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Book Review: The New Inheritors

This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 23 August 2018.

I remember experiencing Kent Wascom’s 2013 debut novel, The Blood of Heaven, almost as a physical onslaught. Savage and searing, it was also gorgeously written. I remember, too, being stunned that the author was only 27; he wrote like a man who has lived several lifetimes.

Blood was the first in a loosely cast series of books that traces the Woolsacks, starting with bloody-minded Angel, through most of two centuries of Southern, dark-souled American history. And while the first sprawled across years and geography, the second, Secessia, had a completely different tone, kept its lens more narrowly focused — on a New Orleans occupied by Benjamin Butler’s Union troops — and unspooled in less than a year. Still, it remained as unsettling and foreign-seeming as the first.

Here, then, is the third of Wascom’s Woolsack novels, picking up in 1890 and bringing us closer to a more recognizable era just beyond the Great War. Again, this book feels completely different than the other two and yet — now that we know his writing — is fully identifiable as belonging to this author.

The first thing to set it apart is that a Woolsack is not the main character. Instead, Wascom brings us into this story through Isaac, an orphan torn from the one woman — not his mother — who cares for him, but is later adopted by another woman and her family, who fully embrace him as their own. His idyllic childhood and early adulthood on the Mississippi Gulf Coast awaken in him a talent as an artist, and his subject is the natural world he discovers around him.

That’s the second thing that sets this book apart: that any of it might be described as “idyllic.” Stretches of the novel are infused with a sense of light, air, and hopefulness that are entirely missing from the first two.

It’s a setup, certainly, to provide a contrast between the surface beauty and the ugliness that lurks just out of sight (“They were young and white and had money, and this combination could put you a good ways out of the path of the world’s great reaping. But not in every case”), as well as a contrast between the time before, in happiness, and the time after, in misery. Still, we, like the characters, can bask in the golden light while it shines.

Gradually, we’re introduced to the Woolsacks, who spend summers on their own island just across the sound from Isaac’s family. We met Joseph and Marina as troubled children in Secessia, and here they are as adults with three troubled children of their own: Angel, the carefully closeted eldest, named for his notorious grandfather; Kemper, the girl, named for her grandfather’s adopted brother; and George, apparently named for no one, described as a “puny boy with blood-red hair,” nicknamed Red, who spends his life attempting to live up to his grandfather’s unhappy example.

When, freshly arrived home after years of southward travel, Isaac finally meets Kemper, she is stealing crabs from a trap, and he is entirely smitten. He seeks her out the next day and finds her “on the beach shooting arrows into the back of a parlor chair…She looked like the wild survivor of some near-apocalypse, careless of the value that things once had, as if somewhere not far she had a smoldering pile of banknotes for a campfire.”

Wascom is a careful student of history, and his portraits of America are riven with many of its seamier episodes. Sometimes these are used as telling asides, and other times they are woven seamlessly into the backdrop of his stories. Kemper remembers “hearing her mother say that the U.S. had dressed Cuba as a woman in torn clothes on the verge of being raped, then kindly shoved Spain out of the way and took our turn.”

Joseph Woolsack’s money, built on his father’s wealth from slaving, has steadily increased through his own involvement in the Caribbean and Central and South American fruit trade, a notorious business in which ruthless U.S. corporate involvement directly gave birth to “banana republics.”

Kemper, aware of the stained wealth, removes herself from her family but is guiltily willing to take its money to support herself and Isaac. She is also haunted by her role in driving her beloved elder brother from the family after Red’s venomous revelation to them that Angel is homosexual. Once the Great War breaks out and Isaac’s refusal to serve puts him in prison, she is completely alone.

Red, for his part, is haunted by voices in his head. After having to teach himself as a child how to smile in an attempt to cover up his otherness, he begins to hear the voices in early adulthood and learns how to cover that up, too, though he listens to their violent instruction.

This is a family not destined for happiness.

The novel moves at various times through the eyes of Isaac, Kemper, and Angel, with a touch of Marina and too little of Neda, the woman who cares for Isaac through his first four years. The pieces of Red’s story come primarily through the eyes of his reluctant enforcer, a well-read black man named Rule Chandler.

Each one is trapped, one way or the other, by expectations they can’t meet and would refuse to anyway, and by circumstances that someone else has dictated for them.

If there is a weakness to The New Inheritors, it’s an unevenness in pacing that makes it feel at times that Wascom is in a hurry to move on. I, for one, did not want him to hurry; the beauty and richness of his observation and detail when he dives deep made me long for more.

If I understand correctly, there is one more book expected in the Woolsack series, which should bring us close to or into the present day. Since the only next-generation Woolsack children belong to schizophrenic Red, it appears he is to be the patriarch ushering the family into the latter half of the 20th century.

Given that Wascom makes an art of illuminating the many ways that America’s history belies the vaunted ideals on which it was founded, it should be riveting to watch him take on the more recent moments in the American story.

Probing for the Empathy Bone

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This column originally appeared in Jenny’s “Write Now” book blog in the Washington Independent Review of Books on August 9, 2018.

One of the questions famous authors are often asked is, “Why do you write?” I’m not a famous author, so no one has ever asked me that, but I’ve thought about it for myself. I write to think things through, to find a new perspective, to discover a way of seeing that I hadn’t considered before.

And though I write primarily for myself, I also want to share my writing in the hope of touching readers in a way that stays with them — that, in some tiny way, perhaps, changes them.

But can it? Will it? Lately, I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing far more than I’ve been writing.

If you follow this column at all, you may know that, in January, I labeled this my Year of Writing, and I anticipated relating a year’s worth of the ups and downs of drafting a novel.

