Category: Pop

Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Ballantine, 384 pages)

You know when a book’s protagonist is really hard to like but, for reasons that you can’t quite understand, you root for her anyway? That is Carrie Soto.
When we meet Carrie, she’s 37 and has been retired from professional tennis for six years. After watching Nicki Chan match her Grand Slam record, she decides to come out of retirement and win back her spot at the top of the tennis world.
Taylor Jenkins Reid has created a character in Carrie who is so real, I keep expecting her to show up in daily sports headlines. But her name appears in fictional media stories time and again, as Jenkins Reid uses sports commentary and news articles to help shed light on what the world thinks of Carrie. And the world sees her exactly as she is: supremely talented but ruthless. In fact, she was given the nickname of “the Battle-Axe” when she was in her prime.
We see some of that ruthlessness during a press conference that takes place during her first event back, the Australian Open. One of the reporters asks if there’s truth to her comeback being a stunt. Carrie responds, “I’ve proven so far that my game is outstanding. So everyone can whine and moan all they want about me being here, but I’ve earned the right.”
Another reporter asks about her upcoming match, to which she replies, “I’m gonna crush Carla Perez and anyone else I play on my way to the final. I’m going to hold their beating hearts in my hand.”
That’s Carrie, inside and out. She’s as abrasive internally as she is externally; it’s not just a show for the media. She’s hard on everyone else, and she’s equally hard on herself. We see this in the thoughts that permeate her mind during her games, including during a tight match against Natasha Antonovich, one of her more formidable rivals.
“I do not look at my father. I do not want to see the worry in his eyes. I tell myself: Do not let her win this set. You are either a champion or a ****up. There is no in-between.”
Rarely, we see Carrie’s vulnerability. She puts a hard wall up against Bowe Huntley, a fellow tennis pro with whom she’d gotten too close to in the past. She has the chance to train with him again, and she imagines a scenario in which she does let him back into her life.
“He’ll say something wonderful at some point, and I’ll start to believe he means it, despite all evidence to the contrary. And then I’ll start to like him or love him or feel something that I swear I’ve never felt before. And then one day, when I’m in too deep, he’ll stop liking or loving me, for one reason or another. And I’ll be left with a hole in my heart.”
Also softening the storyline is Carrie’s relationship with her dad and coach, Javier, a former pro himself. Their relationship, at first, seems all business; when Carrie trains with him as a child, Javi is demanding and has what some might see as unrealistically high expectations. But as the story goes on, we see how deeply he loves her and just wants her to be happy. And Carrie’s feelings for him change, seeming to soften over the years. She had fired him as her coach during her pre-retirement career, but she agrees to work with him for her comeback. Javi becomes a likable character, an endearing foil to Carrie’s hard-headedness.
Carrie Soto is Back is very much about tennis, but don’t let that stop you from picking it up, even if you care nothing about sports in general or tennis in particular. I’ve never played tennis, never watched more than a few minutes of tennis, and never really cared to. But Carrie is tennis, and who she is is expressed through her intense tennis practices, tennis games and tennis relationships.
It helps that Jenkins Reid has done her homework. According to an Aug. 29 interview on The Cut, Reid has played tennis for fun, but “I don’t think I’ve ever won a game, let alone a set or a match. … I had to learn it all for this book, and I’m very insecure about it. Did I learn it right? I don’t know, guys. I’m an imposter. I’m trying really hard. I’m trying to learn as much as I can so that I can give you a good time.”
Jenkins Reid has done just that. Carrie Soto is Back is a good time, not in spite of Carrie’s brashness — or the intense focus on tennis — but because of it. A-

Sacred Nature, by Karen Armstrong (Knopf, 224 pages)

In the opening to Sacred Nature, Karen Armstrong tells a story of visiting a British library to look at original manuscripts of the poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge and John Keats. She was deeply moved by the visit, which she described as “a kind of communion.”

“I was looking at the moment that these poems, which were now part of myself, had come into being. I did not want to analyze the manuscripts. I simply wanted to be in their presence.”

