Category: Pop

Screaming on the Inside, by Jessica Grose (Mariner, 197 pages)

Every decade or so there emerges a new book by a writer who became a mother and was clearly not up to the task. The latest in the genre comes from The New York Times’ Jessica Grose, whose Screaming on the Inside is billed as an indictment of how society treats its mothers. In fact, it’s more of an indictment of the life choices that Grose has made. This is not mommy shaming, just the facts.

Grose is an opinion writer for the Times, and also writes a newsletter about parenting. She has been yowling for several years about America’s mothers being in crisis, hence the book’s subtitle: “The unsustainability of modern motherhood.” This is a popular position in a culture that likes to aggrandize individuals’ problems into societal crises. Parenting is difficult, yes. And the pandemic added new stresses. But Groses’s assessment, which is as much a hysterical rant that probably should have remained in her personal journal, is tiresome to read and full of cringy confessions that undermine her case.

She begins by admitting that, despite covering family policy, she had not looked into the provisions of the Family and Medical Leave Act before getting pregnant at the time she took a new job. She was therefore shocked to learn that she could not just walk away from her new job when she developed debilitating morning sickness and severe anxiety (having gone off antidepressants while trying to get pregnant). She does herself no favors by saying that she “could barely leave the house because I was afraid of both barfing on the subway and sarin gas attacks,” nor by telling the story of how she was incredibly rude to one of her new editors on a work call. Not surprisingly, she was reprimanded and soon left that job.

Thus begins the pattern of the book: a tale of personal woe, followed by tales of woe from a few other women, followed by some statistics and comparisons to Europe:

“A study of around three thousand women from Norway, which has universal health care and paid sick leave, showed that three-quarters of women had taken at least one week of sick leave during their pregnancies. The median length of sick leave was eight weeks, and half of women needed between four and sixteen full weeks away from work. This is what should be standard for American mothers, too.”

We can definitely have a serious conversation about whether American companies are accommodating enough to pregnant women, but citing the number of women who take sick leave during pregnancy — in a country where paid sick leave is available — is probably not the evidence of need that Grose thinks it is.

But OK. Let’s continue to the birth of her first child and her admission that she’d barely even held a baby before coming home with one, her reluctance to breastfeed, her sad attempts to find friends who also had babies through mom groups. (“The only thing most of us had in common was that we had sex in March 2012.”) She later had to qualify her criticism, saying “This is not to say that all mom groups are judgmental and oppressive.”

Despite all the unhappiness and struggle, she then has another child, and takes a job at the Times when her daughters are 2 and 5. There, she comes under attack from the newspaper’s famously acidic commenters whose comments cause her, “in my darker moments,” to ponder the question: “Am I really somehow constitutionally unfit to be a mother?”

Well, yes and no. Obviously, there is no federal licensing for motherhood; otherwise America’s shrinking fertility rate would be even worse than it is. And she is right that mental health struggles shouldn’t be a barrier to having a family. But there is something disturbingly celebratory about how Gross talks about her mental health; in fact, one section of the book begins with the header “Celebrating my birthday with a Klonopin prescription.” This was, in part, brought on by the panic she experienced when schools and day cares shut down due to Covid-19, and a full chapter addresses the problems that the pandemic caused for parents and children.

Those problems are real and were worse for mothers who, unlike Grose, did not have jobs that could be done from home, husbands with health insurance and children’s grandparents who could help provide care. But it was a pandemic, a once-in-a-century (if that) event, so using pandemic problems as evidence of systemic failure is one more example of her flimsy evidence.

Mercifully, this is a short book, and she concludes by describing a conversation with a pregnant friend in January of this year. The friend was ambivalent about having another baby, and Grose was initially upbeat and tried to convince her friend to be happy about the pregnancy (“Once the baby is here, you’ll feel better! … Part of me wishes I had another!”) but then feels “awful that I was still conditioned to slap a happy face on her mixed feelings.”)