My novel-in-progress is about another fraught era in American history, this one at the turn of the 20th century, told through the experiences of one family in Washington, DC. It highlights a series of historical events that, in my view, offers a chillingly on-point parallel to some of the havoc of our current times.

But I find myself in the classic writing low spot of wondering, “What’s the point?”

Instead of writing during these last six weeks since my friend, journalist John McNamara, was murdered in Annapolis, MD, I’ve been thinking a lot about empathy — or, for fans of Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy, an alternative that he calls “rational compassion.”

Certainly, as a writer, I feel that an enhanced sense of empathy is crucial to developing believable characters, or, in nonfiction, to representing other people in a humane, nuanced way.

On January 20, 2017 — perhaps you remember that day — I posted a blog entry, “Toward Compassion,” which was all about the relative value of empathy. As I said there, “I’m one of those people who believes that a lack of empathy leads us to parochial and isolationist views of the world, an us-against-them mentality that rarely leads to positive outcomes.”

But my recent meditation is whether people who seem to lack empathy can actually learn to feel it. Is there an empathy bone that some people have and others don’t? Or is it more like a muscle that just needs to be isolated and exercised to get into shape?

Is there anything I could ever write that would lead someone to begin to feel a sense of empathy, especially for a character — or a real person — who doesn’t look, act, and think exactly as they do?

Along with many others, I spent much of last month considering, for example, the contrast in empathy exhibited around two recent events that unfolded in parallel, one in a flooded cave in Thailand and the other at the U.S.-Mexico border. Much ink has been spilled in that comparison; was anyone swayed?

So I continue to wonder, particularly in our entrenched us-against-them political moment: Can an author’s words really change anything?

Writer Joyce Winslow, for one, is giving it a shot. She was, for two years, commentary editor for the nonpartisan, nonprofit Rand Corporation, and currently works with private clients, having helped 60 in the past two years achieve publication in top-tier papers.

Winslow teaches a popular class at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC, called “Writing OP-EDs to Make a Political Difference,” in which she guides her students in understanding what it takes to write successful opinion pieces for local and national news outlets.

Much like classic debate prep, she urges her students to consider the opposing viewpoint, underpin their work with credible research, use tools of persuasion rather than passion, and dismantle opposing arguments without rancor.

Winslow teaches that true persuasion — the possibility of influencing or changing another’s position — demands fully understanding the opposing viewpoints and exercising a level of tolerance and respect that disarms a defensive reaction.

Speaking of disarming: I was thinking about empathy very specifically this Saturday, as I watched Marjory Stoneman Douglas parent Manuel Oliver create a beautiful mural in honor of his son Joaquin’s 18th birthday, while a small but vocal group shouted bullhorn-amplified slogans at him from across the barricades.

I wondered at the impulse of armed individuals to taunt, hector, and shout invective at a man whose son was murdered in a hail of gunfire at school just six months ago.

Is the empathy bone missing, or has the muscle simply atrophied?

At the time, I was wearing a picture of my murdered friend, John, pinned to my shirt and standing with his widow — that word alone delivers a fresh gut-punch each time — and the endless taunting felt like its own physical assault.

Maybe that was the point. Perhaps they weren’t out to change our minds, just to torture us a little more.

On our side of the barrier, the overarching message was simple and direct: Vote. That is the drumbeat sounded by both the March for Our Lives/Road to Change that sprang from the MSD massacre, and the March on the NRA that sprang from many others. It’s the same take-away I had when I wrote about the way to honor the victims of the Capital Gazette massacre. Participating in a protest is great for messaging, but voting is what makes the change.

There are many things that I will remember from Saturday’s march, but here are two: There were hundreds of sunflowers, as many as the organizers could find, because sunflowers were the last thing that “Guac” Oliver bought before he was murdered, to give to his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day.

And, though the MSD march veterans chanted “Don’t engage” for us newbies as the counter-demonstrators started to get under our skin, they themselves have made an art of engaging. As the rally wound down, several of the kids took bouquets of sunflowers to the other side of the barricades and began to speak quietly with some of the NRA participants, respectfully engaging them in conversation and attempting to find common ground.

I don’t know whether it will make a difference, but it is certainly worth the effort to try. And to keep trying.

I guess I have my answer.

Book Review: Night Gaunts

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 27 July 2018.

Each of the stories in this most recent collection from Joyce Carol Oates originally appeared in other publications. It may be that reading them separate from each other would have allowed each one to stand on its own, thereby heightening the reader’s appreciation. In putting them together, neither the whole nor the parts benefit.

How so?

The author’s repetitive narrative tics — such as her intentional overuse of parenthetical phrases — nag to the point of intrusiveness. She also uses the avoidance of names to make a point: the cruel Sunday school teacher in “Sign of the Beast” is too evil to be named; the obedient Asian lab technician in “The Experimental Subject” is a useful but obscure functionary. Unfortunately, the constant use of “Mrs. S___” for the one and “N___” for the other is simply aggravating. In “Walking Wounded,” the device spirals out of control.

It seems that facial birthmarks are particularly malign, as evidenced by descriptions in two different stories. In “Sign of the Beast,” the narrator states, “The birthmark on my (left) cheek like a pustule was shameful to me.” And in the titular “Night-Gaunts,” the protagonist’s abusive, syphilitic father sports one. “The birthmark has become an inflamed-looking boil that no amount of make-up and powder could disguise.”

Nonetheless, the stories here are appropriately disturbing. The nightmares that Oates conjures are generally grounded in the ugliness of daily life, of the situations beyond our volition that drive us to the edge of reason. In particular, “The Experimental Subject,” which is the longest of the tales, is most effective precisely for its groundedness, its observance of the quotidian details that make its horror plausible.

