Stars and Bars by William Boyd

This novel, Boyd’s third, is set contemporarily in the 1980s first in New York, and then in the Deep South. The main protagonist (if you can call him one) is Henderson Dore, a British art appraiser working for a fine art consignment house. He’s sent on an assignment to visit an elderly millionaire, Loomis Gage, somewhere in the Deep South and conduct a valuation of this man’s 18th century Dutch paintings, make an offer, and work with the best auction houses to have them sold.

The story is a farcical tragicomedy, and since you’re unlikely to care for any of the characters, it could also reasonably be called an ‘uproarious’ comedy. In other words, expect endless cringing and lots of terrible decision making.

Dore is a fairly terrible person, thinking primarily (if only) of his own self-interests. He’s nurturing an affair, and first looks at the trip as an opportunity to get away with his mistress. Not so. The daughter of his ex wife (not his own), who he is hoping to remarry, imposes herself in the first of an endless series of miscarried plans and unnecessary complications.

They head to Luxora Beach, a fictional, tiny, landlocked town in central Georgia. There is no beachfront to speak of, and instead the town is fecund with overgrowth and proudly displays the Stars and Bars (aka the ‘Southern Cross’ or Confederate Flag) in equal ratio to the bright neon signs boasting a red bow and blue rosette (PBR).

Early on, Henderson’s character is described as “[suffering] from all the siblings of shyness: the feeble air of confidence, the formulaic self-possession, a conditioned wariness of emotional display, a distrust of spontaneity, a dread fear of attracting attention, an almost irrepressible urge to conform…” which primes us well for the endless humiliations, missteps, howling blunders and miscalculations to come.

People laugh ‘unattractively’; the family imitates him and he ‘charitably’ ignores them. He is demonstrably the story’s narrative voice (‘charitably’ also giving himself endless passes), but an unreliable narrator in the sense he always feels he’s always on the right side of propriety. He isn’t. The clichés are clearly overdone, but that makes the conflicts all the more ghastly, so if you like dramatic irony… get the popcorn.

As a British man in the Deep South, he is of course met with impersonators. It was never going to be any other way. “You know, I’m trying but I just can’t make sense out of what you say. You know, it just sorta sounds like “Mn, aw, tks, ee, cd, ah, euh” to me.”

They imitate him, and at first he ignores them. Shortly, he decides they will only understand him if he communicates by mimicking their speech, and oddly? It works. He pinches his nose and… “Well shucks, I reckon I jist plum done gone and forgit to ask you to do me a service, like, goshdarn it.”

It’s quite funny at points, but there are so many deeply excruciating episodes in this book, I can give it no more than three stars.

Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward

In Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward tells a personal story of five young black men in her life who died over the space of four years, interwoven with her own story. One told chronologically, the other in reverse, ending at the heart of the story.

The story of these five men, friends and family, centers in DeLisle along the bayou of the Mississippi gulf coast where blue-collar jobs in the factories are vanishing and opportunities are rare. She explores what it means to be a black man in the modern American South. “By all the official records,” she writes, “here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing.”

The title comes from a Harriet Tubman quote during an 1863 civil war battle in Charleston where a black military unit made a failed assault on the Confederate forces: “We saw the lightning and that was the guns. We heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.”

It’s a melancholic and reflective memoir, rather than morbid. Ward has such a gift for storytelling, though given the tragedy of these young lives senselessly cut short, it was important to tell all the stories and to describe the lives exactly as they were in all their context.

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent

Burial Rites is the story, told through many narrative voices, of the final year in the life of the last woman to be publicly executed in Iceland, Agnes Magnúsdóttir. The setting is Northern Iceland, 1829, and Agnes is sent to a croft dwelling to live with a family she’s never met as she awaits her execution date. In the early 19th century, Iceland had no prisons, hence Agnes’ assignment to this farm. Iceland was also still under Dutch rule and you can feel the distance and isolation intensified by these small judicial formalities.

