Review: The Buddha in the Attic

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Most of this is simply wonderful. Otsuka explores a powerful subject – the lives of several Japanese immigrants to America in the 1920s and 1930s up through the forced relocations of World War II. At the same time, she employs a striking technique: most of this is told in the first person plural, in a way as memorable as those rare staples of the approach, “A Rose for Emily” and “The Things They Carried.”

The heart of the story is more lyrical than narrative. It’s possible to track threads that imply the stories of particular individuals, but, for the most part, this recounts everything as it happens to “us.” We’ll get details that cannot have happened to the same individual – one having six children and one having eight – but the power of the work is in weaving all those separate experiences together into what feels like a whole.

Otsuka moves things forward in dramatic steps. Most of what we experience comes in chapters that linger over large historical moments. The first deals with the arrival of postcard brides, and it’s mesmerizing. Some are happy to leave difficult homes, and some are bereft. Some have affairs along the way, and others are so innocent that they have to interrogate the more experienced for details.

A later such chapter deals with the children, and it’s equally gorgeous in the way we get so many fragments of lives that come together. The effect is something like collage. She pushes different pieces together into a whole that suggests individual experiences and simultaneously gives us a sense of a larger, communal whole.

For me at least, the triumph of all that is to reimagine this experience with White Americans – the “we” of most such histories – as the others. The narrative here may be broken in a way that’s subtly reflective of the broken-English of many of the protagonists it offers us, but it achieves a structure that invites “us” into the experience. As whites, we are made to feel other to our own ancestors, to the Americans who allowed this traumatic experience to occur to other Americans who just happened to be of Japanese descent.

So, I love all of that and deeply admire it. I read this for a colleague’s class, and I’m glad to be introduced to Otsuka’s work. This is ambitious and successful in ways that resonate.

And then comes the final chapter.

I understand it’s a controversial one – but no worries about spoiling because there’s no conventional narrative here – but it troubles me to switch voices in the end. In place of the displaced Japanese-American women who have effectively narrated the earlier chapters, we get the voices of those white Americans who confront their absence. There are moving details, a Fuji restaurant becomes a conventionally named diner or a former Japanese home grows dusty and neglected, but I’m frustrated to be asked to empathize with a whole new set of concerns, and I am disappointed not to hear the Japanese Americans again.

There’s a trope in Holocaust studies that pushes against the notion of Jewish absence. The idea there is that we want to be able to hear the voices of those who endured and of those who survived. Jews are more than victims, and we need to hear such stories to remind us ever of that fact.

Here, I am sorry that the last glimpse we get of these Japanese is through the eyes of others. I’d have preferred to see Otsuka persist with her dramatic technical experiment. You can see how challenging it was for Faulkner and Tim O’Brien in their famous stories; the first-person plural doesn’t lend itself well to an ending.

Here, as gorgeous as most of this is, I think Otsuka makes the wrong choice of an ending.

This is a remarkable work, and I recommend it, but I can’t entirely appreciate how she’s chosen to wrap it up.


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Review: Conquistador: Hernán Cortés, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs

Conquistador: Hernán Cortés, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs by Buddy Levy
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

One of the great mysteries of history has to be why Montezuma capitulated as he did to Hernan Cortes. It’s a pretty easy what-if to contemplate that, if he’d followed what appear to have been his instincts, he’d have either held out longer or he’d have been able to give sufficient resistance to buy his Aztec empire some time. Imagine how history would be different if, given an additional decade, the Aztecs had been able to acquire even a few of the horses and guns the Spaniards used. They might never have “won” against the colonizing forces, but they might not have left the vacuum of political power that they did.

Buddy Levy’s history sets out to address that question in part, but it does so by telling the larger narrative of the conquest. To his credit, Levy seems to want to challenge the Spanish-centered narrative that we necessarily know – after all, the victors get to tell the story. The trouble is that there are almost no sources for the Aztec perspective. We get suppositions about what Montezuma and his allies were thinking, but there’s no way Levy or anyone else can really know.