In it, our unnamed protagonist — about whom Oates gives us all possible clues to understand that his name is Nguyen, so why bother being so coy? — pretends to be another student in order to cull out a chunky, awkward, friendless undergraduate as the experimental subject needed for the next phase of his revered professor’s “research” project.

The unsuspecting mark, Mary Frances, is described in terms usually reserved for apes (“an unusually low simian brow…large splayed feet and a center of gravity in the pelvic region”) and cattle (“tentative manner like that of a creature that is being herded blindly along a chute”). Certainly, it helps the researchers to dehumanize a person before performing inhuman experiments on her without her knowledge or consent.

Interesting in concept is “The Woman in the Window,” in which Oates imagines the story captured in Edward Hopper’s painting “Eleven A.M., 1926.” We spend time in the head of the woman sitting in the chair by the window, wearing only shoes, and in that of her abusive, married lover, who is tardy and still taking his own good time to get to their tryst.

Whenever she finally decides to employ them, I, for one, am rooting that her sewing shears get the job done.

Abuse — psychological, emotional, physical, sexual, often in combination —forms the common theme in almost all of these stories, which then capture the catastrophic results. Sometimes the abuse is practically invisible, as in “The Long-Legged Girl,” in which the long-term effects on Elinor of Victor’s constant affairs — or possibly unconsummated obsessions — with his beautiful, adoring undergrads finally leak out in an equally almost-invisible retaliation.

A little disconcerting, though, is the amount of attentive detail given to cataloging the physical defects of characters like Elinor and Mary Frances to the point that it feels like the author’s personal disdain speaking. And yet, I might not have noted that if I hadn’t read these stories in collection.

Requiem

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This column originally appeared in Jenny’s “Write Now” book blog in the Washington Independent Review of Books on July 5, 2018.

I have no memory of a time when I didn’t know John McNamara. I was eighteen months old to his two and half years when my family moved into our little Cape Cod whose backyard touched catty-corner with his. He and his siblings went to Catholic school while my brother and I went to the public school across the street, but we spent virtually every day of our summers together as we grew up.

In about 1971, which would make me nine and John ten, a handful of us — including my brother Chris, John’s brother Tom, and our friend Thomas — decided to put out a newspaper. Hanging out on our screened porch, we wrote copy by hand and typed it up on an old manual typewriter; copies were made using carbon paper. We put out a few issues by the end of the summer. So John started in journalism even earlier than you may have heard.

Of John, I can truly say that we have been lifelong friends.

(The photo above shows him at an early 90s Halloween party dressed as Fred Flintstone, something for his young colleagues he would term an OCR: “obscure cultural reference.”)

He and his wife, Andrea, celebrated their 33rd wedding anniversary in May, and I don’t know another two people who are a better match for each other. As Andrea recently said, their biggest argument was about which of them was the luckier to have the other. He was set to celebrate his 57th birthday at the end of this month.

Though John was unabashedly a sports guy, I can’t think of a single subject we ever talked about on which he didn’t have an informed perspective. He was a citizen of the world: knowledgeable, engaged, intellectually curious.

The last time I talked to him — Saturday, a week ago practically to the minute as I write this, at my nephew’s engagement party — we were discussing the upcoming Tuesday primaries and the endorsements his paper’s editorial staff had made. I live in Anne Arundel County, and the Annapolis paper that John wrote for, the Capital Gazette, addressed local races and candidates that matter to me.

In attempting to hold up my end of the democratic bargain of being part of an informed citizenry, I fully appreciate how lucky I am to still have a functioning local newspaper that actually covers those races.

The last time I talked to John was also five days before he and four of his colleagues were shot to death while simply trying to do their job to get that daily local paper out.

In the scant 48 hours since we learned the worst, when I manage to drag myself away from obsessively searching for and reading or watching everything I can find that mentions John, I wonder at how he and his colleagues arrived — through these most horrific circumstances — at the confluence of so many of the hot-button issues of our current moment in the American story.

I will set aside for this moment the hottest of the hot-button issues — gun violence, the one category in which the United States can claim unrivaled, zero-competition primacy — though I have always wondered at the insistence we have on calling each new mass shooting a “tragedy,” when the correct word is “massacre.”

I will even leave aside the president’s savagery of the mainstream news media, and the increasing threats of physical violence that many journalists report receiving, though I will point you to Katy Tur’s descriptions in her book Unbelieveable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History of the then-candidate whipping his crowds into “cheering about the idea of killing journalists,” a la Vladimir Putin.

Instead, in tribute to John, my focus is on the crucial, unique role that local newspapers play in maintaining our democratic process.

In his latest book, Overload: Finding the Truth in Today’s Deluge of News, Bob Schieffer notes in alarm the dwindling number of small city papers, the ones we have traditionally counted on to keep an eye on our state and local elected officials. Perhaps even more concerning are the papers being bought up by wealthy patrons with the intent of driving a specific agenda on and off the editorial page.

It seems less and less that all politics is local, when the politics coming out of the White House and Congress consumes so much of our limited attention span, and as it becomes increasingly difficult for well-intentioned citizens to find non-partisan, fact-based information about the entire slate of candidates we vote for.

And yet, it’s our local officials who typically have the greatest immediate impact on our daily lives, from choices on local policing tactics to the manner in which to enforce federal statutes. We need local papers for their ability to focus our attention on our immediate communities, on which the rest of our world is built.

I joked with John that I subscribed to the Capital primarily to do my part to keep him employed. Sometimes it didn’t feel like a joke. In the 20 years I’ve lived in Anne Arundel County, I’ve watched in alarm as the paper continues to shrink in every figurative and literal way; it’s even printed on smaller sheets of newsprint now.

