Category: Pop

The Lost Letters from Martha’s Vineyard, by Michael Callahan (Mariner Books, 293 pages)

The quintessential beach read doesn’t have to have a beach in the title or cover art, but it helps. Just ask Elin Hilderbrand, the queen of beach reads, who recently announced she’s retiring from the genre because she has “run out of really good ideas.” Maybe Michael Callahan can step into the void.

Callahan, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, seems an unlikely author to produce a beach read, but that’s what The Lost Letters from Martha’s Vineyard is, despite its aspiring to be a Gone Girl-like thriller. It checks all the boxes: Island in the title. A beach on the cover. Plucky heroine, “roguish” love interest. Chowdah. Plus dueling timelines that go back and forth between the 1950s and 2018, just to make sure we’re paying attention.

The premise is intriguing enough: Kit O’Neill is a single woman who works for a TV star in Manhattan. After her parents died, she and her older sister were raised by the grandmother they called Nan in a roomy suburban colonial in Westchester County. The young women adored their grandmother and were devastated when she died, but it has fallen to them to clean out her house and ready it for sale, which they are reluctantly doing.

Cleaning out the attic, Kit works through the usual stuff of attics — dusty boxes filled with Christmas ornaments, old curtains and bills, yellowed photographs, all familiar. And then she finds a box full of curious things: a playbill from a 1959 production at the Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse featuring an actress called Mercy Welles, a couple of matching shells, a prize ribbon, and a photo of her grandmother with her arm around a man that Kit doesn’t recognize.

Intrigued, Kit takes the box downstairs and does a Google search for Mercy Welles — and among the results, she finds an article called “The Strange and Curious Case of Mercy Welles,” which detailed the mysterious disappearance of a Hollywood actress at the start of a promising career. There was a photo of this Mercy Welles: It was Kit’s grandmother, Nan.

Before Kit can recover from the shock, the author swoops us back to May 1959 to meet Mercy, a winsome young woman from the Midwest whose real name was Edith. “She was twenty-six but feared she looked 30. The industry did that to you. With her green eyes, pale skin, and wavy, honey-blond hair, she knew she was objectively pretty. It did little to assuage the paranoia.”

For all her insecurities, Mercy had gone to Los Angeles seeking a career and quickly became a success, getting engaged to a film producer and nominated for an Oscar as a best supporting actress within three years. But things weren’t good with the fiance, and at the suggestion of a friend, she made plans for the two of them to take a short vacation in New England. Mercy knew nothing about Martha’s Vineyard but imagined a week there in spring to be something like a travel brochure: “a fireplace, steaming mugs of cider, soft cashmere sweaters, a walk hand in hand by the water.”

Then she found her fiance at a hotel with another woman. The romantic vacation was off, but Mercy went to Martha’s Vineyard anyway to figure out her next steps. And within days, she had rented a cottage on the island for the entire summer and was befriending the locals.

Back to the future, in 2018, Kit turns investigator, thanks in part to the celebrity journalist she works for, who is intrigued by the story and is fine with Kit taking off to Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Massachusetts to try to unravel the mystery of how her grandmother sneaked out of fame’s glare and took to raising kids in anonymity in Rye, New York.

With some lucky breaks, she tracks down an old roommate of her grandmother’s, with whom Mercy had corresponded while she was in Martha’s Vineyard. (Not only was there no internet, but there was also not even an analogue telephone in her cottage, leading Mercy to write to the friend, “we’ll have to communicate the old-fashioned way, via correspondence. How very Jane Austen it all will be!”)

Then we’re back to Mercy, who was not quite as anonymous as she thought she would be on Martha’s Vineyard, as many of the islanders had seen the film for which she’d earned an Oscar nomination. As her summer unfolds, we learn about those mementos that her granddaughter will eventually find, as she becomes friendly with a gruff oysterman and with a young Black musician and playwright, and eventually becomes entangled in a crime involving the most famous family on the island.

And on it goes, back and forth between young Mercy and young Kit, as the riddles of the story are somewhat blandly unspooled. The author spent time at a writers’ colony on the island, and knows it well — perhaps too well, as at times he seems driven to mention every village and restaurant. Perhaps he plans to do for the Vineyard what Hilderbrand has done for Nantucket.

As beach reads go, The Lost Letters from Martha’s Vineyard does not disappoint, but it does in the places where striving to be something more. B- —Jennifer Graham

There Was Nothing You Could Do, by Steven Hyden (Hatchett, 272 pages)

When Steven Hyden was 6 years old, he found a cassette tape in the glove box of his parents’ car and asked his dad to play it. When the sound came through, after precisely nine seconds of silence, it was “my personal ‘big bang’ moment,” Hyden writes. “All these years later, I am still chasing the rush of hearing that titanic BOOM! in my father’s car.”