As a result, there’s a vacuum in the narrative as well. Levy’s structure compels him to fill in that mystery, and there are times it feels clumsy. Above all, I have a hard time forgiving him for a throwaway observation that Montezuma may well have fallen prey to what we know today as Stockholm Syndrome in which he came to identify with his captors rather than with the community he’d known his whole life.

Is that possible? Maybe. It feels like a stretch to me, but the real issue is how the sources we do have might indicate that. And Levy isn’t especially forthcoming there.

I always feel compelled to caution that an absence of a sense of the sources may be a result of my listening to this rather than reading it. It may be that Levy has footnotes that, as a reader, I could follow but that are invisible (or inaudible) to a listener.

What emerges, though, is both too much speculation and – in the spaces where we clearly do have documentation – overly detailed accounts of skirmishes and battles. We’ll get the casualty counts of a conflict, complete with the names of each wounded conquistador, and then I’ll realize I’ve lost track of the implications of the battle itself – unless, as always, it was about Cortes’s relentless pursuit of conquest.

There are some powerful questions in play here. Beyond Montezuma’s motivation, we have the challenge of weighing the morality of the Aztecs. They deserve our sympathy for being exterminated, but they were clearly bloodthirsty themselves. Levy has a moment where he imagines Cortes bewildered by the fact that a religious ceremony without a human sacrifice was as alien to the Aztecs as a Catholic Mass without the eucharist. That’s a striking way to put it, but I like to think that any feeling human would have been horrified at the sight of those human sacrifices. That is, the genocide that followed is one of the great crimes of human history, but the violence and terror that sustained the Aztec empire seem criminal to me as well.

The ultimate challenge, though, is to balance the details we do have with the larger narrative in play. Near the end, Levy declares that the battle for Tenochtitlan was the costliest battle – in terms of life – in world history. That’s a striking claim, but it’s one that doesn’t seem supported by the context of the larger story.

There’s a lot to learn here – I’m glad to revisit the story and get the level of detail we do – but I think this falls short of the ambition it holds for itself.


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Review: The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic

The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I took four years of Latin in high school, and I’ve read my Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, so I have a sense of the outline of Roman history. Maybe even more. For what it’s worth, I’ve been a fan of the Gracchus brothers since I first heard about them, and I find the image of a great and ruthless empire – something that figures so deeply in so much schlock fantasy – intriguing.

Mike Duncan shares that sense, and knows his material vastly better than I do. As he tells us in his introduction, he didn’t want to write another history of the dawn of the empire – something that’s been done a lot – but instead wanted to write about the upheavals that made it possible for men like Julius Caesay, Marc Antony, and Pompey to rise to the power that Augustus would eventually claim.

What’s more, he underscores that impulse by inviting us to consider the uncomfortably obvious question of anyone writing such a boo at this historical moment: is this the beginning of the end of our democratic experiment?

I’m glad that Duncan leaves that question in the background; once he plants it, he leaves it to us to answer. And I appreciate the way he weaves as much material together as he does. Still, while I enjoyed this and have found it leading me on to more popular history, I have two concerns.

First, and most concerning to me, we don’t get much sense of where Duncan is getting his material. I believe that the story of telling the story – when the story in question is history – has to be part of the story. I know there are important historians like Appia and Cassius Dio who left records from generations close to these crises, but I want to see how Duncan is drawing on them. There are things he asserts, but I want to know what gives him license to do so.

I listened to this, so it’s possible – even likely, given the general skill of the work – that the written version offers footnotes that would explain such things. Still, as I experienced it, that fundamental question of historiography is an omission.

Second, I think Duncan might have done more to digest this for us. When I shared a failed draft of my own gangster history with an agent, he urged me to rewrite with a sense that someone in the account would have to be a role for Robert DeNiro or Al Pacino. That rankled, but it helped. So I ask here, who would Brad Pitt play in this story?

As it happens, there are two or three possibilities: the Gracchus brothers, Marius, and Sulla in particular. They’re the central individuals here, and each gets multiple chapters of narrative and description.

As Duncan proceeds, though, these “main characters” get tossed alongside many much more minor ones. We’ll hear about their lieutenants or adversaries for a while, but they’ll be relevant mostly in relation to these major figures. I think this might have been more successful, that is, if it were built more around the personalities who rose to the fore rather than around the larger narrative as it moves forward.