Through John, I heard the blow-by-blow of the paper’s acquisition by the larger but also struggling Baltimore Sun, and winced at the realization that the acquiring newsroom now got first dibs on the plum assignments, including the sports desk. Still, on his new beat, John continued to tell human stories, as he always had, elegantly and eloquently.

One was of a Crownsville man who, after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre, crushed his assault rifles with heavy construction equipment and posted the ceremony on YouTube. Another recent story remembered the crowds that gathered in Bowie and elsewhere in Maryland 50 years ago to witness Robert Kennedy’s funeral train as it traveled from New York to Washington, DC.

But John also did his share of reporting on the local political races, his final printed story being on the projected outcome of the Prince George’s County Executive race.

For those of you who have been following the story out of Annapolis of five people who died because they worked for a newspaper, and want to know what you can do to help, here is my best advice on how to honor these people:

Subscribe to the local paper closest to you. Call them on it — in something better than four-letter words — if you find opinion leeching into their news stories, but support them in getting it right.
Do your very best to be an informed, involved, engaged citizen. It is not an easy task, but make a concerted attempt to understand who is running for which offices — county council, sheriff, board of education, judiciary — and what positions they hold on the issues they will be involved in and that you care most about.
Vote. In a democracy, choosing not to vote is never the right choice.

I will always remember John in his element, telling a story with that twinkle in his eyes, gesticulating with an open hand or a pointing finger to further the tale, getting his whole body into the telling of it. As many of his friends have noted, we could count on his dry, observant wit to cut to the heart of any issue with surgical precision. He always made me laugh.

I leave you with this thought, which comes directly from John. In one of his last Facebook posts, on June 10th, he offered this:

To anyone reading this: I cannot urge you strongly enough to see the two documentaries now out featuring Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Mr. Rogers. Seeing these two films will do you some serious good. Both are marvelous and moving. And, in these troubled times, when the forces of darkness seem to have gained the upper hand, it’s nice to be reminded that there is still justice and kindness in the world. You can thank me later…

John, I thank you now, later, and always. Godspeed.

(Read more of John’s most recent stories here. And find out more about the fund has been set up to help the victims’ families here.)

Book Review: Laughing Shall I Die

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 20 June 2018.

Here are two take-aways from Tom Shippey’s latest book: One, “Viking” was a job description, not a racial or ethnic designation; and two, a quality demanded of those Vikings was a finely honed, mordant sense of humor that perhaps we modern nine-to-five cubicle-dwellers would find difficult to understand.

That sense of humor includes composing, on the spot, even as the composer is being bitten to death by a pit-full of adders, a beautiful song that will be handed down through the ages. The song concludes with the line, “Laughing shall I die,” primarily because the dying Viking knows his sons are coming to wreak vengeance on the king who put him in the pit and will subject said king to a longer, slower, far grislier demise.

It’s pretty funny, apparently, if you’re a Viking.

For the rest of us, it’s funny because the death song’s composer is named Ragnar Hairy-breeches, and one of his avenging sons is named Ivar the Boneless. It turns out, though, that while Ragnar may be mostly the stuff of myth and legend, Ivar is not only an historical figure, he is a significant one.

As for the “Boneless” part, no one is quite sure of the nickname’s origin, but one theory is that he was being compared to a serpent — which to the Vikings meant a dragon — so it’s actually a compliment.

The author’s stated purpose in this book is to explore what gave Vikings their edge, when they had fewer people and resources than most of the populations they came up against, as they swept across Britain and mainland Europe into Russia and the Middle East over a distinct 300-year period. He argues that their edge was “the Viking mindset. To put it bluntly, it’s a kind of death cult.” Their disdain of death made them hard to beat on and off the field of battle.

Shippey also notes that his book is meant for “the reading public.” What’s interesting, then, is that Shippey appears to be using his general lay reader — who should be forgiven for not being up on the latest battles within the learned academia of Viking lore — to engage in an argument with scholars on the other side of the divide (one of whom is his former tutor).

The effect is a bit like stopping by a friend’s house and finding yourself used as a go-between in an argument you’ve blundered into (“Could you tell him that?” “Oh, yeah? Well, maybe she should know…”), when you all you wanted was some wine.

To summarize his side of the spat, Shippey believes that modern academia finds its delicate sensibilities affronted by the less culturally refined aspects of the marauding Vikings, and has worked to ignore, bowdlerize, explain away, and generally discount what it sees as a cartoon version of the Viking ethos. These academics compare Viking legend with the overblown mythology of America’s Wild West. Shippey works to dismantle that view.

To do so, he draws heavily upon the great sagas, from which we derive much of our knowledge of the ancient Norse traditions, culture, and religion. Many of those sagas are thought to be far older than the Viking period itself, which is dated to 793, the point at which the outside world became aware of the pillaging Norseman — vikingr, or marauder.

Before written language, the sagas and traditions of eddic and skaldic poetry provided exceptionally well-developed oral histories of Scandinavia, embellished, of course, with many supernatural elements. Eventually, those oral histories were written down by Icelanders and then rediscovered by the outside world at the end of the Middle Ages.

In Viking lore, great deaths are assessed based on how stoic the victim is and what laconic wit he shows as he goes down. One Bui the Broad, having had his lower jaw hacked off, is recorded for posterity as having said (hmm — that seems like a bit of a trick), “The Danish women in Bornholm won’t think it so pleasant to kiss me now.”

The first part of Laughing surveys four sets of characters and their stories to give us an up-close feeling for the well-known Viking heroes of the old sagas. Chapter five, for example, is called “Egil the Ugly and King Blood-axe: Poetry and the Psychopath.”