Today, she is troubled by the people who walk through museums seeming more interested in taking photos and selfies than allowing themselves to become absorbed in the extraordinary things stored there. This tendency is also reflected in our relationship to the natural world, which Armstrong says has become an irrelevant backdrop in our busy lives. She quotes Wordsworth to describe this: “light and glory die away / and fade into the light of common day.”

It’s not all because of social media. In fact, the disconnect between humans and nature can’t be fully explained without also explaining the ways in which Western culture dissociated from nature when it embraced monotheistic religions.

The ancient Egyptians believed the annual flooding of the Nile was a “divine event,” as was the rising and setting of the sun; as such, it was near impossible to ignore Mother Nature, who could, at any moment, be ready to unleash divine wrath. As science and theology ran down separate paths that grew further apart, the thought of nature being somehow divine, or even vaguely important, was swept aside as dusty myth.

Armstrong wants to change that, by gleaning wisdom from the myths and practices of the Axial Age, 900 to 200 BCE, a time she says was “pivotal to the spiritual and intellectual development of our species.”

The religions of that time, including Confucianism, Daoism, Hinduism and Buddhism, had practices that can profoundly benefit us today if we can look beyond our modern view of a myth as being a fabrication, a “charming story,” and instead look at the meaning of the myth and allow it to be a guide. Yes, that is Oprah-level malarky, but hear her out. “A myth is true because it is effective,” she writes.

Armstrong begins by exploring the Confucian belief in “qi,” the energy that links all life, animal or plant, human or divine. Interestingly, Chinese religions are unlike others because they have no creation story, no God-creator, but the opposing forces of yin and yang. (They also were among the first to articulate what is known in Christianity as the Golden Rule.)

Early Buddhism, too, taught that enlightenment could be achieved in not just human beings but was “inherent in plants, rocks, trees and blades of grass.”

Armstrong walks through practices of other ancient modern religions, including the respectful rituals of animal sacrifice (many of the ancients who practiced it would be horrified by our mass slaughter of animals today, she says) and the practice of kenosis, or “anatta,” the “emptying” of the self required in many faiths. St. Paul, Armstrong notes, used the language when he wrote that Christ had “emptied himself” on the cross.

Although Armstrong makes clear the ways that Christianity dissuaded people from seeing nature as sacred, there have been exceptions. A disciple of St. Paul called Denys saw the natural world as revelatory of God, believing “We can only intuit God’s presence through the veils of natural objects, which conceal as much as they reveal. If we could see God clearly, it would not be God. But if we learn to contemplate nature correctly, we find that the tiniest particle of soil can yield a glimpse of the ineffable divine.”

At the end of each chapter, Armstrong offers what she sees as “the way forward.” Her recommended practices include altering our perception of “God” to be not a male dwelling apart from the Earth, but a “dynamic inner presence that flows through all things”; embracing not only stillness and silence, but images of suffering in order to develop compassion; developing our own “Five Great Sacrifices” similar to Hindu practice; the ritual practice of gratitude for the natural world that sustains us; and adopting the Indian rule of “ahimsa” or harmlessness that holds every creature deserves to live, or at least not to suffer. (The Jains took this to the extreme, believing that even stones were capable of pain.)

Regrettably, there is an overarching preachiness in Sacred Nature with regard to deepening “our spiritual commitment to the environment” that will repel some readers.

“Recycling and political commitments are not enough,” Armstrong says, later adding, “We must re-form our attitude to nature and that will entail sacrifice. We can no longer board airplanes, drive our cars or burn coal with our former insouciance.”

You can agree with her completely but still wish for a book that is more poetry, less sermon. Although it is an interesting compilation of major religious traditions’ teachings on the natural world, Sacred Nature will appeal mostly to those who already share Armstrong’s views. B-

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Book Events

Author events

• JOSH MALERMAN, a horror novelist, will be at Gibson’s Bookstore (45 S. Main St., Concord, 224-0562, gibsonsbookstore.com) to presentDaphne on Thursday, Oct. 13, at 6:30 p.m.

• MELODY RUSSELL will sign and discuss her book Noni and Me: Caregiving, Memory Loss, Love at Toadstool Bookshop (12 Depot Square in Peterborough, toadbooks.com, 924-3543) on Saturday, Oct. 15, at 11 a.m.

