Category: Pop

Sweet Fury, by Sash Bischoff (Simon & Schuster, 288 pages)

Check any list of the greatest American novelists and F. Scott Fitzgerald is likely in the top 10. Few of us escape high school without reading The Great Gatsby, but not all of us go on to read Fitzgerald’s next novel, Tender is the Night, published in 1934.

That puts Tender-illiterates like me at a bit of a disadvantage going into Sweet Fury, a debut novel by Sash Bischoff that revolves around a modern, feminist interpretation of Tender.

The disadvantage is not prohibitive — you can still follow the storyline, and might even emerge with a desire to visit (or revisit) all things Fitzgerald. But a fear of missing out might hang over your reading, since Bischoff admits she embedded Easter eggs — inside jokes or references — nodding to Fitzgerald and his work throughout the book.

The story begins with the clinical notes of a psychiatrist, Jonah Gabriel, who has agreed to take on a new client, a Hollywood star named Lila Crane who is about to play the role of Nicole Diver in a modern adaptation of Tender is the Night, directed by her lover. The star and the therapist have an immediate rapport once they discover that they both went to Princeton and were both fans of Fitzgerald.

Crane had decided to see therapy because of trauma she suffered in childhood. Her father was abusive and had an alcohol addiction, and he was driving drunk, with Crane and her mother in the car, when they collided with another car, killing the father.

“I want your honest opinion,” she says to Gabriel in their first session. “If someone has done something terrible to you, can you ever truly heal? Or will you always have a scar? Is there a way to erase the scar itself — and more importantly, erase that person’s power to hurt you again?”

Since Tender also involves alcohol abuse and a car wreck, Crane believes she might benefit from working out her own issues, which also, it turns out, include a past sexual assault. She enters therapy just as she becomes engaged to the man she’s living with, an A-list director named Kurt Royall, who is a powerful, attention-seeking man 18 years her senior. Her mother, not surprisingly, has concerns, even if Lila does not.

The story swivels back and forth between the therapist’s notes, Crane’s journaling and what is happening in real time as production begins on this new, empowering version of Tender. Crane is excited about the production because, as she tells Gabriel, “Our version of Tender isn’t another tragedy of the tortured white man. It’s a feminist story of healing, of reparations.”

From the first page, we’re swimming in a story within a story within a story — Tender is about a psychiatrist who falls in love with a patient, and much of that book derived from Fitzgerald’s relationship with his wife, Zelda, who had mental health issues that required psychiatric care.

But if you haven’t read the Fitzgerald novel, don’t go down the CliffsNotes rabbit hole like I did, as it will just leave your head spinning. Better to just read Sweet Fury on its own merits. That is, if you can get past the title and cover art — a silhouette of a nude woman’s body — that makes the book look like some sort of cringe bodice-ripper. (Honestly, if I’d been reading on public transportation, I would have hidden the cover, and I’m not sure if that makes me a prude or a literary snob.)

The publicity for Sweet Fury promises Gone Girl-like pivots and twists, and after a slow start these come fast and furious, making it difficult to talk about the last half of the book without significant spoilers. Let’s just say that more than one character is not the person they are set up to be; in fact, hardly anybody is.

Bischoff knows how to turn a phrase — my mind keeps returning to her description of an opulent wrap-around porch stretching into a “single, satisfied grin.” And she does an excellent job concealing the twists until their reveal; the story is well plotted and foreshadowing is light. She unpacks everything with sufficient depth at the story’s end.

If there’s a fault in these stars, it’s that Bischoff does not adequately convince us to love any of them as the story unfolds.

I never felt an emotional attachment to Lila, her mother, the scriptwriter, the therapist, the gay best friend or any of the myriad other characters. I read Sweet Fury as one watches the second season of a TV show you’ve never seen before, with clinical detachment. This is, no doubt, partly because I knew little about the book that was incessantly being referenced (even a cat is named Zelda — everything is Fitzgeraldized) but it’s also partly because, as I found out at the story’s end, much of what I thought I knew about these people wasn’t true. And you can’t love characters if you don’t know them.

That said, will I re-read it now to connect the dots I missed the first time? Yes, of course — somewhat grudgingly. And if I’d loved Lila Crane like I want to love protagonists, I’d probably read Tender is the Night, too. But at this point, that’s more time and energy than I want to invest in this particular fictional actress. At least until the movie comes out. B- —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Sweet Fury, by Sash Bischoff

The Cure for Women, by Lydia Reeder (St. Martin’s Press, 286 pages)

Given some of the past practices of medicine, bloodletting and leeches and such, it’s a wonder any of us are alive today. What’s even more disturbing is how recent some of these strange medical practices are.