Part II gives a geographical view of the vast reach of Viking hegemony. Here is where the legends begin to morph into historical reality, and we start to grasp the enormity of Scandinavian influence on the British Isles, the Continent, Russia, and even the Middle East.

Among Shippey’s insights are that Vikings made more successful inroads in England than in Ireland because England had an established bureaucratic infrastructure. There, the Vikings simply eliminated a handful of rulers and stepped into the open slots. Ireland was too chaotic to deal with in a similar fashion; there was no operation to take over.

Part III describes in detail a few of the great sagas, such as Njal’s Saga, to highlight particular aspects of the Viking mindset. The problem is that setting the context requires a long lead-in, which — much like having to explain a joke — drains the energy from the stories.

And therein lies the larger problem: This material begs for a narrative-nonfiction approach, to get blood pumping through the descriptions and perhaps engage the readers’ imaginations more successfully.

Though Shippey tries to keep things jaunty with some of his descriptions, many details are too pedantically academic; it feels as though he’s still playing to his old tutor. As it is, Shippey may simply inspire his readers to binge-watch “The Vikings” (both the TV series and movie) so they can see what they’ve been missing.

Book Review: The Restless Wave

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on June 7, 2018.

Staring down one’s mortality has a way of sharpening focus. We’ve all heard stories recounting deathbed reassessments of choices made, of stinging regrets, and of the urgency to make amends while there’s still time.

And though it’s true that John McCain produced this book under the ticking clock of a brain cancer diagnosis, the reader senses it’s not significantly different than if he’d written it in the pink of health.

McCain fully owns both his failures and his successes, makes no excuses, and begs no forgiveness. He uses this book to record his version of crucial events of the last 20 or so years, but also, as he says, “I want to talk to my fellow Americans a little more if I may.”

It’s worth considering what he has to say. He may side-step some issues, and no one writes a memoir to make themselves look bad, but it’s hard to argue that he is not sincerely considering what’s in the best interests of Americans as citizens of the world.

This is the seventh book that McCain has co-authored with his longtime assistant, Mark Salter, which is perhaps how they were able to pull it together so quickly. While they spend time dissecting McCain’s defeat in the 2008 presidential race — explaining how he was argued out of choosing his good friend Joe Lieberman as his running mate, while never once impugning Sarah Palin — most of the book focuses on the U.S. involvement in the various conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria; foreign relations with the likes of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping; and the urgent need to focus on human rights both worldwide and at home.

As chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, McCain travels widely and frequently. He tries to make all trips bipartisan and uses the time and forced closeness to build personal relationships across the aisle. He makes the effort to see for himself the conditions on the ground in places both widely known and obscure so that he can speak from a more deeply informed position.

He’s unafraid to remind foreign officials where their countries are falling short, particularly on human rights and political freedom, whether or not we consider those countries important to U.S. interests. It is rarely difficult to understand where McCain stands on any subject.

Consider, for example, the subject of torture — or, because no euphemism is oblique enough that we can’t make it more so by creating an acronym for it, EIT (enhanced interrogation techniques). Beyond his own personal experiences informing his feelings on the matter, anyone wondering about his unwillingness to support Gina Haspel’s nomination for CIA director because of her involvement in the EIT program, and her approval to destroy recorded evidence of EIT use, simply needs to read chapter three, “About Us.”

Easily the most chilling image in the book describes the torture of Fatima Belhaj, wife of Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a man who found himself on the wrong side of the U.S.’ short-lived reconciliation with Muammar Qaddafi:

“[CIA interrogators] had taken a photograph of her in the interrogation room at the black site in Bangkok. She was seated in a chair, Americans surrounding her, duct tape wrapped around the lower half of her face, her wrists bound, and completely naked. She was six months pregnant at the time.”

McCain’s fight against the use of torture and for the release of an unclassified report concerning the U.S.’ use of EIT is based on the concept that we are supposed to be better than this. “What makes us exceptional?…Our founding ideals and our fidelity to them at home and in our conduct in the world makes us exceptional…This was never about [terror suspects]. It was about us.”

At one point, he notes that his treatment from his captors in Hanoi was, in comparison, more humane than the perversions exhibited by American guards at Abu Ghraib.

All of this may seem odd coming from a reliable hawk, but McCain has a fully nuanced, well-sourced view of the proper application of force. He walks his readers through his thinking on all of the conflicts in which we’ve been involved (or failed to be involved) since the early 1990s.

He calls out what he sees as the significant foreign policy failures of the Obama Administration, most notably Syria, but allows that multiple administrations are responsible for the unchallenged rise of Vladimir Putin into the pantheon of the world’s great tyrants.

For those who may be wondering, The Restless Wave contains any number of thoughts on the wrong-headedness of the current administration. McCain worries that we are now actively working to abdicate our role in the world order we worked hard to create after World War II, and notes that our allies are increasingly learning to work around us or entirely without us, which should cause us concern.

There are a number of issues where McCain remains silent. While he goes into some detail to explain his thinking on the most recent healthcare vote — observers outside the Senate saw his thumbs-down gesture as more dramatic than it actually was — he remains silent on his vote with the entirety of the Senate Republican bloc on a tax plan that is widely understood to add $1 trillion to the national debt. That’s the agenda item I’d really like to hear his thinking on.

My respect for McCain was cemented when he pointedly refused to demonize his political opponent, Barack Obama, in the 2008 presidential race. As improbable as it may have been then, that sort of restraint seems positively quaint these days.

That McCain’s name continues to be invoked in the president’s ongoing campaign-style rallies as a sure way to prompt the boisterous crowds to boo is one of the more gob-smacking features of this most unpredictable of administrations. One longs to ask, “To what possible purpose?” but none of the likely answers are reassuring.

