Members Only by Sameer Pandya

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on July 7, 2020

Some Americans rather vocally condemn anyone who has a higher education as elitist. Pursuing an education beyond high school doesn’t make anyone elite — two-thirds of Americans have taken college courses and nearly a third have a bachelor’s degree — but it does give people tools for exploring new ideas that, without a higher education, they might not easily find. A key scene in Members Only suggests that colleges and universities have value for students and faculty who are “interested in ideas and new ways of thinking.” Perhaps those who deride higher education as elitist feel threatened by new ideas, or change of any sort.

The protagonist of Members Only, Raj Bhatt, lectures in anthropology at a small university. While educational institutions are sometimes criticized for being too politically correct, particularly when students protest faculty members who are perceived as teaching from a racist perspective, Raj finds himself under the microscope when a student records out of context a portion of a lecture “on the history of Indian men who had come to America starting in the nineteenth century and sold religion and spirituality to the masses,” Deepak Chopra and yoga practitioners among them. Raj asks whether Americans became obsessed with eastern religions because they offered an alternative to “our own sense of loss and emptiness,” a “counterpoint to the emptiness of Christianity and western life.” This is pretty tame stuff by ordinary academic standards, but a group of conservative students, rather than debating the point with him, call for his ouster on the theory that he attacked their religious and cultural (western) beliefs.

Raj’s lecture has evolved over the years, driven in part by his own perspective as someone who is caught between two cultures. His parents moved to California from Bombay in the hope of giving Raj a better life. Raj understands that his material life is better than it would have been in India, but there is more to life than money. In high school, he never felt entirely accepted by white or black students. That sense of being apart, of living on an island of his own, has always been a part of his existence.

Members Only is about belonging, being a member of something larger than oneself, being part not just of an insular family but of the human family. The novel addresses that theme from the perspective of a man with brown skin who never feels entirely welcome or understood when he is away from home. It does so in the context of the academic community and the tennis club to which Raj belongs.

The story takes place over the course of a bad week in Raj’s life. He receives news of two health problems, one that might develop over time and another that appears suddenly. Raj is on the membership committee of his tennis club and is happy that another member has invited a black surgeon to apply. During the membership interview, Raj — hoping to create a bond with the applicant — makes a joke that is in poor taste and that some white members of the committee view as racist. Raj agrees that he needs to apologize to the surgeon, but balks at their insistence that he apologize to the other members of the committee, all of whom are white. They have never apologized to him, after all, for making him feel apart in a hundred different ways.

The notion of white people who feel victimized carries through to the conflict with students in Raj’s class who want Raj to be fired for attacking America and Christianity. The university suggests, in a roundabout way, that Raj might want to apologize to the students for advancing ideas that some of them find offensive. Understandably, Raj does not appreciate that suggestion, but he does not handle encounters with some of the more strident students as well as he might. He also deals with a troubled Indian student with less sensitivity than would be ideal. A video of his mild meltdown, doctored to make it seem worse, goes viral on right wing websites as proof that liberal college instructors are indoctrinating students with anti-Christian and anti-American beliefs.

While Members Only addresses timely questions of race and culture, it also makes clear that Raj, as a human being, struggles with all the issues that are common to humans of all colors. He and his wife are raising two sons, one of whom has behavioral difficulties that his teachers find concerning. Worries about his children only add to his mounting stress.

Notwithstanding its subject matter, Members Only avoids becoming a polemic. Sameer Pandya takes time to develop Raj as a person. His nationality is an obvious part of his identity, but he is also defined by successes and failures — as an academic, as a father and son — that stand apart from his skin color. The care Pandya takes in showing the reader all facets of Raj’s personality makes it easier to understand Raj's struggle with belonging in the larger context of a universal struggle to make the best life we can.

During the first third of Members Only, I wondered whether Pandya would simply recycle familiar themes about the hardships faced by people of color. By the end, I was captivated, not just by Pandya’s ability to address those themes in new and insightful ways, but by Raj as a unique human being who learns something about his life during a difficult week. Without moralizing, Members Only has something valuable to say about serious issues of race of ethnicity, but it does so by telling a story that invites emotional bonding with a troubled but likeable protagonist.

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The Bones of Wolfe by James Carlos Blake

Published by Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press on July 7, 2020

Criminal enterprises are more interesting than most legitimate businesses. Stories about crime families are more likely to capture the imagination than stories about upright families because the problems faced by criminals are outside the ken of law-abiding people. A reader might relate to a story about emotionally distant parents or drug dependent siblings, but we are fascinated by Michael Corleone’s decision to put the family business ahead of his loyalty to Fredo, simply because the decision to kill a disloyal brother is one that we’re never likely to ponder. At the same time, criminals like Tony Soprano remind us that members of crime families have problems in common with members of straight-and-narrow families.

