Category: Pop

Class, by Stephanie Land (Atria, 272 pages)

Stephanie Land’s dream of becoming a writer came through in a big way in 2019 when she published Maid, a memoir about working as a house cleaner for people who were clearly some of the worst human beings on the planet. The book landed at a time of increasing concern about income inequality, and the single mother’s stories about scrubbing other people’s toilets to pay the bills struck a chord; it was a New York Times bestseller, was adapted for a Netflix series and praised by former President Barack Obama as one of the best books of the year.

Land is now back with Class, subtitled “a memoir of motherhood, hunger and higher education.” Because of the success of Maid, it was immediately chosen for the Good Morning America book club and will no doubt enjoy commercial success. Unfortunately, it’s an Eeyore of a book, gloomy and resentful, which detracts from the social messages that Land wants to convey.

She begins in familiar territory, which can best be described as “He done me wrong.” The predominant “he” in this case is the father of her child, Jamie, who readers of Maid will remember had little interest in being a husband or father, and who, according to Land, is the cause of many of her struggles. At the beginning of the book, he has, for example, abruptly said that he will not be able to take their daughter, Emilia, for the summer, as had been arranged. This left Land scrambling to find the vast amounts of child care that she needs because (a) she has to work, fair enough, but also (b) she is enrolled in college, a longtime dream that is contributing to her financial problems in a big way: She will soon graduate $50,000 in debt.

On top of that, she’s planning on getting a master of fine arts. “Writing,” she says, “the real writing that mattered, was meant to be done without cartoons blaring in the background and someone asking for pancakes.”
There’s nothing wrong with ambition, except for the fact that Land’s young daughter seems to be standing in the way of everything her mother wants to do. She’s 5 and is the most sympathetic character in this book. She has a father who’s constantly canceling on her — saying he can’t see her because he has to work — and a mother who keeps leaving her with babysitters or because she has to work. Children tend to love their parents no matter what, and so Emilia is not resentful like her mother, even as she gets sent to detention for being late to school, and has people fail to pick her up when Land forgets it’s an early release day.

Meanwhile, Land has many bones to pick here, not just the grievances she has with her ex, starting with her family. Her mother, she writes, resigned from parenting when Land was 21, moving to Europe to be with a new love. Her father, Land says, was not helpful at all when she called him to say she needed help paying for child care, asking if he would ask his sister to pay or contribute. The aunt is another Bad Person. “In my early twenties, she got upset over people not being grateful enough for the gifts she bought for Christmas,” Land writes. “Ever since, we received a few pairs of socks from her instead. In her defense, they were nice socks.”

Ouch. It is that kind of zinger that makes us want to put Land at arm’s length as she continues with her story of woe, lest she find something bad about us to write in her next memoir. In Land’s world, most everyone is unhelpful and unpleasant, from the guidance counselor at the University of Montana-Missoula to the judge who considers her request for a child support modification and deems her “voluntarily underemployed.”

As in Maid, Land seeks to roll back the assorted indignations of the working poor, those who, for whatever reason, are at the mercy of student loans and credit card payments, with every dollar allotted, and then some, and little more than peanut butter and grape jam in the pantry. Along the way, she wants to take away the stigma of single mothers not being “enough” for their children without a partner. And she writes movingly of trying to date with a child: “Having a kid and trying to date felt equivalent to hanging a wedding dress in my closet and bringing it out to show a person when they picked me up for the first time. Men no longer saw me as a lighthearted dating prospect. They looked at me and I could almost see the reflection of white picket fences and family dinners at five thirty in their eyes.”

But as Land rolls through her days of struggling to take care of her daughter while working and going to school (and at this point, she’s starting to shop around stories that would eventually comprise Maid), it can be difficult to sustain sympathy for her as she gets pregnant again (without being able to identify the father) and applies for another credit card. The people close to her who dare to question her choices get knifed. When one woman, who is giving Land a ride home because her car has died, says, “I’m worried you’re not making good decisions here,” Land writes about “concern trolling,” which she said wasn’t actual concern but “an opportunity to act as if they knew better than me.”

At one point, Emilia, whose tender heart has been broken by her father multiple times, says to her occasional male babysitter and her mother’s roommate, “Are you going to be my new dad?” The answer is no, but she will learn that she’s going to be a big sister, right about the time her mom learns that she’s no longer eligible for food stamps because Emilia has turned 6 (the SNAP formula says Land was able to work full-time then even though the school day was six hours). Not surprisingly, the child asks who the father of her soon-to-be little sister is. Land replies, “There’s no dad, or he’s not around anyway. The baby is just ours.”

That’s a sweet sentiment, which seems to set the little family up for happiness in the future. And despite the ongoing fight with her ex over child support, which seems to be the primary conflict the book is built around, we know how this story ends, or at least we do if we follow Land on social media. No longer a victim of men and circumstance, she is hailed as a voice of the underclass, a champion of those who are being trampled on by late-stage capitalism and predatory colleges and lenders. Nothing wrong with that — but the question remains: is this book, and her writing generally, substantially better for her $50,000 college debt? We’ll never know, nor are we allowed to ask. B-

Eat, Poop, Die, by Joe Roman (Little, Brown Spark, 253 pages)

One of the most fascinating and underrated places on the planet is Surtsey, an island off the southern coast of Iceland born in the 1960s. This land mass, the product of a volcanic eruption, was hoisted above water as if offered on a platter by Poseiden himself, offering scientists the chance to study how life develops on an inhospitable slab of rock.

It turns out that despite the grandest theories of theologians and biologists, life — on this rock, anyway — needed something humble, and kind of gross, for it to emerge and take root. It needed excrement. It was nitrogen deposited on Surtsey via the waste of visiting seabirds that began the alchemy that led to vegetation growing on the island, leading to more animals colonizing the virgin island.

The story of Surtsey and its remarkable development over the past half century begins Eat, Poop, Die, Joe Roman’s surprisingly engaging study of how the most basic of functions contributes to the world’s ecology. The book’s crude title and attendant jokes (“Perfect bathroom reading” reads one commendation on Roman’s website) detract from the seriousness of the work, and its elegance. That said, it takes some work to get the average reader interested in how excrement and rotting corpses power the planet, so perhaps a little levity (including a sideways photo of the author on the book jacket) was necessary.

Roman, a scholar at the Gund Institute for Environment at the University of Vermont, can tell you more about whale poop than you want to know: for example, “In addition to being rich in nitrogen and phosphorus, the concentration of iron in whale poop is more than ten million times greater than in the surrounding seawater in the Southern Ocean.”

Whales’ nutrient-rich excrement helps nourish microscopic animals, and when whales die and their carcasses sink to the ocean floor, they create a habitat called “whale fall” which is ecologically important because, as Roman writes, “The abyssal seafloor is a vast nutrient-poor desert.” When whales are hunted to near extinction, or stranded on beaches and their corpses blown up with explosives, the natural order is disrupted in a way that is no less destructive because it is invisible to humans.

Similarly, Roman looks at the surprising connection between salmon and forest growth in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. What do fish have to do with trees? A lot, it turns out, when the fish are the favorite meal of bears who live in those forests, as well as other creatures that eat salmon, such as eagles, mink, coyotes and wolves.

Scientists are able to determine where nitrogen in plant life originates by a chemical signature that varies by flora and fauna. And there are researchers whose jobs involve comparing the trees next to streams full of salmon with trees that grow next to salmon-less rivers. Spoiler alert: The salmon-adjacent trees “grew faster and taller — which was good for the salmon, as more shade and large woody debris provided cooler summer temperatures and river structure that aided in salmon reproduction and growth.”

The reason, scientists speculate, is the marine-derived nitrogen in the fish gets distributed in the forest through bear excrement. “The salmon life cycle and the massive pulse of nutrients the fish deliver are crucial aspects of forest ecosystems. The trees, streams, and salmon are all connected.”

Roman writes not just from a desk but from deep in the field. For his chapter on salmon he visits a salmon research station in Alaska; he travels to Surtsey, and to Yellowstone National Park to observe how the reintroduction of wolves changed the ecosystem there. As one sign in the park explains it, “Although wolves do not directly affect all life around them, their effects possibly tumble down the entire food chain. This hypothesis is called a ‘trophic cascade.’”

And don’t count the buffalo out — they have roles as groundskeepers, with their excrement depositing nitrogen and phosphorus into the soil. As bison disappeared on the prairies, so did their natural fertilization. Roman interviews a Native American who calls bison “eco-engineers” because in addition to the nutrients they leave behind, they plow the fields with their hooves. This is not a book for reading while you’re eating lunch, as I learned when coming across something called the Bristol Stool Chart, an illustrated scale of the variety of human feces, used by medical practitioners. And of course, human excrement is addressed here; mammals defecate about 1 percent of their body weight every day, with humans making about two trillion pounds of waste each year, much of which is not contributing in a positive way to the planet’s ecology. But some is — I learned, with some dismay, that some people fertilize their gardens with their own urine. (It’s called “pee-cycling,” and yes, Roman tried it, although fist bump to his family who wouldn’t let him set up the system at home or use it in their garden. Instead his urine went to a pee-cycling center in Brattleboro, Vermont.)

But the bulk of the book is about non-human animals and the largely unnoticed role their bodily functions serve in our world. While Roman is careful to note that some of the theories he writes about are unproven, he makes a convincing case that when animal populations shrink, we’d best pay attention, because there are costs other than not being able to see a certain species anymore. In centuries past, for example, John James Audubon famously described migrating pigeons as blocking out the sun; others have described rivers so dense with salmon that you could walk across the water on top of the fish.

Roman believes that replenishing depleted populations is “one of the best nature-based tools we have to face the climate crisis. Wild animals, through their movements and behaviors — their eating, pooping and dying — can help rebuild ecosystems, recycle and redistribute nutrients, keep the planet a little cooler, and address the biodiversity crisis.” We need to “rewild the world,” he says, in a conclusion that is more of an op-ed than a science book. Having established himself as an authority on poop, who are we to argue? It’s a fine book for animal lovers, climate warriors and science geeks, but otherwise may struggle to find an audience. B

A Christmas Vanishing, by Anne Perry (Ballantine, 190 pages)

Since childhood, Christmas reading has been a large part of my enjoyment of the holidays; I could quote from A Christmas Carol in grade school, and one of my favorite books is a collection of Christmas stories from celebrated authors. I start scouring new releases in the summer looking for upcoming holiday books and was hopeful when I came across A Christmas Vanishing by the late Anne Perry.

Perry, born in London and raised in New Zealand, is one of a few authors (Debbie Macomber and Richard Paul Evans among them) who churn out yearly Christmas-themed. There is an assembly-line precision about Perry’s 21 holiday offerings, which in recent years included A Christmas Deliverance, A Christmas Legacy, A Christmas Resolution, A Christmas Gathering and A Christmas Revelation — think of a noun, and Perry put “A Christmas” in front of it and turned it into a bestseller, and she would have continued to do so if she had not had a heart attack last December and died in April at age 84.

Perry is best-known as a crime writer, and the Christmas novels, set in Victorian England, follow that theme.

A Christmas Vanishing follows Mariah Ellison, a widow in her 80s (and the grandmother of a recurring character in Perry’s novels, Charlotte Pitt), on a journey from her home in London to a small rural town where she has been invited to spend Christmas with a friend and her husband. Mariah has known Sadie for a half-century but hasn’t seen her in 20 years; she remembers a falling out of some kind the last time they were together, but she can’t recall the specifics and is pleased to renew their friendship and see the town where she once also lived.

Also, “if she was being honest, she had to accept that she had nowhere else to go, which was entirely her own doing. Her daughter-in-law and grandchildren all had their own seasonal arrangements and she had not been included.”

When Mariah arrives at Sadie’s house via horse-drawn buggy (one of the occasional reminders that this novel is set during Queen Victoria’s time), Sadie’s husband, Barton, unpleasantly tells her his wife isn’t there, he doesn’t know where she is or when she’ll be back, and he’s sorry-not sorry but she can’t stay there. She goes to the house of another old friend but is told she can’t stay there either, and is sent to the house of that friend’s sister, Gwendolyn, where she finally finds a warm welcome.

Because this is a time in which there is no Nancy Grace or internet sleuths, and even Sadie’s husband doesn’t seem particularly interested in finding Sadie, Mariah struggles to assemble a search party, but soon she and Gwendolyn are joined by kindly bookstore owner Oliver, and they puzzle over the possibilities.

Did Barton kill or injure his wife? Did she take off on a lark? Was she in an accident? Has she run off with another man? Been kidnapped? The latter scenarios seem far-fetched given that Sadie is in her 70s and has no family money. The mystery deepens (as deep as this largely shallow story gets) when Oliver and Mariah learn that Barton spotted his wife, looking happy, in the window of a local vacant cottage not long after she disappeared.

There are hints that Sadie’s life was not quite what it seemed, and neither was Mariah’s. And Mariah is realizing she is trying to figure out the mystery of Sadie’s disappearance based on the Sadie that she knew long ago, not Sadie as she would be now. As the story unfolds, so do the secrets of the principal characters, and an element of danger is introduced that threatens Mariah.

“We all have things we would never want publicly known,” Oliver tells her at one point, and that was true for the author as well. In 1994 she was outed by the Peter Jackson film Heavenly Creatures as having participated in a murder when she was 15. Kate Winslet played Perry’s character in the movie, which was based on the true story of the killing of Perry’s friend’s mother. Perry is a pen name for the writer, whose given name was Juliet Hulme.

As was detailed in her obituaries, Perry, who had a chaotic childhood and struggled with mental illness, spent five years in prison in New Zealand before reinventing herself and becoming an extraordinarily successful writer, penning not just mysteries but also a series of novels about World War I. Hers is about as good a redemption story as you can get. We shouldn’t speak ill of the dead or their books, and Perry’s Christmas novels are beloved by millions. But I found A Christmas Vanishing more workmanlike than inspired, and it is a Christmas story only in that it is cold, homes are decorated and there are people roasting chestnuts on the street. C