Take, for example, the “rest cure for women,” a protocol of the 19th century in which women suffering from a raft of maladies — but mainly being thin and “short of blood” — were told to take to their beds, sometimes for months, where they were fed milk and raw eggs, and forbidden social interaction and “brain work.”

While many women were actively harmed by such treatments, there were far worse things done to women under the guise of medicine in that era, even by physicians ostensibly devoted to women’s health. The doctor credited with inventing the speculum, for example, once wrote, “If there was anything I hated, it was investigating the organs of the female pelvis.” This physician was a showman in the vein of P.T. Barnum, performing operations in front of an enthralled audience, sometimes with the patients (often enslaved women) awake and screaming.

All this was occurring in a century in which smart and capable women were being denied entry to medical school because of the belief that they were not intellectually or psychologically equipped for the work, even though female midwives had been delivering babies for millennia.

The first woman to graduate from an American medical school, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, was admitted by mistake — her male classmates thought they were voting on her enrollment as a joke. Blackwell and her younger sister Emily, who also became a physician, are fairly well known today for their pioneering work improving the prospects of both patients and female doctors.

But Lydia Reeder argues that a lesser-known physician, Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, also deserves history’s acclaim. In The Cure for Women, Reeder explains how Jacobi, a contemporary of the Blackwells, took on the established beliefs about women’s monthly cycles, which had been used as “evidence” of women’s inferiority, and refuted them with data.

The daughter of the New York publishing scion George Palmer Putnam, Mary showed her capacity for medicine at age 9 when, after discovering a dead rat in their barn, she asked her mother if she could dissect it. Her mother said no, and her father did not think medicine was a proper career for women, but he had published a book by Elizabeth Blackwell and so consented to let his precocious daughter work at Blackwell’s clinic.

Eventually Mary enrolled at one of the few educational opportunities available to her, the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, but she left “after she discovered she knew more about medicine than most of her instructors” and went on to graduate from a medical school in Paris. In one funny anecdote, her father sent her money there for a dress — she had to plead with him for permission to use the money to buy a microscope instead.

Upon returning to the States with a medical degree, Mary found work teaching at the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary and dedicated herself to evangelizing “a scientific spirit” among women. Unfortunately for modern sensibilities, that scientific spirit also included justification of vivisection, the dissection of live animals, which Jacobi would defend. It is, perhaps, the one area in which her thinking was not visionary, although it might have helped establish her as a serious medical mind at the time.

She went on to marry a widower, Dr. Abraham Jacobi, a leading pediatrician in New York, and shortly thereafter became pregnant and worked throughout her pregnancy — refuting in real time the prevailing thought that women were suited for domestic life and reproduction solely. She began conducting research to test and challenge views about women’s capabilities during menstruation, and also to counter prescriptions of “the rest cure” as well as other medical practices of the time. She was also an advocate of sports and physical activity — as opposed to rest — to improve women’s health.

Perhaps the best story about her is that she submitted a paper arguing that menstruation does not constitute “any temporary predisposition to either hysteria or insanity” to a prestigious Harvard University competition: the Boylston Medical Prize. Per the competition’s instructions, the entry was submitted anonymously. She won, beating out hundreds of men. The work was later published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons as “The Question of Rest for Women During Menstruation” and was widely praised.

Even as Mary advanced professionally, she was lauded publicly for being an excellent housekeeper, and she had three children, and suffered the loss of two — a daughter who died at birth and a son who died at age 7 from diphtheria — a terrible loss for any parent, but especially for two doctors who could not help their child and who wound up blaming each other. The death, Reeder wrote, created a “fault line between Mary and Abraham that would, ultimately, never heal.”

Almost 20 years later, Mary Putnam Jacobi would diagnose a brain tumor in herself, and spent the last years of her life writing a case study on it titled “Description of the Early Symptoms of the Meningeal Tumor Compressing the Cerebellum, from Which the Author Died.”

Her life was clearly extraordinary and worthy of a biography, and Reeder’s treatment is more than comprehensive — to a fault, at times.

Going back and forth between history and inventive narrative, in which Reeder imagines what might have happened in a scene, was the wrong approach for a book about women devoted to science. Their imagined thoughts and actions — such as, “Elizabeth Blackwell, M.D., paced back and forth in her drab Lower West Side apartment, stopping occasionally to glance through her parlor window at the blizzard swirling outside” — are simply unnecessary. The occasional asides into this literary construction serve no purpose other than befuddling the reader.

It is also a little odd that the central character of the book is not introduced in any substantial way until chapter 3.

The author is the great-granddaughter of a midwife who cared for women and children in rural Missouri early in the 20th century, at one point plunging her fingers down a child’s throat to remove a safety pin. That midwife, Ellen Babb, no doubt had as many fascinating stories to tell as Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, despite the vast differences in their economic circumstances and training. The Cure for Women is a tribute to both of them — and a thumb in the eye to the 19th-century male doctor who wrote, “I said I did not believe it was best either for the sick or for society for women to be doctors.”