Instead of trying to look on the bright side, I guess we should wallow in the emotional mud with our unhappy friends. There’s a lot to be said for honest sharing, but there’s also much happiness to be found in positivity. Unfortunately, Screaming on the Inside is a collection of shared misery with a thin menu of solutions. D

Now is Not the Time to Panic, by Kevin Wilson (Ecco, 243 pages)

It’s another mundane day in the suburban household of Frances Eleanor Budge when she picks up the phone and hears a writer for The New Yorker say, “The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers.”

Frances numbly replies, “We are fugitives and the law is skinny with hunger for us,” as her daughter bangs on drums in the background and her husband makes a household repair.

After hanging up, refusing to answer the writer’s questions, Frances reflects, “Our life, which was so boring and normal, was still happening. Right at this moment, as everything was changing, it was like my life didn’t know it yet.”

Thus begins Now is Not the Time to Panic, the new novel by Kevin Wilson, whose previous work includes The Family Fang and Nothing to See Here. From that strange phone call, it’s a wild, comic ride, as Wilson takes readers back 21 years to when Frances, or Frankie, as she was called, was a teenager with a secret.

The teenage Frankie, who lived with her mom and three triplet brothers in Tennessee, was an aspiring writer with a lot of time on her hands when she met Zeke, an aspiring artist. The two bonded over animosity toward their absent fathers, their misfit natures and their boredom.

One day, while trying to think of something to do, Frankie remembered that there was an old Xerox copier in her garage that her troublemaking brothers had stolen from a supply building at the high school. It had previously only been used to photocopy the triplets’ body parts, and now wasn’t working. But Zeke figured out that it was only a paper jam, which he fixed. “This could be fun,” he says. “We could do something weird with this.”

Zeke suggested that Frankie compose a few lines, “a mystery or riddle that no one can solve,” and that he would illustrate it. Frankie complied, and Zeke produced an illustration that was equally odd, with a hellscape of shacks with roofs caving in, wild dogs, children in beds and two “giant, disembodied hands, the fingers withered and jagged, almost glowing” reaching in the direction of the children.

That night, they distributed 63 copies of the poster around town – on telephone poles, in the windows of businesses, in random mailboxes. The next day, they made 300 more. “The whole experience felt like what drugs must have felt like,” Frankie reflects. “It was the high of doing something weird, not knowing the outcome. I imagined my wild brothers had felt this so many times that they were numb to it. But for Zeke and me, well-behaved dorks, it was amazing.” It took a while, but soon a local reporter wrote about the mysterious posters, which he deemed sophisticated, suggesting the quote came from a famous French poet. Zeke and Frankie continued to distribute them, unnoticed. Theories begin to pile up. Some people said the posters were the work of a drug cult and were an ominous threat. The newspaper ran a story under the headline “Evil comes to Coalfield.” Meanwhile, other people in the town started making copies of the poster and hanging them up, too. One person was putting them on top of a water tower when he fell off and died.

Eventually, the story goes national and makes it to 20/20 and Saturday Night Live, and reporting on it wins a Pulitzer for The New York Times, and someone opens a restaurant called “Skinny with Hunger” and so forth. The “Coalfield Panic” becomes so legendary that random people start taking credit for it, but they are shown to be hoaxes, and Frankie has lost touch with Zeke and gone on to live her ordinary life. Which is why she is so unnerved when the writer for The New Yorker, an art critic, starts calling repeatedly, threatening to expose her.

On one level, this sounds like a madcap adventure, something that Christopher Buckley (Thank You for Not Smoking, Florence of Arabia) would write. But there is a poignancy that underlies the story, which is billed as a coming-of-age novel but is much more. It’s also about the source and meaning of art, and about how events from the past forever influence our life. “You hold on to something for twenty years, the expectations and possibilities bend and twist alongside your actual life,” the adult Frankie says.

While the ending wasn’t what I had hoped for (and perhaps not what Frankie and Zeke would have wanted either), Now is Not the Time to Panic was a joy ride from start to finish and moves easily through its two-decade time span like a fast-flowing river. It’s not the great American novel but it doesn’t pretend to be. It’s something even better: a novel that makes you laugh and think and is simply a pleasure to read. B+

Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng (Penguin Press, 352 pages)

Celeste Ng’s latest novel is a depressing dive into a dystopian society, but I had high hopes for it when I found a handwritten note tucked inside the copy I picked up from the library that said, “It is so, so, so good!” I have to wonder if I would have liked it more if that note hadn’t been there, messing with my expectations.

