Category: Pop

At the Sofaplex 22/02/03

C’mon C’mon (R)

Joaquin Phoenix, Gaby Hoffmann.

Phoenix plays Johnny, a man suddenly thrown into the deep end of parenting, in the sweet and lovely C’mon C’mon, a film written and directed by Mike Mills (of 20th Century Women and Beginners fame).

Johnny finds himself suddenly charged with looking after 9-year-old nephew Jesse (an excellently natural Woody Norman, capturing kid oddballness without turning into a writer’s caricature of a child) when Jesse’s mom, Johnny’s sister Viv (Hoffmann), has to go from L.A. to Oakland to take care of Jesse’s dad, Paul (Scoot McNairy), who is suffering from mental illness.

Johnny and Viv haven’t been in each other’s lives much lately — they clashed over the care of their recently deceased mother, over Johnny’s unasked-for opinions about Viv’s relationship with Paul, over basic sibling stuff. But Viv is desperate and Johnny is willing to show up so she leaves Johnny to deal with Jesse — his Saturday morning blasting of opera, his odd tendency to pretend to be an orphan, his extreme (but, like, totally familiar to any parent) reaction to having sugar, his kid tendencies to not stay put. But also, his sudden pointed but thought-provoking questions, his delightful imagination, his charming goofiness, his curiosity at new things (like radio producer Johnny’s sound equipment and kid-interviewing project). So, you know, all the frustrating, wonderful, heartwarming-and-breaking stuff about kids.

The longer Viv has to help Paul, the more Johnny brings Jesse into his life — first to New York City and later to New Orleans, making sure he does basic things like brush teeth and do homework (ha, remotely — you don’t see much of that or this would go from a heartwarming look at parenting to a total nightmare horror story so fast).

Phoenix gives possibly his most relatable, most open and human performance as Johnny, a man who knows how out of his depth he is but doesn’t stop trying for Jesse and is aware that this terrifying and difficult scenario is his sister’s, like, Tuesday. Hoffman also gives a great performance as a woman trying to mom from afar while taking care of her co-parent (and ex, I think), largely to save her son’s dad — and to protect her son from the most difficult aspects of his father’s illness.

This doesn’t sound like the most uplifting subject matter, but it is presented with such grace and care, with such a real-world collision-of-fear-and-awesomeness look at parenting, that C’mon C’mon is just a delight. A Available for rent and in theaters.

I Came All This Way to Meet You, by Jami Attenberg

I Came All This Way to Meet You, by Jami Attenberg (Ecco, 263 pages)

It is apparently the fashion to write a memoir about writing after having achieved at least some modest success. Maybe this isn’t new and goes all the way back to Montaigne, but the trend seems to have accelerated after Anne Lamott’s ever popular Bird by Bird, published in 1994.

Into this space enters Jami Attenberg, a novelist of acclaim whose body of work includes The Middlesteins, her 2012 portrait of a family obsessed with eating; 2017’s All Grown Up (given a B+ here), and most recently, 2019’s All This Could Be Yours.

In I Came All This Way to Meet You, subtitled “writing myself home,” Attenberg gets personal in a refreshingly candid manner. It’s not so much a book as it is a conversation, the sort that occurs at a bar after strangers have had a couple of shots.

It’s a conversation that takes place during the pandemic; Attenberg peppers the memoir with mentions of life during Covid-19 and she occasionally touches on ongoing social issues. But it’s mainly the story of an ordinary woman who got tired of all the ordinariness in her life and set out to build something different. As Attenberg writes in the opening, in which she bluntly summarizes the first 20 years of her working life, most of her jobs were essentially bringing other people’s ideas into being.

“Eventually I thought: What about my ideas? When do I own them?” she writes. “And once I realized that, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I could not stay where I was any longer.”

In a perfect world, an aspiring writer who comes to this conclusion would then find an oceanside cottage in which to write her first book, ensconced there rent-free except for the task of walking someone’s dog. And for Attenberg, it was in fact a perfect world, at least in this regard.

After she spent decades working invisible, low-paying jobs — to include temping, waitressing, typing, blogging — a supportive friend helped set her up in this space, and Attenberg started bringing her characters to life. But that was the extent of her perfect world. It was a hard slog to get to where she is today, an “Author with a capital A,” and she shares her remembrances of this unglamorous life, much of which involved arduous road trips in an old car, trying to get people to buy her books when people didn’t want them — including, at one point, her publisher, who dumped her after her first few books didn’t sell well.