• RICHARD LEDERER will discuss and sign his books about language at Gibson’s Bookstore (45 S. Main St., Concord, 224-0562, gibsonsbookstore.com) on Monday, Oct. 17, at noon.

• JOHN IRVING The Historic Music Hall Theater (28 Chestnut St., Portsmouth, 436-2400, themusichall.org) will host novelist and Exeter native John Irving to present The Last Chairlift, at the Music Hall on Tuesday, Oct. 18. Tickets are $49 and include a book voucher.

History, stories & lectures

• BRET BAIER, the Fox News Chief Political Anchor and author of several books, will discuss his career in media and news journalism, followed by a book sale and signing, on Saturday, Oct. 15, at 7:30 p.m. at the Palace Theatre (80 Hanover St. in Manchester; palacetheatre.org). Tickets start at $59.

Poetry

• GAIL DiMAGGIO and KAY MORGAN hosted by the Poetry Society of NH at Gibson’s Bookstore (45 S. Main St., Concord, 224-0562, gibsonsbookstore.com) on Wednesday, Oct. 19, from 4:30 to 6 p.m.

Writer events

• THREE-MINUTE FICTION SLAM Monadnock Writers’ Group is hosting its regional Three-Minute Fiction Slam on Saturday, Oct. 15, at 9:45 a.m. at the Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Prizes will be awarded to the top three winners. The first-place winner will advance to the statewide finals and a chance to win $250. Everyone is invited to take part in the free competition by either participating or observing the fun. The competition challenges writers to perform original pieces of fiction in three minutes or less before an audience and a panel of judges. The regional event is part of an annual competition sponsored by the New Hampshire Writers’ Project. See monadnockwriters.org.

• TENACITY PLYS and JULES PERLARSKI host a craft class on nonlinear storytelling for all at the Bookery (844 Elm St., Manchester, 836-6600, bookerymht.com) on Saturday, Oct. 22, at 4 p.m.

Babysitter, by Joyce Carol Oates (Knopf, 448 pages)

My desire to read books about abduction and murder of children was never strong even before I had children of my own. After becoming a parent, I wondered how anyone could.

As such, I wasn’t sure if I could get through even two chapters of the long-awaited novel from Joyce Carol Oates, which is built around a serial killer who specialized in children. Dubbed the “Babysitter,” because he abducted children between the ages of 11 and 14 who were neglected and unattended, the killer murdered five children near Detroit, Michigan, when the novel opens in 1977.

The victims speak collectively to reveal details: “When we died, our bodies were carefully bathed, the smallest bits of dirt removed from every crevice of our bodies and from beneath our (broken) fingernails, and the fingernails cut with cuticle scissors; rounded and even, as our hair was washed with a gentle shampoo, combed and neatly parted in such a way to suggest that whoever had so tenderly groomed us postmortem had not known us ‘in life’.”

Even as we may want to run screaming from what came before and what will surely come after, we cannot.

Joyce Carol Oates didn’t become one of America’s most celebrated writers for lack of talent, and with that horrific opening, she glides seamlessly into what at first seems an unconnected story: The budding affair between a wealthy housewife in Far Hills, Michigan, and a man she met only briefly at a fundraiser.

Hannah Jarrett is 39, beautiful, privileged, vapid, taught by her parents to prize elegance, simplicity and taste: “Never take a chance of appearing common” is a mantra to which she clings. Her life and her marriage somewhat resembles that of Don and Betty Draper in Mad Men — outwardly perfect, if vaguely hollow, with picture-perfect children, a girl and a boy. Unlike Betty Draper, Hannah Jarrett has a live-in housekeeper, who, despite Hannah’s belief that she is an attentive mother, seems to do a significant amount of the mothering in the household.

When Hannah is contacted by the man with whom she shared an electric moment at a charity event, she decides to meet him at an elegant downtown hotel, enabled by her husband’s business trip and the housekeeper, who will be with the children no matter how late Hannah returns.

On the drive to the hotel Hannah tells herself a reassuring story: she’s only going to satisfy her curiosity, to feel beautiful and desired for an afternoon; she won’t break any vows, but will have a satisfying and fulfilling conversation with the man in the hotel bar about their mutual and ultimately thwarted desires.

