to capture ideas without the control of the ego, to connect with an “anchor word” from which inspiration flows. Tweedy says that he used this process when writing Wilco’s song “Hummingbird,” conceived with an assist from Henry Miller’s Stand Still Like the Hummingbird. (That’s a nice example of how “theft” doesn’t have to be a crime.)

Simple and folksy, How to Write One Song does not attempt to be more than what it is, a conversation between someone who knows how to write songs and people who don’t. There may not be any great gems of insight here, but there are pebbles of smart, such as Tweedy’s insistence that, to truly succeed at any form of art, the process has to be the goal, not the success of the work, or even the work itself.

In other words, if you want to write a song in order to make money and win a Grammy, you will most likely be emotionally crushed. If you, instead, decide that writing a song is a worthy goal in itself, that the act of creating it has benefits (which Tweedy believes), then you win every time you sit down with a timer and work on your song (or painting or poem) for five minutes. That you win every day when you do it for nothing more than the love of the work.

“There’s just a lot of joy in it, in having created something at all. I don’t feel as bad about other things. I don’t necessarily feel high, or overly joyed. I just feel like, ‘Oh, I’m not wasting my time.’”

But what if we are wasting our time? It’s easy to think that if we are creating things that don’t net us money or recognition. Tweedy says we have to mentally return to childhood, when we hunched over a Crayola masterpiece for an hour and were so proud of what we produced, despite its actual artistic worth. “The drawing got hung up on the fridge regardless of how good it was, because your mom loves you and everyone loves you. Why can’t you be that kind to yourself?”

He goes on: “That’s one of the problems with humans — that we can be talked out of loving something. That we can be talked out of loving something that we do, and we can be talked out of loving ourselves. Easily, unfortunately.”

Will you write a song after reading this book? Maybe not, but it’s still worth the small investment of time, and if nothing else, maybe you’ll resume coloring on the floor, a joyful activity that Tweedy himself would endorse. B

BOOK NOTES
Since songwriting is, well, writing, it’s a natural progression for musicians to write books, too. Whether they’re readable is another story.
Anything by country music superstar Dolly Parton, however, seems a safe bet. She’s out this week with Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics, written with an assist from music journalist Robert K. Oermann (Chronicle, 388 pages). The publisher promises that fans will learn the origin stories of Parton classics such as “Jolene,” “9 to 5” and “I Will Always Love You,” as well as more than 170 other songs that Parton has written.
If you have a Parton fan on your Christmas list, pair this with a “A Holly Dolly Christmas” CD and you’re done.
But Thanksgiving stands between us and Christmas, so more pertinent to your life this week may be The Book on Pie: Everything You Need to Know to Bake Perfect Pies by Erin Jeanne McDowell, with photos by Mark Weinberg (Rux Martin/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 352 pages).
McDowell, the author of 2017’s The Fearless Baker and a host on Food Network Kitchen, believes that pie of any kind is perfectly acceptable fare for breakfast, which seems reason enough to buy this book. In it, she walks novices through crust-making (she prefers butter to Crisco and lard), and offers her own recipes on classics like apple pie, entrees such as chicken pot pie, and dozens of creative variations such as striped citrus pie, watermelon pie, triple chocolate caramel truffle pie and pina colada pie. Your socially distanced relatives and friends will thank you for reading this book.
Also, fans of Hallmark holiday movies (I don’t understand you, but I know you exist) will want to pick up the clunkily titled Hallmark Channel Countdown to Christmas: Have a Very Merry Movie Holiday (Hearst Home, 224 pages). Author Caroline McKenzie offers recipes and decorating tips from “stars, screenwriters, set designers, costume designers, and directors who create the movie magic.”
In other TV-inspired holiday fare, check out The Official Downton Abbey Christmas Cookbook (Weldon Owen, 240 pages) by Regula Ysewijn. “Now you can eat like an aristocrat,” a review in Delish promises, evidence of yet another wide divide in America: the Downton Abbey stans versus the Hallmark Christmas movie peeps.

Featured photo: How to Write One Song

Squeeze Me, by Carl Hiaasen (Knopf, 336 pages)

This year has already seen the publication of one clever novel about the weirdness of the Sunshine State (Florida Man by Tom Cooper) and another that was a satirical takedown of the Trump presidency (Make Russia Great Again, by Christopher Buckley). Did we really need another that combines the finer points of the two?

Why, yes, it turns out that we did. Carl Hiaasen, a Miami Herald columnist who also finds time to crank out books every other year or so, offers balm for the post-election brain in Squeeze Me, a satirical novel that takes a well-worn premise (a political cover-up) and makes it glorious. The fact that it takes place in the second term of the presidency of a man the Secret Service code-named Mastodon should not be a deterrent to anyone except for die-hard Trump supporters born without a funny bone.