Again, though, I did enjoy this. It has sent me to many a Wikipedia article in the last couple days, and I’ve appreciated this deep dive into a history that’s long drawn me.


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Review: Understanding Complexity

Understanding Complexity by Scott E. Page
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I picked this one up because Scott Page is an old college friend, and hearing his voice – not so much as a reader as a lecturer – was part of the deep pleasure of listening to it. I remember him back in his student government days with the same mix of seriousness and good humor – putting energy into the work but never taking himself too seriously.

So, biased as I am, I declare his presence, his voice, worth the price of admission.

But there’s much more here as well. I guess I could have provided a workable definition of what it means for something to be complex, but I’d never have been able to weave a basically simple concept into the playful depths that Scott manages.

The fundamental observation here is that “complexity” represents a space between easily mappable scenarios and what seems pure randomness. We can measure an economic exchange that involves a couple producers and a couple consumers. We have no hope of measuring something as unpredictable as quantum motion. In between lies something like the macroeconomic conditions we know, an area we cannot accurately predict or control but that we do have the power to influence.

Understanding that in-between, “understanding complexity,” is a dramatic new frontier in data science. It’s the child of game theory and chaos theory, suggesting that simple concepts, twined together, can produce a complex view of what we mean by complexity itself. It feels like a wonderful logic game, and it also feels like it might be the key to making our world substantially better.

I’m not doing justice either to the substance or color of Scott’s argument, but it’s stimulating throughout. He has wonderful metaphors like “dancing landscapes” and “Mt. Fujis,” and he has a knack for setting up the concepts early that he will need later.

My favorite part here, I think, is the way he demonstrates the power of agent-based model simulations. He demonstrates throughout this that, when we account for “bottom-up” phenomena of organized systems – which is any system where potentially countless individual actors make individually based determinations that produce a potentially predictable reaction in an interdependent whole – bizarre and wonderful things can happen. He gives the example of computer simulations in which cells light up as black or white when they meet certain conditions (such as whether their neighbors are black or white) and then produce seemingly top-down results – such as when a set of black/white binary cells produce what looks like a stick-figure creature taking steps forward.

I’m rushing to get down ideas that Scott made clear in sustained fashion but that came to me in spasms of understanding. I’m not deleting this one because I am tempted already to listen to it again.

In the meantime, I feel smarter for having listened to it.


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Review: Ayiti

Ayiti by Roxane Gay
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It’s hard to know quite what this book is. It’s sort of a short story collection, but – while there is one fine full-length story and three or four mid-length ones – much of it is closer to poetry. It’s got strong dashes of what feel like autobiography, but then it veers into points of view very different from one another. It has moments of real tenderness toward parents and children, and then it features work that feels like (and indeed was originally published as) erotica.

The fact that this is hard to categorize, though, is part of what makes it as strong as it is. Gay refuses to stand still as a self-identified immigrant. She doesn’t give us the story (or stories) her subjectivity is “supposed” to share. Instead, she reveals her own experience (or seems to – unless you check out her biography somewhere else, it’s hard to know where her life ends and her invention begins) and then insists on her authority to write the fiction that appeals to her.

Some of her protagonists are Anglo, some straight, some still children, some wealthy, some at risk of death, and some comfortably established in the U.S. I listened to this, and that compounded the sense that one story/prose poem bleeds into another. It’s tempting to identify Gay with some protagonists over others, but resisting that temptation seems to be a big part of what we’re asked to do. This is a narrative voice that flashes its ethnic experience, that trumpets its Haitian sensibility, and that then ventures wherever it chooses to go.

I think it might be interesting some day to read this in conversation with Sandra Cisneros’s House on Mango Street. Both explore ethnic perspective in small doses (making each readily teachable) and both tweak the expectation that its author has any obligation to translate a particular ethnic experience into prose that a widespread (i.e. white and “non-ethnic”) readership can access.