The Wolfe family has roots in Ireland and Mexico. From its family base in Brownsville, Texas and in concert with the Mexican side of the family, the Wolfes now smuggle guns and engage in other outlaw activities on both sides of the border. The Wolfes place great value on education and family bonds. They operate their business using reliable management techniques, most of which would be recognizable in any legitimate business. Some of their management strategies, on the other hand, are more violent than those employed in a typical family business. Like many other families, however, the Wolfes go to bat for each other. Unlike some families, they inevitably place family ahead of profit.

The Bones of the Wolfe is the fifth novel in James Carlos Blake’s series about the Wolfe family. They are a likeable group.

The story begins with the hijacking of a shipment of guns that are being delivered to a cartel. The family member in charge of security, Mateo Wolfe, orchestrates a quick and successful response. As two Wolfe brothers, Frank and Rudy, are celebrating by screening a particularly good porn DVD that came into their possession during the gun recovery, their cousins — Rayo Luna and Jessie Juliet — insist on joining them, and then on providing commentary about the acting.

Jessie notices that one of the actresses, Kitty Quick, bears a striking resemblance to a woman she saw in an old family photograph. She shares the discovery with the family matriarch, Catalina Wolfe, who at 115 has seen a great deal and is revered by the rest of the family. Catalina instructs Frank and Rudy to find Kitty, who might be a descendent of Catalina’s lost sister. Rudy and Frank would not think of disobeying, so they embark on a quest that takes them to Los Angeles and then to Mexico, where they must persuade Kitty to leave the cartel kingpin with whom she is staying. This leads to a harrowing chase that includes an escape in a boat across the Gulf of Mexico during a hurricane. Fun stuff.

Blake pulls this off because he has mastered the art of writing an action novel with literary flair. He creates atmosphere and characterization without deadening the pace by creating too much. The main characters kill when they deem it necessary but they don’t go out of their way to be violent and in other respects behave quite decently. While the plot is less meaty than some of the earlier books in the series, the streamlined storytelling makes The Bones of the Wolfe a fast and exciting read.

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Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri

Published in Japan in 2014; published in translation in Great Britain in 2019 and in the US by Riverhead Books on June 23, 2020

Having a familiarity with Japanese history would probably help a reader dive into the full depth of Tokyo Ueno Station. I lack that familiarity, although some googling and consulting the SamuraiWiki (yes, there is such a thing) helped me understand references to the conflict between the Shōgitai and Imperial troops, leading to the Battle of Ueno. In addition, a student of Buddhism, or a reader who is familiar with each of the novel’s references to eastern religious rituals and beliefs, will likely have a more nuanced perspective on Tokyo Ueno Station than I did. Such are the difficulties and rewards of tackling Japanese fiction. The novel nevertheless conveys universal truths, regardless of and apart from history and religion, including the pain of loss and the search for meaning in an apparently random universe.

Kazu, the novel’s narrator, tells the story from his memories of being alive. Those memories are fading, as is his ability to distinguish colors and smells. At the age of 67, Kazu began living in Ueno Park in central Tokyo. By 2010, apparently the year of his death, he was 73. He collected cans for recycling to earn the pocket money that helped him survive. Kazu often wondered whether survival is worthwhile. His status as a ghost suggests that he decided his pain was unendurable. Yet he still wanders through the park and the train station, still listens to conversations, still watches when the emperor’s car drives past, the emperor waving at the people lining the sidewalks, probably without really noticing them. Death has not changed Kazu much; certainly, it has not removed the pain. Fading away is his best hope for peace.

Kazu’s life shared milestones with the emperor’s — they are the same age, their children were born on the same day, the park that became his home was a gift to Tokyo from the emperor — yet their lives are a study in contrast. Kazu worked as a laborer, traveling from one construction project to another. He was rarely home to visit his wife and child. His son died in the middle of life. Shortly after Kazu’s retirement, when he finally had time for his wife, she died sleeping next to him after he came home drunk. Kazu wondered whether his wife cried out in pain, whether he could have saved her if he had not fallen into a drunken sleep. He carried the weight of both deaths. After his granddaughter came to live with him, he decided a 21-year old woman should not be burdened by an old man, so he left her a note saying he was moving to Tokyo and that she should not look for him.

