Books I Read - July 2020

July was my first month of not working at Seeking Alpha in nearly eight years, and my wife went home to the states for the summer a week into the month. So, I had a lot of reading time. Here's what I got into in July, including more on my Memphis fascination, a couple curiously set books, and an American classic.

1. Molly Caldwell Crosby, The American Plague (History)

This falls into the Memphis category. The plague is yellow fever, and Crosby begins her story with the 1878 yellow fever outbreak in Memphis, before moving to Cuba in 1900, when Walter Reed and his team proved that yellow fever spread through mosquitos, both a controversial finding and one they found in a controversial manner.

Crosby's research is very solid, and I like how many details she provides on her process in the notes at the end of the book. She is transparent about when she has to add in shades of color to flesh out the narrative, and she does a good job explaining the scientific elements of the narrative, including how researchers disagreed over yellow fever's spread and how they resolved those disagreements.

The narrative itself didn't grab me as much as I expected, perhaps due to the limited degree of detail available in the source material. Once the story gets to Cuba, it gains momentum as we fall into an epidemiological whodunit.

The applicability to 2020, whether in the scientific process and the errors made or, say, when Memphians argue over whether or not to impose a quarantine, is top of mind and obviously relevant. I didn't choose to read the book for that reason, but it provided for a mirror of sorts. It was not reassuring either for the current environment or a hypothetical new yellow fever outbreak.

2.Tendai Huchu, The Maestro, The Magistrate, and The Mathematician (novel)

My wife ordered this and read it and liked it, so I was next to get it. The story is set in Edinburgh and follows the lives of three men who emigrated from Zimbabwe, and the action is in the mid to late '00s. The magistrate is a former judge who finds himself considered less qualified for work in Scotland, and also dislocated from his place in his family and community; the mathematician is a hotshot 20-something from a wealthy background and who trades commodities and stocks and drives fast cars; and the maestro is a loner who buries himself in his books, almost literally.

I liked the characters quite a bit, especially the first two I mentioned above. Both the Edinburgh setting and the look into the Zimbabwean emigre community were strengths of the book as well. Huchu could have spent more time on these characters - I would have been happy with a book just about the Magistrate, and didn't think the Maestro added much to the story. The plot was enjoyable, though the twist at the end felt a little unearned and thus not impactful. All in all a pleasant read. We both giggled at this section:

He envied the brave souls on Amazon, the dissenters hiding behind anonymous avatars, who gave War and Peace one star and told Tolstoy to go stuff it - too long, too slow, too many characters, what's with all the digressions, just get on with the story, Nikolayevich. One Casey Jones had asked if Tolstoy was taking the Mickey. Ms Jones wrote: I could not believe how many words there are in this book! It is just full of them. She felt it could have been a tenth of the size, and went on to say she had read The Count of Monte Cristo, which was a lot more readable. On a forum like that, Ms Jones was assailed by Tolstoyans, one of whom suggested she read Bridget Jones's Diary instead. But the fact remained that she was a brave nonconformist, one of the precious few.

3.Kiese Laymon, Long Division (novel)

I will probably need to read this book to fully absorb it. The plot is a time travel story set in a small town in Mississippi, where Citoyen Coldson tries to rescue girls from the future and his grandfather from the past, while also sparring with his friendly rival LaVander Peeler in the "Can You Use That Word in a Sentence" competition. It's a funny book, and the echoes of injustice in Mississippi from 1964 to 1985 to 2013 are well drawn and land harder amidst all the humor.

It could be the time travel and the loops that make this a confusing book, but I had more trouble tracking the characters' motivation. I think that's mostly because most of the characters were teenagers, and teenagers' motivations change three times a day, but I also may have rushed my reading of the book. I will revisit, because I think it's worth it.

4. Holly George-Warren, A Man Called Destruction (Biography)

I have a basic theory on biographies. There are two types of biographies. First there are the first round of biographies, which come either when someone is near the end of their life - Sylvie Simmons' I'm Your Man about Leonard Cohen, e.g. - or shortly after they died, where the people who knew the subject are still around to talk about and provide context on his/her life. And then there are the biographies that are done at more of a remove, to place the subject in historical context. Both types are important, and the best biographies can bridge the gap between the two, and it's just a basic theory.

Holly George-Warren's biography on Alex Chilton is squarely in the first group, with all the good and some of the bad that can come with that. The good is that it is exhaustively reported, including interviews with almost everyone alive who knew Chilton, it seems. I'm not a Big Star junkie or anything, so this shouldn't be a surprise, but I learned a lot about both Chilton and the late 60s-80s, as well as Memphis (now you see why I read this!), and that is a credit to the work. I also thought the author did a very good job analyzing the music that Chilton produced over the years, and hit the right balance of how much to analyze the music vs. how much to tell about Chilton himself. I would have loved harder examples of how he became such a great rhythm guitarist, but that is certainly a smaller thing to point out.