I’ve been following Gay in a small way for a couple years. This is my first full-length work of hers (and it’s fleetingly short, of course) and I enjoyed it more than I expected. As a critic – in the limited way I’ve read her – she seems contradictory, though I acknowledge she may well make a consistent case for herself in Bad Feminist. Here, her ability to be one thing and then another, to insist on the power of her ethnic heritage and then – just as fully – to insist on her right to write as a full citizen of the world, gives this short and beautiful work a powerful punch.




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Review: The Weight of Ink

The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I admire and enjoy three-quarters of this book.

Half of this is set in the 17th century when Esther, an orphaned Jewish girl (later an adult woman), comes from Amsterdam to serve as a maid and then scribe for a thoughtful rabbi in London. Exposed to writing and philosophy – and wrestling with the devastation of losing her entire family to tragedies that challenge her faith in a benign providence – she grows into a philosophe, a thinker wrestling with modern philosophy as it’s emerging in the work of Thomas Hobbes and, above all, Baruch Spinoza.

When this novel is set in the past, it comes alive. Kadish has a real skill in mimicking the careful written voices of her long-ago characters, and she has some nice success at paraphrasing the stakes of serious philosophical arguments. At the heart of this conflict, though elegantly presented, is a complicated question about whether it’s possible to be a martyr for one’s faith if one has come to believe that life itself – absent either human or divine intent – is the ultimate engine of the universe. That thinking puts her at odds with the gentle and wise rabbi who’s taken her in, and it leaves us with a beautifully realized intellectual crisis.

The other half of this is set at the beginning of the 21sth century. Half of that half is compelling. When aging scholar Helen and her grad student partner Aaron make connections among the different documents they uncover, and when they reconstruct Esther’s life from 300 years earlier, we get the feeling that real scholarship can convey. I’ve dug in archives – though never with such momentous work at hand – and it has those moments of real power. When you feel you’re solving a puzzle no one else has quite seen before, it’s a rush.

Kadish is often clever in the way she uses the 21st century discoveries to move the older story forward. When the archives reveal, for instance, that someone has died, it moves the older story forward weeks, months, or even years. As scholars, these characters have weight.

But the other half of this contemporary half strikes some sour notes for me. Aaron is involved – or no longer involved – with a woman who has gone to Israel. He’s apparently quite the handsome catch, but he’s also self-absorbed. Some of his early emails to her fall flat; in a novel with some real eloquence, they seem bland, a problem compounded by the fact that Kadish uses them to dump information we need to understand the implications of the Esther papers.

Helen has a lost love of her own, an Israeli who, though he loved her, loved his country more. And [SPOILER:] by the end, Kadish is twisting things uncomfortably to keep their stories alive. At one point Aaron tears a document in order to keep it from rival scholars. (There’s no way this man would do such a thing if he were realized as Kadish otherwise presents him.) At another, a sickly Helen cashes in her retirement account to buy some of the documents from the ignorant family who owns the house where they were discovered. Again, it’s an absurd move for such a scholar to do since, among other things, it would put the very provenance of the papers into question and would compromise her for taking financial advantage of someone uninformed.

When you add in that the book is really too long – too long, perhaps, by a quarter – it makes me wish Kadish had simply cut out the drama in the contemporary account. She doesn’t need it, and it distracts from the excellence of the rest of this. [SPOILER:] Kadish gives in to a similar impulse to exaggerate what’s already sufficient when, having created a wonderful myth about a woman who masquerades as a succession of men to correspond with the great thinkers of her time, she adds in the possibilty that Esther might be Shakespeare’s granddaughter by way of the famed Dark Mistress of the sonnets. It’s a throwaway concept, and one that – by its outsized premise – dims the fundamental creativity of the project.

Those complaints aside, this really is a rewarding novel. It does what historical fiction is supposed to do, and then it amplifies that by giving us the perspective of scholars of today piecing together a long-ago puzzle.


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Review: The Collector

The Collector by John Fowles
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Some books don’t age well. You can still see some of the skill that Fowles brings to this, and there are still glimpses of 1970s-era popular philosophies in conversation: what are the ethics of living in a world with the hydrogen bomb? How can I be a self and still invest my energy in art? What are the lingering effects of class in a nouveau riche context?. So it’s not entirely confusing to see that it once figured as a serious novel.

