The Guest Lecture by Martin Riker

Published by Grove Press/Black Cat on January 24, 2023

The narrator of The Guest Lecture makes occasional but increasingly unsuccessful attempts to impose structure upon a stream of consciousness ramble. The result is insightful and delightful.

Abigail was on a tenure track in the field of economics, dutifully publishing once a year in Tier 2 journals. She became sidetracked as she thought about an essay Keynes wrote called “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” Although the essay purported to make predictions about future economic growth, Abigail saw it as making deeper and more wide-ranging connections between economics, rhetoric, and optimism. She wrote a “messy little heartfelt essay” on those themes that went modestly viral, leading to an invitation to write a book that explored the same vague thesis. The book was published to little acclaim.

Abigail was then denied tenure on the pretense that her work was derivative because another economist had discussed similar subjects, although not through the lens of Keynes. Abigail was not familiar with the economist’s work and while her own book was no more derivative than nearly all scholarship (very few journal articles represent original thinking), she believes “a grumbling line of bitter visages” voted against tenure because they had “a vexed relationship with novelty, always preferring to re-tread existing critical paths rather than blaze new ones.”

Abigail has a dim view of academic economists, a group of consisting mostly of males who are fixated on mathematics and measurement but never wonder about what gets measured and what (or who) gets left out. She has a similar view of academic philosophers, noting that Plato believed philosophers alone would understand “essential truths,” proving that Plato “never met anyone from our philosophy department.”

While contemplating unemployment, Abigail is invited to give a lecture based on her book. She plans to compare “the two Keyneses: the creative improvisational human he was in life and the institutional symbol of unchecked governmental expenditures that history has made of him.” She wants to focus on Keynes’ view of optimism, but as she builds her planned lecture in her mind, it is anything but focused. When she tries to follow the old memory trick of imagining each section of the speech as a room in her house, Keynes joins her for a stroll through the rooms.

The novel consists largely of Abigail’s lecture, or her thought digressions as she tries to construct it. Keynes helpfully scolds her when she’s straying too far off track although, by the end, there’s no track to follow. The initial rooms of the house in Abigail’s mind are filled with interesting ideas: her disagreement with Keynes’ notion that everyone shares the same desire for leisure rather than work; optimism as a form of antagonism and thinking as a model for living; rhetoric and Sophists; Plato’s elitism; the debate about pragmatism in the Western intellectual tradition (whether it is better to be right or to be useful); resistance to feminism in economics.

Whoa, Keynes warns, you don’t have enough time to cover all this ground. But Abigail doesn’t care because she is having too much fun: “I am enjoying myself thinking about all of this: the history of rhetoric, the history of ideas.” The novel is, at its best, a celebration of ideas, of deep thought, of living a life of the mind.

But it is also a condemnation of living that life. As Abigail applies her ideas to her own life, she wonders how she came to her present (soon to be jobless) state. She faults herself for relying on instinct to carry her along with “a total absence of strategy.” She admires Keynes for following truths to reasoned conclusions, for his willingness to change his mind in response to new evidence, and wonders about her own aversion to risk. Or did risky decisions, none of which were well considered, result in the denial of tenure?

Where has a life of the mind gotten Abigail? Eventually, Abigail’s thoughts digress to her childhood, her failure to make friends in high school, the satisfaction she received from meeting smart people in college, the one meaningful friendship in college that faded away after graduation, her marriage and daughter. Abigail loves her husband but wonders whether he is, as a stay-at-home dad who stands upon his refusal to sell out to corporate America, taking advantage of her willingness to work so that he can pursue the kind of freedom from labor that Keynes assumes we all want.

Nothing recognizable as a plot emerges from The Guest Lecture. That’s fine. Through humor, sometimes biting and other times wistful, the novel tells a lively story — the story of ideas. The attempt to personalize that story through Abigail is probably necessary (a book about ideas wouldn’t be a novel without a character) but the story of ideas is stronger than the story of Abigail, whose self-doubt and resentments become a bit whiny before she realizes that nobody really fits into the world, that few people can (like Keynes) live a life of the mind and still make a difference.

