Category: Pop

The Promise of a Normal Life, by Rebecca Kaiser Gibson (Arcade, 266 pages)

The pantheon of bad mothers is crowded, from Medea to Mommy Dearest. The latest inductee is Polina, a Jewish physician and mother of two who dabbles in motherhood the way some people dabble in a hobby that they are only vaguely interested in.

Polina curdles the childhood and adolescence of the unnamed narrator of The Promise of a Normal Life, a debut novel from Marlborough resident Rebecca Kaiser Gibson. She is a perfectly coiffed, upwardly mobile chain-smoking pseudo-villain who, in her perpetual self-absorption, is unaware of how she is failing at her most important job. Her oldest daughter, sensitive and unusually perceptive, sees all.

The novel, told in first person, opens in 1967 with the narrator at age 18 en route to Israel on a ship. It is an impromptu trip during a break from the University of Sussex and marks the first time she feels the promise of the freedom of adulthood, of the glamor and adventure that might await away from the stifling control of Polina and Leonard, the narrator’s father. This is where I belong, she thinks. As it so often does in real life, reality soon rudely barges in. She is sexually assaulted by a hairdresser on the ship in an encounter that she can only fuzzily remember, having been asleep at the time.

Her meekly passive response turns out to be a pattern of her life, seemingly the result of growing up with a larger-than-life mother who had provided for her children in material things but did not bestow any emotional gifts. The reason was evident, not only in her behavior but in her words.

“Polina told me once that she’d decided, when she was in Scotland talking to some women about how they would treat the children they would have, that the most important thing was to keep your own life first. The children should stay in their place,” the narrator remembers.

That hands-off philosophy was enhanced by Polina’s employment of a housekeeper, who prepared most of the meals, did the housework and did much of the work of tending the children. When Polina did mother, she did it brusquely, as when she would bring consomme to a sick child in bed, command them to drink lots of liquids, and then depart.

Even once her daughters are young adults, they are people to command, not to enjoy. When the narrator meets the parents of the man she will marry, she is surprised by their relationship. “When I actually met her, I was struck by how much Tom’s mother seemed to admire her son. I didn’t know how to understand a mother who made room for her child’s maturity.”

And it wasn’t just Polina. When her daughter and Tom decide to get married, Leonard and Polina could not let go of their roles. “My father could barely look at me, his own child, could hardly stand to see my green eyes doting on those blue ones. Leonard could not prevent me, but he could take over,” pushing the couple to marry on the parents’ timetable.

While the narrator is a thoughtful, intelligent and self-aware young woman who finishes college and starts a career, she struggles to see how she is taken advantage of by men. The reader, as well, is not easily able to see the next trainwreck coming as the narrator navigates adulthood.

In my own family lore, there is a story we tell about my then-5-year-old son who, during an apparently uneventful movie, leaned over to his great-grandmother and said “If they don’t start blowing up stuff soon, I’m outta here.”

There will be that temptation at times for readers who grew up on Dan Brown or James Patterson, those who expect something explosive to happen in the last paragraph of every chapter, which will then yank them into the next.

The Promise of a Normal Life moves slowly; there’s not much in the way of TNT. It is a quietly revealing character study that wields its power in lyricism and detail. Gibson, a widely published poet who taught creative writing at Tufts University for 23 years, endows her narrator with her own gifts of observation and wisdom. At one point, when the narrator and her husband move to Los Angeles, she joins a synagogue having suddenly felt attached to Jewish heritage. (“Suddenly it seemed interesting, instead of ordinary and assumed. The desert dry air had given me room to imagine.”) A rabbi later tells her, “You are a mystic, a true Jewish mystic,” which in the context felt like something of a come-on, but still resembled truth.

Without spoilers it’s difficult to discuss the last quarter of the novel, but it extends to the end of Polina’s life, when her daughter, for the first time, addresses her mother by something other than her first name.

For much of the novel it is unclear just how damaging Polina was — there are hints that there might be something more than just garden-variety bad parenting involved. At the same time, the narrator is at times so fragile that it also seems possible that the hard-driving Polina will eventually be vindicated — that she wasn’t the problem, but something else was. It’s a thin mystery within the complex tapestry of this family, but it works. The Promise of a Normal Life offers anyone with a — how to put it? — challenging mother a compelling sense of solidarity. A

The Half Known Life, by Pico Iyer (Riverhead, 225 pages)

Pico Iyer is primarily known as a travel writer, but it should not be surprising that he delves into the spiritual in his latest book, given that he spends a part of each year in silent retreat at a hermitage in California. In The Half Known Life, Iyer rummages through his experiences traveling from Iran to Israel to Sri Lanka to North Korea.