The artist was Bruce Springsteen; the album Born in The U.S.A., issued 40 years ago this year.

There Was Nothing You Could Do is Hyden’s exegesis of Springsteen’s impact — in Hyden’s own life and in the country, focusing on Springsteen’s best-selling album, released in 1984. The title is a line from the song “My Hometown,” the last single released from “Born in the U.S.A.” The subtitle references “the end of the heartland.” But don’t be scared off by that. While there is some politically tinged commentary, as has always accompanied Springsteen’s work, it’s mostly a book about music.

First and foremost, Hyden is a fan, although his fandom had an inauspicious beginning, coming as it did in childhood. Kids loved Born in the U.S.A. “for the dumbest possible reason — because we heard the songs constantly. That’s all it takes to appeal to little kids,” he writes. “Kids my age weren’t brainwashed, exactly. We were Boss-washed.”

It wasn’t as if that’s all he listened to, however; Hyden’s examination of the Boss-washing of America detours into other culturally significant pop musicians: Michael Jackson, Prince and Madonna (all of whom comprise “the big four” of the 1980s); as well as Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan. Springsteen, he writes, was something of a combination of the latter two: “… he could move like Elvis and write like Dylan. The pelvis and the brain had been fused into one.”

A critic for the entertainment website Uproxx and the author of previous books on music (Twilight of the Gods and Your Favorite Band is Killing Me), Hyden brings encyclopedic knowledge to the topic, and as such, There Was Nothing You Could Do sometimes reads like an encyclopedia, as when he lists the various iterations of songs that were proposed for Born in the U.S.A. when the album was under development. Herein he runs into a problem: For the Springsteen fanatic — and they are legion — much of this material might induce a yawn.

There’s a lot of material that seems better fit for a blog, such as digressions into the author’s fantasies: what would have happened, say, if Springsteen had drifted from the lane of heartland rock to straight-up country music, or had put out another album in 1985 when Springsteen mania was at its peak. (He even proposes a playlist for this.) And Gen Z might raise a collective eyebrow to Hyden pronouncing Springsteen more of a “national monument than a pop star” at the age of 75. For all of their success, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band never had a No. 1 hit.

Still, despite some vaguely silly asides, Hyden does a good job of explaining the Springsteen phenomenon as he delves into stories that relate specifically to Born in the U.S.A., such as how the “Dancing in the Dark” music video was made, and how it was received.

The video, directed by filmmaker Brian De Palma, shows Springstreen awkwardly dancing at a concert with Friends actress Courteney Cox (relatively unknown at the time). It “undeniably made him more famous in the short run, and it unquestionably made him easier to make fun of in the long run,” Hyden writes. The video has become a popular GIF and “personifies everything that is corny about Bruce Springstreen and almost nothing that is cool about him.”

But it could have been worse, Hyden reveals. In another video that was made and ultimately abandoned, Springsteen “looks like a mime attending a Jazzercise class,” he writes.

Hyden is at his best when he strings together snapshots from Springsteen’s life, from his troubled relationship to his father to the existential struggles that inform so many of his lyrics, and connects them to the singer’s appeal. “If you want to see the emotionally repressed man in your life cry — a stoic father, an unflappable granddad, a weird uncle, an immature brother — send him to a Bruce Springsteen concert,” Hyden writes.

Toward the end, he examines the controversy that erupted from the Super Bowl Jeep commercial that angered both conservatives and liberals in 2021. It was indicative of America’s deep political divide that a commercial inviting Americans to “meet here in the middle” irritated so many people. “‘The Middle’ was designed to please exactly no one,” Hyden writes. “In that way, Bruce did manage to unite red and blue America, ironically, their condemnation of him.”

Hyden did not interview the Boss for this book, although he’s been within 50 feet of him, at a concert where he obtained special press seating. His reporting comes from previously published articles, Springsteen’s autobiography and other books. and so much of this information is already out in the world; this is just an artful rearrangement of music history. For the casual fan, the minutiae might be too much. But Hyden is a skilled wordsmith, and There Was Nothing You Could Do is a surprisingly breezy read, despite the ominous title. It’s a sort of love letter we all might write to our favorite pop star if we had the time and skill. B-

The Demon of Unrest, by Erik Larson (Crown, 497 pages)

It may be an egregious conflict of interest for a native South Carolinian to review any book about the onset of the Civil War, given the Palmetto state’s outsized role in that conflict. So take everything I say here with a grain of grits.