The novel's ending invites the reader to wonder whether the guest lecture is even a thing. Abigail has been thrown off her game by the tenure committee and might need to plan a speech to gain clarity of thought and purpose. It is at least clear that Abigail is making a valiant effort to balance intellect and anxiety. She’s a likable mess who, the reader can confidently assume, is closer than she thinks to getting her life together — assuming that's an achievable goal for anyone.

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This Other Eden by Paul Harding

Published by W. W. Norton & Company on January 24, 2023

This Other Eden is based on one of the countless dark moments in American history, the moments when the government interferes with the lives of people who are causing no harm to serve the interests of greed and intolerance. The novel is set in a time when eugenics, a pseudo-science rooted in racism, became a weapon that governments wielded against the powerless.

The novel’s Apple Island is, in the words of a woman who lived there, “a poor little island of such poor dear souls.” In a broad sense, the story parallels the tragedy of Malaga Island, an enclave of mixed-race settlers who were evicted and sometimes institutionalized under the pretext of protecting Maine from feeble minds.

Paul Harding imagines Apple Island as a place settled by Benjamin Honey, a former slave, and Patience Honey, a Galway girl, in 1793. Benjamin planted apple trees in the hope of creating a new Eden. He and Patience raised a family. By 1815, the island had thirty residents. In 1911, Esther Honey, great-granddaughter of Benjamin and Patience, tells the story of the 1815 hurricane that devastated Apple Island. She does not know that the island will soon be devastated by the government of Maine, although when it happens, the island’s fate does not surprise her. She knows that powerful white men feel the need to disturb people like her.

By 1911, Apple Island’s population consists of three extended families (the Honeys, the Larks, and the McDermotts), as well as Annie Parker, who lives alone, and Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, who spends most of his time carving biblical images inside a hollow tree. The islanders have inherited traits from “African fathers and Irish mothers, Penobscot grandmothers and Swedish grandpas.” Theophilus and Candace Lark claim to be cousins but are likely brother and sister; only four of their nine children lived. Cheryl Sockalexis (who might be a Native American) and her three children move to the island but Cheryl leaves when she feels assured that the islanders will care for her kids.

Apart from the Larks’ consensual incest, an unwelcome pregnancy caused by a father who raped his daughter plays a role in the island’s history, as does the victim’s secret vengeance. In other respects, Apple Island is just another small fishing village, not much different than mainland villages, its residents eking out lives with some help from relief supplies that rarely match their needs.

A missionary to the island, Matthew Diamond, provides instruction to the children. He is surprised that Emily Sockalexis is a math whiz, that Tabitha Honey easily learns Latin, and that Ethan Honey is a skilled artist. Matthew arranges for Ethan to live with the Hales in Massachusetts, where he might be given an opportunity to attend art school. That dream is jeopardized by Ethan’s dalliance with an Irish servant. Thomas Hale is utterly opposed to miscegenation.

Underlying the story is Maine’s embrace of eugenics and its creation of a Governor’s Commission to study and determine the fate of Apple Island residents. The white men who measure and observe the residents find them wanting. A decision is made to evict them all, sending some to an institution for the feeble minded.

The story focuses on the difficult but harmless lives of the islanders and their powerlessness in the face of a government that envisions Apple Island as a tourism destination, one that would not attract tourists if occupied by mixed-race residents. Whether they are sharp or dull and regardless of their skin color, the islanders are ultimately a collection of people who get along with each other, depend on each other, and call the island home. Apple Island is far from utopia but, unlike the mainland, it is free from racism and greed. The islanders are decent people whose lives are upended, whose roots are destroyed by men who are confident that white skin assures their moral superiority.

Harding tells a simple story with pitch-perfect prose. Compassion bleeds from his sentences. Harding’s focus on the characters channels the reader’s attention away from the larger social injustice to the impact that injustice has upon individuals. The novel’s point is that humans deserve to be treated with the dignity to which individuals are entitled. Inbreeding might have impaired some residents of Apple Island, but that harm is minor in comparison to the harm inflicted by the entitled proponents of eugenics. You don’t need to be a social justice warrior to appreciate the beauty and power of Harding’s indictment of government policies that destroy families and communities.

