What We Wish Were True, by Tallu Schuyler Quinn

What We Wish Were True, by Tallu Schuyler Quinn (Convergent, 187 pages)

After Tallu Schuyler Quinn was diagnosed with cancer in the summer of 2020, she started a journal on Caring Bridge, a website where people struggling with an illness (or their families) can share updates on their condition.

It’s hard to see how she had time — or frankly, the capacity — to write.

Quinn, who had just turned 40 when she became ill, was the leader of a nonprofit she had founded a decade earlier, the Nashville Food Project, and was married with two young children. Her diagnosis was stage IV glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, and doctors removed a tumor “the size of a big meaty fist.” The surgery extended her life slightly but also knocked out part of her vision and some of the gray matter that processes words.

“Almost overnight I have had to let a lot of things go,” Quinn wrote. “I’m not cooking as much, I can’t drive any longer, my gardens are overgrown, I can’t really help my kids with their schoolwork, and my own writing comes with a new difficulty and requires a new effort.”

Her cancer battle was relatively short; Quinn died in February. Unlike another young mother and author with a stage IV cancer diagnosis, Kate Bowler (Everything Happens for a Reason, and Other Lies I’ve Loved), she didn’t get to see her finished book, which is a collection of short essays about her life, her work and her dying.

It’s a surprisingly upbeat book, given the subject and Quinn’s frank disclosures about her deteriorating condition and her profound grief. She believed in God and even had a master’s degree from a seminary, but was not willing to go gently into the dark night. But she found a way to be grateful for life even as she grieved how the tumors “mix me up in these sad and terrible ways.” She writes of wailing her thanks to God as salty tears poured into her mouth. Whatever the tumors took from her, they left the gift of poetry.

Although Quinn had earned a degree in papermaking and bookbinding, before cancer, she had not planned on being a writer. “After graduating from seminary, with a diploma in hand from a reputable institution, I did what any promising ministerial student would do: I moved to Boston with my friends and started working at a grocery store.” On the night shift, stocking shelves and throwing out aging meat, she started thinking about food waste and spent resources and the immorality of it all. These ideas would later percolate as part of her vision to feed hungry people in Tennessee, but first she spent six months working in Nicaragua, witnessing the kind of need that many Americans never encounter. She tells a wonderful story of a ride in a truck where they kept stopping to pick up people who asked if they could catch a ride, too. “If there’s only one thing I understand from living there, it’s that no expectation of how much I can carry or ask another to carry for me is too swollen,” she writes. It’s apropos of nothing, and everything at the same time.

This is stage IV brain cancer: Weight gain from steroids. Acne. Nausea. Nasal passages so dry they bleed. Constant bruising. Itchy skin. Sleepless nights. Lost words. Confusion. Prayers offered in tears instead of words. Yet still a primal urge to hold onto life. “I am sicker than I have ever been and am still faithfully, scrappily striving to heal. My lips hurt. My throat is dry. My skin is cracked. Come drink this broth with me and we can get quiet.”

Quinn writes that is incredibly lonely being so sick, but at the same time, she is ultimately sustained by the community that springs forth to help her. The quote she chooses for the beginning of the book is from Gunilla Norris’s Becoming Bread: “We become who we are, together, each needing the other. Alone is a myth.”

It’s unclear how much help, if any, Quinn had in writing this book; it’s clear that she was rapidly deteriorating in her final months; she died in hospice and did not enter any new journal entries on Caring Bridge toward the end. The last two pages of the book are her imagining what death might be like, coming back as a leaf, a pelican, a star, a song or a quilt. It feels petty to ask for more from a dying woman writing a book, but I still wished for dates on the essays, some sense of when they were written, given the quick trajectory of her illness. And I also wished for a coda of sorts from her family. For a memoir as intensely personal as this is, Quinn departs too abruptly from it, as from her life. Still, it’s a deeply moving reflection on mortality, a snapshot of an ordinary person who was asked by life to endure something horrible and did so wreathed in courage. B+

Book Notes

New England is well-represented in publishing this spring, with a lovely new reflection from New Hampshire author Sy Montgomery, a smart thriller set in Vermont and a memoir from a former flight attendant who grew up in Rhode Island.

Montgomery’s latest offering is The Hawk’s Way(Atria, 79 pages). Props to her and her publisher for revealing on the cover that the narrative of the slim volume was originally published as a chapter in her 2010 book Birdology (Atria, 272 pages). It’s common for accomplished authors to present previously published material in a new book (as Ann Patchett did recently in These Precious Days) but unusual for this to be revealed right up front.

In this case, however, the repackaging makes perfect sense. The story is a taut and gorgeous telling of Montgomery’s friendship with a renowned local falconer and her own grappling of conscience with a majestic beast of prey and what they represent. (The falconer, Nancy Cowan of Deering, was founder of the New Hampshire School of Falconry and died earlier this year.) There are also 16 pages of color photographs. It’s a great gift for any bird lover in your life.

