Category: Books

No Time Like the Future, by Michael J. Fox (Flatiron, 238 pages)

If Michael J. Fox hasn’t been on your radar screen since the 1980s, you’ve missed a lot. You probably know that he has Parkinson’s disease, a diagnosis he announced in 1998, and started a foundation to fund research, and that he continued to work, acting and writing.

But because he appears eternally youthful, it’s still jarring to learn that Marty McFly, that Alex P. Keaton, is the father of four adult children and sits around mourning his empty nest. Children are time machines, he writes in his latest memoir No Time Like the Future, describing the “cruel velocity” with which our offspring catapult us into a future where, he says, “I wish away my time while I wait for my children to come and visit.”

Well. Didn’t see that coming when Fox was zipping around in Doc Brown’s DeLorean.

But Fox is now 59 and while that is young as Boomers go, he has been suffering the effects of a progressive neurological disease for 30 years, so the subtitle of this memoir is “an optimist considers mortality.” Optimism has been part of his brand since the diagnosis — his previous books were titled Lucky Man and Always Looking Up, the latter of which became a documentary called “Adventures of an Incurable Optimist.”

Lately, however, Fox says, there are days in which he wonders if he is out of the lemonade business, if it’s time to succumb to the lemons. He writes of possessing a body that has been weaponized — even with medication and regular physical therapy, his mobility and balance is so unpredictable that he is nervous about getting too close to his 90-year-old mother, for fear of knocking her over. “I love my mother too much to give her a hug,” he writes.

It’s not just Parkinson’s that’s the problem, but the chaos caused by the disease. He frequently suffers from injuries caused by falling, a finger swollen so badly that doctors feared they might have to amputate; a pinched sciatic nerve that renders him unable to go on the beach during a family vacation to the Caribbean; a broken arm that required a stainless-steel plate and 19 screws to fix. And he also suffered a tumor on his spinal cord that required a dangerous surgery two years ago.

The recounting of all these woes may seem like a proposal for the world’s worst book. Who, save the schadenfreudeans among us, wants to read 238 pages of a likeable person’s suffering? But Fox pulls it off, because the book is well-crafted, beginning and ending with a catastrophic fall, and the existential crisis that it represents, and it reveals an admirable mind, one that can fire off smart comic lines (“If Mike fell in the kitchen and no one was there to see him, would he still break his arm?”) while admitting despair.

It is the broken arm, not the disease, that pushes Fox to question whether his half-full philosophy of life is useful, to question whether being a “hopeaholic” (a term coined by artist Anna Deavere Smith) is actually harmful, both to him and to his fans.

“Have I oversold optimism as a panacea, commodified hope? Have I been an honest broker with the Parkinson’s community?” he wonders in anguish. “The understanding I’ve reached with Parkinson’s is sincere, but the expression of it risks being glib. … In telling other patients, ‘Chin up! It will be okay!’ did I look to them to validate my optimism? Is it because I needed to believe it myself?”

This is particularly relevant, because Fox’s reminiscing makes it clear that, despite his harsh trials, he dwells on a plane distant from most suffering mortals. When he drinks pina coladas in the Caribbean, he does so with Keith Richards; he is wealthy, able to afford the best of care and exotic vacations. It’s easier to view the glass as half full when it contains Dom Perignon, not vinegar.

But Fox is markedly self-aware and comes to believe that his attitude has become too cavalier, that he has spent too much time focusing on his body and its assorted travails, and that he needs to spend more time examining his mindset. He notes that while Franklin D. Roosevelt is known for saying, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” in the same speech Roosevelt said, “Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.”

I’ll not spoil the ending by revealing Fox’s conclusion, only say that No Time Like the Future is occasionally disjointed but assembles itself nicely by the end and is a surprisingly thoughtful memoir by one of America’s most beloved celebrities. Michael J. Fox is not Alex P. Keaton but for the earnestness; he is not Marty McFly, but for the zeal; but he is the rare enduring celebrity who deserves a platform, and continued applause. (His foundation has funded $1 billion in Parkinson’s research.) Still, this memoir, his fourth, is gritty and maybe not the inspiration that people newly diagnosed with Parkinson’s might want. Gift carefully. B

BOOK NOTES
Books can be the best gift — or the worst.

On the plus side they are easy to wrap and relatively cheap to mail. You have literally millions of choices and are not limited to books published recently. Vintage signed copies of an author someone loves makes a wonderful gift (even if it’s inscribed to someone else), which leads to another plus: Books endure and are a tangible sign of your affection.