Professional politicians like John McCain are in increasingly short supply, and we are worse off because of it. We need people who grasp what “proper order” is and why it’s important, and are willing to explore good-faith bipartisan approaches to solving complex issues. We need members of Congress who understand that principled compromise is the way to get the people’s work done.

I miss him already.

Volunteering: The Gift that Keeps on Giving

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This column originally appeared in Jenny’s “Write Now” book blog in the Washington Independent Review of Books on April 26, 2018.

If you’ve spent more than 20 seconds on the Independent’s website in the last month or two, you may have noticed that our sixth annual Washington Writers Conference is coming up next week. (We tend to mention it. Frequently.)

The Independent is a nest of book lovers, both from the reading end and, often, from the writing end. (A number of our folks offer serious authorial cred, like immediate past president David O. Stewart, whose Impeached was a clue on “Jeopardy” last year.) As nonprofits, both the Independent and the conference rely heavily on volunteers.

One of those volunteer positions is conference chair, and this is the second year I’ve served in that alternately exciting and nerve-wracking role. As I noted in my last column, I am not normally a joiner, and yet here I am doing some heavy lifting in the participation department.

Why? you might ask (and, believe me, I’ll be asking myself that question around 3 a.m. on conference day). The answer is that I am a firm believer in writers — and readers — getting out and participating in the writing community as a way of making opportunities for themselves. Contributing with a spirit of generosity and supportiveness has a way of opening doors.

There are few successful DC-based authors more generous with their time than Alice McDermott, winner of the National Book Award. She teaches at Johns Hopkins, is on the board of the Writer’s Center, and is happy to contribute a large chunk of her afternoon to be with us next Saturday to share her writing wisdom. She models what “giving back” looks like.

She has also long been one of my favorite writers. For the Independent, I had the pleasure of reviewing her latest novel, The Ninth Hour, and I’ll be introducing her when she is “in conversation with” Get Lit, D.C.’s Tayla Burney. As I mentioned on the conference Facebook page, I hope that my fan-girling doesn’t embarrass all concerned.

It’s worth noting that every one of our panelists and speakers at the conference is volunteering her or his time, from McDermott to veteran broadcaster Bob Schieffer, to Brookings Institute senior fellow/syndicated columnist/Georgetown University professor E.J. Dionne. That’s some major firepower aimed at supporting fellow authors along their writing path.

The Washington Writers’ Publishing House is likewise all about establishing a supportive community of local writers. They exclusively publish winners of their annual fiction and poetry contests, and previous winners then help to coordinate the next contests and shepherd winners through the publication process. Their entire model is built on the concept of community-building and giving back so that others can experience that same success.

I mention all of this because WWPH’s 2016-2017 fiction winner, Jacob Weber, will be at the conference discussing the journey to publication of his short-story collection, Don’t Wait to Be Called.

Examples of supportive volunteerism abound within the Independent’s ranks, too, like longtime contributor Ed Aymar, who will be on our “Writing a Page-Turner” panel. Ed is heavily involved with the International Thriller Writers, most especially in their “the Thrill Begins” program to support debut thriller writers. He also coordinates regular Noir at the Bar events in DC and elsewhere, gathering local noir writers to read their work in the dark, noisy, alcohol-soaked environments that infuse their stories.

I started volunteering for the Independent after the 2014 conference, beginning as an assignment editor (matching reviewers with books), then reviewing books and later writing this column, then helping out with the conference, then becoming chair. All of those roles opened doors for me that I would not have experienced otherwise. (Plus, it gets me quoted on Lit Hub and in the industry blurbs on Amazon. Sorry, that’s just cool.)

When I conduct workshops at conferences — which I was not yet doing when I volunteered in 2014 — I use my experience at the Independent as an example of how participating in the writing community pays dividends. Not the least of those dividends is the building of your own network of supporters who will celebrate your successes, expand your horizons, and open up ever more opportunities.

As the clock ticks down to conference day, I admit that the time involved is interfering with my writing schedule, and I look forward to getting back to the Year of Writing starting May 6th. But I also look forward to the infusion of energy that the Washington Writers Conference engenders; in last year’s conference video, Stewart likens it to being near a nuclear reactor.

That energy comes from reconnecting with friends from earlier conferences, making new ones, meeting and hearing from some of our favorite authors, and possibly clicking with the agent we’ve been searching for.

There are infinite ways for writers to engage with the community. Look around and find the one or two that resonate most with you, because enjoying the experience is crucial to making it a success for you and those you’ll be working with. While you’re looking around, you might want to look here.

See you at the conference!

Book Review: Votes for Women! American Suffragists and the Battle for the Ballot

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on April 17, 2018.

As we prepare for the 2020 celebration of the 100th anniversary of U.S. women receiving federal voting rights, books recounting the suffragists’ long fight are starting to roll out. Winifred Conkling’s contribution, written for young adults, is an excellent history for all readers, detailing the long, tangled, and sometimes violent path to the passage of the 19th Amendment.

Conkling takes a straightforward approach to relating the history of the movement and the women who drove it, many whose names we know, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Susan B. Anthony to Alice Paul, and a number whose fame (or notoriety) has not lasted as long, like Victoria Claflin Woodhull and Carrie Chapman Catt.

The narrative starts with Elizabeth Cady learning that, in her world of early-19th-century Upstate New York, even the most determined girl could not make a contribution equal to a boy, laws and culture being what they were.

However, she was allowed to attend Troy Female Seminary, which offered a curriculum competitive with those offered to men, and she had the benefit of spending summers with her rich and progressive cousin, Gerrit Smith, who gave her freedom to exercise her forward-thinking ideas.