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The Cabinet of Dr. Leng by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Published by Grand Central Publishing on January 17, 2023

The Pendergast series has always depended on the macabre and bordered on the supernatural, but the most entertaining entries showcased Pendergast’s prowess as an investigator. He combined a Sherlockian mastery of observation and disguise with broad and extensive knowledge of arcane subjects to solve strange murders, often with the assistance of Vincent D'Agosta, an NYPD detective. The stories have often incorporated elements of horror fiction, but the series lost its footing when it began to focus on Constance Greene, Pendergast’s ward, a woman who has lived for more than a century without physically aging beyond her twenties.

The Cabinet of Dr. Leng reaches way back to book 3 (The Cabinet of Curiosities) of this 21-book series for the story’s foundation. A dead relative of Pendergast, Enoch Leng, was responsible for Greene’s longevity. Greene has long mourned the loss of her sister Mary, whose organs were harvested in Leng’s effort to find a chemical that would stop his body from aging. Thanks to a time machine that appeared in the silly novel Bloodless, Greene was able to travel into the past, where she hopes to rescue Mary, as well as her childhood self and a brother who died soon after his release from prison. She also wants to kill Leng, who is fated to die in her own time line, although only after a long and evil life.

To avoid the nasty paradoxes that accompany time travel, the machine opens a portal to the past or future in other dimensions. Greene apparently gives no thought to meddling with the past in someone else’s universe. There are presumably an infinite number of alternate universes. It is unclear why Greene thinks saving one of an infinite number of Marys is a worthwhile endeavor, given that all the others will be left to their fate. But the Greene branch of the Pendergast tree has made less and less sense as the tree has grown, so let’s not trouble ourselves with the absurdity of Greene’s decision to travel through time and between dimensions for reasons that are far from rational.

For some time now, Constance has been irked that Pendergast won’t shag her, which would be a creepy thing to do with a ward. The affronted Constance doesn’t want Pendergast to follow her because her heart would break if she ever crossed his path again. It seems to me Pendergast should be happy that he is quit of her, but naturally he arranges for the machine (destroyed at the end of Bloodless) to be rebuilt, enabling him to follow Constance in disguise because he is sure that Leng will otherwise outwit her and end her life.

The story follows Pendergast and D'Agosta as they muck about in nineteenth century New York City, battling Leng and his underlings while trying to hide from Constance. A subplot follows Pendergast’s most recent FBI partner, Armstrong Coldmoon, who was helping D’Agosta solve a murder in a museum while investigating a related murder on a reservation. Fortunately, Coldmoon does not need D’Agosta to continue the investigation, as Coldmoon strikes out on his own before Pendergast recruits D’Agosta to take the interdimensional trip. Pendergast has a habit of asking D’Agosta to put his life in danger. One can understand why D’Agosta’s wife has had enough of Pendergast.

With about ten pages left, it becomes clear that neither of these plot threads will be resolved. Hey, you can’t sell another novel in a decaying series if you actually complete a story. But the “to be concluded” comes with a surprise, although it’s not that surprising given the authors’ tendency to reprise villains who died in earlier novels.

Preston and Child write impressively atmospheric descriptions of 1880 New York. I even learned something about how museums store artifacts. The story is peppered with action scenes that earn its designation as a thriller. The story is lively. Unfortunately, the plot is a tiresome retread of characters in a series that has strayed too far from its vision of Pendergast as a modern Sherlock.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Decent People by De'Shawn Charles Winslow

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing on January 17, 2023

Decent People is a novel of small-town secrets and southern bigotry. In 1976, black and white people mix uneasily in the North Carolina town of West Mills, but everyone understands that there is a black side of town and a white side of town. 

As a white widow with black children, Savannah Temple Russet is not accepted in either side. Savannah has been estranged from her racist parents since she decided to marry a black man. Savannah’s mother is particularly vile. Savannah’s best friend is Marva Harmon, whose sister Marian is the town’s first black doctor.

Savannah and Marva are keeping a secret — their addiction to Valium and the source of their pills. Savannah’s father, who owns the shopping center in which Marian rents space for a pediatric clinic, has a secret that reveals his small-town hypocrisy.