And a gift book can easily be made to pop with a few thoughtful additions, such as a book light to attach for night reading. (Note to my mother: I am all about the fingerless gloves imprinted with passages from A Christmas Carol on the literati website Storiarts.)

But a book is only a good gift if chosen with a high degree of sensitivity. How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi (One World, 320 pages), is popular this year, but it’s difficult to give because of the implication. Same with Joel Osteen’s Empty Out the Negative (Faithwords, 160 pages) or any kind of self-improvement book. Novels, too, tough. For a few years, I tried giving friends a copy of the best book I’d read that year but found they don’t always share my enthusiasm. And J.K. Rowling has a new children’s book out, but we have to tiptoe around her this year.

That said, there are some books that are pretty much guaranteed to please people in certain categories. Below is a roundup of suggestions from a serial book giver.
For Democrats: A Promised Land, by Barack Obama (Crown, 768 pages) or My Own Words by Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Simon & Schuster, 400 pages)
For Trumpy Republicans: Liberal Privilege by Donald Trump Jr. (self-published, no word count available) or Live Free or Die by Sean Hannity (Threshold, 352 pages)
For Never-Trump Republicans: It Was All a Lie, How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump by Stuart Stevens (Knopf, 256 pages) or Reaganland: America’s Turn Right, by Rick Perlstein (Simon & Schuster, 1,120 pages, not a typo)
For Health Geeks: Clean, the New Science of Skin by James Hamblin (Riverhead, 288 pages)
For Nature Lovers: What It’s Like to Be a Bird, by David Allen Sibley (Knopf, 240 pages) or The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, (Greystone, 288 pages)
For Shakespeare Buffs: Shakespeare in a Divided America by James Shapiro (Penguin, 320 pages)
For Beatles Buffs: 150 Glimpses of the Beatles, by Craig Brown (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 592 pages)
For Young Children (and Their Parents): No More Naps! by Chris Grabenstein (Random House Books for Young Readers, 40 pages)
For Animal Lovers: Dog Songs by Mary Oliver (Penguin, 144 pages) or Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life by John Gray (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 128 pages)
For Anyone Who Loves Christmas: Christmas at the Vinyl Cafe by Stuart McLean (Penguin, 272 pages) or A Literary Holiday Cookbook by Alison Walsh (Skyhorse, 272 pages)

Featured photo:No Time Like the Future, by Michael J. Fox

A User’s Guide to Democracy, by Nick Capodice and Hannah McCarthy (Celadon, 349 pages)

If there’s anything we can take away from the 2020 election, it’s that everyone’s an expert on American democracy. In their own minds, anyway.

Your third cousin twice removed, the guy who comments on everything you post on Facebook or Twitter, and your father (especially your father) know exactly how this republic is supposed to work, and how we should keep it. This is because for many of us an alarming amount of time has transpired since we last took an American history class, and we weren’t paying that much attention anyway.

Enter Nick Capodice and Hannah McCarthy, hosts of NHPR’s Civics 101 radio show and podcast, who propose to correct this widespread trend of pontification without facts. Their A User’s Guide to Democracy: How America Works may not be the best book for holiday gift giving, as any recipient might perceive it as an insult, but it’s a delightful handbook of everything you used to know and largely forgot, plus a generous serving of interesting trivia about politics and players. An added bonus is that the book is a paperback, as any kind of user’s guide should be so you can highlight without guilt.

A User’s Guide to Democracy is basically a civics class, designed to equally inform and amuse. The authors are aided in this quest by Tom Toro, a cartoonist for the New Yorker, who puts a wry spin on the information. (Example: the cartoon illustrating a section on who can be a U.S. senator — which notes that only 10 Black Americans have served in the Senate — shows a white guy carrying a briefcase confronting a metal detector and melanin detector.)

It begins with an exploration of what the legislative, executive and judicial branches of the government do, how they came to have these powers, and what they actually achieve. (Not as much as you might think. “Of all the bills and resolutions proposed in the House, about 3 to 5 percent become law. And that low percentage has been pretty standard ever since we got on this merry-go-round in 1789,” the authors write.)

From there, they explore federalism and the eternal tug-of-war for power between the federal government and the states. The authors see it as fraught co-parenting and understand that despite its fractious history this is the sort of subject that makes readers’ eyes glaze over. “We know you skimmed this section,” they write at the end of the chapter.

The reward for getting through it, however, is a base of understanding that is useful for exploring the stuff that is most relevant right now: elections and how they work. “The nation’s myriad voting systems and mechanisms are a source of perpetual confusion, fury, and mistakes. Methods vary from town to town, state to state. And then there’s that ‘wait, what?’ known as the electoral college — a last-minute additional to the Constitution that has tormented us ever since.”