But Erik Larson has produced a masterful work in The Demon of Unrest, his narrative history of one of the most consequential five months this country has seen: the time period bookended by the election of Abraham Lincoln on Nov. 7, 1860, and the shots fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. We all know generally how the story began and ended. Larson fills in the details, by presenting the stories behind the stories, in rich detail. Incredibly, he manages to make the story suspenseful.

Not that this hasn’t been done before — the Titanic movie was suspenseful, and we knew how that ended, too. But Jack and Rose were fictional characters, their travails invented by James Cameron. For The Demon of Unrest, Larsen combed through realms of historical documents and journals and reconstructed the minutiae of the lives of leading figures in the Civil War, some of whom, like Abraham Lincoln and Mary Boykin Chestnut, are well-known; and others, who may not be quite as familiar.

He then artfully assembled the information and, instead of trying to write history, he just told stories — stories that explain the onset of the Civil War better than any AP history course ever could.

Thousands of books have been written about Lincoln; NPR once reported that Lincoln is only second to Jesus of Nazareth in the number of books written about him. So for serious Lincoln fans, The Demon of Unrest may not bring much new information to their table in this deeply sympathetic portrait of the 16th president. And I would be remiss to not point out that this book is not kind to the South, focusing as it does on letters and speeches that make clear that the conflict hung on slavery, not states’ rights. (Although there was a Confederate officer in South Carolina who was literally named States Rights Gist — mercifully, the man only went by “States” and the name seems to have died on the battlefield with him.)

Even Mary Boykin Chesnut, the Civil War diarist who was the wife of a wealthy planter, does not come off looking great, though her writing is generally acclaimed and was the basis of a book that won a Pulitzer Prize for history. We may not cheer when her Mulberry plantation is desecrated by Union soldiers, but neither do we weep.

That said, Chesnut is not presented as abjectly villainous, as are Edmund Ruffin and James Hammond, two pro-slavery and pro-secession Confederates whose beliefs did not age well and whose deeds were abhorrent even for their time.

Hammond, for example, sexually abused people he enslaved and also four under-aged nieces; he wrote unashamedly about his exploits in his journals. There was a great scandal when the relationship with the nieces came to light and Hammond retreated from public life for a while but later, incredibly, was returned to public office in South Carolina. Ruffin, a Virginian, was famously assigned to fire the first shot on Fort Sumter. He did so after dining the night before on cheese and crackers, and sleeping on “a pallet under two thick blankets,” still dressed in his clothes, because he was so excited for the war to start.

There are heroes in The Demon of Unrest, however, apart from Abraham Lincoln; most notable is Major Robert Anderson, the commander of Fort Sumter, the small island in Charleston Harbor where the first shots of the war were fired. Anderson is heroic, despite having once been a slaveholder, not only because he was on the right side of history, but also because he remained loyal to the Union despite his deeply conflicted feelings about the impending war.

He was, for example, sympathetic to various complaints of the South, and he was friends with General P.G.T. Beauregard, South Carolina’s military commander. The two men had to navigate the increasing military hostilities amid a friendship that began at West Point. They were unfailingly solicitous to each other in their correspondence, even as they were making preparations for their respective forces to do battle.

One of the starkest takeaways of the book is how vitriolic the South had become not only to the union but to everyone in the North. And they especially hated people who lived in New England. William Russell, a war correspondent for the London Times, was reporting in the colonies and wrote, “Whether it be in consequence of some secret influence which slavery has upon the minds of men or that the aggression of the North upon their institutions … certain it is there is a degree of something like ferocity in the Southern mind toward New England which exceeds belief.”

One might say a vestige of that remains in the South’s animosity toward certain New England sports teams.

Larson ends his story on April 18, 1861, but includes an epilogue that gives the post-war outcomes of all his major players. The Demon of Unrest adds to his compendium of lengthy narrative histories that include his treatment of Winston Churchill and the London Blitz, the Galveston hurricane of 1900, and the build-up to World War II under Hitler’s Germany.

His books are exhaustive, and as such, some consider them exhausting, but he performs a kindness for the reader by formatting the stories in short chapters, some only four or five pages. They are the sort of books best read over the course of a year, not over the course of a vacation, and require a high degree of interest in the subject matter. But nobody does it better when it comes to putting readers in the trenches of history, in this case with cannonballs whizzing over our heads. A —Jennifer Graham