The novel begins with a Palm Beach socialite gone missing during a charity gala. Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons, whose wealth derived from marrying well twice, spent a lot of time at events benefiting second-tier diseases. (The current one, the White Ibis Ball, is a fundraiser for “a group globally committed to defeating Irritable Bowel Syndrome.) She has the sort of friends who object to her being listed missing through a “Silver Alert” for seniors. “Isn’t there a premium version for people like us? A Platinum Alert, something like that?”

Like many of her friends, Kiki Pew’s lineage can be described simply from whence her money came, i.e, “the antifreeze and real-estate Cornbrights”; and the “asbestos and textile Fitzsimmonses.” It is the sort of sly detail that makes Squeeze Me so delectable, savage and mocking yet never coming off as mean.

Kiki Pew, in addition to raising money for various causes, is an ardent supporter of a president who is “white, old and scornful of social reforms.” So are her friends.

“Often they were invited to dine at Casa Bellicosa, the Winter White House, while the President was in residence. He always made a point of waving from the buffet line or pastry table.”

Unfortunately, Kiki Pew, fascinating a character as she is, is with us only for a short time, as what happened to her sets up the cover-up that consumes the bulk of the novel. The unsettling manner of Kiki’s death was not good for business at the Lipid House, the place where she was last seen. But, rewritten, it could be very good for the president.

So a plot is hatched to blame her disappearance on a 25-year-old man from Honduras named Diego Beltran, who was arriving on the shore of Palm Beach via a smuggler’s boat the same night at the White Ibis Ball. And the president seizes the opportunity to suggest that her “brutal murder” was an act of “political terrorism” aimed at his administration. At her funeral at Cape Cod (“Winter residents of Palm Beach inevitably return north forever, either in caskets or urns”), she is eulogized by the vice president as a “martyred patriot.” A rallying cry is soon heard across the country: No more Diegos!

There is a monkey wrench in this plan, which is that there are people who do know what happened to Kiki Pew, most significantly, Angie Armstrong, who runs a nuisance-wildlife removal business. From alligators to coyotes to possums, Armstrong wrangles them all, releasing them in the wild when possible, burying them when it’s not. (Again, demonstrating Hiaasen’s wicked mastery of blending real life with comic fiction, in one memorable scene she snares a bobcat hunched on a Peloton bike like Grace in Boston.)

Baked into this Wag-the-Doggish story is an affair the first lady (code name Mockingbird) is having with a Secret Service agent.

Hiassen is a longtime writer of humor, but this book is an extraordinary accomplishment, given a personal tragedy. His brother, Rob Hiaasen, was one of the journalists killed by a gunman in a newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland, in 2018. The book is dedicated to him. It’s good that he has retained a sense of humor in the wake of loss like that. (Side note: A novel that Rob Hiaasen had worked on for years was published after his death. All proceeds from Float Plan go to a group called Everytown for Gun Safety.)

As the election fades into memory — if the election fades into memory — we may all be a little hung over, needing just a we fix of politics before returning to what resembles real life. Squeeze Me will get you over the hump. A

BOOK NOTES
You don’t have to have been a supporter of Barack Obama to be dazzled by the recent video clip of him effortlessly swishing a basketball through a hoop in Michigan while on a campaign stop with Joe Biden.

Say what you want about his politics, but the former president is cool. Which reminded me of a 2018 book, Shade: A Tale of Two Presidents, (Little, Brown & Co., 240 pages). The author is Pete Sousa, who was the official White House photographer for the entire eight years of Obama’s administration. His book juxtaposes photos of Obama with tweets, articles and headlines about and by Trump, and is predictably devastating but also smart and entertaining. It is definitely not for Trump fans, but if you know someone who still has an Obama/Biden bumper sticker on their car (I still come across them), this would be the perfect Christmas gift, paired with Obama’s new memoir.

Shade was released in paperback last fall, but this is the type of book better in hardcover.

What we all should be reading for the next few weeks are books about the Electoral College in anticipation of the events of Dec. 14, but who can stomach that?

Better: Humorist David Sedaris has a new collection of previously published work: The Best of Me (Little, Brown & Co., 400 pages).

But if you are bent on staying up with the news, these are two salient books that should be read together: Why We Need the Electoral College by Tara Ross (Gateway Editions, 320 pages) and Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College by Jesse Wegman (St. Martin’s Press, 304 pages).

Incredibly, there are two other books about the Electoral College that were published this year: Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? by Alexander Keyssar (Harvard University Press, 544 pages); Presidential Elections and Majority Rule, the Rise, Demise, and Potential Restoration of the Jeffersonian Electoral College by Edward B. Foley (Oxford University Press, 256 pages).|

Don’t ever let anyone tell you traditional publishing is dead.

Featured photo: Squeeze Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Featured photo: Leave the World Behind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cuyahoga, by Pete Beatty (Scribner, 262 pages)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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