Capodice and McCarthy do a fine job of explaining why 270 electoral votes on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December decide the presidential election and why the founders thought this so necessary. (It was essentially because although they believed the people — the ‘people’ being white landowners, of course — should make that choice, they feared America devolving into some sort of “mob-ocracy.”)

“These electors were to be men of high virtue, men who could see the high virtue and moral integrity in a candidate, and cast their vote for him regardless of how the proles voted.”

The authors then escort the reader through an entertaining tour of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and its amendments, and Supreme Court cases they believe everyone should know. The most critical reader will have to hunt hard for anything that smacks of political bias; Capodice and McCarthy may show their hands ever so slightly in their interpretation of Citizens United v. FEC and a few other places, but never worryingly so; the reader emerges with a sense that A User’s Guide to Democracy is a solidly nonpartisan read, a relief.

Even an appendix, in which they offer presidential fun facts, intends to amuse, not enrage, although I suppose supporters of President Donald Trump could perceive bias in the fact that they choose to include about him: “He is the first president since Polk not to have a pet.”

Overall, the book is a fresh take on an old subject, and wildly relevant. It won’t elevate the authors to the ranks of storied historians such as Doris Kearns Goodwin or Jon Meacham, but will appeal to people who don’t even know who Goodwin and Meacham are, which is to say the vast number of Americans who participate in its democracy. Or talk about it from their armchairs, anyway. B

BOOK NOTES
In normal years, a good use of national book prizes is to arm yourself with a bit of knowledge in advance of holiday parties.
This gives you an arsenal of small talk that goes beyond the weather, even if you haven’t read the books in question, since probably no one you will encounter has read them either. If nothing else, you can amuse yourself by conducting a small poll of how many people even know of the existence of the books atop the elite lists, such as the New York Times’ list of the most notable books of the year, or the Booker Prize.
This not being a normal year, you may not have this opportunity, but it’s still good to know what the elites consider the best books of the year, if only to snicker at the lists. Cheryl Strayed did this on Twitter recently, when she noted that her bestseller Wild (Vintage, 336 pages) was left off the Times list in 2012, as was Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (Crown, 422 pages). Given the long legs of those titles, among the most successful books that year, year-end lists deserve our skepticism.
That said, here are the big-name winners announced in November; all work cited here is the paperback version, if available.
The Booker Prize: Douglas Stewart forShuggie Bain, a novel based on the author’s childhood in Glasgow, Scotland, with a mother battling an alcohol addiction (Grove Press, 448 pages).
National Book Award for fiction: Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu (Vintage, 288 pages): “Generic Asian man” discovers secret history of Chinatown and his own family history.
National Book Award for nonfiction: The Dead Are Arising, the Life of Malcom X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne (Liveright, 640 pages): Thirty years of research inform this biography on a controversial civil-rights leader.
The New York Times chooses 100 notable books of the year (making it even more perplexing that they missed Wild and Gone Girl), and they’re not ranked. You can see them all at nytimes.com/interactive/2020/books/notable-books.html but be forewarned: Even if you read a book a week like Bill Gates, this list will make you feel like the most uninformed person on the planet.

Books

Author events

• TY GAGNE Author presents The Last Traverse. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Online, via Zoom. Wed., Dec. 9, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• ALKA JOSHI & SARAH MCCRAW Joshi presents The Henna Artist and McCraw presents The Wrong Kind of Woman. Hosted by Bookery in Manchester. Online. Tues., Dec. 8, 6 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

• THERESA CAPUTO the star of TLC’s Long Island Medium will present “Theresa Caputo: The Experience Live” at the Capitol Center for the Arts (44 S. Main St. Concord, ccanh.com) on Wed., April 7, 7:30 p.m. Tickets start at $39.75 (with option for a VIP Photo Op for an additional $49.95).

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.

Writing

• POSTCARD POETRY CONTEST Peterborough Poetry Project seeks submissions of original poems written on picture postcards for an upcoming anthology. Deadline is Dec. 31. Visit peterboroughpoetryproject.org/contests for more information.

• CALL FOR BLACK WRITERS New Hampshire-based theater company and playwright collective New World Theatre announces an open call to Black writers to submit monologues that reflect their personal experience of living while black, to be published in an anthology titled “08:46.” The deadline for submissions is Jan. 1, 2021. Visit newworldtheatre.org/08m46s.

Featured photo: A User’s Guide to Democracy

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