But today? It just doesn’t fly to have a novel about an emotionally limited man – we might be inclined to see him as Asperberger-y in this moment – who kidnaps, or “collects” a young woman and locks her in his basement. It’s clearly a send-up on a deep-seated misogyny, but like a movie that parodies pornography to the point of being pornographic, this seems to reinforce the misogyny its critiquing. Strip away its veneer of seriousness, and this feels like one of those lurid paperbacks from the 1960s or one of those slasher films of the middle 1980s.

Miranda, trapped in the basement, is mostly an object here. The novel laments that but then proceeds to wallow in it. To paraphrase much of it, “How awful that such a man could feel entitled simply to take a woman for his ‘collection.’ Now let’s linger over the details of how he did it.”

Part Two seems to attempt to address some of that fundamental problem by switching from the male perspective to Miranda’s, but even there we see something that may have been invisible when Fowles wrote this: Miranda’s inner world is still shaped by the pressures of men, whether her kidnapper or an overbearing art professor who questions whether women can ever be true artists. In Part One, she’s the object of a pornographic gaze; in Part Two she’s aware of that gaze and then given little alternative but to exploit and be exploited by it. She plays at being the mistress in a master/slave dynamic, and she determines to use her sexuality to manipulate Frederick only to learn that he [SPOILER:] intends to take pornographic photos of her to help keep her from thinking about escape. She is rarely given license to defend herself physically, and when she gets it she’s not strong enough to make an impact – even when she’s swinging an axe against an unarmed, unprepared man. And, to add insult to all that, she blandly accepts the verdict of her artist mentor that she lacks the talent ever to be a serious artist.

The bottom line remains here that this is an uncomfortable, at times excruciating book to read today. I knocked out the first half quickly and determined I didn’t like it. I stuck it out because I was morbidly curious to know how Fowles would resolve it.

[SPOILER:] And even that conclusion seems dated. Rather than resolve things on its own terms, Fowles introduces a sudden and fatal condition for Miranda. (This for an otherwise healthy 20 year old woman.) She dies as he bungles an effort to get her medicine. Then, having resolved to kill himself and make it look like a dead lover’s pact (she’s become the accepting dream girl in her death) he finds the journal that constitutes Part Two (it’s unclear how she otherwise hid it from him in a room where she had no agency, but there you go) and, deciding she was always trying to manipulate him, ends the novel by contemplating the kidnapping of a young woman who bears a resemblance to her.

I suppose there’s supposed to be irony in the fact that Frederick, having glimpsed his own madness, learns nothing. What isn’t ironic is that I don’t feel I’ve learned all that much either – except possibly that as a culture we can grow intellectually, aesthetically, and ethically.


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Review: Testimony: A Memoir

Testimony: A Memoir by Robbie Robertson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Robbie Robertson has an incredible story to tell. It’s not enough that his mother is a Choctaw Native-American or that his father was a Canadian Jewish gangster who died in an accident (possibly an “accident”) before he was born. And it’s not enough that he was on the road as a member of Ronnie Hawkins band when he was only 17, that he provided some of the most important electric guitar in Bob Dylan’s first electric period, or that he was on the scene for most of the rock excess of the mid-1960s to mid-1970s.

Above all, it should have been enough that he was an integral part of The Band – its lead guitarist and chief songwriter – which is, arguably, one of the handful of the greatest rock bands in American history.

That last point needs a little defending, but hear me out. British rock is mostly about great bands: Beatles, Stones, Who, Kinks, Oasis, and name your favorites. It’s rarely about major solo artists; even Brit rockers like Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton worked to create new bands before abandoning their band success and going out as individual front men. American rock tends to go the other way. Our stars, from the start, have been front men: Elvis, Buddy Holly, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and, again, name your favorites.

When it comes to American bands, though, there are only a handful that have endured without splitting off lead singers or guitarists somewhere else. (I recognize I’m oversimplifying, but still…) At first blush, I can think of only a few American bands that have reshaped mainstream music, have been balanced rosters without a clear front man/woman, and have endured: The Dead, Jefferson Airplane, R.E.M., maybe Pearl Jam, and The Band.