In many ways it would be hard to find a more unappealing depiction of a novelist’s life, from driving alone in a white-out in Wyoming to being booed at a literary festival when she was introduced as being from Brooklyn.

At one point she says this about a book tour: “I do my event. A Jewish event, a panel of four authors. I sell five books. Thanks, Jews. Another car to the airport, two hours before my flight. And there I sit.”

That paragraph, in all its pith, demonstrates precisely why this memoir is so engrossing. Attenberg is completely uninhibited; you never know what she is going to say next. The writing is as choppy as the sea, and as unpredictable, as is her life story, which she unspools gradually.

As much as the memoir is about Attenberg, it’s also about her friends. Despite being a generally anxious person, she has the enviable talent of finding and cultivating friends, such as the Alaska mom she met in Guatemala when she was doing travel writing — a woman who travels internationally for a month by herself every year — or the younger Italian novelist she spotted at a literary festival wearing a black Victorian gown. (“I immediately thought: Her, I must know.”)

On the subject of friendship, Attenberg waxes philosophical, writing: “The thing about bad friends is you never realize when you’re being one until it’s too late. Forgiveness and understanding? Not in this economy.”

She also brings that candor to writing about her romantic relationships. One, undertaken after a solitary trip to Sicily during which a restaurant refused to seat her because she was alone, was particularly promising: “No children, no desire for them whatsoever. No old marriages rotting in the past. We both owned our own homes. We both had flexible schedules. He even promised to quit smoking for me.”

There may have been no children, but a beautiful essay grew out of this relationship, about their trip to a “bone chapel” in Portugal — Capela dos Ossos, circa the 16th century, built using the remains of more than 5,000 people. Visiting it, Attenberg writes, she was “in a state of thrall to the bones.”

“Everything was dead … and yet it felt so alive to me at the same time. It was designed for thought. Alive and dead, stories everywhere. Thousands of possibilities, thousands of stories. The bones had been brought together in this space, the bones would never be alone. They have each other, I thought. And all of us, visiting them, every day.”

Bones became a metaphor for her life, and ultimately for the relationship as well. She is a work in progress, as we all are, but just is more talented than other people in lassoing the mess into art.

To call Attenberg an original thinker is an understatement. Her words crackle like an overbuilt fire, and whether or not you’ve read her work previously, this thoughtful memoir is worth a look. A

Book Notes

With Valentine’s Day coming up, you’re probably scouring the shelves of your local independent bookseller looking for the perfect book to give to your significant other. If you’re not, you should be. Chocolate is gone in a week. The perfect book may outlast your relationship.

You can buy love poems, of course — a new title is Love by Night (192 pages, Andrews McMeel) by SK Williams. But these are not to be confused with poems about love, such as Please Love Me at My Worst(Andrews McMeel, 144 pages), last year’s collection by Michaela Angemeer.

You can buy books about great relationships other people had — such as Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda (Bloomsbury, 432 pages), the story of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s marriage in their own words. Or books that promise to help you have a great relationship of your own, such as Fierce Love, Creating a Love That Lasts — One Conversation at a Time (Thomas Nelson, 240 pages).

Or you can forget the cheesy sentimental stuff and give your significant other a book about love that isn’t really about love, but just has love in the title and is a cool and interesting book. To wit: Love Poems (for Anxious People) by John Kenney, known for his writing in The New Yorker and also for two previous books, Love Poems for Married People and Love Poems for People With Children. It’s from G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 112 pages. With poems titled “Here comes someone whose name I should know” and “Am I meditating yet?” these are not really love poems, but that’s kind of the point.

I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness (Riverhead, 304 pages) by Claire Vaye Watkins is a novel released last fall that’s probably more of a wry gift for your BFF when you exchange cards about how much you hate Valentine’s Day. But we can’t resist the title. Premise: Woman with postpartum depression leaves her baby and husband and goes all Thelma and Louise without the Louise. It’s widely described as hilarious.

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois (Harper, 816 pages) by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers was an Oprah’s pick last year and Barack Obama said it was one of his favorite books. It’s a novel that reads like poetry and it is not actually about Du Bois, the late Civil Rights activist, historian and sociologist, but his words are interspersed throughout.