Kazu tells us that the homeless do not usually tell each other stories, but a couple of the men he encounters in the park tell him about their past lives. A sense of guilt and shame is their unifying feature. Many of the park’s homeless occupants come to a sad end, sometimes by being beaten to death for sport by Tokyo teens. Their stories are in sharp contrast to the snippets of conversation that Kazu overhears, the idle gossip or comparison of purchases at the mall, the chatterers oblivious to the lives around them.

Tokyo Ueno Station suggests the importance of noticing the unnoticed. “To be homeless is to be ignored when people walk past while still being in full view of everyone.” Watching a young man read the prayers for health or success at a temple reminds Kazu that, when he was a young man, he “had no interest in other people’s hopes or setbacks.” The experience of homelessness triggered an empathic awareness of the world that Kazu lacked when he lived a more fortunate life. It is an empathy that government lacks, as he learns when park management displaces the homeless and their cardboard huts so that the imperial family can enjoy the park and its museums without being troubled by reality.

Yet empathy cannot cure the sadness that Kazu feels. The sorrow of death has captured him. Whether he has imagined or witnessed his granddaughter’s fate is unclear, but he has seen enough death to consider whether the time has come to for him to die.

Tokyo Ueno Station might be read as a critique of the Japanese government, its post-war drive to become an economic superpower at the expense of family and a meaningful existence. On a more personal level, the novel stands as an examination of the choices (or lack of choices) that shape life and death. The novel tells a bleak story in spare prose that suits its subject matter, but it encourages readers to recognize the importance of the only life we have and the value of all that lives that we choose not to see.

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Interlibrary Loan by Gene Wolfe

Published by Tor Books on June 30, 2020

A sequel to A Borrowed Man, Interlibrary Loan is Gene Wolfe’s final novel. Wolfe reportedly turned it over to his publisher shortly before his death, but it feels incomplete. Perhaps if Wolfe had survived, an editor might have wanted him to flesh out the story, or at least to provide additional context for the ending, but Wolfe died and the manuscript is what we have, take it or leave it.

The 22nd century world established in A Borrowed Man makes cloned authors available to library patrons. Check out a cookbook author and you can get a hands-on cooking lesson. Check out Ern A. Smithe, a “recloned” mystery writer, and perhaps you can get help solving a mystery.

The background is interesting but it was largely established in A Borrowed Man. I’m not sure that Interlibrary Loan adds anything noteworthy to the concept.

The plot sends Smithe and a couple of female reclones (one a cookbook author, the other a romance novelist) to a smaller library on an interlibrary loan. Smithe prefers the library where he was residing but any chance to be checked out is welcome. Being checked out once a year pretty much guarantees his future. A prolonged period of being ignored might cause the library system to burn him as an unwanted book.

The little girl who checks out Smithe at her mother’s direction explains that a dark spooky shape invades her mother’s bedroom at night. The mother, Adah Fevre, wants Smithe to solve a mystery involving a treasure map pasted into a book. The map has hallucinatory properties. Why this should be true is, like much of the plot, is never adequately explained. The beginning of the story seems like a collection of false starts that might have been trimmed away if Wolfe had lived to give the manuscript the rewrite it needs.

The story sends Smithe and a reclone named Audrey (famed for writing books about her adventures as an explorer) to Corpse Island, where Adah’s estranged husband finds cadavers that his anatomy students can dissect. The husband is busy having sex with the reclone romance writer (who doesn’t seem to mind) and Smithe gets busy with Audrey (to their mutual satisfaction, at least in Smithe’s opinion). Adah is jealous but Adah is also crazy so nobody pays much attention to her unless she’s holding a knife.

Something like an adventure story that turns into a treasure hunt follows the arrival on Corpse Island. A treasure is located but its purpose or properties are never explained. Reclones come and go, sometimes returning as different reclones of the same dead author. It’s all a bit confusing, made all the more so by an unexplained portal to an ambiguous place through which nebulous beings travel for mysterious reasons. Perhaps Wolfe intended to elaborate on the other world in a later book. Perhaps he simply sent off an unfinished manuscript because he didn’t want his estate to refund his advance for failing to submit the book. We’ll never know.

The story and the relationships are sort of intriguing, but the novel’s merits are balanced by its flaws. Fans of A Borrowed Man might want to read Interlibrary Loan simply to immerse themselves further in the strange future that Wolfe created. Other readers might find it more satisfying to read or reread Wolfe’s earlier and better books.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Nine Shiny Objects by Brian Castleberry

Published by HarperCollins/Custom House on June 30, 2020

Knowing only that the book had something to do with lights in the sky, I thought Nine Shiny Objects might be a science fiction novel about first contact with aliens. It isn’t. The novel is more of a generational saga. The only aliens are Mexicans and Asians who immigrated to the United States to give their children the hope of a better life. The hope is realized for some of those children but not for the one who dies.

