Decent Thriller Mismatched Ending

For a debut novel, Woman on the Edge, by Samantha M. Bailey is overall decent thriller.

First off, it starts with a climax. On a busy train platform, a stranger shoves an infant into Morgan’s arms, begs her to take care of it, and jumps in front of the incoming train.

Although it begins with that explosive scene, and you think, ‘Ok, where is it going to go from here?’ the book keeps you on the edge of your seat the whole time. The short chapters alternate between “Morgan”, happening in the present, and “Nicole”, the stranger who jumped, happening in the past. There are back stories to both women, involving Morgan’s diseased husband, her estranged mother, Nicole’s husband, best friend, brother, a woman from her distant past and her meteoric success as the founder and director of a great company.

The real heroine of the story is Morgan. From the moment the infant, Quinn, is thrust into her arms, she feels affection for her. Although she’s under suspicion by the police, and has no one to lean on except her lawyer, she bravely, single-mindedly and doggedly pursues the puzzle and does her own detective work to find out if Quinn is okay and why this total stranger chose her to take care of her little daughter. She encounters opposition, suspicion and danger every step of the way, but never gives up.

Nicole, on the other hand, starts off as a successful owner and director of a company, but after having her baby, when she keeps getting threats from a woman in her past who holds a grudge against her, starts losing her mental balance. Although she has a few close people who offer to help her, she refuses help and gradually deteriorates to the point of no return.

True to thriller-style novels, Bailey makes you doubt everyone as the culprit of Nicole’s demise. A red-haired woman attacks Morgan, leaves threatening notes and objects for Nicole and her brother. A woman from Nicole’s distant past who used to send her nasty notes is also a red-head, but she lives in a different town. There are other women with red hair connected to various characters in the book.

The “Morgan” chapters grow to be more and more interesting as the book goes on.

The “Nicole” chapters however, become harder to read as the story progresses. They start off with a normal degree of post-partem depression and worry for a new mom. But they gradually become more agonizing and annoying to go through. This reader found them somewhat over the top as Nicole becomes more and more paranoid, dysfunctional and addicted to her anti-anxiety pills. “She grasped the arm of the couch and heaved herself up, dropping her chin to her chest until the wooziness passed…her arms aching…Nicole barely had the energy to make it up the stairs…She’d draped black silk sheets over all the first-floor windows, so her house felt as dark as she did inside.” “Voices rang in her ears…She shook her head back and forth to get rid of them.”

To her credit Bailey keeps up the tension until almost the very end.

However, the ending is too abrupt and clean. The book suddenly changes its tone: the psychological thriller suddenly becomes an action thriller, the puzzle is quickly solved, the loose ends are too conveniently tied and delivered in a neatly wrapped package with a bow on top.

The change of tone at the end is too jarring and doesn’t match the rest of the book.

A Letdown at The End

Two young Irish immigrants in New York become cops. Both are in their early twenties. Francis Gleeson is engaged to Lena, an Italian-Polish girl, and Brian Stanhope is engaged to Anne, an Irish nurse.

Mary Beth Keane starts her novel Ask Again, Yes, with the two young cops’ first foot patrol in 1970’s Bronx, a dilapidated, tense and crime-filled area of the city. She skillfully paints a picture of immigrant families living in crammed New York city apartments and why Francis yearns to live in the suburbs, despite Lena’s objections.

Both young men marry their fiancés, and end up buying neighboring houses in Gillam, a suburb of New York. Lena tries her best to befriend Anne to no avail. Anne seems antisocial and weird.

Lena gives birth to three daughters. Anne, after losing one child has a son, Peter. Peter and Kate, Lena and Francis’s youngest daughter, become close friends, spending all their time together.

Time passes, Peter and Kate become teenagers and their relationship changes to a romantic one. Anne considers her son above Kate and doesn’t want him to hang out with her. Anne also starts showing signs of mental disorder, and causes a tragic incident which changes the lives of both families forever.

Most of the book is about how various members of the two families cope with the fallen pieces of their lives.

Mary Beth Keane portrays various methods of dealing with trauma. While one person choses to walk away from a difficult situation, another one steps up to the plate and picks up the slack. Most people remain quiet about their feelings and pay a very heavy psychological price for it.