But there are limits to how edgy you can be when selecting a book with love in the title. The ‘I Love My Instapot’ Anti-Inflammatory Diet Recipe Book: Not recommended. If that’s your only choice, go with the candy.

Book Events

Author events

• ERIK LARSON Author presents The Splendid and the Vile. The Music Hall Historic Theater, 28 Chestnut St., Portsmouth. Wed., Feb. 16, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $13.75. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

• GARY SAMPSON AND INEZ MCDERMOTT Photographer Sampson and art historian McDermott discuss New Hampshire Now: A Photographic Diary of Life in the Granite State. Sat., Feb. 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• HOWARD MANSFIELD Author presents Chasing Eden. Sat., March 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• BECKY SAKELLERIOU AND HENRY WALTERS Becky Sakelleriou presents The Possibility of Red. Henry Walters presents Field Guide A Tempo. Sat., April 16, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

Poetry

• ROB AZEVEDO Poet reads from his new book of poetry, Don’t Order the Calamari. The Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Thurs., Feb. 3, 6 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com.

• REBECCA KAISER Poet presents Girl as Birch. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Mon., April 11, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in 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.

Album Reviews 22/02/03

Power Paladin, With The Magic Of Windfyre Steel (Atomic Fire Records)

You know, I don’t think I’ve seen the words “Reykjavík, Iceland” in years, or at least since there was talk of the city hosting a biannual Olympics. Oh wait, though, that’s every year, including this one. But before I tangent all my allotted words away, this power metal band is from there, actual Iceland, and, as I fully expected, their childlike enthusiasm is off the charts. I’m sure I’d get along with them personally; not that I’m a Dungeons & Dragons guy, but I’ve never not gotten along with anyone who’s into those dragons-and-elves games, a passion that drives these five or six or however many guys. They’ve confessed to being fans of Dio, Iron Maiden, Hammerfall and Rhapsody, so they obviously have no shame, and that’s refreshing in its way; the true test, though, is the music of course. Toward that, we start with “Kraven The Hunter,” which recalls Motley Crue’s “Kickstart My Heart,” then move to the Savatage-ish “Righteous Fury,” and the title track, a pomp-blasted hit of epic metal. It’s all super tight, and look at how cute this all is; I can’t hate these guys at all, sorry. A

Martin Wind/New York Bass Quartet, Air (Laika Records)

Every time I think I’ve heard it all, something bubbles up from this massive pit of promotional albums and makes me go, “OK, another country heard from.” Picture it: four guys who all play double bass (i.e., the upright acoustic bass guitar), but instead of laying down the low lines for four different bands, they’re in one place, jamming to familiar tunes from various genres. If you need some sort of certificate of authority for this one, Rufus Reid thinks it’s great, as does 84-year-old bass icon Ron Carter, so all that’s really to be done here is listen to some of it. It starts off with the title track, two or three of the players bowing at the high end in a thing that threatens for a second to droop into the maudlin strains of “Whiter Shade Of Pale” but instead turns into J.S. Bach’s immortal ‘Suite No. 3 In D Major: Air’ (you heard it in the movie Se7en, when Morgan Freeman is in the library). It’s an eerie thing to hear, but these supremely talented guys make it sound natural, rather cello-ish. Return To Forever drummer Lenny White also helps turn that arrangement on its head, and later helps to nail down a cover of Weather Report’s “Birdland.” Quite the gold nugget for eclectic tastes here. A

PLAYLIST

• Feb. 4 is here, can you feel the madness creeping in, on little tiny creepy feet? It’s frickin’ freezin’, frantic fam, I hate everything about it, and my seasonal affective disorder (or whatever it’s called, I just don’t like being cold) has me breaking down into teary madness every morning, just waking up and realizing that I still live in the North Pole and this will never end, ever. Other than that I am fine, I hope that you are well as well, as we examine the “slate” (I really hate seeing that word being used by a writer when “set” or “list” wouldn’t tick off half their audience) of new albums that’ll be released on the 4th in the hopes that someone will have one too many drinks and accidentally buy one. Hopefully no one accidentally buys the new album Pompeii from official crazy lady Cate Le Bon, because when she was writing it she was grappling “with existence, resignation and faith. I felt culpable for the mess but it smacked hard of the collective guilt imposed by religion and original sin.” Ha ha, she’s like Bjork but in clown makeup and outfits because she’s so edgy. She told the utterly enthralled, neckbearded writer from Pitchfork Media the album “was written and recorded in a quagmire of unease. Solo. In a time warp. In a house I had a life in 15 years ago.” Yes, Cate Le Bon, but what we really want to know is what snacks did you have? Probably nothing good, I’ll bet, and that’s why she lives a lonely fourth-dimension existence, being weird, all because she doesn’t have tasty shelled pistachios or chocolate cream pies. That’s basically all I eat now, someone should text her that diet tip, but in the meantime let’s see if my stomach can handle the new Cate Le Bon single “Running Away,” I’ll bet it can’t. Hold on, this isn’t so bad, it’s like a poor imitation of Siouxsie And The Banshees, but really, that’s what every band should be doing now, trying to imitate Siouxsie. Every once in a while a decent-enough melody trickles in, then disappears again into the sloppy imitation-’80s muck. Ok, this thing’s getting on my nerves, let’s just go to the next thingie.