B- —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Cabin, by Patrick Hutchison

Cabin, by Patrick Hutchison (St. Martin’s Press, 294 pages)

In 2013 Patrick Hutchison was despondent in Seattle, his dreams of becoming a writer going no further than composing marketing emails and doing other copywriting gigs. His twenty-something friends “were going off and doing ridiculous things like getting careers and advanced degrees, husbands, wives, kids, dogs, and other accoutrements of the heavy-responsibility genre.”

In contrast, Hutchison’s long-term plans “ended at knowing when the leftover Chinese food would go bad.”

One day the answer to his dilemma showed up on Craigslist: a listing for a decrepit 10×12 cabin in scenic Snohomish County, about an hour and a half drive away. The price: $7,500.

Despite not having $7,500 — or, for that matter, any handyman skills — Hutchison drove up to see the place and made an offer almost immediately. His memoir, Cabin, recounts the experience of making it habitable and in the process reinventing his life. It’s no Walden, the Henry David Thoreau classic, but it doesn’t aspire to be. It’s more a story of millennial angst in the internet age and the longing for competency, connection and meaningful work.

And, of course, nature. It wasn’t so much the cabin itself that seduced Hutchison as it was the land it was on, and the views.

“I knew people that had larger places to store their lawnmowers. Architecturally, it took inspiration from drawings of houses made by preschoolers. Box on bottom. Triangle on top,” Hutchison writes.

But it was nestled in an area that was thickly conifered, with mature trees and plentiful ferns, near the Skykomish River and an enormous waterfall that Hutchison says looked like something out of the Old Testament.

Not that the neighborhood was ideal. The street was ominously called “Wit’s End Place.” Other tiny cabins nearby were “charming in a dystopian sort of way,” and many were clearly abandoned. The driveway was basically a swamp. There was no electricity, cell service or plumbing. The closest wi-fi was at a McDonald’s 15 miles away. And there were spiders — so many spiders.

Nonetheless, Hutchison only saw its potential, both as a retreat and as an answer to incessant questions about what he was doing with his life. Fixing up a cabin in the woods seemed a pretty good answer to that. “At times, it felt like the cabin and I were partners in a sort of joint self-improvement project. When the cabin was all fixed up, maybe I would be too,” he writes.

Hutchison had friends who bought into his vision and were willing to make the trek and invest their own elbow grease to build a deck and an outhouse, among other projects. As such, this is no story of a self-made man improving his lot (literally and figuratively) in the woods.

While it’s true that Hutchison emerges as a different man at the end of the story, his cabin is not the do-it-yourself project that Thoreau’s was. Even the truck Hutchison used to haul stuff to the site was borrowed from his mother. It took a village and then some. But, to be fair, even Thoreau left Walden Pond every couple of days to eat a meal at his parents’ house and drop off his laundry, and the lot belonged to his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Hutchison is genuinely funny and brings a light touch to his story of back-breaking work, particularly when it comes to his newfound infatuation with power tools. (In one scene he tells a cashier at a hardware store that he’ll also be buying a chainsaw and says he is “half expecting balloons to fall from the ceiling in celebration of such a rad purchase.”) At the same time, he is learning of the pleasures of old ways and old things, at one point bringing to the cabin a typewriter that had belonged to his late uncle, and realizing he had no idea how a typewriter worked.

There are, of course, challenges and dangers along the way, to include mudslides and falling trees. And Hutchinson, daydreaming of the cabin while he’s at his day job, doesn’t devote his whole life to the project — he is in and out of the woods while pursuing other adventures, including travel with a girlfriend who shares his distaste for the sort of life where you moor yourself to a job and a place.

He worries as the project progresses that the tiny cabin might be getting too comfortable, even in its simplicity. And 16 pages of color photos, which show the work and the results, do in fact make the place look like what has been called “cabin porn” — daydreams of a simpler existence off the grid with a wood stove glowing and light snow falling outside well-insulated windows.

These days you can buy a brand-new tiny house on Amazon for under $10K without all the work that Hutchison undertook. But his journey wasn’t about finding a place to live so much as it was about finding a reason to live, and in this his quest was like that of Thoreau, who famously wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life….”

Like Thoreau’s cabin, Hutchinson’s cabin will not be a permanent part of his life but serves as a stationary vehicle that transports him to a different way of being. Don’t look to Cabin for advice on how to restore a dilapidated tiny house or downsize your life, but as inspiration for going down the road less traveled, a well-oiled chainsaw in hand. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Cabin, by Patrick Hutchison