The novel is The Children on the Hill (Gallery/Scout, 352 pages) by Jennifer McMahon, which has been described as a modern take on Frankenstein. Fellow Vermont author Chris Bohjalian has called McMahon, the author of 10 novels, “a literary descendant of Shirley Jackson.” The story involves three children (two siblings and another child brought into the family by their grandmother) who are obsessed with monsters; one grows up to have a podcast called “The Monsters Among Us” and she returns to her Vermont hometown to investigate a crime and reported monster sightings. There’s buzz about a Gone Girl-worthy plot twist that makes this an especially satisfying read.

Finally, Fly Girl (W. W. Norton, 288 pages) is the book you want to read on your next flight in hopes of getting special attention from flight attendants.

Ann Hood, a native of Warwick, Rhode Island, went to work for TWA in 1978, when flight attendants were still called stewardesses and advertised as onboard “sex kittens,” she writes. Hood is an accomplished memoirist and author, but says when she meets people socially, they’re more interested in hearing about her years as a flight attendant than her writing. This is her answer to everything we want to know.


Book Events

Author events

DONALD ANTRIM Author presents One Friday in April. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Tues., May 17, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

R.W.W. GREENE Author presents Mercury Rising. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Fri., May 20, 5:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

TAMMY SOLLENBERGER Author presents The One Inside: 30 Days to Your Authentic Self. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Wed., June 1, 6 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

PAUL BROGAN Author presents A Sprinkling of Stardust Over the Outhouse. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Thurs., June 30, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

CASEY SHERMAN Author presents Helltown. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Sun., Aug. 14, 1:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

Book sales

SPRING BOOK SALE Bag sale features thousands of hardbacks and paperbacks including fiction, nonfiction, mystery and a variety of children’s books, plus a large selection of DVDs, CDs and audio books. Baked goods will also be sold. Brookline Public Library, 4 Main St., Brookline. Sat., May 14, and Sun., May 15, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Poetry

DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Writers groups

MERRIMACK VALLEY WRITERS’ GROUP All published and unpublished local writers who are interested in sharing their work with other writers and giving and receiving constructive feedback are invited to join. The group meets regularly Email [email protected].

Writer submissions

UNDER THE MADNESS Magazine designed and managed by an editorial board of New Hampshire teens under the mentorship of New Hampshire State Poet Laureate Alexandria Peary. features creative writing by teens ages 13 to 19 from all over the world, including poetry and short fiction and creative nonfiction. Published monthly. Submissions must be written in or translated into English and must be previously unpublished. Visit underthemadnessmagazine.com for full submission guidelines.

Book Clubs

BOOKERY Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. 844 Elm St., Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

Album Reviews 22/05/12

Slow Crush, Hush (Quiet Panic Records)

Honestly, we may as well just forget genre-pigeonholing at this point; it’s as if all history has been forgotten, not that that’s the most horrible thing. This Belgian, female-fronted shoegaze band managed to latch onto an opening slot on tour with straight-ahead metal band Pelican, which, to me, is a ridiculous combination, but who knows, indie bands gotta do what they gotta do these days; pretty much all their money comes from shows now, so, oh well, carry on. My Bloody Valentine is probably the most common RIYL bullet point with these guys, although album-opener “Drown” is more along the lines of a Lana Del Rey bedroom warmup, but from there the proceedings do commence, with the apocalyptic “Blue,” which does have a mud-metal tint to it a la No Joy, Ringo Deathstarr and whatnot. “Swoon” is a speedier little joint; imagine an insanely sexy stab at a James Bond movie-title-theme that’s about five years ahead of its time. No new ground broken, but nothing wrong either. B+

HeatWave International, We Won’t Be Silent (Give/Take Records)

This goth-techno maxi-single — basically one tune and two remixes thereof — was presented to me as the work of a supergroup of sorts, one led by Baja, California,-based Mario Alberto Cabada, chief of the No Devotion Records imprint (and probably Give/Take Records as well, which put out this record). He’s obviously big into Depeche Mode and the zillion other bands that claim to be DM disciples but which always seem to sound a lot like this stuff, typical Metropolis Records gruel that evokes latter-day Gary Numan as interpreted by Germans, like BackAndToTheLeft and whatnot. I applaud the effort if not the result so much, and oh, I forgot to mention that the other “superstar” band members on board for this joint are sometime Ministry keyboard guy John Bechdel, Panoptica’s Roberto Mendoza, and Ant Banister from Sounds Like Winter. I’ve been under a rock as far as being aware of the latest and greatest latex-club bands, so it’s not wildly surprising that I’ve never heard of any of these guys, but either way, the song and its reiterations are neo-Bauhaus-y but, in the end, nothing I’d whole-heartedly recommend. B