Josephine Wright spent most of her life in New York, where her brother Hershel was able to be open about his sexuality. After returning to West Mills, Jo learns that Hershel was keeping a secret about why their mother decided to move north.

A family secret was kept from Fran Waters and Eunice Manning until 1960, when they were in their late teens. At that point, the girls became rivals for a farmhand named Breezy Loving. He took advantage of the situation and enjoyed the company of both girls. The secret that the girls will only learn later in life adds to the soap opera of their triangular relationship.

Eunice and Breezy are married when the novel begins. They have a son named La’Roy. Concerned that her son is too effeminate, Eunice takes La’Roy to Marian Harmon in the hope that a doctor will know what to do. Eunice expects Marian to talk to La’Roy, but Marian tries to persuade Savannah’s sons to beat the gay out of La’Roy. Savannah does not appreciate the attempt to turn her children into thugs, even if they are already bullies. Confrontations with both Marian and Marva ensue.

Much of this is backstory suggests that Decent People will be a novel of melodramatic scandal. The novel threatens to cross that line, but the secrets take on new importance after Marian, her sister Marva, and their brother Lazarus are murdered. Marva was Marian’s assistant; Laz was her driver and cleaner.

Savannah and Eunice are both murder suspects because Eunice confronted Marian and Savannah confronted both women, although neither Eunice nor Savannah want to admit that the confrontation concerned Marian’s attempt to “treat” La’Roy by persuading Savannah’s sons to beat him. Savannah’s father Ted is a suspect because he was seen arguing with Marian for reasons he also chooses to conceal. Jo’s fiancé, Lymp Seymore, is a suspect because he made nasty statements about the Harmons in public.

Jo is angry that of all the suspects, Lymp is the only one who was taken into custody for questioning. She conducts her own investigation because she’s convinced the police don’t care who murdered three black people. She’s right that the police aren’t making much of an effort to solve the murders. They blame it on the usual suspects — unidentified “folk from up North” — and chalk it up to a drug deal gone bad because pills were found at the murder scene. But why would drug dealers leave drugs behind?

The novel isn’t a whodunit. Most of the story has passed before a reader has enough information to make an educated guess about the killer’s identity. In hindsight, the clues are there, but I didn’t solve the mystery on my own. Nor is the killer’s identity particularly important to the story. The reveal is almost an afterthought.

This is instead a novel about characters concealing truths in the hope that they can live relatively decent lives, free from judgment and hypocrisy, lives that are not defined by small-town scandals and the prejudices that are passed from generation to generation. It is the story of a gossipy town in which secrets will out. As Eunice observes, “nothing stays secret for long in West Mills.”

De'Shawn Charles Winslow tells the story in quietly understated prose. He creates lives in full. It's good to give characters flesh, but some of the backstories stray from the essential. One that comes in the novel’s second half bogs down the story for a bit. For the most part, however, the story moves at a good pace as it shifts its focus among the key players.

The novel fails to generate the emotional intensity one might expect from a book based on a triple homicide and attempted child abuse, perhaps because its tragedies come across as representative rather than personal. Marian’s desire to punish La’Roy for effeminate mannerisms might best be seen as a stand-in for all vicious intolerance, rather than a convincing response to Eunice’s request for help.

The novel’s strongest moment comes at the end, when Savannah realizes that her reliance on pills (which never seems to have a negative impact on her life) causes her to lose credibility with her children. I’m not sure Eunice ever gains comparable insight into the much greater harm she does by failing to accept her son for who he is. Still, that’s an honest portrayal of life. Some parents make progress and others don’t.

Novels that spotlight the evils plaguing small towns are a literary staple. Maybe the targets of the spotlight are too easy to hit. Yet Decent People is an admirable attempt to remind readers that racism and homophobia are accepted by supposedly “decent people” in too much of the nation, particularly in towns where like-minded people allow bigotry to thrive.

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Mr. Breakfast by Jonathan Carroll

First published in translation in Poland in 2019; published by Melville House on January 17, 2023

Mr. Breakfast is constructed from fantasy elements that are popular in modern romcom plots. I’m not typically a fan of those elements (how many variations of Groundhog Day does the world really need?), although I make obvious exceptions. Dickens used similar elements — motivating choice by providing access to alternative lives — in A Christmas Carol. Who doesn’t love Scrooge learning the truth about himself by gaining a new perspective?

Graham Patterson learns the truth (or possible truths) about himself from a tattoo that only a select few share. Graham is a struggling comedian who rejected a friend’s advice to take an edgier, more daring approach to comedy. His girlfriend, Ruth, left him, in part because his career and life were going nowhere, in larger part because he did not want children.

Graham decides that he will never make it as a comedian. He buys a Mustang and drives from the east coast to the west, where he expects to make a conventional life, perhaps working for his brother. He buys a camera so he can take some pictures along the way. One of the pictures is of an abandoned diner in Nevada called Mr. Breakfast. Graham will become a celebrated photographer unless he decides to reject the track his life is on.

Graham’s car breaks down in North Carolina, where he enters a tattoo parlor and impulsively chooses a “breakfast tattoo.” The tattoo comes with a lot of rules, but the short version is that it will allow him to visit two other lives that he is apparently living in parallel realities. He samples them and learns that in one he is a successful comedian who took his friend’s advice about edgy jokes. In the other he married Ruth. He has the opportunity to choose among the three lives. After making the choice, the tattoo will disappear. If he makes no choice, all the lives will merge and the result won’t be fun.

Other characters with the tattoo (including Anna Mae, the tattoo artist) demonstrate the possible outcomes of varying choices. For example, one learns something in a future life that allows him to succeed in his original life. One decides to embrace the pain of her current life rather than escaping into a different one because “sometimes you’ve got to be lost to find yourself again.” All the tattooed lives intersect with Graham’s at different points.

As if the premise doesn’t provide enough fantasy, more mystical events occur as the story progresses. A blind girl and a dead friend tell Graham about other rules associated with his tattoo. Only certain people can see certain pictures Graham has taken; everyone else sees a blank page. A significant turtle and an extinct but very nasty bird make unlikely appearances in Graham’s lives. Graham and another tattooed character learn something about the afterlife. Believe me, you shouldn’t be in a hurry to get there.

I struggled to find a coherent point to the conflicting messages that the story seems to send. Anna Mae suggests that by trying on alternative lives, people can choose the one that best suits them, but then must do their best to make the life work. Doing so puts positive energy into the universe. But if the choice turns out to be wrong, you might get hit by a train, so what good does the positive energy do? Maybe your energy helps other people. Maybe getting hit by a train is the tradeoff for living your best life. Maybe the point is that making a choice, even the wrong choice, is better than making no choice. Maybe the novel’s point is that the best choice, with or without a tattoo, is to live an unselfish life, although another character does well by focusing on self-interest. That’s a lot of maybes in a book that often seems to be moving in circles.

In an alternate life, Ruth makes the argument that whether it is good or bad, nobody deserves the life they have. Life is what it is. Lives are determined by the choices you make but also by health, the circumstances into which you are born, and other factors over which we have no control. Graham thinks about a girl herding cattle in Africa who has the intelligence to be a groundbreaking medical researcher but will never be given the education needed to make that choice possible. He thinks about the difference between a special life (defined by fame and accomplishment) and a peaceful one (defined by love, family, and an unchallenging job that pays the bills). Graham does a lot of thinking but the choice he makes is ultimately based on the need to respond to a crisis, not by calm meditation on which of two lives will fit him the best. Maybe the point is that we shouldn’t think so much.

The story could also be viewed as teaching a “the grass is always greener” lesson. Graham’s alternative lives have their merits, but they also have the pain that is part of life. Maybe the point is that we should be content with making the most of life even if that means enduring pain and hardship (although if I’m a wealthy sultan with a harem in one of my possible lives, I’m jumping to that one).

None of the potential lessons are particularly original. Nor is “visit alternative lives and see how they might turn out” an original plot device. Still, Jonathan Carroll assembles strong characters to tell a muddled but entertaining story. Make of it what you will. I recommend it simply because I enjoyed reading it, not because I regard it as profound.

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