In Our Missing Hearts, the government has passed PACT, the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act, which has resulted in the banning of anything that might promote anti-Americanism and forces children of parents who don’t fully support the act to live with state-approved foster families. PACT targets Asians, particularly the Chinese; the American government blames the decade-old “Crisis” — an economic downturn marked by unemployment and poverty — on Chinese manipulation.

The story follows 12-year-old Bird, whose mother, Chinese-American poet Margaret Miu, left him and his father three years prior, after the line from her poem “Our Missing Hearts” was adopted as a slogan for anti-PACT activists. Worried that the government would take Bird away because she was perceived as a traitor, Margaret left first.

While the idea is good, its execution drags the story down. Ng (author of the adapted-for-Hulu novel Little Fires Everywhere) made some interesting writing choices in Our Missing Hearts. My biggest pet peeve is that she doesn’t use quotation marks at all, anywhere, even though the characters have dialogues. The decision struck me as somewhat arrogant, serving no purpose other than showing that Ng has become well-known enough as an author to take such liberties. But I realized I wasn’t being fair and should find out if there was a good reason for it, so, naturally, I asked Google. An article on BuzzFeed gave me the answer; Ng was asked about her style choices, specifically the lack of quotation marks. Her response:

“When I started writing the novel, I found that I was instinctively writing without quotation marks … but I had to think about why. (I’ll be honest, I usually hate when there are no quotation marks.) … I wanted the novel to feel slightly folkloric, almost dreamlike; for Bird, the events feel a little bit like stepping into a fairytale, one of the stories his mother told him when he was young. When you think of a story being told out loud, the way folktales often are … there’s a blurring between the person narrating, and the words of the story, and the things the characters say. So, removing the quotation marks helped create that effect for the reader.”

Maybe someone who is less of a stickler about grammatical rules would appreciate that artistic perspective, but strong dialogue can really move a plot along and give the characters personality, and this didn’t have any of that. In fact, my main issue with the novel is that I didn’t really care about the characters; they were flat, dull and one-dimensional. Ng switches perspective about halfway through the novel, from Bird’s point of view to Margaret’s, and while it helps explain her reasons for leaving more clearly, that emotion still isn’t there. A mother who has to leave her child should be devastated; what we see is her focusing instead on her anti-PACT mission. It’s noble, of course, but she seems almost robotic.

The character I actually liked the most was Sadie, who was removed from her home because her parents were working against PACT. At first we get to know from Bird’s memories of her; later he meets up with her on his journey to find his mother — which he seems to do only because she sent him a cryptic letter that he thinks is a request for him to find her, and not because he has a strong emotional desire to see her. He might, but the story focuses more on how he works through the clues his mother gave him to find her.

Dystopian novels are often bleak, but Our Missing Hearts was both bleak and boring. At times I didn’t even want to finish it, but it’s pretty short, and I promised to write a book review about it, so here we are.

While the concept was good, it might have been better as a short story, where the lack of character development would be less noticeable. As a novel, Our Missing Hearts is missing, well, heart. Maybe that’s the point. But the story would have been more powerful if there were more feeling behind it. C+

Novelist as a Vocation, Haruki Murakami; translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen (Knopf, 224 pages)

The career of Haruki Murakami is one of the more mystifying legends in the literary world. He’s told the story many times: how, sitting in the stands at a baseball game, he suddenly had the thought that he could write a novel, despite not having written anything much more substantive than college papers. It was, as he calls it, an epiphany. The next day, he bought a fountain pen and paper and started writing a novel at his kitchen table after he got home from work in the evening. It took six months.

That was 35 years and 25 books ago.

Everyone now trying to do the same thing (or something similar) during November for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) should know, however, that even Murakami didn’t think much of that first book, Hear the Wind Sing, of which he now writes, “What I had written seemed to fulfill the formal requirements of a novel” yet “was rather boring, and as a whole, left me cold.”