PLAYLIST

• May 13 is the next traditional day for album releases, because it is a Friday. Yes, a Friday the 13th in the Age of Apocalypse, I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to see what will happen! Whatever else is in store, we’ll see the release of the album These Actions Cannot Be Undone from Gentle Sinners, a one-off project by singer James Graham of post-punk/indie rock band The Twilight Sad, and Aidan Moffat of Arab Strap. Both of those gentlemen are from Scotland, but I know what you’re thinking: What care I about The Twilight Sad? The answer is nothing at all, because I’ve never heard of them, but I’ve definitely heard of Arab Strap; they’re sort of a post-indie deconstructionist project, which is fancy-speak for “They’re kind of rad and creepy,” something like that. I haven’t particularly liked anything I’ve heard from Arab Strap, but the dude sings with a Scottish accent, as does James Graham, if I’m reading this promo sheet correctly. That’s sort of annoying, because any voice teacher will tell you that people’s accents tend to disappear when they’re singing, but I’ve told you that before already, so let’s dispense with the preliminaries and waddle over to YouTube, so I can be annoyed by whatever Gentle Sinners have put up as far as advance music for this album. There’s a bunch of songs to choose from, and I randomly selected “Face To Fire (After Nyman),” which starts with a typical AC/DC guitar line except it’s being played as a bagpipe sample (remember, they’re from Scotland). Then the muddy, no-wave guitar line comes in and the whole thing just starts getting worthless, like a cross between Violent Femmes and Melvins. Would you listen to something like that for an entire album? If so, why would you?

• But wait a minute, the whole slate isn’t stupid this week, because look over there, guys, it’s the Pride of Akron, Ohio, The Black Keys, with a new LP titled Dropout Boogie, here to save the day! You know this indie-rock band from hits like “Tighten Up,” which won a Best Rock Performance Grammy in 2011; with its megaphoned vocal and sloppy not-quite-muddy guitar, it was the perfect throwback-blues/Spoon-wannabe tune for the Molson beer commercial it soundtracked. That’s how things work these days: band makes halfway decent song; band gains street cred; band blows all their street cred by selling their song to some corporate guy with a duffel bag full of money; music bloggers pretend not to notice; band gets away with it. As for Dropout Boogie, the single is “Wild Child,” a ’70s-rock-radio-style tune that sounds too much like Joe Walsh’s “Funk #49” for my taste, which means my haters will think it’s the best thing since sliced olive loaf. Bon appétit.

• Sacré bleu, what in tarnation could possibly be next up, gang? Wait, I know, it’s someone I’ve never heard of, named Yves Jarvis, whose new album, The Zug, is here, on my hallowed docket! Can’t believe I have to do this stuff for you ingrates [incoherent grumbling] — OK, this human is actually Jean-Sébastien Yves Audet, a Canadian experimental musician who used to call himself Un Blonde. So, the single, “Bootstrap Jubilee,” is actually really cool, a gently hip 12-string loop bopping along underneath a breezy but sturdy vocal line. I looked into this a bit more, and he’s kind of like Donovan reincarnated for Generation Ringtone, definitely worth a check-in, folks.

• We’ll pull up the stumps on this week’s nonsense with former Woods singer-guitarist Kevin Morby and his new LP, This Is A Photograph. The title track is a Woodstock-tinged folk-stomper, very fun, really cool stuff.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

The Homewreckers, by Mary Kay Andrews

The Homewreckers, by Mary Kay Andrews (St. Martin’s Press, 437 pages)

Mary Kay Andrews is, by many accounts, “queen of the beach read,” although Elin Hilderbrand would probably like a word about that. So would Emily Henry, the Ohio author who published a book called Beach Read in 2020.

It’s a little early for beach reading in New England, but Andrews’ latest, The Homewreckers, is a doorstop of a novel at 437 pages, so if you start now, you might finish by Labor Day. Hard-working readers can get through it quicker, but not without pain.

It’s not that Andrews isn’t an expert wordsmith; she’s written 30 books in 30 years and so has well more than 10,000 hours invested in her craft. It’s just that the story isn’t interesting enough to hold our attention for that long. As either Blaise Pascal or Mark Twain said (depending on which book of quotations you consult), they would have written shorter if they’d had more time. Andrews must have written The Homewreckers very quickly.

The premise is decent enough: A Hollywood producer visiting the charming Deep South town of Savannah, Georgia, encounters Hattie Kavanaugh, a young woman who works with her father-in-law restoring homes. In a bit of slapstick comedy that serves little purpose other than setting up a scene for a TV movie, the producer literally falls through a rotting kitchen floor on top of her.

Although Hattie is a widow who’s still not fully recovered from her husband’s death in an accident, she operates in the high rungs of Maslow’s tiers of self-actualization and is not impressed by the credentials of the man who fell on her while she was crawling around under the house inspecting its plumbing. She merely observes to her friend and co-contractor that Mo Lopez appears to have all his teeth before shooing him away.

