Recent Reviews
At The Edge of the Haight by Katherine Seligman
This review was published in the San Francisco Examiner on February 28, 2021
https://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/novel-insightfully-looks-at-the-lives-of-homeless-people/
The homeless are more often discussed than understood. No doubt that’s why Katherine Seligman’s ‘At the Edge of the Haight’ received the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Her absorbing novel introduces us to a group of young people living in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. We learn their names and family backgrounds. We witness their daily trials and become immersed in the odyssey of their lives.
Maddy Donaldo, the narrator and protagonist, is a twenty-year-old woman without a home. When she was young, her truck driver father abandoned the family. Her mother found work as a cashier at Safeway but then suffered a psychotic break. After Maddy aged out of the foster care system in Los Angeles, she boarded a bus to San Francisco.
In San Francisco, she learns how to survive in the Park and nearby streets. She finds a group of young people with whom she feels some connection, especially a young man from Arizona named Ash. In the Park, they hide their sleeping bags on tree branches by day and sleep under trees at night. The individuals in the group seem both detached and dependent on one another. With no notice, they disappear and reappear in each other’s lives. Their choices are frustrating. Many are emotionally wounded and use drugs and alcohol to ease their pains.
Though Maddy sometimes sleeps at a Haight shelter, she feels safer in the Park. She does, however, take advantage of the shelter’s showers, clothing, and free food. Police harassment and threats of violence from other homeless people make each day a challenge. Given the persistent emotional isolation Maddy has endured, she has few expectations for her life. She is tough and resilient but also tender and vulnerable. Her dog Root, whom she found when she first arrived in the City, is her most reliable companion.
Maddy’s life changes dramatically when she follows Root into a cluster of bushes in the Park. There she sees a young man on the ground bleeding to death; his assailant stands nearby. The plot develops as Maddy struggles with the aftermath of this traumatic incident. The police want Maddy to testify, the dead boy’s parents want to adopt her, and the murderer wants to make sure she doesn’t tell anyone what she saw. Navigating these conflicting demands causes Maddy to expand her thinking and imagine alternatives for her life.
As the story unfolds, Seligman shows the many causes of housing instability for young adults. Many young people are thrown out of their homes. Some have mental illnesses. Some come from poverty, but not all. Sometimes their parents have their own financial troubles and emotional afflictions. Other parents can no longer deal with their child’s behavioral or neurological differences. But whatever their prior struggles, all these young adults share the belief that they have no other place to go. To complicate matters, many are wary of help. Maddy wrestles with such feelings before fate turns in her favor.
‘At the Edge of the Haight’ is not a political polemic or policy paper; rather, it is a book about people living on the edge. Seligman’s skills as a journalist are evident in the story’s realism. Her detailed descriptions allow the reader to imagine the harrowing day to day lives of those living with constant housing insecurity. Seligman has created characters for whom the reader feels empathy and engagement. Without being heavy-handed, she is challenging us to understand, rather than ignore or condemn. When Maddy was young, her mother said to her, “You can’t judge people because you just never know why they do what they do.” Katherine Seligman has written a novel that does not judge but instead offers insight.
Deacon King Kong by James McBride
James McBride’s compelling new novel Deacon King Kong feels like a sociological study merged with a heartbreaking and hopeful saga. His colorful cast of characters which include Sportcoat, Hot Sausage, Deems, Pudgy Fingers, Elephant, and Bean, provide poignant perspectives of African-Americans living in a NYC housing project in 1969. The novel entertains while illustrating the effects of persistent and systemic racism. Though many characters engage in ugly acts of violence, the story elicits empathy as we learn about each characters’ backstory and life circumstances.
In the first paragraph, seventy-one-year-old Cuffy Lamkin, known as Sportcoat, has shot nineteen-year-old drug dealer Deems Clemens, another Causeway Housing Project resident. Everyone in the Cause knows Sportcoat, a well-liked church deacon who is often drunk on King Kong, a homemade brew. They also know Deems, a talented young man who has been sucked into dealing drugs. But why did Sportcoat shoot Deems? It took me several chapters to discern McBride’s intent as the narrator’s tone initially seems unaffected and whimsical. Yet, soon, the book’s more profound aim becomes evident. Yes, levity and laughter grace these pages, but within a broader context of suffering and sorrow. The book delivers a compassionate account of the Cause residents, the local gangsters who control the drug trade, and the cynical police who lack understanding or power to change the situation.