• Oh terrific, can we just go back to Fake Siouxsie so I don’t have to listen to anything from Time Skiffs, the new LP from Animal Collective? I mean, all you ever needed to say in an Animal Collective CD review was “Cool fractals” and that was really it, although yes, they changed things up after the hipster crowd decided to abandon the band to the trash folder of college-rock history, so maybe there’s something worthwhile on this new “slab” (another word I hate to see used in a music review, because it makes the writer sound like they’re from the 1950s). I mean, it could happen, so let’s check out their new song “Prester John.” It’s noisy and creepy and slow. Wait, I get it, they’ve obviously been listening to a lot of Massive Attack, because this is just an edgy, grungy ripoff of “Teardrop,” which you know as the opening theme to the old TV show House. Next.

• OK, here we go, it’s a new album from edgy/gross/awesome metal guys, Korn, called Requiem! I’ll bet there’s no way I’ll have anything bad to say about their new tune “Start The Healing.” Whoa, bouncy beat here, my foot is already tapping, and — wait, this is some pretty basic nu-metal, almost kind of pop-punk, or like Tool. What the — oh, whatever, it’s Korn. They’ve earned the right to suck.

• We’ll end the week’s nonsense with indie-punk girl Mitski, because she’s awesome, so “Working for the Knife,” from her new album, Laurel Hell, must be awesome too. Wow, there’s like cowboy guitar in there, and it’s trippy but high-class, your girlfriend will probably like it. You should probably marry her, by the way. — Eric W. Saeger

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).

At the Sofaplex 22/01/27

Hotel Transylvania 4: Transformania(PG)

Voices of Andy Samberg, Selena Gomez.

Also voices of Kathryn Hahn, Jim Gaffigan, Steve Buscemi, Molly Shannon, David Spade, Keegan-Michael Key and Fran Drescher. Adam Sandler, who voiced main character Dracula for the first three of these movies, has passed the microphone on to voice doppelganger Brian Hull.

The movie gives you the gist even if you’ve never seen any of these Hotel Transylvania movies before (or, if, like me, you’ve definitely seen some of them but can’t remember much of anything about them): Drac and his vampire daughter Mavis (voice of Gomez), her human husband Johnny (Andy Samberg) and their son Dennis (voice of Asher Blinkoff) run a monster-serving hotel in a creepy Transylvanian castle that does such a brisk business Drac employs many a zombie and ghoul. Newly married to human Ericka Van Helsing (voice of Kathryn Hahn), great-granddaughter of The Van Helsing (voice of Gaffigan), Drac has been planning to officially turn the hotel over to Mavis and Johnny. But Johnny is such a stone cold goofus that Drac backs out at the last minute, telling Johnny that it’s because the property can only be passed to another monster. Johnny, desperate to truly be part of the family, uses Van Helsing’s monster-ray to turn himself into a monster. When Drac attempts to turn Johnny back into a human, he accidentally turns Frankenstein, the mummy and Wayne the werewolf human, creating all sorts of people who need to be returned to their former form — including Drac himself, who finds himself becoming human and losing the power to turn into a bat mid-fall.

Because the McGuffin-ray is broken in the process, Drac and Johnny set off on a quest to find a crystal that will repair it and set things right. What they don’t know when they head off is that, while Drac can eventually adjust to being human with some sunscreen and a shower, Johnny is in danger of having his monsterness constantly mutate until he becomes a giant, mindless, brightly colored destructo-saur.