Agnes is not what the family expects, and her familiarity is disquieting. She’s been found guilty of the murder of her ex-lover, a farmer and healer, alongside two others. As the narrative unfolds, there’s a growing uncertainty and less clarity that the judgments have been appropriate. The truth starts to bend, and one wonders whether factual and emotional truth can be the same, and which we should privilege when considering guilt.

This was intensely bleak. The Icelandic landscape and characters are closely entwined in this story, and the elements give it shape. The pages are full of the sea, rocks, wind, ice and muted light… the blood of slaughtered sheep, phlegm, dung, cold, and thin air of Northern Iceland. Glass windows are still high luxury, so the family crowds together in this small, filthy house with heavy snows kept out by translucent animal skins. The days are passed lambing, scything grass for turf, making blood pudding, carding wool, midwifery, crocheting small articles, telling each other Icelandic Sagas, and waiting. Rather than feeling like a visit to Colonial Times, the world she recreates is horrifically severe and ominous.

The author created a nearly perfect story. She pored through parish records, oral histories and what little surviving correspondence she could find to animate it in an authentic, nuanced, beautifully written narrative. Although she’s Australian, writing a story set 200 years in the past in a country and culture not her own, with almost ephemeral surviving evidence, she shows a deep and sympathetic understanding of her subject. The labour of detail is also mind-blowing, without ever seeming like she’s showing off.

The structure and writing are filmic in quality, and more than once I was reminded of the VVitch, casting the story and day-to-day toil in the same muted palate. The symbolism of ravens and stones is a bit relentless, and a few characters (notably Toti) felt a bit unreal. Other reviewers have commented on the overwrought similes, and having seen their example, I don’t quite know how I missed this myself, but overall I thought the writing was outstanding:

“they have strapped me to the saddle like a corpse being taken to the burial ground … bruises, blossoming like a star clusters under the skin … I am tied like a lamb for slaughter … I wonder where they will store me, cellar me like butter, like smoked meat. Like a corpse … like a cow I go where I am led … it is as though the winter has set up home in my marrow … rotting slowly in a room like a body in a coffin … Like a woman, he said. The sea is a nag … The light had arrived like a hunted thing”

Very close to a 5-star book for me, but I’ve rounded down slightly.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara

It’s hard reading this while knowing that Michelle McNamara died before its publication. It’s particularly difficult reading this and knowing that Michelle never knew the Golden State Killer was apprehended, despite a decade of obsession that likely contributed to her own passing. The name was even coined by her.

This sweeping work is the product of meticulous investigation decades after this 1970s and 80s murderer and rapist committed his crimes. Although it’s full of grisly detail (the Golden State Killer murdered 12 and raped more than 45), it’s neither gratuitous or reimagined and dramatized.

It becomes maddeningly repetitive as the same details and suspect profile materialise again and again. This person stalked his targets, brought pre-cut ligatures, wore a mask, and generally stole objects of sentimental value like engraved jewellery, pieces he’d often leave at the next victim’s house. He targets one-storey bungalows in California, often having a leisurely snack after his assault, and escaping on bikes stolen from the neighbourhood.

Years later in 2004 California’s Proposition 69 passed, which now means that all felons must provide a DNA sample when arrested which then goes into a state-wide database. This combined with the power of CODIS, which is the FBI’s DNA database, seemed to offer a promising opportunity to narrow in on the Golden State Killer. Unfortunately, the killer’s DNA would be only as good as the databases, and without any matches (or criminal justice cooperation from big commercial DNA banks like 23 and me or Ancestry), the killer was not detected, even though his DNA profile was available.

Eight thousand suspects were examined over the years with hundreds of these having had their DNA run. Michelle talks about modern criminal investigations and how, particularly with the internet providing unprecedented information and access, anyone can become an amateur sleuth. She met countless others in pursuit of the Golden State Killer. This case brought many together partly due to the pain he inflicted across these communities, but also because of the sheer feast of data he left in his wake, leading many to seemingly endless theories to contort and connect in new ways, supporting fresh theories or creating the illusion of patterns that might not exist.