Mo, however, has not only teeth but vision. He works for a TV network that specializes in home fix-up reality shows; his most recent was Killer Garages and he needs a new show. He sees past Hattie’s grungy work boots and dirty coveralls and sees a TV star. Also, in case we need to know on page 17 where this is going, he sees “hazel eyes and full lips,” someone who “had that fresh-faced girl-next-door-thing going on, her hair in a careless pony tail. Slender, but curvy in the right places.”

He — and I quote — “couldn’t manage to get Hannie Kavanaugh off his mind.”

At this point, you might be tempted to toss The Homewreckers and look for a mountain read instead, but give the queen of beach reads her due. There are challenges to be overcome here, not least of which is that Hattie Kavanaugh has no interest in being a star of a reality show. She does need money, however, and it doesn’t take long for Mo to convince Hattie to be part of a show called “Saving Savannah” — pitched to her as a sort of love letter to her work. The show would follow her as she takes a deteriorating home with good bones and loves it back to life. Hattie thinks hopefully that something like this might inspire other people to do the same.

In her first reel of video, she says, with sweet sincerity, “I’m Hattie Kavanagh. And I’m saving Savannah. One old house at a time.”

Problem is, the cynical executive back in L.A. doesn’t see anyone watching that sappy drivel. So she renames the show and revamps the concept. “Homewreckers” will be “the space where a dating show meets a flip show.” She sends in a sexy, big-city designer to “help” Hattie, in hopes that there will be real-life sizzle between them, to add to the drama.

Hattie, of course, doesn’t know this. Mo, who knows it, doesn’t like it. But Hattie has signed the contract, and off to the races they go.

This seems enough drama for a beach read, but there’s also a murder mystery entwined, which is kind of distasteful, given the lighthearted fare that surrounds it. “Love, murder and faulty wiring” is the tagline on the cover. Three of these things are not like the others. “Let’s throw in the murder of a 25-year-old mother” to add complexity to a beach read is a painful stretch.

Ultimately, the problem with The Homewreckers is not the bloated verbiage, or the predictable ending, or the never-ending yapping about Savannah, but that I didn’t care about the characters to hang with them as long as was required of me. This was surprising because Hattie is not a one-dimensional character; she is still mourning her husband and has a fraught relationship with her felonious dad; there are layers to this story, and genuine humor. Hattie’s father-in-law is named Tug and has a penchant for exclaiming “Jesus, Mary and Fred.” And Andrews can throw out some good lines as when she has Mo tell Hattie she smells like rainbows and joint compound.

Granted, I’m a person who thinks a beach read is a magazine — something easy to hold and easy to discard when it gets wet and smells like beer. So maybe you’ll love it. But more likely, Elin Hilderbrand has nothing to fear. B-

Book Notes

In this age of body positivity, we aren’t supposed to talk about beach bodies, except in the concept of the meme that says “How to have a beach body: 1. Have a body. 2. Go to the beach.”

True that, but it’s also true that some of us might be a little more comfortable at the beach minus a few pounds. If you are in that camp, please know that everything old is new again when it comes to diet books. In other words, old diet books never die, they just get reissued.

Behold the “New 2022 Edition!” of The South Beach Diet, introduced in 2003 by Florida cardiologist Andrew Agatston. Yep, he’s still around and runs the Agatston Center for Preventive Medicine, which these days promotes intermittent fasting. The South Beach Diet has been so popular for so long that it has its own category on Amazon.

Dr. Agatston did issue a new paperback version of The South Beach Diet in 2020 (Rodale, 336 pages). But the hottest-selling diet and fitness book right now is The Whole Body Reset (Simon & Schuster, 400 pages) by Stephen Perrine. It may or may not be a selling point that Perrine is editor of the AARP magazine, which explains why the book is targeted at people in midlife or beyond. Like South Beach, it promises a flatter belly and overall improved health with a focus on protein with fewer carbs.

Another new health book that promises weight loss is Glucose Revolution (Simon & Schuster, 304 pages) by Jessie Inchauspe. She’s a social media influencer (@Glucosegoddess on Instagram) but, interestingly, has a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a master’s in biochemistry and comes to the subject well-educated. Worth a look.

Finally, I’m interested to read the provocatively titled Drop Acid (Little, Brown Spark, 336 pages), the latest offering from Dr. David Perlmutter, the controversial physician-author who wrote 2013’s Grain Brain and several follow-up books that posited that grains and sugar are the brain’s “silent killer.” In this book, the villain is uric acid, which is a waste product that circulates in our blood. Perlmutter argues that elevated levels of uric acid, caused in part by consuming too much fructose, are contributing to obesity, cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline and other ills.

At this rate, there will be nothing left for us to consume but water, which naturally leads to the best title ever for a health book: You’re Not Sick, You’re Thirsty. For all I know, it could be malarky, but the title is good for a smile. It’s an oldie, from 2003; Warner, 304 pages.