The issues that come with a first round biography are reflected here. The story could have been shaped better; the author compiled so many facts but then rattled them off without a clear flow at times. For example, there were about 3-4 chapters that ended with 'this was the moment Alex realized he needed to clean himself up', but then his debauchery continued in the next chapter. I don't think the book should have been shorter, but there was a stop-start feel to his post Big Star, pre content in New Orleans days.

George-Warren knew Chilton, and her warm feelings for him slip into the story, even if she doesn't reveal her relationship with him until the epilogue. That's fine on its own, but her writing was very hands off about Chilton's numerous problems. It's a biography, not a moral stage, but among the things that went unexplored was his habit of pursuing high school girls well into his 20s, Wooderson style; his committing domestic violence; his homophobic and anti-Semitic behavior; and just his generally being kind of a dick, even when he finally cleaned up his drug and drinking habits. I know the author doesn't have to spoonfeed us, we can react our own way to Chilton's behavior, but there was something a little too clinical for my taste about how she presented his flaws.

For all that, I really enjoyed reading the book and love compelling biographies in general. Any recommended biographies that bridge those two categories I mentioned above?

         

5.Robert Penn Warren, All The King’s Men (novel)

I took a two-trimester seminar on the Civil War in my senior year of high school. The first trimester covered the history of the war, and the second focused on the literature that emerged from it. It was a sign that I was missing the deeper passion for the classroom at the time that, on the first day of class, one of the two teachers co-teaching the course said something like, 'when we say Civil War history, we don't mean studying the battles or being a Civil War buff or anything,' and I felt called out. It was a bigger sign when, in the literature segment, I turned in a paper titled "Beloved: A Civil War Novel". That was an assignment where our teachers 'anonymously' reviewed each student's paper in front of the whole class, to give an idea of what they were looking for, and I put anonymously in quotes because when they got to mine and pointed out how dumb it was, I burst out laughing and couldn't regain my composure for the entirety of their review. I passed, but not with flying colors, let's say.

But the class stuck with me, evidently. I haven't read any Toni Morrison since, but I have The Bluest Eye sitting behind my desk; I remember how difficult Faulkner was, and the last line of "Absalom, Absalom" - "Why do you hate the South?" "I don't! I don't hate it! I don't hate it!" - bewilders me to this day. I went to school in North Carolina and spent a month in New Orleans in my 20s and have been reading about the Delta and about the South recently and over the years.

One of the first books we read in that seminar, though I can't remember which trimester, was Robert Penn Warren's The Legacy of The Civil War. Beyond the fact of reading it, that book did not stick with me in any way. But it introduced me to Warren and to All The King's Men, which was showing up on all the best novels of the 20th century at the time. And, almost twenty years later, I got to the book.

All The King's Men is usually billed as the story of Huey Long. Long was a populist Louisiana politician who rose to the Governor's office and then to the U.S. Senate. His policy views were left wing - he was a critic of FDR from the left - but his politics were a very 'ends justify the means' approach, and some call him an example of a 30's dictator in the U.S., ruling Louisiana via patronage and political muscle. Warren is on the record as protesting this comparison, but I read that as a protest along the lines of 'don't literally interpret every plot twist as derived from Long's life, and don't presume my views and the narrator's align, or anything else.' It's hard to track the rise of Willie Stark, the stand-in for Long, and not think of the real thing.

That said, I don't think the story of Willie Stark/Huey Long is the core of the book. Or maybe, Stark's rise/fall is the engine that keeps the book going, but it's not the key narrative. Politics are like the weather, elemental and eternal, but out of a normal person's control to a large degree. Instead, we can react to politics, prepare for politics, make choices with politics around us, and we can either do honor to ourselves or not.

All The King's Men is set in the '20s and '30s in Louisiana, and I would argue it's the story of Jack Burden more than Willie Stark. Burden is a journalist from an upper-class family who becomes Stark's right-hand man, his get things done type - digging up dirt on rivals, persuading people to go along with 'the Boss', as he and most people call Stark, and so on. Burden is a compelling character, though full of flaws - he's a racist, if milder than some of the other characters, and black people are relegated to the sides of the stage throughout, dismissed and held in vague contempt (with the n word showing up on page 1); he's a misogynist, not able to accord women their fullness of motivation and character, even down to his mother and the woman he loves. Those are perhaps legacies of the time, but more specific to him is that he is aimless, a spoiled romantic who, having lost his hopes in this world is not interested in taking the reins on anything, which leaves him flirting with nihilism and ok with the 'ends justify the means' approach the Boss espouses. His facing up to what is goodness, what is his role and agency in the world, and how should he use his time and privilege (he's a man who never really needs to work, since his mother has money to share at most points in the book), is the true conflict of the book. Stark's end is foreseeable if you read up on the history, but also more of a typical tragic arc, hubris and reaching for the stars and doing all he could because his time was short and so on.