One person chooses to harbor animosity, whereas another choses to forgive. People deny their wrongdoing, clinging desperately to their own image of themselves.

Keane explores many issues, among them mental illness, addiction, marriage, love, loyalty, family, heredity, denial and avoidance. She gives vivid descriptions of medical procedures and various intensities, sensations and kinds of pain.

She paints an almost too-good-to-be-true picture of police departments that are rigorous in their choice of recruits and investigations of mistakes and mishaps.

She also conveys the message of the importance of family: how the sins of parents are visited upon their children, and how the care and support of loved ones, however clumsy, unsolicited, unwanted, or late, prevails over mistakes and outright failings of the past.

Ask Again, Yes is an easily readable novel, with mostly likeable characters, and some good psychological analysis of family relationships and people dealing with trauma. It creates and maintains suspense, and with it the interest of the reader to the very end.

Having said all that, although it’s reasonably well-written, two things about the book are not satisfying. One is the title, which doesn’t make sense throughout the book, and when it finally kind of does, it’s almost juvenile. The more important one is the ending. Keane creates complicated family dynamics with high drama. She leads the reader on throughout the book, only to simmer things down to a neat and tidy, simplistic ending. It lets the reader down, because it doesn’t fulfill the built up expectations.

Cringeworthy

My first and dominant reaction to Kate Elizabeth Russell’s debut novel, My Dark Vanessa, was:

Cringe.

The story is about an eighteen-year-long affair between Vanessa and Jacob Strane, which starts when she is 15, and he, her English teacher, 42.

The book moves back and forth between 2000, when Vanessa is 15 and a student at Browick, a private school, and 2017, when she is 32, working at a dead-end job as a concierge at a chic hotel in Portland.

At Browick Vanessa is shy and socially awkward. She’s a loner who writes poetry. She has a crush on her English teacher. He notices and takes advantage of it. He starts touching her and making advances.

Cringe.

As a retired high-school teacher, who was told repeatedly starting from Faculty of Education, I’m legally not allowed to touch students, and my classroom door has to stay open if I’m alone with a student, every time Strane touched Vanessa, or closed the door to his office when he was alone with her, I winced. I kept thinking What’re you thinking? Are you stupid?

Their relationship develops into full-fledged sex. Everyone around notices they’re having an affair, word gets out, a parent at the school complains and an investigation ensues. Strane convinces Vanessa to deny everything, say she fabricated the rumors, apologize publicly and leave the school.

In the following seventeen years Vanessa and Strane continue their affair on and off.

Again, cringe.

During the whole time Vanessa is in a psychological paralysis. When she’s 32, another Browick student, Taylor Birch, publicly accuses Strane of sexually abusing her, when she was at Browick. Taylor approaches Vanessa to get her to join Taylor and others in a lawsuit against Strane. Vanessa refuses, but it makes her review her relationship with Strane in a different light.

The book explores the extent of psychological damage sexual abuse does to young girls, whether the girl believes it was abuse or not. It explores how school officials and authorities, and even parents are complicit in the cover up. It also sheds light on why victims often wait years before they go public, and questions the wisdom and benefit of going public with the accusations, since the claims and testimony of the victims become the subject of rigorous investigations, causing them further suffering. Victims also face extreme public backlash and hate mail on social networks.

It also explores Vanessa’s role in the long relationship. At the age of fifteen she is in love with her teacher. She keeps constantly hovering over his classroom. So is she just a victim or is there room in her behaviour to be considered a willing participant? Can she be considered a mature minor? One with a precocious sexual desire?

Can all her psychological issues as an adult be blamed on the affair with Strane? After all she was always uncommunicative, passive and withdrawn.

Where the novel falls short is in exploring a grown up and educated man’s obsession with younger girls, despite the full knowledge that it might cost him his reputation and job, and land him in prison? Many things about Strane remain vague. Why hasn’t he married? Why did he insist on getting a vasectomy in his thirties? What is his “daddy” syndrome about? Why does he knowingly engage in self-destructive behaviour?

The attraction that young female bodies have for men, regardless of age, is nothing new. Middle-aged and older men have always been attracted to younger women. Even in this day and age in different parts of the world many teenage girls would willingly marry an older man if he’s rich and/or powerful. And the girls’ parents would consider her lucky.