As the narration unfolds, the history of Sportcoat and Deems and the other characters is revealed. The story speaks to their complicated lives of poverty, loss and alienation. Many residents, like Sportcoat, crack under stress. Others like Deems scratch out a living while their dreams diminish by the day. This unjust housing system allows people to live in wretched conditions. Fortunately, the presence of the Five Ways Church enables Cause residents moments of joy, love and connection. But drugs, liquor and violence haunt this housing project. The narrator states, “And now heroin was here to make their children slaves again, to a useless white powder.” With cruel irony, the Cause residents glimpse views of the Statue of Liberty in the distance.
As more violence ensues, a crowd gathers to hear Sister Gee, the pastor’s wife, give an update. McBride’s fury is felt, “They stared at her with that look, that projects look: the sadness, the suspicion, the weariness, the knowledge that came from living a special misery in a world of misery. Four of their number were down -gone, changed forever, dead or not, it doesn’t matter. And there would be more. The drugs, big drugs, heroin were here. Nothing could stop it. They knew that now. Someone else had already taken over Deems’s bench at the flagpole. Nothing here would change. Life in the Cause would lurch forward as it always did. You worked, slaved, fought off the rats, the mice, the roaches, the ants, the Housing Authority, the cops, the muggers, and now the drug dealers. You lived a life of disappointment and suffering, of too-hot summers and too-cold winters, surviving in apartments with crummy stoves that didn’t work and windows that didn’t open and toilets that didn’t flush and lead paint that flecked off the walls and poisoned your children, living in awful, dreary apartments built to house Italians who came to America to work the docks, which had emptied of boats, ships, tankers, dreams, money, and opportunity the moment the colored and the Latinos arrived. And still, New York blamed you for all its problems.”
Miraculously, Deacon King Kong ends with a modicum of hope and happiness. And while James McBride’s celebrates the resiliency of the human spirit, the novel is also a searing indictment of the persistent racism that unjustly torments our fellow citizens.
This is Happiness by Niall Williams
This is Happiness by Niall Williams is a magnificent novel and a perfect book to read during this pandemic. Williams’s narrative transports us to a simpler and more tranquil time. He tenderly captures the lives of people living in the small village of Faha in western Ireland. The story takes place in the 1950s, just as the parish is going to receive electricity. William’s book is one of the most meaningful I’ve read this year. You can feel yourself on the western coast of Ireland looking up at the stars. “Faha was where, when darkness fell, it fell absolutely, and when you went outside the wind sometimes drew apart the clouds and you stood in the revelation of so many stars you could not credit the wonder and felt smaller in body as your soul felt enormous.”
The book is narrated by Noel (Noe) Crowe, an older man, as he recalls the year he lived with his grandparents in Faha. Noe was seventeen then, and he recollects the dramatic months when workers erected poles that would carry electricity to the village. One electric worker named Christy McMahon had lived with Noe and his grandparents while working on the electrification. Christy specifically sought this assignment in Faha. Five decades ago, he had left his bride, Annie Mooney, at the altar on the day they were to be married. Christy felt haunted by his abandonment and hoped Annie would forgive him. He told Noe that he had loved her, but he became afraid his love “would swallow me up.” So at sixty years old, Christy had returned to Faha time to right the mistake he made.
The time Christy and Noe spent had a profound effect on Noe’s understanding of people’s complexity. Christy had told the young Noe, “Some of the things you do when you’re young are unforgivable to you when you’re old.” And Noe concluded from watching Christy wrestle with his choice of fifty years ago that “an older person must accommodate the younger one inside them.”
In lyrical language, Williams describes the presence of music, the ubiquity of rain, and the various religious perspectives of the Faha villagers. He illuminates the power of storytelling to pass the time and dissolve the darkness, especially in the days before electricity. Quirky and earnest characters grace the pages. On one level, the book might be perceived as a tale with sparse action, and yet it is an intricate exploration of universal emotional themes. The book is nostalgic without being maudlin, insightful without being moralistic. This is Happiness is compassionate and profound. It is an ode to the miracle and mystery of being alive. The village of pre-electricity Faha no longer exists, but thanks to William’s beautiful prose and enchanting storytelling skills, this time and place and live on. 5/5