That, of course, is not what happens. In her skillful narrative, Oates makes Hannah’s drive to the hotel, and even the ride up the elevator to the man’s suite, suspenseful and chilling. It is a drama seemingly completely unconnected to the “babysitter” killings, but also, we know, somehow entwined. Moreover, there are hints of future — or are they past? — events that push their way into the telling, making it unclear if what happens on any given page is, as Ebenezer asked of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, things that definitely happened or things that simply could happen.

The dynamic between Hannah and her Manila-born housekeeper, Ismelda, is polite, but fraught, as perhaps all housekeeper/employer relationships are. Hannah is both grateful and resentful of the help, and at times the similarities between “the Babysitter,” serial killer, and the babysitter/nanny/housekeeper are a bit heavy-handed. While Hannah’s children, we are led to believe, are not neglected in the way that the Babysitter’s victims are, their mother’s deficiencies are revealed in her interactions with her housekeeper.

Coming home distracted after a tryst, Hannah is so consumed by her fantasy life (“I have a lover!”) that she is unaware that her daughter is gravely ill until the housekeeper apologetically wakes her. While in no way evil or even deeply unlikeable — she is much too bland a person for that — Hannah is not a sympathetic character, even though her upbringing was in many ways troubled. Which is why it’s a shock to so quickly care so much about what happens to her and her family.

When Oates writes, “Despair of women, that men are unknown to them, essentially,” she speaks not only of the overt monsters but also of the hidden lives of husbands and friends. But women, too, have parts unknown to others and also to themselves, as Hannah learns as she is drawn deeper into a relationship despite the frantic screaming of conscience.

Babysitter is no cheap thriller but offers sharp cultural commentary on racism, class, religion and modern-day parenting. Give all the credit to Oates, who has crafted a finely tuned horror story that, like the film Fatal Attraction, is all the more horrific because of its placid suburban setting. A

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Book Events

Author events

• DONALD YACOVONE will discuss his new book Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity on Thursday, Sept. 29, at 7 p.m. at Gibson’s Bookstore (45 S. Main St., Concord, 224-0562, gibsonsbookstore.com).

• STEPHEN PULEO visits the Nashua Public Library (2 Court St., 589-4600, nashualibrary.org) on Sunday, Oct. 2, at 2 p.m. to discuss his book Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919. Registration is required.

• RENEE PLODZIK, Concord author, visits Gibson’s Bookstore (45 S. Main St., Concord, 224-0562, gibsonsbookstore.com) on Thursday, Oct. 6, at 6:30 p.m. to present her cookbook Eat Well Move Often Stay Strong.

• MARGARET PORTER presents The Myrtle Wand at Gibson’s Bookstore (45 S. Main St., Concord, 224-0562, gibsonsbookstore.com) on Wednesday, Oct. 12, at 6:30 p.m.

• JOSH MALERMAN, horror novelist, will be at Gibson’s Bookstore (45 S. Main St., Concord, 224-0562, gibsonsbookstore.com) to present his newly released bookDaphne on Thursday, Oct. 13, at 6:30 p.m.

• JOHN IRVING The Historic Music Hall Theater (28 Chestnut St., Portsmouth, 436-2400, themusichall.org) will host novelist and Exeter native John Irving to present his newest release, The Last Chairlift, at the Music Hall on Tuesday, Oct. 18. Tickets are $49 and include a book voucher.

• LYNN LYONS, psychotherapist and anxiety expert, returns to Gibson’s Bookstore (45 S. Main St., Concord, 224-0562, gibsonsbookstore.com) on Wednesday, Nov. 16, at 4:30 p.m. with The Anxiety Audit: 7 Sneaky Ways Anxiety Takes Hold and How to Escape Them.

• JOSH FUNK & KARI ALLEN Children’s authors Josh Funk and Kari Allen present their newest books, The Great Caper Caper: Lady Pancake & Sir French Toast Book No. 5 and Maddie and Mabel Take the Lead, atGibson’s Bookstore (45 S. Main St., Concord, 224-0562, gibsonsbookstore.com) on Saturday, Nov. 19, at 11 a.m.