The book is a travelog, of sorts, and the subtitle (“In search of paradise”) suggests that he intends to write an examination of how different religious traditions view the afterlife. But Iyer’s purpose is more complex than that.

Our longing for paradise after death is simply an extension of our longing for paradise on Earth, whether it be a place or a state of mind. He quotes Omar Khayyam, “Take care to create your own paradise, here and now on earth.” He is more concerned with how we live together in this realm, on this planet, given our vastly different perspectives on life’s biggest questions. How, he asks, can we “keep faith with even the hope of Paradise when nearly all the paradises I’d seen were, sometimes for that very reason, war zones?”

Ultimately, he offers no prescriptions, only musings, and a wealth of trivia on different cultures’ views of death and what comes after.

In Japan, for example, cemeteries are called “cities of tomorrow,” a hopeful take on human remains. Iyer writes of his Japanese wife’s custom of maintaining an altar in their home dedicated to her deceased parents, of leaving food and tea for them there every morning, and visiting their graves to tell them everything that’s going on in the family. “The doors between the living and the dead are kept open across the land, and at intervals throughout the year, lanterns are lit so the dead can make their way back to earth and look in on their much-missed loved ones.” To some Japanese, the dead are even closer to the living than they were in life.

In Sri Lanka, Iyer retraces the steps of the famed monk Thomas Merton, who was found dead in Bangkok shortly after his travels. Although a Christian, Merton had been moved by a 46-foot Buddha in deathly repose, so much so that he later wrote, “I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for.” Iyer marvels at this, “that a man who had devoted his life to the Christian God had been so stirred by the face of the Buddha, as if heaven was not the private property of any group.”

In Australia, Iyer visits the coastal city of Broome, where he is confronted by hostile Aboriginal people who resent the encroaching tourism. He notes that although a majority of Aboriginals identify as Christians, “they did not understand why Europeans needed to go into a special house to talk to God, eyes closed. For them, the promised land was nowhere but the land around them.”

And in Kashmir, the contested region which has territory that belongs to Pakistan, India and China, he visits the places that once represented earthly paradise to his mother and extended family, and muses on Salman Rushdie’s poignant question, one that can keep you up all night: “Was happiness God’s gift, or the Devil’s? He’d begun his book on Kashmir by quoting the local poet Agha Shahid Ali: ‘I am being rowed through Paradise on a river of hell.’”

And of course, he visits Jerusalem, which he has come to believe is “the place where everyday morality and religion part ways, on grounds of irreconcilable differences.” The constant tussling over holy spaces by Muslims, Jews and Christians (and within Christianity, that tussling between various denominations) renders the city a crowded and harsh cacophony that contradicts the heart of the various faiths. Jerusalem, he writes, is “a riot of views of paradise overlapping at crooked angles.” It is, he writes, “an unusually rooted place … that was always about to go up in flames.”

Iyer is a thoughtful, spiritual man of great intellect who writes beautifully, as in this description of Broome: “Nighttime clouds were illuminated by long, silent flashes, as if the heavens themselves were submitting to an X-ray.” The biographer of the Dalai Lama, he stands outside the biggest Abrahamic faiths — Islam, Judaism and Christianity — yet is reverential to religious faith of all kinds and writes respectfully even as bringing a critical eye to their battles and contradictions.

Still, the book struggled to hold my attention, as it never established a clear storyline other than the author holding forth on the myriad places he has visited; the paradise theme seems thin connective tissue that does not rise to its promise and its usual power. More memorable than Iyer’s own reflections were those of others, such as the Sufi koan about man: “Though drowned in sin / Heaven is his lot.”

Commenting on a particular type of film, Iyer writes, “they hold you for two hours with supple and constant swerves, and at the end you’re farther from a clear conclusion than ever.” The same could be said of this book. Paradise is neither lost nor found here; The Half Known Life is more of a purgatory. C+

Wolfish, by Erica Berry (Flatiron, 380 pages)

After Erica Berry was awarded a fellowship to work on a book about wolves, she took a train from Minneapolis to Portland, where she would spend a few weeks alone researching and writing in the delightful paid-for isolation awarded to writers of promise. By the time Berry had settled in her seat, I had already learned something new: that Amtrak cars are segregated into “families/couples” and “singles.” Maybe everyone in the world but me knew this already, but our brains like learning new things, and I discerned that Berry’s book about wolves and fear would be quite a trip. And it was, just not in the way that I expected.

