Everything My Mother Taught Me by Alice Hoffman

Published digitally by Amazon on December 19, 2019

Amazon commissioned five stories for a series it calls Inheritance. The stories are unconnected to each other except by the broad theme of family secrets. In a departure from its usual format, Tzer Island will review one story in the Inheritance series each day this week.

“Everything My Mother Taught Me” is told from a child’s point of view. Adeline Ivey is only twelve for most of the story, but in the tradition of fiction told from a child’s perspective, she is wise beyond her years. Perhaps her wisdom benefits from hindsight, although Adeline’s age at the time she tells the story is unclear. The narrative voice is distinctly Alice Hoffman’s and it does not match a twelve-year-old whose education has been minimal. It is therefore fair to assume that Adeline is telling the story at a later stage in her life. Still, Adeline portrays herself as having a deeper understanding of human nature than would be typical of a child raised in relative isolation.

The story is set in 1908, a time when women who felt unconstrained by the bounds of matrimony might have been termed promiscuous, or worse. Adeline tells us that her mother Nora “ruined my father’s life, and mine, and she didn’t seem to notice.” Nora did so by keeping company with men in the local tavern rather than her husband, who dies a quiet death while his wife is enjoying the attention of other men. None of Nora’s boyfriends want the burden of supporting a widow, so Nora is forced to take a job as a lighthouse keeper on a small rocky island near Boston.

For reasons of her own, Adeline stopped speaking after her father died. Her silence does not seem to trouble the island dwellers, some of whom she befriends. Eventually she gives advice and comfort to a married friend named Julie, who for some reason decides to confide in a mute twelve-year-old, perhaps because muteness assures that her secrets will not be revealed. In any event, the heart of the story concerns a conspiracy between Adeline and Julie, largely planned by Adeline, to save Julie from her abusive husband.

Alice Hoffman writes with quiet grace. The story ends in a satisfying way that instills warm feelings toward Adeline without relying on contrivances to manipulate the reader’s emotions — save perhaps for Adeline’s willful muteness, a character trait that is surprisingly unoriginal. In all other respects, however, I admire Hoffman’s restraint. “Everything My Mother Taught Me” does just enough to make its point — even a child can make and implement a life-altering decision, one that the child will intuitively know to be correct — without trying to do too much. I didn’t entirely buy Adeline’s silence or the setup, but I nevertheless enjoyed the story, and that’s what counts.

RECOMMENDED

Can You Feel This? by Julie Orringer

Published digitally by Amazon on December 19, 2019

Amazon commissioned five stories for a series it calls Inheritance. The stories are unconnected to each other except by the broad theme of family secrets. In a departure from its usual format, Tzer Island will review one story in the Inheritance series each day this week.

“Can You Feel This” is a mundane story about the anxieties of a new mother who, in childbirth, recalls a traumatic experience that she has hidden from her husband. Julie Orringer hints at the traumatic incident before it is revealed near the story’s end. Until then, the story’s focus is on childbirth, territory that has been explored in countless stories about the anxieties experienced by new mothers. Orringer does nothing new or special in this story’s examination of the fear of motherhood.

Emily is understandably freaked out about the bleeding that won’t stop. Recalling her doctor’s warnings, she fears losing her baby. As her husband Ky drives her across a bridge to Manhattan, she’s also freaked out because she sees a different bridge where her mother died 28 years earlier. Apparently, Emily has never become acclimated to traveling from Brooklyn to Manhattan via a bridge.

Against her wishes, Ky takes her to the hospital where she saw her mother’s dead body. Emily feels very alone because she has no living parents, notwithstanding the presence of a patient husband who drove her to the hospital and stayed in her room during her C-section, as well as three friends who visit during her brief hospital stay. Emily is a bit fragile.

Doctors stick Emily with needles and repeatedly ask “Can you feel this?” Hence the title, which presumably also refers to all the other things the protagonist does or doesn’t feel. How very literary.

Since it happens quite early, it isn’t a spoiler to report that the baby is delivered alive and that he smells like wildflowers. Alyssum, in particular. Orringer goes on about new-baby scent for just a few sentences, but that’s a few sentences too long for my taste.

