Recent Reviews
Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver
Just like our country, the house that stands at the center of Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel Unsheltered, feels like it is on the verge of collapse. Though Kingsolver does not mention any specific names, her novel explores the deleterious effects of shortsighted social policies and the belief that scientific facts are malleable and partisan. Her novel is complex, rich and frightening, yet leaves her readers with shreds of hope.
Unsheltered is the tale of two families living 150 years apart in the same spot: the corner of Sixth and Plum in Vineland, New Jersey. Willa Knox, her husband, two kids and her xenophobic, dying father-in-law have played by the rules and are struggling in the midst of the 2016 presidential election. Willa is a journalist whose magazine has folded. Her husband is a college professor whose college has gone bankrupt. Her son has $100,000 of debt from Harvard Business School and her daughter has just returned from Cuba extolling the virtues of a socialist system that provides shelter, health care and education for its people. Meanwhile, Willa relentlessly navigates our convoluted health care system to ease her conservative father-in-law Nick’s pain. Nick embraces candidate Trump “because rich white guys are supposed to be running the world.” He doesn’t understand “how black and brown people get to have nice stuff, be in charge of things? Or women, God forbid. When Nick didn’t get his turn yet?” Desperate for a way out of their financial crisis, Willa researches their eligibility for grants under a historic home preservation program.
In 1861, Charles Landis was a famous real estate mogul who bought 20,000 acres for $500 in Vineland, New Jersey. Seeking to create his version of a utopian community, Landis required all residents to abide by his rules. Kingsolver notes the parallels between the life of our current leader and Charles Landis. (Landis did, in fact, shoot someone and suffered no consequences!)
During the 1870s, Thatcher Greenwood, a Vineland science teacher, his wife, two daughters and mother-in-law lived in the house at 6th and Plum. They, too, lacked the resources to maintain their house. The dominant political issue of their time is the controversial teachings of Charles Darwin. Greenwood understands science and is in awe of Darwin’s discoveries. He befriends his neighbor, scientist and historical figure Mary Treat who corresponds with Darwin and other scientists of that time. Landis disdains Darwin and believes that God directs the lives of human beings.Fearing the wrath of Landis and the Vineland community, Greenwood simply teaches his students the concept of evolution without mentioning Darwin. Community outrage is imminent.
Both families live during times when corrosive and divisive rhetoric permeate their communities. In the 1870s, Darwin deniers were vociferous and vicious. In our time climate change deniers are similar. Darwin’s theories were proven to be accurate. The facts of climate change have been scientifically verified. Yet, many of our current political leaders will not accept this paradigm shift. Kingsolver offers reasons why people embrace a president whose vision is narrow and self-serving. “When men fear is the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.”
Kingsolver’s novel is ambitious, probably too ambitious. Only a writer of her skill could juggle so many topics, themes and characters. Yet, the characters (especially Willa Knox and her family) feel didactic and one-dimensional. Each character’s role is to illuminate one failing component of our current social policy.
Though the book is a denunciation of our political discourse and draconian public policies, it is also a humane account of hardworking people who adhere to the rules and are still failed by their government. Though these are difficult times, Unsheltered reminds us that America has endured uninformed self-serving leadership before and, with some luck, we will again.
When The Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. One of the stories I remember from my childhood involved the Tanforan Race Track just south of San Francisco. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Americans of Japanese descent were held at this racetrack before they were forced on trains and sent to one of ten internment camps. My mother often recounts her father driving their family to Tanforan to bear witness to this wrong. My grandfather said to my mother and uncle, “ You should know that treating people this way is immoral.”
I recently told this story to a friend of mine who suggested I read Julie Otsuka’s 2002 novel, When The Emperor Was Divine. I highly recommend it.
The novel begins, “The sign had appeared overnight. On billboards and trees and the backs of the bus-stop benches. It hung in the window of Woolworth’s. It hung by the entrance of the YMCA.” This seems like an intriguing and innocuous first few sentences. However, it is the spring of 1942 and the signs plastered around Berkeley order all Japanese-American families to report to the “Civil Control Station at the First Congregational Church on Channing Way.”
A nameless Japanese-American woman sees the signs around her neighborhood not far from the Berkeley campus. She begins to pack, buries valuables in her backyard, burns sacred family treasures and photos from their life in Japan and kills the family pets. She has already experienced first-hand the wave of anti-Japanese hysteria. The FBI had taken her husband in the middle night from their comfortable home and ended their simple life. He was now being held at a camp for enemy combatants.