In part, the push for women’s rights was driven by the abolitionist movement, since women wishing to speak in public against slavery were accused of being “unwomanly and unchristian,” because, at the time, it was considered unseemly for women to speak in public.

The movement was also tied to the temperance movement, widely seen as a women’s issue because of the damage men’s excessive drinking caused to families. Without the vote, women had no formal way to press for change.

Newly married Elizabeth Cady Stanton met abolitionist Quaker Lucretia Mott in London in 1840 at the World Anti-Slavery Convention — which, ironically, would not allow women to be delegates. By the end of the event, the pair had made plans to hold their own convention to “form a society to advocate the rights of women,” according to Stanton.

The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 is widely seen as the start of a formal movement focused on women’s rights. Even there, the idea of suffrage was considered outrageous, and Mott shied away from making it a point of discussion.

Since no nation yet recognized women’s right to vote, she feared it would make the women look ridiculous. It appears to be Frederick Douglass’ impromptu speech to the gathering of more than 300 women that allowed the resolution for suffrage to pass.

Susan B. Anthony, a temperance champion, had no interest in women’s rights until she was repeatedly told that, as one, she could not speak at temperance conventions. She and Stanton met in 1851and immediately formed a bond that lasted 50 years.

During the Civil War, women’s suffrage took a back seat to the cause of ending slavery, and it was generally seen to be risking both issues to pair them together. The 13th Amendment ended slavery, and the 14th guaranteed citizenship and civil rights to male former slaves. The dual causes of emancipation and women’s suffrage, which had often supported each other, were now bitterly at odds.

When the issue of the 15th Amendment arose, guaranteeing voting rights regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude — with no mention of gender since it was already in the previous amendment — Stanton and Anthony campaigned against it, Stanton sometimes using racist arguments.

The episode drove a wedge into the unity of the suffrage movement, as did free-love advocate Victoria Claflin Woodhull, whose scandals in the name of suffrage cost the movement significant support and set its efforts back years.

As the century turned and both Stanton and Anthony passed the reins to the next generation, the wind was out of the movement, and it lagged until 1910. Carrie Chapman Catt took over as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, but it was Stanton’s daughter Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch, along with Alice Paul and Lucy Burns — all strongly influenced by the militant tactics of the British women’s movement — who get the most credit for reinvigorating the U.S. efforts.

Paul’s huge march in Washington, DC, in 1913, and the melee that it caused, engendered widespread attention. (Oddly, the author states that only spectators were hurt in the semi-riot, when it seems well-documented that many marchers were taken to local hospitals.)

Paul and Catt’s approaches to winning suffrage were often at loggerheads, especially when Paul’s “Silent Sentinels” began to picket the White House — the first group ever to do so — and later to get arrested. The women’s infamous mistreatment in prison was yet another rallying cry that brought people to the movement.

The “Susan B. Anthony Amendment,” the 19th, was passed in the U.S. House and Senate in May and June 1919, respectively, and was finally ratified in a nail-biter vote in Tennessee in August 1920. Catt, supportive of President Woodrow Wilson and seen as the moderate voice for suffrage, was invited to the White House for congratulations, while Paul, the impatient, rude agitator, was snubbed.

Given the current political engagement of teens embodied in the #NeverAgain movement, perhaps the most useful lesson for this book’s target audience is the unflagging determination with which two generations of women pressed what often seemed like a hopeless cause.

Winning a pitched political fight is rarely brief or straightforward, but the victory — almost always — goes to the side that refuses to give up.

Need Some Advice?

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This column originally appeared in Jenny’s “Write Now” book blog in the Washington Independent Review of Books on March 22, 2018.

It’s funny to me how many authors bemoan the solitary nature of writing: how hard it is to forsake all society, to turn our backs on friends and family; how the isolation makes us a little ragged and churlish.

For me, the isolation of writing is one of its great attractions. I’ve never been much of a joiner to begin with, and friends of mine would probably agree that churlish is a good description whether I’m writing or not.

Still, however much I enjoy solitude, there comes a time when even I need to get out of my own head and bounce my work off of other people. Though many of my writing friends are in critique groups, even considering that kind of long-term commitment makes me claustrophobic and panicky.

Instead, I joined a small writing workshop that meets six times in 12 weeks, with the opportunity to submit up to 150 pages for critique.

(This is the second time I’ve had the chance to work with DC-based author and writing coach Mary Kay Zuravleff, and, at this point, my writing and I would follow her over a cliff.)

Writers are a prickly bunch. We need a lot of advice, but we’re often not that great at accepting it. Typically, we’re far better at seeing the weakness in others’ writing than in our own. When we read anyone else’s story, we can see what works, what doesn’t work, and often why.

All that insight evaporates when we turn a critical eye toward our own pages. Even when we know it’s not really working — or perhaps especially when we know that — we hug that ugly baby even tighter.

Here, though, I find it’s energizing to use a draft that is still pink and raw from the birthing process to be reminded of everything I already know about what makes fiction work. Advance the story with every sentence! Reveal in action! Make every character want something! (Even if, as Kurt Vonnegut assures us, it’s just a glass of water.)

Knowing, of course, is not the same as executing, but seeing and hearing it again ahead of trying it again brings me that much closer to success.

One of the first conversations we had in the first session of the workshop was about favorite books of writing advice. Mary Kay pulled out her marked-up, dog-eared copy of a relatively new addition to the writing advice canon, Benjamin Percy’s Thrill Me.

At the end of a discussion about managing multiple plotlines, she handed me her copy and said, “Read the part about flaming chainsaws.” Instead, I read the entire book, and promptly went out and got my own copy.

Have you ever noticed how many books there are that give advice to writers? You can fill a decent-sized library with all the volumes that attempt to explain writing, either to those who have no clue or to those who need some reminding.