Book Events

Author events

ANDREW BIGGIO Author presents The Rifle. Tues., May 10, 7 to 8 p.m. The Wright Museum of WWII (77 Center St., Wolfeboro). Seating is limited, and reservations are required. Admission costs $5 for museum members and $10 for non-members. Call 569-1212 or visit wrightmuseum.org.

DONALD ANTRIM Author presents One Friday in April. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Tues., May 17, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

R.W.W. GREENE Author presents Mercury Rising. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Fri., May 20, 5:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

TAMMY SOLLENBERGER Author presents The One Inside: 30 Days to Your Authentic Self. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Wed., June 1, 6 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

PAUL BROGAN Author presents A Sprinkling of Stardust Over the Outhouse. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Thurs., June 30, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

CASEY SHERMAN Author presents Helltown. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Sun., Aug. 14, 1:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

Book sales

SPRING BOOK SALE Bag sale features thousands of hardbacks and paperbacks including fiction, nonfiction, mystery and a variety of children’s books, plus a large selection of DVDs, CDs and audio books. Baked goods will also be sold. Brookline Public Library, 4 Main St., Brookline. Sat., May 14, and Sun., May 15, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Poetry

DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Writers groups

MERRIMACK VALLEY WRITERS’ GROUP All published and unpublished local writers who are interested in sharing their work with other writers and giving and receiving constructive feedback are invited to join. The group meets regularly Email [email protected].

Album Reviews 22/05/05

Sue Jeffers, Up With the Masses (FBI Records)

I’m a bit late to the party with this full-length, but this veteran folkie’s messages are timeless until further notice; she eschews widening the typical (and oh-so-unconstructive) red-vs.-blue divide in favor of a far more positive worker-unification slant in the manner of Woody Guthrie. So, yeah, you can smell the patchouli from here, but she’s got the receipts, being that she’s old enough to have known what was going on in her former town of Kent, Ohio, when the tin soldiers and Nixon showed up to squash the Vietnam War protests. Yeah, she was there, right in the thick of all that, so she knows to tread a bit lightly when confronting the issues of our time. Over gentle acoustic strums and piano tinkling, Jeffers volunteers her Marianne Faithfull-ish warble for service in the Black Lives Matter cause (“Lives Stolen”) and protest chestnuts (a cover of Woody Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre”), but her best moment comes when she flexes a Bob Dylan-ish knack for working-person’s lyricism while calling for a general strike in her “Essentially Expendable,” where she proves that her generation is still plugged into all our grim realities. A

Christian Lee Hutson, Quitters (ANTI Records)

I’m sure it must be pretty weird to live in Los Angeles to begin with. Despite the fact that I know a few people from there who seem really nice and not so — I don’t know, self-serving, disposable and/or fame-hungry as I’ve caricatured in my head, I still picture L.A. as a place that’s even more impossible to conquer than New York City simply because normies expect less from its star-making machinery. Contrast that with this busking, Sufjan Stevens-ish songwriter’s experience of it, a place that’s got a soul in there somewhere, whether we northern Vikings can believe it or not, and its denizens are well aware of its temporariness: It’s “a place where everything in the end gets blown away and paved over with something new, where even the ocean and fires are always whispering, ‘One day we’ll take it all back.’” So these songs are pretty, banjo-and-dojo-lazing things, Americana with only the slightest West Coast tint, occasionally bursting into full big-production bombast. This guy’s really good, is what I mean. A

PLAYLIST

• Hey, man, if there’s anything that’ll get us through these hard times, it’s great rock ’n’ roll, you know? I’m still waiting for that very thing, but you never know what a fresh batch of new releases will bear, maybe there will be some keen and groovy and awesome and dope rock ’n’ roll in the barrel of new stuff coming out on May 6, and as always, I have every expectation that my mind will be blown, so I’m going to look at what’s coming our way, right now! Uh-oh, maybe I spoke too soon, because what to my wondering eyes should appear but none other than fluffy whitebread-twee silly-willies Belle and Sebastian, with their new album, A Bit Of Previous! Oy vey, they’re still a band, I can’t believe it, but I’m forcing myself to keep an open mind, because maybe this will sound unlike anything they’ve ever done before, and I won’t have to wash my ears out with Iggy Pop or Al Jolson after I subject myself to the new single, “Unnecessary Drama.” Huh, the song doesn’t start out like the usual dreck that made them famous; there’s someone playing a harmonica, and there’s some actual rock ’n’ roll going on — aaaand it’s awful, the chorus is something that belongs on an old episode of Gilmore Girls in which the whole town of Faerie Depot or whatever they call it is just cold rockin’ out and banging their heads around the town gazebo while a bunch of grandfathers bring down the hipster thunder, and there’s Rory Gilmore giving awkward glances at Sebastian Bach or whatever annoying boy she was dating in that show. Wait, maybe someone will smash a guitar and raise my pulse past clinically dead level — hm, nope. Nope. Thanks for nothing as always, Belle and Sebastian! (Serious question, does anyone still listen to awkward-’n’-quirky aughts-era twee for enjoyment anymore? Hasn’t it gone the way of Milli Vanilli and Chuck Berry by now? No?)