But possessed of the idea that writing a novel was his destiny, Murakami did not stay discouraged even though he wasn’t satisfied with the first draft. As he tells in his new memoir Novelist as a Vocation, he swapped the pen and paper for a typewriter and started again in English instead of his native Japanese. That limited the vocabulary available to him and forced him to write more precisely — to create, as he says, “a creative rhythm distinctly my own.”

Ultimately he rewrote the entire novel in this style and found that writing “filled the spiritual void that had loomed with the approach of my thirtieth birthday.” A year later, the book was short-listed for a prize for new writers, which he won. And Murakami Inc. was off and running, despite the disdain of some of Japan’s literary elites, one of whom has called him a “con man.”

Novelist as a Vocation recounts many of the stories that Murakami has already told, including how he got started and why he became a long-distance runner who runs every day (and a marathon every year). It also explains, in some ways, the Murakami phenomenon — why he has enjoyed enduring popular success despite a writing style that is often plain-spoken. Along the way, he offers advice to aspiring novelists, although he doesn’t seem to have a high opinion of them as a species, writing, “The way I see it, people with brilliant minds are not particularly well suited to writing novels.”

He also says, “There are exceptions, of course, but from what I have seen, most novelists aren’t what one would call amiable and fair-minded. Neither are they what would normally be considered good role models: their dispositions tend to be idiosyncratic and their lifestyles and general behavior frankly odd.” He tells the story of the 1912 meeting of Marcel Proust and James Joyce, who barely spoke to each other at a dinner party in Paris. “Writers are basically an egoistic breed, proud and highly competitive. Put two of them in the same room and the results, more likely than not, will be a disappointment.” A certain arrogance also helps novelists who succeed, he suggests.

What novelists are, besides dogged, is accommodating. They are tolerant of other novelists because, as Murakami puts it, there’s always more room in the ring. Many people write one or two novels; few do what he does: churn them out consistently. Not that even Murakami makes his sole living from writing novels — he also has done English-to-Japanese translations for 30 years.

I have always been something of a Murakami skeptic. Even his celebrated memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which I’ve read twice, seems flat to me, its sentences as matter-of-fact as a grocery list. So it was interesting to read that the author himself does not pay heed to too much of his press. “… I am, when all is said and done, a very ordinary person,” he writes. “ … Not the type to stand out when I stroll around town, the type who’s always shown to the worst table at restaurants. I doubt that if I didn’t write novels anyone would ever have noticed me.”

Also, he writes of being removed from the literary elites, having failed to win a couple of other prizes that he was shortlisted for early in his career. This has made him question the value of any prize, “from the Oscars to the Nobel.” The most important thing to have is good readers, not the acclaim of one’s peers, he says. (It’s worth noting, though, that Murakami also acknowledges that his career as a novelist might have fizzled if he hadn’t won the Gunzo Prize for his first effort.)

In short essays about his life and the craft, he goes on to muse about the importance of originality (and the difficulty of having an original style be accepted, whether in writing, painting or music); the mechanics of writing (he doesn’t work on novels unless “the desire to write is overwhelming” and instead does more mundane tasks, like translation, until that occurs); and why a scene from the movie E.T. is an apt metaphor for novelists who don’t have a lot of life experience. (Short version, you have to assemble a transmitter with an odd assortment of junk stored in the garage.)

Murakami estimates that 5 percent “of all people are active readers of literature” but those 5 percent are ardent, he says. “As long as one in twenty is like us, I refuse to get overly worried about the future of the novel and the written word.”

Perhaps the most fascinating line in Novelist as a Vocation is this: “I don’t make promises, so I don’t have deadlines. As a result, writer’s block and I are strangers to each other.” So many writers convince themselves that they need deadlines to motivate them to work, but Murakami suggests that creativity flows best without this pressure. He also doesn’t seem to put a lot of pressure on himself as far as output goes, writing only about 1,600 words a day when he’s working on a novel, with a hard stop after 10 pages, even if he wants to write more.

Interestingly, this memoir was released in Japan in 2015 and took seven years and two translators to make it to the U.S., just in time to help NaNoWriMo participants who need a jolt of adrenaline to power through. It serves that purpose well, and is also a surprisingly pleasurable read for anyone trying to understand the magic of Murakami more broadly. B+