Fortunately, Joseph James DeAngelo, the veritable needle in this haystack, was arrested after detectives were able to positively match his DNA to that of the Golden State Killer, and have charged him with the crimes that fall within the statute of limitations. He remained in the Sacramento area (a short drive from many of the crime scenes), and it’s been revealed that he was a cop, even overlapping with the time in which the crimes were being committed. He was fired only after he was caught shoplifting dog repellent and a hammer (shudder).

Michelle died in her sleep when this book was just coming together, and her husband, Patton Oswalt, hired her lead researcher and another colleague to pull together the final work in as complete a form as they could. I’d like to think her energy and interest in this case helped return law enforcement’s attention back and close it for good.

Educated by Tara Westover

Tara Westover grew up off-the-grid. Her survivalist family worked in the scrapping yard, eschewed education and government, and loosely subscribed to Mormon fundamentalism. Her father, something of a prophet within his nuclear family, believed in the Illuminati, was certain that Y2K would be the end of days, and brainwashed his family into believing that the government would show up any day to raid the farm for not sending the children to school. Her mother was a reluctant midwife who believed in muscle testing and herbal tinctures, hired an entourage to work on oils and salves, and used these in lieu of medicine. In this memoir, there are countless, hideous scenes of horrific accidents. One thing must be said: they truly believe in what they preach. The ultimate tests come when they are physically mutilated and near death, but still rebuff any offers to go to the hospital for medical attention. They endure car accidents; oil tanks exploding in their face; near-death incidents as they hang off the side of unbroken horses, caught up in stirrups; 12 foot falls onto rebar; unspeakable motorcycle injuries; brutal physical and psychological abuse … and despite this, the memoir doesn’t feel voyeuristic or even judgmental.

It likely won’t be a surprise to know that Tara has been estranged from several members of her family (parents, multiple siblings) not necessarily as a result of writing the memoir, but because she called out a manipulative, abusive sibling and her family split either side of a predictable chasm, where rural and urban take position, red and blue take staunch hold, and the educated leave while the propagandized look the other way.

As a child, her father taught her where to aim in order to crush someone’s windpipe. By the time she was ten, the only subject she had received systematic instruction on was Morse Code. She learned to preserve endless jars of peaches, and how to clean the factory packing grease off a new rifle (stockpiled for when the government raid might come).

Tara is polished and poised, and despite her complete lack of formal education in the first 17 years of her life, she manages to teach herself trigonometry, algebra, and study hard enough to pass the ACT and gain admission to BYU. Now a scholar of philosophy and history at Cambridge, Tara was in part lucky to find the advocates and mentors that she did. For example, the Mormon bishop at BYU who went out of his way to help her apply for aid when she was close to dropping out, or her mentor at Cambridge, Professor Steinberg, who encouraged her to apply for a Gates Scholarship (though not with a bit of patronizing, “It’s as if I’ve stepped into Shaw’s Pygmalion!”). Despite any intervention or aid, her triumphs are wholly her own. Her ability to teach herself as she did was the most intensely moving and striking aspect of this memoir for me, even against the background of horrors and accidents.

Throughout her remarkable memoir, I was struck also by her generous read of memories that may have been influenced by opinion or perspective. She doesn’t lose sight of the vulnerabilities in a memoir, or the misremembered incident, but it’s telling that her parents sued her only over the claim that her father was bipolar (not actually claimed) and that her mother suffered a brain injury as a result of one car crash. If those are the only objections her parents had to the memoir, then that is pretty damning.

Tara performed an unimaginable sacrifice in persevering her own education against immense resistance from her family; in leaving her home to go to college; in standing up to her family; and especially in publishing this memoir. Not only were the chances of this story being told by an enlightened, thoughtful, coherent author infinitesimally unlikely, but she also knew that to write it would close a lot of avenues back to her family.

Yet:

“We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell. This is especially true in families.”

Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard

This short volume is both accessible and short enough for anyone to read in a single setting. Mary Beard developed this piece from two lectures starting with examples from Greco-Roman mythology, like the earliest example in literature of a woman being told to shut up (Telemachus to his mother Penelope in the Odyssey), to more recent examples of how women are silenced and kept out of power. She writes right up to the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing, to Elizabeth Warren’s silencing on the Senate floor, Teresa May’s Prime Ministership (the lectures already feel dated in some regards), and the unrepeatable things her opponents say to her on Twitter.