But in North America, where the line for adulthood is drawn at 18, and it’s a crime for a person a few years over that line to have sexual relations with someone under that line, and we’ve been brainwashed with that concept, reading about a 42-year-old teacher fingering his 15-year-old student, regardless of how willing that student is, makes you cringe.

“Why Can’t They Just Get Over It?”

With the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves of indigenous children all over the country, these days the talk on the topic of residential schools focuses on identification of the bodies and various statements by government and other officials.

There’s rarely a mention of a name, or an individual case of a survival. There are no details of how the experiences at the residential school influence the rest of the life of a person, their offspring, and the people they interact with.

In response to indigenous complaints, non-indigenous people often ask, “Why don’t they just get over it?”

Michelle Good’s Five Little Indians answers that question very well.

It follows five teenagers who were lucky enough not to die in a residential school from hunger, sickness, severe beatings trying to resist rape, or failed attempts to run away.

Kenny, Lucy, Maisie, Clara and Howie flee/are rescued/released from The Mission School and have to survive in the world outside with no skills and no understanding of how life works outside the mission. They are thrown into a world which judges them, puts them down and discriminates against them.

Traumatized by years of physical, psychological and sexual abuse, confused, scared and angry, these teenagers scramble to earn their keep, and resort to various self-destructive behaviors to deal with their pain and maintain their sanity.

Michelle Good’s mother, grandmother and cousins are residential school survivors. The idea of writing this book took shape when Good was practicing law and representing residential school survivors. She says: “I was realizing just how much Canadians or Canada at large doesn’t understand the impact of how these individuals suffered because of their attendance at these schools… It occurred to me that this needed to be told as a story — as something that people could engage in — with more ease than a factual diatribe.”

And engage she does.

Kenny, Howie and Clara suffer from a simmering anger that at times erupts and lands them into long-term headaches. Kenny cannot settle anywhere for long, regardless of how much he wants to. Lucy has to count sheep or something else to calm her incessant anxiety. Maisie sabotages her own life and physically harms herself, to dull her psychological pain. Some become drug addicts or alcoholics. Some can’t take it anymore and commit suicide.

Good puts a face on the statistics that create the stereotype of a native person. She shows how when kids are taken by force from their parents at the age of 4, 5 or 6, forced to wear a uniform, forbidden to speak their language, given little to eat, punished severely for the smallest mistake, raped and beaten, for about 10 formative years of their lives, the effects on their psyche are permanent.

That seeps into all their relationships, and affects their close ones too.

The parents and grandparents from whom the kids were snatched away are broken beyond repair as well. That impacts the whole community.

They can’t just get over it.

Even when Kenny runs away from the Mission School and returns home to his mom, she is so broken from the trauma of losing him, that she’s become an alcoholic. She is dysfunctional and can’t provide the consolation and support he so badly needs.

Kendra, Kenny and Lucy’s daughter, hates her dad, because he keeps disappearing and leaving them alone to fend for themselves. Even she, the daughter of two residential school survivors doesn’t get their pain. So the survivors are not only alone in dealing with their trauma from the past, they’re also alone in their most intimate relationships with their parents, spouses and children.

They don’t even talk about the trauma from their shared past to each other, because verbalizing what they went through is too painful. Even when encouraged to come forward and testify about the atrocities committed against them, they refuse. It’s just too agonizing, and it’s not going to help them anyway.

One such testimony is so devastating it results in suicide. 

There’s a good reason why Michelle Good won many recognitions and awards, including the Governor General Literary Award, for Five Little Indians. It paints a vivid and convincing picture of the experiences of tens of thousands of indigenous Canadians for the rest of us.

And in doing so it takes us one step closer to understanding them.

Writing to Die For

Compared to Bel Canto, the only other book I read by Ann Patchett and fell in love with, The Dutch House is flat.

But the amazing thing is that it’s still captivating, because it flaunts Patchett’s inimitable intelligence, wit and language. After all there’s a reason why it was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in fiction.

Not a whole lot happens in the book. When Maeve is 10 and Danny 3, their mother leaves them and goes to India to serve the poor. They live in a huge and gorgeous mansion that is known as The Dutch House, which their dad, a developer, bought when the house was auctioned for a ridiculously low price. The dad is distant and reticent, and the children are mainly cared for by their maids. A few years later dad marries Andrea, a much younger woman who is in love with the house, and somehow wheedles her way into his life. Andrea has two children of her own. A mere four years later she kicks both Maeve and Danny out of the house.