The bulk of the story explores Emily’s endless stream of anxieties: her reluctance to enter a state of motherhood because of her unhappy experience with her unstable mother; her attempts to figure out how to operate her newborn. Neither her husband (who stays dutifully in the background) nor her supportive visitors lessen her self-absorbed anguish. Why Emily insists on feeling sorry for herself in the midst of all this love and attention is a bit of a mystery. Emily seems to think she needs her long-dead mother to tell her how to raise a baby, a task that women have been doing forever, despite getting advice and instruction, not to mention helpful pamphlets, from hospital staff. If she needs coaching, she can also turn to another visitor, a “powerful” West Coast neuroscientist who is the mother of three children and one of Emily’s long-time friends. So why all the fuss?

The story works its way to a denouement after Emily leaves the hospital and must again confront a scary bridge, (presumably) symbolic of a bridge between pre-mommy life and her new-mommy status. In second-person prose that is (presumably) meant to connect the reader more closely to Emily, we learn the source of her life-shaping trauma. I rejected the traumatic moment as ridiculously manipulative and, in any event, I had little sympathy for Emily’s three-decade long refusal to confront her past. Nor was I moved by the suggestion that childbirth will finally give Emily reason to change.

Orringer’s prose is fluid. Emily is the only character who is given even the slightest substance (all that can be said of her husband is that he seems like a nice guy), although it isn’t unusual to shortchange secondary characters in short fiction. I found no offsetting virtues to overcome my dislike of a contrived motherhood story about an annoyingly fragile character. Readers who enjoy obvious emotional manipulation or, for that matter, stories about anxious new mommies will likely have a very different reaction.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Cruel Stars by John Birmingham

Published by Del Rey on August 20, 2019

As is customary in science fiction, many future humans in The Cruel Stars are wired into the net, but only if they can afford the brain augmentations. Augmented humans can store their engrams, allowing them to survive death by implanting their memories into a new brain. People of means can also live several lifetimes using the same technology.

The only unusual twist in that theme is the presence of the Sturm, humans who believe that the purity of the human race is defiled by augmentation or extra lives. As the ominous name “Sturm” might signal, the Sturm and their Human Republic have dedicated themselves to killing the impure and to restoring human space (the Greater Human Volume) to its pure organic origins.

The Sturm have reappeared after an exile that followed the Great War between the Javan Empire and the Armadale system. Earth brokered a peace to end that war, and the Royal Armadalan Navy ship Defiant patrols space to enforce that treaty.

Several storylines converge in The Cruel Stars. One key character is Lucinda Hardy, who worked her way from a difficult childhood to the position of lieutenant, where she is newly assigned to the Defiant. The Defiant is undertaking a patrol at the request of Earth. Their mission is to find out why three probes have gone silent. They suspect wrongdoing by the evil Sturm. The patrol goes sideways when an encrypted communication turns the captain into a raving, flesh-eating monster. That’s enough to make the survivors excrete their neural nets and take the ship offline for fear that their Artificial Intelligence has been corrupted.

A key character in related storyline is in his seventh lifetime. Frazer McLennan is investigating a Sturm ship that crashed on a remote planet in the distant past. When a pompous prince from House Yulin arrives, McLennan needs to practice diplomacy with a keg of scotch — until an encrypted communication turns the prince into a raving, flesh-eating monster. McLennan’s crankiness makes him the novel’s most entertaining character.

McLennan spends some of his time guarding Princess Alessia, who feels put upon because she is facing an arranged marriage that will join House Montanblanc to House Yulin, part of the corporate realm known as the Yulin-Irrawaddy Combine. Alessia is your basic pampered princess who rises to the occasion when conflict ensues

A pirate named Sephina L’trel commands a ship called Je Ne Regrette Rien. To convince the reader of her toughness, she beheads a Yakuza underboss to get the data chip in his brain. Sephina has a history with Lucinda Hardy. Sephina’s motley crew finds itself caught in the middle of a reengaged war between the Sturm and the rest of humanity.