Published 100 years after women were given the right to vote (in the UK) (and only some of them), the lectures focus on women’s continued exclusion from roles of power, and the ways in which they must compromise their femininity should they achieve a semblance of power (from Margaret Thatcher’s speech training, which she took in an attempt to lower her voice, to the power pantsuits that Merkel or Clinton wear to conform). Some of her arguments go a bit far maybe (I don’t have anything against a pantsuit).

Some of the most interesting references in these lectures for me were the examples of historic quotations having been so blatantly manipulated or potentially made up. Sojourner Truth says, “… and ain’t I a woman,” but the dialect of Soujourner Truth has likely been rewritten to match the style of contemporary Southern Abolitionists. She grew up in the North speaking Dutch as her first language.

This volume does not demonstrate how we can redefine the relationship of women to power in a satisfying way, but it does offer plenty of evidence to argue that this relationship urgently needs to change.

Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg

This book would be most relevant to women who are fortunate enough to have choices, especially how much and when and where they want to work. Sheryl Sandberg makes a lot of space for what people might look for out of life, but quickly makes it clear that this book speaks particularly to women who place a high value on career success. There are many situations that most (or every) women will face in the workplace, within their communities, and at home. By and large, the core of this work is about developing yourself within the bounds of your career, including your own guiding approach to personal sacrifice.

It may strike you (it did me) that a career memoir written by a billionaire would seem … out of touch. In some ways, it is. She talks about the struggle her and her late husband had living in two different cities, and how the problem was solved when he became CEO of SurveyMonkey and “was able to move the company headquarters from Portland to the Bay Area.” My biggest gripe (more on this) was how systematically her work seeps into every moment of her waking life, where she answers emails from the toilet, the soccer field, or gets up even before her newborn to return again to her emails. With some of those early moments, and with a title like ‘Lean In,’ I hardly saw the need to bother, because it seemed clear that the proposition was going to be that career matters above all else and you have to learn how to suck it up and suppress your own physiological and emotional needs as much as possible to succeed. Yes and no.

I was far more impressed by this than I expected to be, and felt there was a lot of great career advice. For example, women often believe that good performance will naturally lead to rewards, and that they don’t need to advocate for themselves but just focus on performance. Women also worry about taking on new roles, projects or assignments when they don’t feel they completely qualify for them already. Women tend to apply for opportunities when they feel they fulfil 100% of the criteria, but men tend to apply when they fulfil 60%. So many abilities are acquired on the job.

While this tautology is a bit obvious, this also landed for me: the tendency to stay put leads to staying put.

Otherwise, her advice about how to pick a company to work for (assuming you have choices) should be approached with one main criterion in mind: fast growth. When companies grow quickly, there are more things to do than people to do them. I very much agree with her belief that the most important career decision a woman makes is whether she’ll have a life partner and who that life partner is. ‘Lean In’ is not just a directive to women, but to men to get more involved in their family’s home life.

One of my favorite anecdotes in the book revolved around her relationship to her two younger siblings, her “first two employees.” They’d march around with Sheryl in monologue, and at the conclusion of every point they’d scream “Right!”

While much of the advice and personal experience was useful, it also felt a bit dystopian. She works 8 – 5:30 in order to make sure her new born can feed before and after work, and though she was reluctant to be open about her working hours, she explains that she finally did because she wanted to encourage others to personalise their schedules. This loses a bit of its point when she then explains that by personalising her schedule, she’s really just logging in at home and continuing to work.

Reading this now, after its initial popularity, then backlash, followed more recently by what Sheryl could not have anticipated (particularly the crises at Facebook that would come down on her as COO, and shortly after that, dealing with the grief of losing her husband suddenly and unexpectedly to a fatal arrhythmia), it’s disquieting to read about the depictions of her barely-achieved life balance or exalted, paramount career ranking at the time.