• Wait a second, whoa, this might be OK, it’s a new album from Sacramento, Calif., indie-rock band !!! (No, that’s their actual band name, one of the stupidest ones ever invented; it’s so stupid that every time someone writes about them, they have to add “[Chik Chik Chik]” so people will know who they’re talking about, isn’t that so aughts-indie?). No, funny story, the other week someone on Twitter asked the entire internet what they thought was the best bass line ever, and I tweeted that it was the bass line from !!!’s tune “Myth Takes,” and nobody hit Like on my tweet because no one on Twitter cares about music except when rappers get into “beefs.” Anyway, good lord, folks, YouTube can’t even find anything from this new !!! album, Let It Be Blue, because it probably crashes YouTube’s server whenever someone inputs “!!!” in the search thingie. Do you now see how stupid that band name is? OK, I tricked it, and am now listening to the single, “Storm Around The World.” It’s basically like Modest Mouse but more urban-asphalt-y, mid-tempo, mildly funky. It’s OK.

• Canadian pop-punkers Simple Plan are back, with their sixth album, Harder Than It Looks, and its single, “Congratulations,” which probably sounds like a Blink-182 B-side. Yup, it does, no need to sacrifice any further syllables on this.

• We’ll close the week with wine-indie Canadians Arcade Fire, whose new LP, WE, is here, just to annoy me. No, I’ll shut up, there are a couple of Arcade Fire songs I’ve liked, and this new single, “The Lightning I, II” is nice and bombastic and hormonal, a song that will work great while you chug Red Tail chardonnay and fill out your divorce papers or whatever people usually do when they listen to Arcade Fire.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Riverman: An American Odyssey, by Ben McGrath

Riverman: An American Odyssey, by Ben McGrath (Knopf, 272 pages)

The curious life and mysterious death of Dick Conant makes for a story that is the lovechild of Henry David Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild.

Unlike Thoreau’s sometimes tedious account, this is a Riverman that sings. It is a story that author Ben McGrath owns, having spent time with Dick Conant and written about him for The New Yorker, both while he was alive and after he went missing.

Conant was 49 years old when he became a nomad of America’s waterways. You could say he started America’s “Great Resignation” two decades early, having quit his job as a hospital janitor and left his rented house with a dramatic flourish. (He left frozen fish hidden in the attic, “a stink bomb on delayed fuse,” McGrath wrote.) Conant bought a canoe at Walmart, stocked it like a prepper and put it in the water pointed south. And he spent much of the remainder of his life either on the water or preparing to go back out there again.

Conant was not an uneducated man — McGrath describes him as “an old art major with Falstaffian appetites” looking like a cross between Santa and a lobster — who, when he won some money gambling, bought a book, Journals of Lewis and Clark, with his winnings.

Nor, for all his eccentricities (like drinking soy sauce from a bottle), was Conant crazy. The copious journals discovered after his disappearance (McGrath draws on thousands of pages of Conant’s musings) revealed a methodical man who employed the scientific method, if a bit crudely, to solving problems that arose on his travels.

For example, searching for solutions to the age-old bane of outdoorsmen — insect bites — Conant studied the ingredients of expensive store-bought products and realized that many products for itch-relief contained ammonia. So he bought a cheap bottle of plain ammonia and tested it on his skin. Having no unpleasant reaction, he began using it daily. (Probably shouldn’t try this at home, kids.) He was practical and industrious, once fashioning a rudimentary temporary bed out of driftwood.

Like Chris McCandless, the subject of Into the Wild who died after becoming ill in the wilderness of Alaska, Conant took chances most of us wouldn’t take; for example, he drank from some of the rivers he paddled. But unlike McCandless, who likely would have returned to civilization eventually, it was unclear that Conant ever would. His journals reveal a man who expected to die on his travels and was comfortable with that.

His journeys weren’t interludes but his life, unlike Cheryl Strayed’s adventure on the Pacific Coast Trail, detailed in Wild, or Sebastian Junger walking East Coast railroad lines in Freedom. Conant wasn’t seeking publicity or attention; in fact, his life and (presumed) passing might have gone unnoticed by the larger world had he not met McGrath by chance in the riverside town in New York where the writer lives.

The next day, unable to stop thinking about the strange traveler, McGrath literally tracked Conant down the river until he found him, in order to write about him.

Conant proved a cooperative subject, and the men became friendly enough that he stayed in touch, writing to McGrath from the road. He kept McGrath’s phone number on a scrap of paper in the canoe, which is why law enforcement contacted the writer when Conant went missing.

In this book, McGrath engages in what is sometimes known as embedded, or immersive, journalism, having become a part of his subject’s life. This is a perspective we don’t have in reading about another famous “riverman” — the New Hampshire hermit called “River Dave.” Of course, Conant wasn’t a hermit; by all accounts, he was gregarious and made friends easily, many of whom McGrath tracks down as he tries to unravel the mystery that is Conant’s life.

Surprisingly, Conant also had a large family with siblings leading conventional lives. At one point McGrath travels with one of Conant’s brothers to explore a storage unit that reveals more about the sojourner’s hidden life. At age 56, for example, he had applied to (and been rejected by) the University of Nevada School of Medicine. It also turned out that Conant was an artist — the storage locker contained more than 300 original paintings and sketches, done over four decades. In short, the deeper McGrath probes into Conant’s life the more fascinating it becomes. At the same time, the more McGrath learns about Conant during his investigation, the more questions arise.

Conant became a folk hero in river culture because of his travels, but even before he set off in his canoe, his was a colorful and robust life, though one that would not have ever made the pages of The New Yorker. As such, Riverman is, in many ways, the world’s longest obituary, and one of the most beautifully crafted, with the occasional aside into the canons of American river life and literature.

Not long after they met, Conant told McGrath that his life was dangerous and free and exciting, but “at this point in my life, I’ve had enough of this excitement. I’d much rather be home with a woman and a family like you have, than out here on the water. But this is the alternative.”

Those words and Conant’s strange disappearance in North Carolina in 2014 — the canoe was found capsized with the paddle attached, no remains were found — suggest that this story is as much a tragedy as a mystery. Whatever the genre, McGrath’s telling is utterly engrossing. A

Book Notes

Those of us fortunate enough to have a mom who is still living have (checks calendar) a little more than a week to come up with a Mother’s Day gift. Speaking as a mother, a 10-day cruise to somewhere sunny is best, but a book and some flowers will do.

Beyond the boring and predictable (cookbooks and chick lit are to Mother’s Day what grilling books are to Father’s Day), there’s an edgy genre that moms with a wicked good sense of humor might like.

For example: There Are Moms Way Worse Than You(Workman, 64 pages) by comedy writer Glenn Boozan is a Seuss-like ode to offbeat parenting in the animal kingdom and promises to offer “irrefutable proof that you are indeed a fantastic parent.” At first glance it looks like the worst children’s book ever, but it’s actually for moms. Illustrations are by Priscilla Witte.

For moms who like dystopian fiction, check out Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers (Simon & Schuster, 336 pages), given an “A” here recently.

Nonfiction for the working mom: Ambitious Like a Mother (Little, Brown Spark, 272 pages) by Lara Bazelon examines “why prioritizing your career is good for your kids.”

The Three Mothers, How the Mothers of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation explores a topic that is often overlooked: How the hands that rocked the cradle had an often unacknowledged role in history. The book is from Flatiron, 272 pages.

Also Mom Genes (Gallery, 336 pages) by Abigail Tucker is a scientific exploration of the power of maternal instinct that was well-reviewed.

Maybe not: My Evil Mother, a new short story by Margaret Atwood (author of The Handmaid’s Tale) that’s available only on Amazon as a Kindle original. Unless your mother is a witch. Then chances are she will love it. (It’s about a teenager in the 1950s who suspects her mother might be a witch.)


Book Events

Author events

SY MONTGOMERY Author presents The Hawk’s Way. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Tues., May 3, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Book sales

SPRING BOOK SALE Features thousands of hardbacks and paperbacks including fiction, nonfiction, mystery and a variety of children’s books, plus DVDs, CDs and audio books. Brookline Public Library, 4 Main St., Brookline. Sat., May 14, and Sun., May 15, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Poetry

DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Writers groups

MERRIMACK VALLEY WRITERS’ GROUP All published and unpublished local writers who are interested in sharing their work with other writers and giving and receiving constructive feedback are invited to join. The group meets regularly; the next meeting is scheduled for Tues., April 5, from 5 to 7:15 p.m., and will be held virtually over WebEx Meetings. To reserve your spot, email [email protected].

Writer submissions

UNDER THE MADNESS Magazine designed and managed by an editorial board of New Hampshire teens under the mentorship of New Hampshire State Poet Laureate Alexandria Peary. features creative writing by teens ages 13 to 19 from all over the world, including poetry and short fiction and creative nonfiction. Published monthly. Submissions must be written in or translated into English and must be previously unpublished. Visit underthemadnessmagazine.com for full submission guidelines.

Book Clubs

BOOKERY Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. 844 Elm St., Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email [email protected] or visit goffstownlibrary.com

BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email [email protected].

NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email [email protected] or visit nashualibrary.org.

Language

FRENCH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE CLASSES

Offered remotely by the Franco-American Centre. Six-week session with classes held Thursdays from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. $225. Visit facnh.com/education or call 623-1093.