Into that mix, Warren introduces a number of entertaining or paragon-esque side characters. There's Sadie Burke, the secretary/fixer who believes she's the one who pulled all the strings to get the Boss into the governor's mansion, with a chip on her shoulder from having a smallpox scarred face; Tiny Duffy, a large political crony who becomes Lieutenant Governor because the Boss thinks he can handle him best at close range; Adam Stanton, the noble leading doctor leaving in a relative hovel, who bangs away at the piano to relieve his moral stress; and Sugar Boy, the Boss's driver who is slow to form a word but quick with a gun and lightning fast with a car. That's just a sampling, and they're all worth considering for how they react to Stark, how they exist in a world where he is the dominating, oxygen inhaling force. The tension between Stark and Stanton, for example, the closest to polar opposites that this book offers, at least in one axis, throws down the moral gauntlet for us all, while making clear we'll all stumble one way or another.

The book called to mind two main touchpoints for me - Citizen Kane, which came out a few years before All The King's Men, and which similarly follows an ambitious quasi-tyrant in his rise to fame and power and then his downfall. In this case, the longing for the rosebud, for the moment when everything went awry, is for Jack Burden to feel, and he has a more complex relationship with the past and with Anne Stanton, Adam's sister (both of them children of a famed governor who embodied high-minded uncaring towards the people that Stark stood in, well, stark contrast to), his dreamed of paramour turned confidant.

The book is also of a scope with the great Russian novels, and hits positively Dostoevskian notes. For example, when Stark is closing the agreement for Adam Stanton to head his new hospital, Stark's dreamed of pure end to all his wrangling about:

"Yeah, one more thing. But look here, Doc - you know Hugh Miller?"

"Yes," Adam said, "yes, I know him."

"Well, he was in with me - yeah, Attorney General - and he resigned. And you know why?" But he went on without waiting for the answer. "He resigned because he wanted to keep his little hands clean. He wanted the bricks but he just didn't know somebody has to paddle in the mud to make 'em. He was like somebody that just loves beefsteak but just can't bear to go to a slaughter pen because there are some bad, rough men down there who aren't animal lovers and who ought to be reported to the S.P.C.A. Well, he resigned."

I watched Adam's face. It was white and stony, as though carved out of some slick stone. He was like a man braced to hear what the jury foreman was going to say. Or what the doctor was going to say. Adam must have seen a lot of faces like that in his time. He must have had to look into them and tell them what he had to tell.

"Yeah," the Boss said, "he resigned. He was one of those guys wants everything and wants everything two ways at once. You know the kind, Doc?"

He flicked a look over at Adam, like a man flicking a fly over by the willows in the trout stream. But there wasn't any strike.

"Yeah, old Hugh - he never learned that you can't have everything. That you can have mighty little. And you never have anything you don't make. Just because he inherited a little money and the name Miller he thought you could have everything. Yeah, and he wanted the one last damned thing you can't inherit. And you know what it is?" He stared at Adam's face.

"What?" Adam said, after a long pause.

"Goodness. Yeah, just plain, simple goodness. Well you can't inherit that from anybody. You got to make it, Doc. If you want it. And you got to make it out of badness. Badness. And you know why, Doc?" He raised his bulk up in the broken-down wreck of an overstuffed chair he was in, and leaned forward, his hands on his knees, his elbows cocked out, his head out-thrust and the hair coming down to his eyes, and stared into Adam's face. "Out of badness," he repeated. "And you know why? Because there isn't anything else to make it out of." Then sinking back into the wreck, he asked softly, "Did you know that, Doc?"

Adam didn't say a word.

It could be Kirillov or Shatov ranting in Demons, or even Stavrogin at the monastery. Well, except for a couple things. First, Warren writes with the quintessential American self-centeredness, not for the author himself but for the characters. This hero plunging into the muck sensation is our country's biggest addition to the world canon, perhaps epitomized here by Jack Burden's sudden trip to Long Beach, California, when his personal and professional lives cross in just the wrong way.

And related to that, Warren writes the hell out of this story. At times it verges on too much, on a degree of detail that you imagine has died in our century, where it feels like he's not quite showing off but like Tolstoy above, a little too slow. It feels to me a little like Grapes of Wrath, where Steinbeck alternated plot chapters with descriptive setting chapters, except Warren writes in 10 long chapters so the pages and formats meld together. But it's also beautiful writing, and I'd rather he write it full than miss out on these moments. You can get a taste of it in the above, the simile about flyfishing for trout.

I'm hardly the first to draw a connection between Russian writing and Southern US writing. A class I could have taken freshman year but did not talked about the parallels between either the Soviet Union and the south or the Soviet Union and the African-American south, or maybe just between the stereotype of the babushka and of the mammy, and I would love to learn where that class was going. I do know Carson McCullers loved the Russian novelists and had a bit of Chekhov to her approach. Writing all this, my grasp on American literature feels incomplete, my analytical ability rusty.

But reading a book like this re-sparks that desire and passion.