The story is told in nine chapters, each focusing on a different character, each beginning about five or ten years after the last chapter ends. The novel spans a period from 1947 to 1987. While the chapters are linked by certain locations and events, they read very much like self-contained short stories. Brian Castleberry’s goal is to show connections, cause-and-effect relationships, actions that set events in motion, spiraling into unexpected outcomes. While the characters and their lives are intriguing, I’m not sure the stories cohere in a way that creates a unified story.

The novel begins with Oliver Danville, who reads about a sighting of nine objects in the sky at Mount Rainier. Danville makes a pilgrimage, convinced that he will encounter a guiding intelligence that will give meaning to his aimless life. As he approaches his destination, he meets a farming family. Saul and Martha Penrod agree to join him on his quest, leaving behind Paul and Jack, their two adult sons. For years Paul will carry a grudge against Danville, who (in his view) lured their parents away, never to return. Jack later wonders whether that event instilled the anger that motivated the rest of Paul’s life, the hatred of hippies and commies and nonwhites, of anyone who did not fit within his narrow vision of what America should be.

Danville has a sister named Eileen, who in the next chapter falls in love with a waitress named Claudette, a character who reappears at the novel’s end. Eileen believes her brother, who now calls himself the Tzadi Sophit, had a vision, that he carries a message transmitted to humans by aliens. He is, in other words, the leader of a cult that might be a forerunner of Scientology.

The novel’s focal point, however, is a Long Island real estate development called Eden Gardens, a place that Eileen designed and that Seeker Industries built. Eden Gardens is on the outskirts of Ridge Landing, a community that is barely tolerant of its Jewish residents and that relies on a racial covenant to exclude people of color. Eden Gardens was imagined as a shared community and disparaged as a commune, a tract of houses that sat empty until 1957 when, in the dead of night, the Seekers’ leader filled it with his racially and ethnically mixed followers. Paul Penrod, an avowed racist, is there when Eden Gardens is being built, and plays a key role in the violence that shapes the rest of the novel.

From that foundation, the story lurches onward. A young black man named Stanley West witnessed the events in Eden Gardens. In a chapter that takes place a few years later, we learn how West's short stay in Ridge Landing affected the course of his life. A songwriter stars in a chapter that tangentially reintroduces Max Feldberg, who was a child of dubious parenting in Ridge Landing. That chapter culminates in ambiguous events involving another perceived cult that sends shock waves into the future. We learn about that event in a chapter that focuses on one of the Ridge Landing bigots who resents hearing about it from Morley Safer on 60 Minutes. By the end of the chapter, the bigoted character hints at the possibility of learning to overcome the senseless hate that has infected her community.

A popular radio talk show host with an affinity for conspiracy stories carries a chapter. Max’s daughter carries another. The last chapter brings back Paul and Jack. One of them is dead and the other doesn’t seem to realize, or care, that he’s interacting with a ghost.

At its best, Nine Shiny Objects tells a story of intolerance and its consequences. Without preaching, it touches on some of the low points in American history, from McCarthyism and entrenched racism to Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War. There is a bit of hope in the story, if only because the reader understands that prejudice endured by gay and black and Mexican characters will inspire civil rights struggles that will slowly erode (but not defeat) bigotry. Sadly, we know from the nightly news that the struggle must continue through future generations if the American ideal of equality and progress is ever to be realized.

At its worst, the novel is a surprisingly vague in critical moments. Max, for example, seems to have been leading a watered-down version of a Manson-like cult, but I would have enjoyed hearing Morley Safer's report given the absence of detail that we get from Castleberry. The same is true of Danville’s cult, about which we learn too little. These omissions seem odd, given Castleberry’s talent for delivering fully formed characters and imagining in depth the communities in which his characters reside.

I regarded the last chapter’s reliance on a ghost as having gone one contrivance too far. I’m not sure that all parts of the story contribute to a cohesive whole; at times, the novel seems a bit wobbly. As is sometimes true of first novels, Castleberry’s ambition may have exceeded his ability to tell a manageable story. The novel's drama tends to get lost in the wealth of background detail. But I love the complexity of the characters, the fluidity of Castleberry’s prose, the ways in which the chapters vary from each other, and the core message that envisioning a perfect community is much easier than building one.

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