Album Reviews 22/04/28

May Erlewine, Tiny Beautiful Things (Warner Records)

Some really gentle, very pretty stuff here engineered for comfortably settled womenfolk who enjoy sipping chai tea while gazing out the window at lazy rains. This Maggie Gyllenhaal lookalike is from Big Rapids, Michigan, and drew her inspiration for this full-length from the similarly titled book by Rumpus advice columnist Cheryl Strayed. Erlewine has the perfect voice for such a thing, wedged somewhere between Natalie Imbruglia and Jewel, and the songs fit like your favorite super-thick socks, laid-back but earning attention as they putter along. The instrumental bits are always pleasurable, with piano, dobro, acoustic guitar working pretty much perfectly together to form pieces that evoke Americana and AOR-pop at the same time. “Your Someone” is outstanding, fluttering along on silken wings and really blooming at the chorus; “He Knows” borders on Taylor Swift’s early days (when she wrote actual songs); “Could Have Been” flirts with Billie Holiday torch. I can’t find anything wrong with this album at all. A+

Meshuggah, Immutable (Atomic Fire Records)

Oh man, are these guys good, and that’s coming from someone who’s basically a newcomer to their greatness, given that I generally avoid thrash metal and missed out on their stuff for seven full albums (I’ve still got a lot of catching up to do). Immutable is their ninth full-length, and the draw is, as always, Tomas Haake, the drummer for this Swedish tech-metal juggernaut. Here it is, if you want some juxtaposition in order to grok the technical abilities at work here: Dillinger Escape Plan is first-grade math, Meshuggah is quantum calculus. If I were stuck on a desert island with only one record, this one would be in the running as my choice, since it would take a lot of listens simply to understand what’s going on here, which is, namely, very advanced syncopated patterns and polyrhythms, a lot like progressive jazz in a way, as others have noted. But the base of the recipe isn’t post-bop, it’s thrash-metal that has to be heard to be believed. If the above is all old news to you, the first Godzilla-playing-with-a-bunch-of-telephone-poles tune is “The Abysmal Eye,” taking the band’s patented approach that just never gets old. Astonishing. A+

PLAYLIST

• Ay caramba, it’s already the last week of April, and there will be new albums coming your way on the 29th! There’s so many of them for me to pick and choose from this week, so let’s start with 900-year-old bong-collector Willie Nelson, whose 900th album, A Beautiful Time, is winging its way in trucks to the five people who still buy CDs at full retail price! Funny coincidence, I asked a friend whom he thought would make a great president of the United States, and he said Willie Nelson, so maybe that really isn’t just a meme, what do you think? I’ll tell you what I think, I think it’s one of the dumbest ideas I ever heard, having a bong in every room of the White House, and would he offer the Pope cannabis gummies when he came by? I don’t like it, and I probably won’t like this upcoming album’s first single either, it’s called “I’ll Love You Till The Day I Die,” but I’m going to find out right now. So there’s a video for it, and he’s stacking some playing cards on some table in a honky-tonk bar or something, and the song is a typical country-and-western slow-burner, about some girl he once talked to for a few minutes, but that short conversation changed him forever. There is slow piano and thoughtful strumming, in case you couldn’t possibly picture what might be going on here.

• Grammy-winning country songstress Miranda Lambert is known as the other person to marry Blake Shelton, and the first person to place third in the USA Network’s Nashville Star talent show, but that placement was enough to make her into a famous singer, so keep your chins up, people who place third in things. Lambert’s ninth full-length, Palomino, features a tune called “Music City Queen,” and I was actually kind of interested to hear it, because 1980s weirdos The B-52’s are guests on that song, but naturally there’s no advance of that song yet, so it looks like I’m stuck listening to a different single, called “Strange,” which is just a normal tune. She kind of sounds like Dolly Parton when she’s singing on this tune; it’s a pedestrian joint with an unplugged guitar part, then a Reba McEntire part and so on. It’s OK!

• When it comes to stomping industrial-rock madness, I don’t think German band Rammstein is relevant anymore, what with KMFDM still putting out albums and whatnot; I haven’t heard anything from them in years, but supposedly they’re not industrial metal anyway, their style is actually “Neue Deutsche Härte,” which is German for “new German hardness,” a genre that mixes ‘Neue Deutsche Welle’ (whatever that is), alternative metal, groove metal and elements of electro-industrial and techno. Either way, I was never really crazy about them, but here they are, in front of my face, proffering a new album, called Zeit. The title track has a really disgusting video, and the tune is slow and bombastic, and of course they sing in German. It’s about pirates or something with muskets, I can’t understand anything they’re singing, so let’s move on to the next whatsis.

• Lastly we have British indie-rock outfit Bloc Party, with their sixth full-length, Alpha Games! This band is OK, with their jagged Gang Of Four-style guitars and soccer-hooligan vocals, as heard on almost-hit-singles like “Banquet” and “Helicopter”; you’ve probably been exposed to their tunes before at sports bars and beach arcades, but it probably went in one ear and out the other, like, you were like, “Is that The Police? Rancid maybe?” and decided you didn’t care. The new single, “Traps,” is appropriately spazzy; it’s sort of like “Rock Lobster” but more boneheaded. It’s OK.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

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