If you have Amazon Prime, you have access to this movie for free — which is probably its principal selling point. This movie doesn’t feature nearly enough monster hijinks and physical comedy and is way too talky and focused on the plot of Drac handing off his hotel. (I’m sure there’s a joke in here about this being Succession for kids but with literal monsters instead of psychological monsters, but this movie doesn’t really warrant that much cleverness.) I don’t think my younger kids care about father-in-law/son-in-law relationships and they probably would have liked more with the swarm of werewolf puppies and the comedy based on the Blob. But this movie isn’t, like, actively offensive or particularly violent and I think my older kid would watch this if it were the only thing available or if it was the alternative to some kind of chore, so, C? Available via Amazon Prime.

Munich: The Edge of War (PG-13)

George MacKay, Jannis Niewöhner.

Jeremy Irons also stars in this adaptation of a Robert Harris novel which is surprisingly suspenseful despite the fact that it is about two guys running around in 1938 not preventing World War II. I mean, spoiler alert? Not really, and that’s kind of an interesting creative challenge when you set up your characters to complete a mission the larger outcome of which is already known to have failed.

Here, we get our spy thriller tension in part from the fact that British translator Hugh Legat (MacKay) is rather spectacularly not a spy. He seems like sort of an aide to prime minister Neville Chamberlain (Irons), who is sent on a delegation going to peace talks in Munich in part because years earlier he went to college with German Paul von Hartman (Niewöhner). A similar mid-level government type, Paul worms his way into the German delegation by serving as a translator for Hitler (Ulrich Matthes). Paul is part of a small group of German government types who think that, if Hitler illegally invades Czechoslovakia, they’ll be able to get the support of the German military and oust Hitler from power. Instead of invading, Hitler agrees to first meet with the British and French and his ally Italy to discuss a means of avoiding war — or, as it plays out here, a means by which the other countries can let him take chunks of Czechoslovakia without them having to intervene.

But Paul has different plans. He wants to use the conference as a cover for passing documents to Hugh, his old Oxford buddy, that prove that Czechoslovakia is just the beginning and that Hitler is planning a war of conquest throughout Europe. He gets a guy to get a guy to get Hugh included in the British delegation so that they can work together to get the documents to the right people and prevent the countries from appeasing Hitler. But while Paul, a former ardent Hitler-supporter who has become disillusioned with the Nazis, is used to sneaking around, Hugh, just a guy who regularly gets yelled at by both his boss and his neglected wife (Jessica Brown Findlay), is not great at skulduggery. For example, he “hides” important papers in a desk drawer in his hotel (why not staple them to the door, Hugh) and is so bad at following Paul without being seen that they might as well be holding hands and singing.

I wish the movie had played that aspect — Paul as the weary citizen of a police state, Hugh as a neophyte — up a bit more, because it did help ramp up the tension. Weighing in at over two hours, I think the movie could have lost some of the side stories and focused on a streamline tale of two men trying to desperately do some real world-saving behind the scenes of some hot-air diplomacy. We take a lot of detours into Lenya (Liv Lisa Fries), a mutual college friend who had formerly been together with Paul; Hugh’s shaky marriage and stalled career, and Paul’s relationship with his assistant, Helen (Sandra Huller). Shaved down by about half an hour and more singularly focused on the diplomacy-spy angle, Munich: The Edge of War could have been a more energetic noir-ish suspense film. As it is, it is occasionally pokey but watchable history drama fare. C+ Available on Netflix.

Swan Song (R)

Mahershala Ali, Naomie Harris.

Also Glenn Close and Awkwafina.

In the cleanly designed, tech-filled future, Cameron (Ali) is terminally ill but hasn’t yet told his family, including wife Poppy (Harris). This gives him a rare opportunity: He can tell them about his condition and live out his final days with them or he can essentially download his memories and personality into a healthy but otherwise identical clone who will slip into his life. Either way, Cameron won’t be there to see his young son and the baby Poppy is currently pregnant with grow up, but a Cameron can be there for them.

Dr. Jo Scott (Close) is the doctor performing this strange, secret procedure at what feels like a beautiful, modernist spa out in the woods where Cameron also meets Kate (Awkwafina), a woman who is essentially waiting for her end while her replacement has been living her life. His wife is just getting over a prolonged period of grief over the death of her brother and has previously stated that she would be happy to have such a real version of her mother back, especially if she didn’t know it wasn’t her “real” mother. These are Cameron’s arguments for going through with the swap. But he is also bothered by the deceit and the loss of his life before his death by basically giving it away to someone else.