And if you don’t think The Band have endured, give a listen to their music, and then try on something by the Avett Brothers, Conor Oberst, the Felice Brothers, the Lumineers, or any of a dozen bands working in the Americana vein right now. Dylan and Neil Young may be the grandfathers of Americana, but the genre runs right through The Band. They are the fathers of this new sound, and – since I’m biased in thinking it’s the richest source of contemporary rock going – I think they still matter.

So, digression ended, this ought to be a great story. It ought to be an account of how this group of disparate musicians – four were from Canada and one an Arkansan – came and stayed together. It ought to be the story of how drummer Levon Helm mentored Robertson into a musician capable of hanging with Dylan and how time with Dylan matured him into one of the great songwriters of his era. (“The Weight,” anyone? And there are 12-15 more great ones where that came from.) It ought to be about the full story behind the way Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Helm had as rich a trio of singers as any band this side of Fleetwood Mac in their prime.

And then it ought to be an answer to the complaint levied by Helm and some of his supporters that Robertson sold out The Band by acquiring all the publishing rights to their songs, leaving himself a playboy pal of David Geffen and relegating the rest of them to the lives of working musicians.

But this book is barely any of that. I hung on throughout it because, as I expect I’ve implied, I’m a big fan of The Band. Instead, this is a succession of things that happened to Robertson, a sometimes mixed up account of his life leading up to The Band and culminating in their memorable Last Waltz break-up concert.

It opens in awkward fashion, starting with the day he took a train south from Canada to join Ronnie Hawkins band in the U.S., but immediately flashing back to a disorganized series of anecdotes about learning the guitar and getting to know Hawkins.

After Robertson straightens out his account – which also doubles back to, and then makes overly complicated, the story of his Jewish gangster uncle’s involvement with the Toronto mafia – it becomes a series of scenes that never quite culminate in a larger narrative.

He must know that there are Levon Helm fans (and likely Danko and Manuel too, with the many fans of Garth Hudson blissfully disinterested in the business side of it all) who resent him, who see him as the guy who made millions off their shared work. Instead, we get perhaps a paragraph in which he reports that the other band members asked to sell him their song rights – even Levon – even after he triple-checked to make sure they knew what they were doing. So they were all strung out on heroin and booze at the time; he was the sober one who thought to take out a loan to buy the rights and give them ready cash.

And all of this ends surprisingly. For a memoir that gives only surface reports of the character of the other Band members, it ends with The Last Waltz. I’d have liked to see more; Robertson did go on to a commercially successful (though, to my ears, largely unlistenable) solo career, and he did become an important soundtrack composer. And the other Band members, the wonderfully unruffled Hudson aside, have all died in ways that I’d like to see him reflect upon. Throughout the second half of this, he expresses concern for Manuel’s substance abuse; I’d like to have heard what it was like to see that deeply talented man kill himself years later – or to have him reflect on Danko’s later, also sad death – or on Helm’s late-life renaissance as a wise man of the Americana scene.

As if those absences aren’t enough, this is just badly written. There’s a flatness throughout, a tendency for Robertson – whose lyrics show a capacity for real poetry – to depend on inert adjectives rather than sustained insight. By way of two examples among many, far too many: there’s his description of his wedding night, “On that special night, we got pregnant.” Or, as he contemplated the L.A. drug scene around David Crosby and Stephen Stills, “Trouble was brewing, and we couldn’t wait to get a hold of it.”

Not every music memoir will rise to the level of Patti Smith’s. Despite its dodging certain difficult topics, I enjoyed Willie Nelson’s very much for the way he managed to show a consistent self from his wannabe songwriter days, through his Outlaw country, to his standing as one of the major figures of American popular music.

But this one, which could be so much more, seems flat. There’s little about the artistry behind this still-terrific music (though there are moments when Robertson gets interesting as he talks about harmonies, arrangements, and guitar parts). Instead, it seems the report of a fascinating man, not so much giving testimony, as contentedly smoothing out the rough parts to make it seem all more pleasant, a far more benign, than it must have been.


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