Maeve and Danny bond in an incredible way and even after they are adults and Danny doesn’t live in Pennsylvania any more, every time they get together, they drive to The Dutch House, park in front of it, admire it, smoke and talk about their past.

One of the reasons it’s hard to put the book down despite the simple plot is Patchett’s compassion for everyone and everything: “…two leafless maples shivering in the front yard”. Another one is her amazing ability to analyze and explain her characters’ feelings and behaviors, “Owning the place where I lived, …. plugged up a hole that had been whistling in me for years”. But the main reason is her ever present wit. She describes the first encounter between Maeve with Celeste –Danny’s future wife – as, “They could have been married on the spot, Maeve and Celeste. Such was their love at that moment.” They irony is they turn into hardcore enemies later on.

Patchett explores the deep crevices of the human soul, and its reaction to trauma. Danny and Maeve react to their misfortunes in a similar way in some regards – clinging to each other with an unbreakable bond, and being obsessed with the Dutch House – but in totally different ways in their feelings towards their mother and their choices of career and family.

The novel is also rich with many themes such as love, forgiveness, family relationships, sexism, socioeconomic disparities, and capitalism.

The story is told in first person from the point of view of Danny. He is not communicative, and the narrative feels a bit clunky at first. But Patchett’s superior language manages to mask everything. Another feature of the book that works beautifully at times, but seems disjointed at others is the first- person narrative jumping around in time. In the same chapter Danny sometimes talks about two periods in his life that are years apart, at times in a stream of consciousness, and at times with no apparent reason.

Danny, Maeve and Celeste’s characters are fully three-dimensional and well developed. But the mother, father and stepmother’s characters are not. They seem more like stock characters from some fairly tale.

At times when I felt Patchett was just throwing crumbs, manipulating me into reading, and thought to myself, “Ok, where is this story going?”, the voice inside my head told me, “Just shut up and read. You’re enjoying it, aren’t you? You would read Ann Patchett’s shopping list if you got your hands on it.”

Patchett truly commands the art of writing.

Brilliant Ideas, Shame About the Tedium

The topic and the ideas in Talking to Strangers made my head spin. This is the first Malcolm Gladwell book I’ve read and as far as I’ve heard from friends who’ve read his other books it’s in his typical signature style.

It’s a book that ingeniously analyzes our thought patterns and behaviour when meeting and interacting with strangers. It examines many different aspects of our thinking and actions, it gives innumerable examples to prove said aspects, it goes off on tangents to discuss peripheral factors, and it bombards you with various scientific studies, numbers, statistics, details, names, places and dates that make you overdose on information.

If it wasn’t for the intelligence of the ideas and theories in the book, the excessive information might have turned me off. But the concepts are so fascinating that I was convinced to sit through the interminable minutiae.

One of Gladwell’s main clever points is what he calls “default to truth”. In a nutshell it goes like this: when faced with strangers most of us choose to believe them. It’s not that we’re stupid or don’t ever suspect that they might not be telling the truth, it’s just that in the absence of absolute proof to the contrary we choose to see them as honest. Gladwell argues that “default to truth” is overall better in terms of our survival and quality of life than being suspicious all the time and calling people out on these suspicions. Whistleblowers, although useful to prevent fraud and abuses of power, are unpopular and lonely people. And we need to communicate with other people and trust them to survive.

To prove this theory he cites detailed examples from double-agent spies in the CIA to experiments done by psychologists to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, among others.

Another main clever argument that Gladwell presents is what he calls “illusion of transparency”. He says that we expect people’s facial expressions, body language and behaviour to show their inner feelings. That’s what we see in movies, but in real life that’s not always true. Often there’s a mismatch between the truth of someone’s character or intentions and the way they behave.

Again Gladwell gives numerous examples including Hitler and the way three main British politicians read him incorrectly in personal meetings, to judges making a lot more mistakes in judging criminals than a computer, to the Amanda Knox case, in which an innocent person was put behind bars based solely on her mismatched behaviour.