Most of this movie is Ali’s performance and, as you’d expect, he gives a solid one, one that allows for enough suspension of disbelief about the sci-fi aspects so that you can swim around in the bigger picture life questions with his characters. This isn’t some twisty thriller; the movie is more concerned with the internal journey Cameron takes and as that kind of contemplative tale it is engrossing. A Available on Apple TV+.

The School for Good Mothers, by Jessamine Chan

The School for Good Mothers, by Jessamine Chan (Simon & Schuster, 325 pages)

Parents are more likely to have a child taken away from them by the government than by a stranger. Yet for most of us, Child Protective Services enters our consciousness only when we hear of its failure.

An alternate world is presented in Jessamine Chan’s debut novel, The School for Good Mothers, in which the state vastly oversteps its bounds and is given terrifying power over families when someone is accused of child neglect or abuse.

The story is about a single mother, Frida, who, overcome by exhaustion and stress, makes the shockingly bad decision to leave her toddler alone while she goes to get coffee and pick up some forgotten work at the office. Neighbors call the police when the child, named Harriet, starts crying.

When the police call Frida to say they have her child, she is overcome with guilt and rushes to the station, expecting to pick up her child after sufficient explanation and groveling. Instead, she finds herself in a cascading nightmare.

The police let Frida’s ex-husband, Gust, take Harriett to the home he shares with his young girlfriend. They tell Frida that she will have to convince Child Protective Services of her worthiness before she can have her child again. This isn’t just today’s Social Services, however, but a 1984-ish imagining of a state darkly empowered by surveillance technology and the belief that the state knows more about proper child-rearing than parents.

Soon after Harriett goes home, two men from Child Protective Services arrive to inspect her home and outfit it with cameras. They will be watching, even without Harriett in the home, in order to assess Frida’s fitness to mother her child. They explain that artificial intelligence will use the footage to analyze her feelings, that this will be fair because it eliminates human error.

Frida accepts this because she has no choice; it’s a condition for getting her child back. But so are monitored visits with Harriett with a social worker watching — visits in which she is expected to play with her toddler in her ex-husband’s house, the same daughter who now feels abandoned by her mother.

Not surprisingly, these visits go spectacularly poorly, and eventually Frida is deemed “insufficiently contrite” and a “narcissist with anger-management issues and … poor impulse control.” She is given her last option: to submit to a year’s stay at a state-run facility at which she and other mothers accused of neglect or abuse are taught how to be “good” mothers. At the end of the year, the state will decide whether she can have her child back.

Chan engages a politically fraught topic in the age of debate over free-range parenting, the ethics of nanny cams and other forms of surveillance, and whether parents or educators should decide what children are taught in public school. But she has crafted an elegant and engrossing story that only once steps out of the narrative (and then only briefly) to mention contemporary conflicts. Other than a few paragraphs, this is a story about Frida alone, and she is a complicated and bewilderingly sympathetic protagonist.

Although Frida insists she had one very bad day in her mothering career — her lawyer coaches her to call it a “lapse in judgment” — it was an extraordinarily bad day, and the fact that she had barely slept the night before does not absolve her of leaving a toddler alone in an exercise saucer for nearly two hours. Even though the child wasn’t hurt, it was a horrific offense, and it seems right that the state conduct a review for Harriet’s sake.

But compassion grows as we learn more about Frida’s circumstances — the discovery of her husband’s affair while she was still pregnant, the over-involved girlfriend who texts parenting advice to Frida and posts pictures of Harriett on social media, the shared custody arrangement that forces Frida to work while caring for a sick child on her own.

But again, there are no stereotypes here, just human beings in varying stages of imperfection. The father who left Frida also held her hand in divorce court; the girlfriend who seems to want the child for her own testifies on behalf of Frida’s parenting.

The only true villains here are the smug, condescending “playground moms” who look down on the parenting of others, and of course the state.

Its arrogant and overreaching arm, which coldly keeps Frida from the child who gives her life purpose and meaning, becomes so much of a villain that we wish the Avengers would swoop in.