The final key character is named Booker. He generally lives inside a warrior bot, although at an early point in the story he is waiting for his source code to be deleted. Booker is the second most entertaining character, largely because of his complaints when he gets transferred to less powerful bodies, including a gardening robot. That’s life. You don’t always get the body you want.

The Cruel Stars is an above-average space opera with military sf themes. The plot features a good bit of action, the prose style is above average for the genre, and the background is well conceived, if fairly typical. The parallels between the Sturm, who insist on biological purity, and the Nazis, who insisted on racial purity; aren’t subtle but the theme is timely. By the end, the good guys seem to be just as bloodthirsty as the bad guys (only annihilation will serve as victory), but perhaps that troubling theme will be explored in the novel that I assume will follow this one. For space opera fans, I would recommend The Cruel Stars as one of 2019’s better offerings.

RECOMMENDED

The Book of Science and Antiquities by Thomas Keneally

First published in Australia in 2018; published by Atria Books on December 10, 2019

Two stories intertwine in The Book of Science and Antiquities, each following a man to the end of his life. One is the modern story of a documentary maker. The other is the story of Learned Man, whose life in prehistory is imagined to be one of self-sacrifice. While Learned Man’s death seems meaningless from a modern perspective, it was viewed as profound by Learned Man’s clan. The mere fact that Learned Man once lived is viewed as significant by his Aboriginal ancestors.

After meeting Peter Jorgenson, the geomorphologist who discovered the remains of Learned Man near Lake Learned, Shelby Apple decided to make a documentary about the discovery. Jorgenson told Shelby that Learned Man was honored by those who buried him. Jorgenson regarded Learned Man’s death as evidence that “to be human is to have business to attend to, to be on a quest.” While we may want an easy life that includes no pilgrimage, in Jorgenson’s view “we don’t have a life worth having” if we fail to undertake “a dangerous search.” Unfortunately, “being human is a test that kills us.”

What was Learned Man’s quest? As Thomas Keneally imagines it, Learned Man is an otherwise ordinary man who gives credence to dreamt visions. He calls the teacher he sees in his dreams “the Hero,” one of many heroes (gods) who enact laws to govern the growing body of people in their various clans. Learned Man is called upon to enforce the laws that bind the clans when a clan member does an injustice to a woman from another clan. Eventually, Learned Man discovers that a curse has been laid upon the land and this it is his duty to remove the curse. His selfless action in that regard explains why a stone was found with Learned Man that originated far from the site of his burial.

Learned Man lost his Son Unnameable to one of the dangerous creatures that made human life a marginal experience. He quarrels with his wife and fears for the safety of his children. As Keneally portrays him, and as Jorgenson explains, Learned Man is all of us. “He prodded the universe the way we prod at it. He felt overwhelmed by it, but had the human urge to encompass it. He chased love with the same sacred and profane mix of motives we do.”

Keneally tells Learned Man’s story in chapters that alternate with Shelby’s story. Shelby has had a successful career but, with the discovery of tumors on his esophagus, he knows that it will come to an end. He does not fear death so much as he fears the loss of independence. Rather, he denies the immediacy of death, despairing only “the ferocious weight of time” that may run out before he finishes his quests.

Like Learned Man, Shelby cherishes his wife and children. He has taken dangerous journeys to Vietnam and Eritrea, to the Arctic and under the sea, to make his films. He has experienced loss. He has been weak with women. He has taken up the causes of modern Heroes, sages of the human tribe, using film to tell stories of wrongs that would easily be remedied in a less selfish world. He has recently championed the cause of returning Learning Man to his Aboriginal descendants. In that regard, he prevails upon Australia’s prime minister, “a captive of right-wing brutes in his party who still believe in serving the market Moloch as an almost theological duty.”

Keneally gives the reader a lot to chew upon, from the harm caused by white missionaries who provide fish without teaching the less fortunate to fish, to the collection of cells that define us only to betray us, to the ease with which men conceive and devote themselves to destructive theologies. His themes are as big as the meaning of life and of death, but he explores those themes by imagining the connection of individuals, from our earliest ancestors to the present, all surviving against the odds while searching for something in life that transcends mere survival.