A third principle is what he calls “coupling behaviours”. This refers to context. In dealing with strangers we often miss the context, the place where they are and the facilities they have at their disposal, and thus we misjudge the person. Among the long and detailed examples he cites are police methods and policies in combating crime, suicide statistics and campus rapes.

This is the bare skeleton of Talking to Strangers. There are a whole lot more suppositions and bare truths. There are countless more examples, case studies, statistics and analyses.

What’s absolutely fascinating is how Gladwell’s mind works. How he makes sense of his formidable body of knowledge and information by classifying and grouping seemingly totally irrelevant cases and events to support his unique psychological and sociological hypotheses.

But in the opinion of this reader Gladwell could have proven his points with far less detail and examples. That would have made Talking to Strangers a far more enjoyable to read.

Gripping Story, Powerful Prose

 

A friend of mine saw the book Educated on my desk and asked, “Is that what you’re reading? How is it?” It took me a few seconds to respond.

When I did, without thinking I curled my hands into fists, hunched my shoulders, puckered my face, drew a sharp breath in, and said, “Oooh, it’s very good!”

That’s the kind of book Educated is.  It’s painful, it’s mind-boggling, it’s fascinating, it’s maddening and it’s beautifully written.

Educated is a memoir by Tara Westover, the youngest of the seven children, born in 1986, in Idaho to her Mormon parents. Her father, who she later in life finds out is bipolar, is not violent but is a bully and has a tight grip on his family. He is a paranoid religious fanatic, opposed to public education, health care, and anything and everything to do with the government.

The children are taught reading, writing and some math at home. The family lives isolated in a house by Buck’s Peak. Following dad’s orders, the mom and children are constantly canning peaches and hoarding supplies, packed bags ready by the door, to flee to the mountain if and when the “Feds” come for them, or to face the end of the world, when it comes.

Her dad owns a scrapyard, and makes his children work there. He is careless and takes risks. Both he and his children get injured frequently. But they never see a doctor or take medicine. Instead, they’re treated with herbs by their mom, who’s an herbalist. Even huge gashes, broken bones and third-degree burns get treated at home with herbs. “My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.”

Shawn, one of Tara’s brothers, becomes violent. He repeatedly abuses Tara verbally and physically. Two of Tara’s brothers break away from home and go to university. Eventually Tara does so as well, despite being penniless and never having gone to school. She teaches herself algebra, overcomes insurmountable obstacles, suffers nervous breakdowns, has several setbacks, but is so talented and determined that eventually, with the help of her professors she succeeds in getting a PhD in History from Cambridge University.

Moving away, and getting educated changes Tara’s worldview “…never again would I allow myself to be made a foot soldier in a conflict I did not understand.” However, gaining a new perspective doesn’t always lead to eradication of the old one.

Besides being a gripping story of a woman’s quest for mental independence, what is amazing about this memoir is the fascinating study of the divide in the human psyche: between the intellect and behavior, between conflicting feelings, between understanding something and acting on it. Educated is the psychological analysis and portrayal of the contradictory workings of the brain.

Unlike fictitious characters who often behave and change in a reasonable and foreseeable ways, members of the Westover family, including Tara, are unpredictable and inconsistent.

After Shawn repeatedly beats Tara, drags her by the hair, sticks her head in the toilet, etc. etc. she still loves and trusts him. When she returns home from university on her Christmas or summer breaks and he casually asks her if she wants to go for a ride or an ice cream, she says yes, (while her reader screams NO!!!) only to be beaten and abused again.

Her dad, who calls her a whore for wearing clothes that don’t fully cover her legs and arms, loves her singing, and not only allows her to sing in musical shows, but is proud of her for it.

Her mom, who encourages her to go to university, turns against her for doing so. When Tara tells her that Shawn abuses her, the mom believes Tara, but when the dad doesn’t believe Tara, her mom sides with the dad and turns against Tara.

Even after Tara lives away from her family for years, gets her B.A. and M.A., even after she knows her father is bipolar, fanatic and manipulative, and has played with the lives of everyone in the family, she’s still heavily influenced by him, and seeks his love and approval.

Even now, after her book has been on the best-seller lists for weeks on-end, in her interviews Dr. Tara Westover defends her father as a complex character rather than a mentally unstable and abusive bully.

Educated is a record of the struggle to “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery” and the near impossibility of doing so, written in a devastatingly beautiful prose.