Chan has a delicate touch and she refrains from overt moralizing; moreover, The School for Good Mothers is an extraordinary first novel because Frida is not one-dimensional. She did a terrible thing and we never really understand why she did it. But Frida is not quite an antihero, either; she loves her child desperately and did many things right before the state began training its eye on the things it believes she does wrong. As such, it’s a nuanced and intelligent novel that is also thoroughly absorbing, the sort of book you can breeze through on a weekend but will think about all the next week. A

Book Notes

Last week, we started running through a literal Book of the Month club for 2022, choosing the best-reviewed books that have a month in the title.

So far, we’ve had The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow; February House by Sherill Tippins; March: A Novel by Geraldine Brooks; One Friday in April by Donald Antrim; Eight Days in May by Volker Ullrich; and Seven Days in June by Tia Williams. On to the rest of the year.

July: The most recent is a book of poetry, July (Sarabande Books, 120 pages), published last June by New York writer Kathleen Ossip. NPR named it one of its “books we love.” But you can also go back to 2014 for the Tim O’Brien novel July, July (Houghton Mifflin, 322 pages), a story of 10 friends attending their 30th college reunion.

August: Snow in August (Little, Brown & Co., 320 pages) by the late Pete Hamill, former editor of the New York Daily News, is the best we can do, although this takes us back to 1997. It’s the story of a friendship that bloomed between an Irish Catholic boy and a lonely Brooklyn rabbi.

September: The Fortnight in September (Scribner, 304 pages) is a 1931 novel by R.C. Sheriff that was reissued last fall as a 90th anniversary paperback edition. NPR called it a “gift” that came back into the public consciousness during the pandemic. It’s also described as a “timeless classic” and is about a family of five vacationing on the coast of England.

October: The End of October (Knopf, 400 pages) by Lawrence Wright, a writer for The New Yorker, is about a deadly pandemic that begins in Indonesia and spreads across the world. Stop us if you’ve heard this one before.

November: November Road (William Morrow, 320 pages) is a 2019 thriller by Lou Berney. It’s set at the time of the John F. Kennedy assassination, and involves a mobster on the run who picks up a mother and kids on the side of the road and gives them a ride in exchange for his cover: disguising himself as an insurance salesman on a trip with his family.

December: Lots of choices here, many of them terrible, but let’s go with Lost in December (Simon & Schuster, 368 pages), a novelized retelling of the Bible’s “prodigal son” story by the wildly popular Richard Paul Evans, author of The Christmas Box. Scoff all you want, but it’s got five stars on Amazon. Guess we’ll need to read The Christmas Box, too.

Book Events

Author events

• TOM RAFFIO Author presents Prepare for Crisis, Plan to Thrive. The Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Thurs., Jan. 27, 5:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com.

• CHAD ORZEL Author presents A Brief History of Timekeeping. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Thurs., Jan. 27, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• ISABEL ALLENDE Author presents Violeta. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Sat., Jan. 29, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration and tickets required, to include the purchase of the book. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• JOHN NICHOLS Author presents Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiters. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Tues., Feb. 1, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• GARY SAMPSON AND INEZ MCDERMOTT Photographer Sampson and art historian McDermott discuss New Hampshire Now: A Photographic Diary of Life in the Granite State. Sat., Feb. 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

Poetry

• ROB AZEVEDO Poet reads from his new book of poetry, Don’t Order the Calamari. The Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Thurs., Feb. 3, 6 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in 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.

Album Reviews 22/01/27

Dust Prophet, “Hourglass” (self-released)

Local bands could learn a thing or three from what this veteran threesome — led by Manchester’s long-put-upon, one-man demolition crew Otto Kinzel — accomplished publicity-wise in getting this new single to make the rounds in some of the more notable blogs. It debuted on none other than the Decibel blog, sporting a great review, for starters, which means this ain’t no joke, as metal releases go. Bassist-keyboardist Sarah Wappler and drummer Tyler MacPherson support guitarist-singer Kinzel in this one-shot, which is aimed at the stoner-metal crowd, i.e. folks who are into everything from Sabbath-ish Trail Of Dead stuff to Sabbath-ish Candlemass stuff, and it’s quite fitting in that regard, launching with an almost-sitar-emulating bit that has a world-music tint to it, after which comes the expected slow-mo-mosh-pit bombast in the vein of Sabbath’s “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” or your basic Kyuss-ish slowbie. Kinzel sounds quite a bit like early Ozzy Osborne here, which is of course apropos; there’s no reason these guys couldn’t have the success of any of their competitors. A+