After Berry settled down comfortably in her seat, happy to “watch the prairie buckle into the mountains” and read, she was dismayed to be joined by a somewhat threatening man who was eventually forcibly removed from the train. It was the first, it turns out, of many times that Berry felt threatened by men, causing her to move throughout the world in the emotional state of a rabbit or other small mammal that is always on cusp of being somebody’s dinner.

Enter the wolf.

More than a decade ago, Berry became interested in the politics of wolves in the West, where in some places wolves were being reintroduced to areas where they had gone extinct. (“More wolves, less politics” is actually a slogan for some wolf advocates.) Some of the wolves have been outfitted with tracking collars (despite the fact that some don’t survive the stress of temporary capture), and they had a cult following as they crossed state lines and found mates. Their exploits, and those of the people who follow them, are in fact more fascinating than much of what is found on network TV.

But Berry took it further. She started to think deeply about archetypes of wolves and why they are so embedded in our culture as animals that inspire fear, so much so that we compare terrorists to wolves. (It is a good question — why do we so frequently identify a killer as a “lone wolf” instead of, say, a lone Grizzly bear?) Wolfish is the result. The book is a gorgeously written, deeply researched and smartly plotted examination of animal fear that will be well reviewed and possibly win prestigious awards, but will be read by hardly anyone.

That’s in part because Berry is telling two painfully disparate stories: that of these beautiful, wild, unafraid creatures, and that of the crippling anxiety that seems to be part and parcel of the lives of so many young adults, especially women. In the world that Berry describes, young women are always moving through a terrifying forest with wolves around every tree; it is a story that we’ve been told since childhood, and it’s interesting to learn the origins of “Little Red Riding Hood.” (The oldest version in print dates to 1697; similar stories have long histories in China, Korea and Japan.)

And Berry does not seem to be exaggerating in terms of her own life. She has had a staggering number of threatening encounters with men, to include being surrounded by a silent group of men wearing white T-shirts (with slits for eyes) over their faces, to men who follow her in a park, whistle at her while she runs and murmur obscenities to her on a bus — to the point where she says friends have “suggested I was prone to ‘bad luck,’ as if the encounters I had were mistakes, aberrations, not just blips in the field of female — of human! — life.”

No woman, of course, should have to be subjected to constant threats and harassment, and every woman, whether or not they are as beautiful as Berry as is, has stories about feeling threatened — stories that even years later can leave us, in the language of Emily Dickenson, zero at the bone. But the narrative that Berry employs — interspersing tales of the famous wolf known as OR-7 and his travels, with stories of murdered women and children, and her own crippling fears — makes for unnecessarily dark reading, with just enough light for the occasional eye roll.

Cases in point: her agonizing over the ethics of flying to England for two weeks of wolf-watching paid for with yet another grant (“What could I observe about the wolves to justify two-pickup-truck-beds worth of sea ice melting, the amount the emissions from my round-trip seat will hypothetically finish off?”) and her guilt about calling authorities on another genuinely threatening man who showed up at her home (“It was a story about the power of my white female fear, a fear that could ignite the apparatus of a police state I had long ago come to doubt.”)

And so we go on like this for nearly 400 pages, Berry luring us forward with delectable wolf stories and treats while the reader wishes she had gotten professional help for her fear. Even her mother, it seems, has felt this way; Berry writes, “Whenever I used to tell my mother about being afraid of this or that, she would look worried,” she writes.

“How much fear should you stoke to stay alive? How much trust can you afford before it kills you?” Berry asks, and they seem to be questions she asks in her own defense. Fear is, of course, an evolutionary tool to keep us alive. It is also, like physical pain, more difficult to control once it gets past a certain point. She quotes from the Robert Browning poem “Ivan Ivanovitch,” which is about wolves attacking a family traveling by sled: “Who can hold fast a boy in a frenzy of fear?”

That poem and other stories Berry tells, such as that of a young Alaskan teacher killed by wolves in 2010, remind us that there are in fact frightening beasts in the world that most of us will spend our lives comfortably distant from, seeking adrenalin elsewhere. Wolfish plumbs the depths of fear in interesting ways, but ultimately suffers from an author too much in its grip. B+