By Chapter 2, it is September of 1942 and this unnamed woman, her elementary school age daughter and son are on a train to the Topaz internment camp in the Utah desert. Identification numbers are pinned to their clothing. Bricks are thrown at the train as it makes it way from the Bay Area to Utah. The mother warns her children to never say the Emperor’s name out loud in any context.
Life in the camp is monotonous and the living conditions appalling. The dust, wind, cold, and stress of not knowing when their confinement will end torment the family. The young boy lies awake wondering what horrible thing he had done that caused his family to be sent to this dreadful place. Some nights he remembers his bedroom at home. But most nights he replays the traumatic vision of his playful and poised father being placed in the back of the police car in his robe and slippers.
It’s a short novel, just 144 pages. In simple poetic prose, Otsuka transmits the strong emotions of indignity, shame and rage that each character feels. It is difficult to process this unfathomable alteration to their lives. By the time the family reunites in their Berkeley home 3 years and 5 months later; their sense of themselves and their place in the community has dissolved. They are psychically scarred. How could they not be? Julie Otsuka’s powerful novel bears witness to this horrific episode in our history.
The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling
This review was published in the San Francisco Examiner on December 26, 2018
http://www.sfexaminer.com/golden-state-evocative-story-mother-crisis/
“The Golden State,” an impressive and insightful debut novel by San Francisco writer Lydia Kiesling, is a book about motherhood, aging, loss and love.
Written with humor and wisdom, it combines a coming-of-age story with a transformational California road trip. In Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” Sal Paradise is a Beat Generation wanderer. His road trip takes him to San Francisco on a restless odyssey. In Kiesling’s novel, Daphne Nilsen is an overwhelmed millennial mother who leaves San Francisco in search of a way forward.
Daphne, in her early 30s, works at the Institute for the Study of Islamic Societies and Civilizations at UC Berkeley. Her Turkish husband Engin has been waiting in Istanbul for five months for a bureaucratic visa snafu to be resolved. He longs to return to San Francisco and restart his life with Daphne and their 16-month-old daughter, Honey. While waiting, the couple use Skype to stay connected and plot immigration tactics.
Daphne feels isolated and alone taking care of Honey. When a student Daphne advised is involved in a horrific car crash in Turkey, Daphne is devastated. She feels responsible for the tragedy and the news triggers painful emotions about her own troubles.
She leaves work, packs her car, retrieves Honey from day care and bolts from the Bay Area. Her destination is the fictional town of Altavista in the high California desert where multiple generations of her family had lived. She and Honey begin their escape by way of El Cerrito, Richmond, the Nut Tree and Sacramento.
Daphne has no plan. She is pulled viscerally to the quiet beauty of Altavista and the tidy doublewide mobile home she inherited from her mother. In those peaceful surroundings she had felt the loving embrace of her parents and grandparents.
At a town diner, Daphne meets a forthright and philosophical 92-year-old woman named Alice, who has driven from Colorado to visit a sacred spot from her lost life with her husband. Daphne learns that Alice’s husband died 50 years earlier, the first of many losses she has suffered. Alice’s reflections and her resilience impress Daphne. She muses, “I feel there is something accusatory in her tone, as if to say, ‘I didn’t have some little meltdown like you seem to be having over nothing.’” This imagined rebuke actually empowers Daphne.
With minimal punctuation and few paragraph breaks, the novel feels like an intimate conversation. Ten chapters shape the story: one for each day she is away from the Bay Area on her pilgrimage to the high plains. Kiesling is best when she describes the exhilarating love and enervating boredom Daphne experiences caring for Honey. Though she is sometimes resentful, Daphne’s love for Honey is fierce, her devotion total. Yet fears haunt her: “Why did I have a child? To have a child is to court loss.”
Like the caterpillar in the book she reads to Honey, Daphne needs energy to advance to the next stage of her life as she sorts out how she arrived at her breaking point and how to move forward. An orphan without siblings, a wife deprived of her husband and a single parent with a job and a toddler, Daphne has been plodding along unconscious of her accumulating grief.
Visiting her safe space, laden with meaning and memories, she better understands both the emptiness and fullness of her life. By the novel’s end, we understand the full contours of Daphne’s existential crisis and we are now rooting for her to find her golden state.