As the quoted passages demonstrate, Keneally’s prose is lush and vibrant. He makes it possible to relate to characters whose lives are in many ways unlike our own, yet in fundamental ways exactly like our own. The Book of Science and Antiquities is an ambitious novel, but Keneally maintains control of his narrative, never letting ambition get in the way of telling personal stories about characters (even if from prehistory) to whom readers can relate.

RECOMMENDED

Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD on December 3, 2019

Dead Astronauts is told, in part, from the perspective of a fox who merged with a biomechanical version of itself and was sent on missions of exploration, apparently to other times or universes. The fox plotted revenge against the humans who, in its view, were torturers. After all, humans hunt foxes for sport because foxes can’t hunt humans. When it is the fox’s turn to kill, it muses: “Killing is easy. I think that’s why people do it so much.”

One theme of Dead Astronauts is that after centuries of being hunted or used as test subjects, animals might have the last laugh. Scientists who try to un-fox a fox might find themselves outfoxed. In that regard, Dead Astronauts might be viewed as an animal rights story, a reminder that our fear of alien abduction is no different than a bird’s fear of being caged by humans, that gathering data by harming an animal is no different than an animal tearing apart a human to satisfy its curiosity. It’s all just a matter of perspective.

The story might also be viewed as a cautionary tale of the consequences that follow from the human capacity to block unhappy thoughts. The fox imagines what humans might ask if they were honest: “Do you have the new phone yet that someone made continents away because they were forced to and then someone else starved to death because when they mined the components they destroyed all the crop lands and the forest?”

While this is in part the story of a fox, it is also the story of all foxes, because the fox as a species knows how to burrow down, to hide, to survive, perhaps to outlast humanity. Sometimes it is the story of birds and fish, both specific creatures and a species in general. We’re all part of the same world, the novel suggests, one that humans are insufficiently meek to inherit.

Yet the story is also told, in part, from the perspective of Charlie X, a human who was still just Charlie when, as a boy, his father worked for the Company. Charlie’s gift was the creation of new creatures, biomechanical life forms with altered genes, some of which he created without the Company’s knowledge. Charlie, like the blue fox he created, viewed his own creator — his father — as a torturer.

Charlie and the Company made something of a mess. The scientists who made the mess, likened to magicians, left destruction in their wake, at least in one universe. A homeless woman from the past named Sarah, contemplating an apparent journal from the future, seems to suggest that there might be something worth living for, even if that thing is unknowable. Just ask the fox.

Maybe those few facts are spoilers (although I would have found a user’s guide to be helpful) because the first three quarters of the novel leave the reader clueless about what’s going on. Those chapters introduce three characters: Grayson, Chen, and Moss. One of them might be a dead astronaut, or perhaps they all are. Shape-shifting Moss might literally be moss, but perhaps none of them are human, at least not now. They seem to be living different versions of the same history over and over, repeatedly encountering a blue fox and a duck with a broken wing, not knowing from one encounter to the next whether those creatures will be allies or enemies. They seem to be looking for Charlie X, although what they hope to accomplish by finding him is unclear. I assume they want to change the past or damage the Company through a strategy yet to be invented.

Does such a baffling story merit a recommendation? At times the narrative approaches incomprehensibility. I suppose the same might be said about Ulysses, a highly regarded classic by those who made it the end, so perhaps hard sledding isn’t a reason to condemn a novel. I can say that the fox has more characterization than is given to the typical fictional fox, and that the broad outlines of biogenetic engineering that form the novel’s background, while common in science fiction, are intriguing. I can say that the prose is sometimes poetic, although Jeff VanderMeer sometimes abandons poetry to repeat the same cluster of sentences dozens of times over the course of several pages. I can say that I would probably get more out of the novel after a second reading, but I don’t know if I will ever find the energy to struggle through it again (I’m still awaiting the strength to take another stab at Ulysses). Since struggle can be its own reward, I’ll recommend Dead Astronauts guardedly with the caveat that the novel isn’t for readers who want the clarity offered by a writer who spells everything out.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS