Let's Not Do That Again by Grant Ginder

Published by ‎ Henry Holt and Co. on April 5, 2022

Let’s Not Do That Again is the story of a mother-daughter relationship that frays due to poor communication and mistaken beliefs. The family drama offers a typical reconciliation moment, followed by a dramatic moment that straddles the border between horrific crime fiction and dark comedy. A couple of romantic subplots round out the novel. One involves a senator’s gay son and an FBI agent. The other asks the recurring question: When two people in the early stages of love do something really awful together, will it bring them closer together or send them to separate prisons?

Nancy Harrison is a congressional representative who is running for a Senate seat. She won her husband’s seat in Congress after he died. During her Senate campaign, her daughter Greta drunkenly joins a French nationalist protest in the streets of Paris and hurls an empty champaign bottle through the window of everyone’s favorite overpriced restaurant. Greta has no interest in nationalism because, without immigration, the US would have no Italian food. Greta’s motive involves her animosity toward her mother, stoked by her paternal grandmother and by her sexual attraction to Xavier, a French nationalist whose project is to determine “how wholly corrosive love can be.”

Greta’s act of defiance is captured on a cellphone video. After it goes viral, Nancy’s political opposition accuses Greta of being a communist while branding Nancy as the world’s worst mother (something to do with “family values”). The novel is rooted in the unfortunate reality that attacking politicians based on the actions of their children is a thing now.

Nancy sends her son Nick to retrieve Greta from Paris. Nick is gay, has slept with most of the gay men in New York, and is close to Greta, having raised her while Nancy was making laws in Washington. Greta, whose issues with her mother are explained as the story marches forward, thinks Nancy is happy to have a gay son as a symbol of her progressive values. Nick, on the other hand, has spent his life cleaning up the messes made by Nancy and Greta. He’s getting sick of that role, leading the reader to wonder how he’ll respond to the final and biggest mess that comes near the novel’s end.

The other two characters of note are Nancy’s campaign manager Cate Alvarez and her co-worker Tom Cooper. They don’t benefit from the same character development as the Harrison family members, but they play an important role in the novel’s key event. How that event will affect their blossoming relationship is another question that the plot will need to address.

Let’s Not Do That Again is marketed as a comedy. The novel’s darkest moment is best viewed in that light. As a comedy, however, the story offers few laughs. There are elements of parody in the novel’s take on politics and privilege, and an ongoing joke about Nick’s attempt to base a musical on the life of Joan Didion is amusing. The novel’s humor is largely infused in Grant Ginder’s descriptive writing. Walls in a restaurant are “the color of radioactive egg yolks.” Greta refers to a co-worker at an Apple store as “annoying, the sort of person who couldn’t pick up on a hint if it had its hands around his balls.”

The novel is carefully constructed. Seemingly unimportant details in the early pages turn out to have significance. The novel’s lesson is the familiar stuff of light fiction — families are a mess but, in the end, we’re glad to have them. A less familiar lesson is that new beginnings and fresh starts are a myth. We can’t detach from a past that shaped us; we can only try to make sense of the past so that we can do better tomorrow. The novel’s most interesting question is whether it’s possible to live with the guilt of keeping secrets from those we love if revealing those secrets will harm others that we love. Maybe the novel’s lessons and questions aren’t profound, but the story that embodies them is entertaining.

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The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

Published by Scribner on April 5, 2022

The Candy House is a novel of characters, some of whom first appeared in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. Egan develops the characters and lets them loose to do as they please. Their stories never quite cohere into a plot but telling a story with a conventional plot does not appear to have been Jennifer Egan’s intent. Yet she acknowledges that “without a story, it’s all just information.” And so she tells stories, lots and lots of them.

The novel jumps around in time. Much of it takes place in the immediate future, although the fictional present includes technology that does not exist in our temporal reality. Backstories tend to date back to the 1990s with glimpses of memories formed in the 1960s. Stories also extend into the mid-2030s.

Egan uses her characters to explore themes of identity, affinity, authenticity, privacy, and the price of freedom. She primarily raises those concerns with technology that Bix Bouton invented in 2016. Own Your Unconscious allows people to externalize their consciousness to a Mandala Cube and revisit their memories. An advance in that technology soon allows memories to be uploaded anonymously to a Collective Consciousness (sort of a digital cloud for memories).

Collective memories are available to everyone who wants them. There is, of course, nothing anonymous about memory, as faces of individuals performing good or bad deeds are recognizable to those who dip into the collective. The technology allows crimes to be solved and reduces some versions of evil, but it also creates a new form of surveillance society and sparks a higher level of social paranoia.

Part of the story focuses on the idea of a vacant identity — an identity established on the internet and later abandoned, only to be reinhabited by a proxy (typically a bot) that uses clues to the originator’s personality to impersonate the creator. Some people vacate those identities to escape from a society based on data. The escapees are known as “eluders” because they strive to remain invisible to the digital world.

Since there is no overriding plot, readers might get of sense of whether The Candy House is their kind of book by learning something about the characters. There are too many to mention, but some stand out more than others.

A music producer and an anthropologist named Miranda Kline had two daughters. Miranda abandoned her daughters for a few years to study the “affinities” that make people like and trust each other. She developed “formulas for predicting human inclinations.” Miranda studied a closed, isolated society. She didn’t think her predictive formulas would work in a large society because people would be unwilling to supply all of the information that the formulas require. She didn’t anticipate the willingness of individuals to abandon their privacy, to live their lives in the spotlight of social media. (The potential consequence of documenting your life on social media is another of the novel’s themes.) A few years after Bix Bouton commercialized her ideas, a displeased Miranda eluded.

Rebecca Amari is obsessed with authenticity. So is Alfred Hollander. Alfred made a long, tedious documentary about geese because he viewed animal behavior as authentic. His next project involved screaming whenever he believed people were being phony to provoke authentic responses. Rebecca takes a more scholarly approach, but she is worried that any study of authenticity will become so wrapped up in “phony academic bullshit” that it will not attain the authenticity she seeks to understand.

Alfred’s brother Ames has a mysterious connection to the military. His brother Miles messed up his life in various ways before ending up in rehab and becoming a drug counselor. His cousin Sasha had a compulsion to steal before turning her life around and made a career by recycling trash into art. Visiting Sasha on impulse only accentuates Miles’ sense of failure. Miles describes his story as one of redemption because redemption stories have “narrative power.” Lucky for Miles, “America loves a sinner,” so he decides to enter politics.

Sasha’s husband Drew, a surgeon, has his own demons, living the memory of a friend’s drowning for which he holds himself responsible. Bix was in their company until they entered the river. Sasha and Drew’s son Lincoln is a counter. His world is about numbers, statistics, percentages. His work involves the detection of proxies posing as humans in social media. Outside of that realm, he is socially awkward. Lincoln is representative of individuals who think humans are less complicated when they are represented as data. One of the novel’s themes is the difference between impressionists and empiricists, the difference between those who “tend toward the romantic” and those who tend toward scientific detachment. One of the novel’s questions is whether it is possible for someone to be both at the same time.

A chapter narrated by Molly offers a funny take on the importance that teen girls place on being “in” with the right person, leading to a desperate jockeying for social status. Another chapter seems to be part of a future instruction manual for infiltrating and gathering intelligence about violent men. A chapter written as text messages became a bit wearying to read.

So that’s what The Candy House is. Individual stories, loosely bound by connections in the ways we are all connected — by family, acquaintance, interests, memories, and media. A lot happens during the course of the novel, including interesting events: an attempt to commit suicide by jumping from a hot air balloon; a potentially violent quarrel between neighbors about whether a fence post has been moved. Still, readers are unlikely to become attached to any character because, their stories having been told, the novel moves on to someone else. They might reappear in a memory or be mentioned as the relative of another character, but the novel is frustrating in its failure to follow the full lives of its most interesting characters. Rebecca Amari seems to be a central character before she becomes lost in the crowd. Bix Bouton is frequently mentioned but not often seen, although his son Gregory makes a late appearance. We learn what happened to Miranda but we don’t see it happen. Yet that’s life, and that might be Egan’s point. We drift in and out of each other’s lives. We might hear about someone we used to know, we might remember them, we might look them up on social media, but after our stories diverge, they might never rejoin. (On the other hand, I was happy to see the mystery of Ames’ military career resolved in the last chapter.)

Like characters, intriguing concepts (such as “vacant identities” and “proxies”) are introduced early in the story before they all but disappear. Other themes, including the perils of collective consciousness, show up more consistently. Gregory offers the most useful take in that regard. Gregory rejected his father’s Own Your Consciousness, viewing it as an existential threat to fiction. Gregory wants to be a writer but can’t finish his book after Bix dies. A visit in the 2030s with his former writing teacher leads to an epiphany. Gregory discovers that we don’t need technology to create a collective consciousness. Fiction does that by letting readers “roam with absolute freedom through the human collective.” Writers have the vision to see “a galaxy of human lives,” each “propelled by a singular force that was inexhaustible,” a collective that hurtles toward the writer’s curiosity, each star in the galaxy an individual story for the writer to tell.

That might be Egan’s purpose — the selection of unique stars in the galaxy of human lives, showing how the characters or their stories relate to each other. Some of the stories are so evocative that may trigger, or become embedded within, the reader’s own memories. The book ends with a wonderful scene in which a kid playing baseball is confident that, while he has never hit a pitch in his life, each failure is an explainable aberration from the norm in which he always hits a home run. The kid’s story could be any story of self-delusion or self-confidence, the story of people who don’t let the past stop them from trying. It also reminds the reader that successes, like failures, are transitory; that there are always new challenges ahead; that past performance is no guarantee of future success or failure. The lesson I took from The Candy House is that the future keeps coming, that every person has a different future and an infinite number of potential futures, and that we shouldn’t be lost to the possibility of writing our own story.

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The Art of War by Sun Tzu

Published by St. Martin's Press on March 29, 2022

Sun Tzu is so well known that he can quoted by people who have never read him. Lord knows I’ve done it. And Lord knows an endless number of authors have based their self-help books on Sun Tzu’s. Some of those might have even read The Art of War, although I doubt it.

St. Martin’s Press is publishing an “Essential Pocket Classic” edition of The Art of War. It’s in English, so I thought, why not read it? Leaders in business, football, and other occupations who liken themselves to generals fighting wars all swear to have followed Sun Tzu’s fifth century guidance. For those who have been faking it, this is their chance to actually read the book. Lionel Giles’ 1910 translation is clear and elegant, although Sun Tzu might account for some of the elegance.

Not all of Sun Tzu’s advice about war provides a useful analogy to fighting other battles. Using fire as a weapon is probably not a sound strategy in the business world. Even as applied to warfare, Sun Tzu’s advice about defending high ground versus low ground versus intersections and the six other “varieties of ground” are probably better suited to generals whose armies consist of chariots and swordsmen. Still, Putin’s generals might have wanted to read Sun Tzu’s advice about protecting supply lines and not getting bogged down. Maybe there isn’t a Russian translation.

For those who don’t want to spend an hour or two with the book, here is my Shorter Sun Tzu:

Know your enemy and know yourself. Pick your fights. Never fight without a purpose. Plan ahead but seize unexpected opportunities. Strike where the enemy is weak. Fight from a position of strength. Be sneaky. Don’t be fooled by a sneaky enemy. Use spies to gather information. Watch out for enemy spies. Keep your head. Don’t be predictable. Recognize and adapt to changed circumstances. Don’t fear retreat. Don’t go out of your way to piss off the enemy. Leaders should be firm but fair. Leaders should share goals but not strategies with the troops. Get out of bed before your enemy. Don’t fight uphill. Armies are expensive. Be generous with the spoils of your plunder. Such is the art of warfare.

Of course, Sun Tzu says all of this with more eloquence, hence: “At first, then, exhibit the coyness of a maiden, until the enemy gives you an opening; afterwards, emulate the rapidity of a running hare, and it will be too late for the enemy to oppose you.”

I’m not sure that war analogies are all that useful outside of football. Healthy competition doesn’t need to be a war. Cooperation can be more productive than conquest. Sun Tzu also notes that, in the military context, there are good reasons not to fight wars when they can be avoided. I regard that as his best advice.

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Redemption by Mike Lawson

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on April 5, 2022

Jamison Maddox’s mother and uncle are wealthy, but he is proud of his independence. He makes a healthy salary on Wall Street until he goes to prison for insider trading. When he gets out, his mother won’t support him and he’s too proud to ask his uncle. Felons can’t easily get jobs in finance — not unless they’re connected, anyway — so Jamison grudgingly accepts an unsolicited offer to work in Redemption, Illinois for a low six-figure salary. Jamison’s job is to do financial research and to keep the results confidential. Very confidential.

Jamison is never told a client’s identity or why he’s conducting the research. He’s on the second floor and has no access to the third floor, where employees presumably have those answers. The first floor is devoted to security, which is tight: regular polygraph tests, periodic searches of cellphones and home computers. The first rule of working at Drexler Limited is don’t talk about Drexler Limited. Not even to other employees of Drexler.

Having little else to do in a small town, Jamison begins an affair with his boss’ beautiful wife, who also works at Drexler. About the time that Jamison learns some dark secrets about Drexler, Gillian Lang convinces him to run away with her. They need to abandon their lives and find new identities because, if Drexler catches them, they’re dead. Why they face that threat is not immediately clear, although it is obvious from the start that Drexler is a shady operation.

Some readers might have sympathy for Gillian. She was raised in (and feels stifled by) a life of crime. She is, however, rather manipulative and has internalized the belief that crime is an appropriate means of achieving personal comfort. If Drexler would let her out more, she’d probably be fine with her life.

Some readers might have sympathy for Jamison. He’s a bit spoiled and entitled but he’s minor league as financial criminals go. He’s also dealt with his circumstances — both his privileged life and his downfall — in ways that suggest he is governed by a loose code of decency. I was indifferent to both characters apart from admiring their remarkable luck as they endeavor to stay alive.

A few other characters are differentiated by their personalities. The ruthless head of Drexler feels no remorse but is grateful for the good life that Drexler has given him. Jamison’s rich mother is self-centered and loathsome; his rich uncle is friendly and helpful; his uncle’s daughter is autistic and resourceful. Jamison’s uncle is probably the only character in the novel a reader might want to know.

The story suffers from a weak ending and an improbable premise. The novel’s resolution seems too easy given the turmoil that precedes it. A character’s ability to negotiate immunity with no evidence that he has anything of value to offer suggests a failure to understand how federal prosecutors work. The full truth about Drexler, revealed in the novel’s last pages, is difficult to swallow. Those weaknesses aside, Mike Lawson sustained my interest by never making the novel’s direction or outcome obvious. I would give the novel a wavering thumbs up, but Redemption is not in the same league as Lawson’s recent Joe DeMarco novels.

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Ocean State by Stewart O'Nan

Published by Grove Press on March 15, 2022

Marie Oliviera narrates pieces of Ocean State from an adult perspective as she recounts formative events of her childhood. Her family lived and had generational roots in Rhode Island. When she tells the story, Marie is the only family member who has not fled from the small town where she grew up.

At 13, Marie had a child’s “overdeveloped sense of justice.” She wanted everyone to be happy, “despite our actual lives.”  Marie had a reasonably close relationship with her mother Carol (despite Carol’s unsuccessful efforts to curb Marie’s overeating) but Marie wasn’t thrilled about Carol’s drinking or the men she dated. Marie had a slightly better opinion of Russ, who at least spent money on Carol, than she had of Wes, who owned guns and throwing stars and did cocaine. Marie’s father was mostly absent, but that didn’t stop him from getting into a dust-up with one of Carol’s boyfriends. It's that kind of family, which might explain why events unfold as they do.

Marie's narrative revolves around her older sister Angel. From almost the first page, the reader is aware that Angel killed a girl named Birdy Alves. Much of Birdy’s story is told from the perspective of a third person narrator. The first- and third-person narration combines to explain the escalating tension between Birdy and Angel. After about two-thirds of the story has has been told, Birdy disappears. The rest of the story addresses the aftermath of Birdy’s death.

Stewart O’Nan is an adult male, but he crafts a convincing portrayal of the drama that is so often central to teen female lives. Birdy is insecure, demanding, and driven by uncontrollable desires. After dating Hector for some time, she begins fooling around with Angel’s boyfriend, Myles Parrish. Birdy is willing to risk her relationship with Hector, in whom her interest has waned, to satisfy her craving for Myles’ attention. When an incriminating photo of Birdy and Myles appears on social media, Angel realizes that (1) she needs to keep Myles on a much shorter leash and (2) Birdy needs to be punished.

Myles is from a more affluent family and is probably out of Birdy’s league, but the same could be said of his relationship with Angel. He’s cheated on Angel before and apparently finds satisfaction in shagging Birdy. At least, he doesn’t seem capable of choosing between them until Birdy and Angel force the issue. Myles is a typical teenage male who goes along to get along, mindlessly following the directions of whichever girl he happens to be with when she gives him an ultimatum.  

Birdy spends much of the novel feeling humiliated as a consequence of her own choices (and of the tendency of teenage girls to shame each other). She gets emotional support from her married sister Josefina and from a clueless mother who means well. As a tale of two similar small town families, Ocean State makes the point that parents have little influence when they take on the impossible challenge of raising a teenage girl.

Ocean State also explores the theme of family secrets. Marie doesn’t want her mother to know about her secret snacking. Marie’s mother doesn’t want Birdy or Angel to know about her overlapping relationships with Russ and Wes. Understandably, Angel doesn’t want Marie or her mother to know about the conflict with Birdy that preceded Birdy’s disappearance. Yet secrets are impossible to keep from teens who relentlessly search bedrooms and eavesdrop on conversations to uncover hidden truths.

O’Nan creates palpable tension at the end of the novel as Angel’s lawyer negotiates her fate. As a teen, Angel is incapable of imagining the future. Any amount of time away from Myles is unthinkable. The idea that Myles might serve more time because he’s a male strikes her as monstrously unfair (which, in fact, it is). Angel’s internal struggle is fascinating because, from a standpoint of morality or practicality, she’s always focused on the wrong thing — a transitory love that adult readers understand is both meaningless and the root cause of her problem.

O’Nan managed the difficult trick of turning a teenage tragedy into a real tragedy — one that an adult can appreciate from an adult perspective while recognizing that the teenage perception of facts is vastly different. He makes the wise choice of all but ignoring the murder. A less mature writer might have sensationalized the story with tabloid details. O’Nan keeps the focus on the characters and how they respond to the drama of their own making. That choice brings literary merit to trashy content.

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