Kristian Montgomery & The Winterkill Band, A Heaven For Heretics (self-released)

Another local band, if you count Vermont as more or less local; Montgomery, a native Dane, moved there from Cape Cod, which is where he was when we first chatted over Facebook PMs in March of last year, upon the release of his Prince Of Poverty LP, which I do recall rather liking. His forte is Appalachia-rock, which is just my rushed catch-all for this blend of hard-charging but breezily pretty Americana/semi-country. I suppose if he wanted, Montgomery could make a run for the space occupied by Dierks Bentley or really any other band that’s got enough bluegrass-elegance in its formula to avoid ever being accused of courting NASCAR and wrestling fans, but look at this mess, I’m all over the place, so let’s get to the point: Imagine a more aggressive, working-class Amos Lee or Peter Bradley Adams and you’re in the ballpark. This stuff is truly good, sporting a production that sounds like they had a ton of studio time to refine these gems. Dobro lines turn straight into earworms, hooks are omnipresent; this will probably amaze you if you’d be up for something Bob Seger-ish but fluffier and much more eloquent. A+

PLAYLIST

• Jan. 28 has a really low Yelp rating, because it falls right in the middle of the “January/February Slog,” when the holidays are long forgotten and the only thing people can really do for fun is to see if they won’t get actual frostbite on their feet just for walking to the mailbox. I am already completely insane from winter and would take up daily drinking if it weren’t super dangerous, but either way, Jan. 28 will see our next corporate dumping of random albums, for you, the public, to consume in enthusiastic fashion! In keeping with this column’s subject-to-change tendency to favor indie bands over commercial hip-hop albums that you all know about (or summarily avoid) anyway, we’ll kick off this week with none other than the brand new Eels album, Extreme Witchcraft! I have a couple of Eels albums and only play them when I’m in a self-destructive mood; you see, I don’t like Mark Oliver Everett’s music and, um, uh, never really did, except for maybe one song off Hombre Lobo (for the record, there’s no need to tweet at or email/Facebook me that Hombre Lobo is a “sub-par Eels slab” or whatever, because (a) I won’t believe you, and (b) it may indeed be even less tolerable than the other Eels album I have, but I can’t find it, and actually I couldn’t care less if one of the cats chewed it into unlistenability; as a matter of fact, if my own kitty Babypuss scratched up that CD, I’m giving him at least 10 Greenies treats for being the world’s greatest goodboy). No, you know what bothers me about Everett’s crummy tunes is that his picture should be under the Webster’s definition of “weird beard,” like he’s got this lumberjack neck-beard, like Paul Bunyan, which makes it even more difficult to appreciate the overrated “eclecticism” of this desert-dwelling Californian who’s pretending to be a super-cool millennial even though he’s 58. I mean, other than that he’s totally an artiste par excellence, so keep that in mind if my words have made you mad, and I hope you’ll take the time to find something else in our newspaper that’s more in line with your taste; I can recommend several regular columns. Oh whatever, I hate the Eels but I can’t just say that and call this a mini-review, so I’m off to torture myself with the new single “Good Night On Earth” right now. Oh boy is this stupid, a room-temperature stun-guitar riff, no bass, Super Mario Brothers drums, then some Flaming Lips garbage-noise, and then his dumb voice, with its weird beard singing. I can’t stand this trash so much I can’t even put it into words.

• The only Pinegrove song most people know, if they even know one, is “Old Friends,” a laid-back tune that sounds like a lame grunge band covering a Nilsson song. But they’re more of an alt-country/emo band, if you can picture such a thing, not that you ever would, so the band’s new album, 11:11, is more in line with that as far as the single, “Alaska,” goes: a little bit Guster, a little bit Dashboard Confessional. Actually it’s not all that bad.

• Urge Overkill is the goofy hard rock band that did the cover of “Girl You’ll Be A Woman Soon” in Pulp Fiction. Their new LP, Oui, has a song called “Freedom” that sounds like Foo Fighters trying to be Barenaked Ladies. No one would care about this.

• We’ll wrap this up with flute-metal fossils Jethro Tull, whose zillionth album, The Zealot Gene, is here, with a single called “Shoshana Sleeping” that’s pretty cool, kind of mid-career Zeppelin-ish except there’s that dumb flute, and singer Ian Anderson is trying to talk-sing like Lemony Snicket. Ha ha, he’s so weird and overpaid.

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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