(Many of them purport to give advice on both writing and life. It’s alarming to think that admitting you could use help with writing signals that you’re struggling all around.)

I have a couple theories about why there are so many advice books. One is that every moderately successful writer is grilled to explain how they did it, as every editor and agent is beseeched to reveal the key to their book-accepting hearts. And the other is that writers secretly hope that stacking these books up next to their laptop will somehow magically relieve them of the need to do the actual writing.

Now that I have my own marked-up copy of Thrill Me, I’ve also pulled my collection of writing-advice books off the shelf and picked up a few new titles suggested by friends. I know they aren’t going to do the writing for me, but I find it helpful to choose one from the pile and read a section ahead of starting to write.

I’ve had my copy of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction for 20 years. Seeing a photo of it that I posted, she noted that mine is a fourth edition, and the ninth edition is in the works. Perhaps it’s time I upgraded, but then I’d have to re-highlight. I like it for the extended excerpts and practical commentary.

Even older is my copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, a funny and down-to-earth book that is written as though you, the reader, are sitting in her semester-long seminar.

My favorite feature of How Fiction Works by James Woods is that the top of every right-facing page contains a synopsis of the discussion at hand, such as “Grounded Skepticism,” “Absence in Characterization,” and “The Myth of Solid Characters.”

Madison Smartt Bell, a local author and writing teacher, gave us Narrative Design, which is worth studying for its methodical, structured dissection of a series of short stories in terms of plot, character, tone, point of view, and so on.

My stack contains a bunch of others; I think it’s helpful to find a few that speak to you, that touch on the issues you know are your personal trouble spots. Really, it’s all good advice.

Now, to apply it.

Book Review: Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review on March 14, 2018.

Steven Pinker wants us to stop being so pessimistic.

While it’s true that we are besieged every day by voices trumpeting the many ways things are bad and getting worse, Pinker makes a compelling case for why we need to adopt a more constructive outlook.

First, to believe that things are worse than ever is objectively wrong; second, by over-focusing on the negative, we waste energy that should be invested in solving fixable problems; third, in buying into the downward-spiral narrative, we reinforce it.

Case in point: the election of a president whose toxic brand of populism harks back to a golden age that never was. This book serves to disabuse us of mistaken nostalgia and point us all in a forward-looking direction.

Pinker is a cognitive psychologist, linguist, Harvard professor, and the author of a host of books on language, culture, and humanity. He brings us Enlightenment Now as a follow-up to his controversial 2012 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

In that work, Pinker argues that human life held little value throughout the ages, and that the dramatic deepening in our understanding of human dignity can be traced back to the Enlightenment.

The author discovered the extent to which people refuse to believe the “good news,” no matter how tall the pile of objective evidence (oh, the quirky charms of human nature). Enlightenment Now takes another run at the argument and is organized into three sections: “Enlightenment,” “Progress,” and “Reason, Science, and Humanism.”

“Progress” consumes the lion’s share of the book, with chapters devoted to topics such as health, inequality, the environment, peace, terrorism, democracy, quality of life, and existential threats.

Each chapter is an enthralling read on its own. Throughout, Pinker presents quantifiable specifics — with tables and graphs — to underpin his arguments on the substantive, measurable, global progress we’ve made in all these areas, many of which presented problems once thought to be intractable.

In the chapter on health, for instance, Pinker lists the estimated number of lives cumulatively saved by the discovery of blood types (1 billion); the chlorination of water (177 million); and the successful campaign to eradicate smallpox (131 million).

Pinker quotes Richard Carter to remind us of 1955, when Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was declared safe: “People observed moments of silence, rang bells, honked horns, blew factory whistles, fired salutes…”

Our success in making infant and childhood death a rarity in the U.S. has led us to a place where people who’ve never experienced the horror of an epidemic dismiss the value of immunization and, in fact, make vaccines the villain.

It’s this general lack of perspective — we didn’t live through it; therefore, we can’t know how bad it was — that Pinker attempts to remedy. He’s fighting against the concept that, to be taken seriously, both people and institutions (like the news media) must focus on all that’s wrong. To highlight the many ways that things continue to improve is to be dismissed as a Pollyanna.

Pinker acknowledges there are true existential threats to our wellbeing: Climate change tops the list. The crisis seems to defy solution because of its enormity and complexity, coupled with the ticking clock of a fast-approaching tipping point.

It’s a huge problem, yes, but a solvable one, according to the author, if we agree to bring our collective ingenuity to bear. That willingness may have slipped forever out of reach, though, when climate change became a partisan issue.

For those who imagine Pinker as a liberal elitist, some of his positions may seem surprising. He is a fan of intensive industrial agriculture, arguing that density is far more productive and less wasteful of land and resources than small, organic farms. In the climate-and-energy debate, he is a proponent of nuclear power and of fracking.

He holds in contempt “the environmentalist groups, with what the ecology writer Stewart Brand has called ‘their customary indifference to starvation,’” who cause significant harm, primarily to developing countries, with their vilification of genetically modified foods. Humans have been developing GMOs (both accidentally and on purpose) for thousands of years.

Yet when discussing existential threats, the author reaches a bit, and his willingness to let technology solve our problems tends to skip past the Law of Unintended Consequences. Personally, I don’t need to be convinced of the improbability of an apocalyptic robot war, but I’m interested to hear Pinker’s thoughts on the more pedestrian threat of technology companies’ increasing control over information flow, which continues to ratchet up even as we experience the damage it causes.

Enlightenment Now might generally be preaching to the converted, but its thought-provoking and wide-ranging analysis of the state of Enlightenment-era ideas and values might spur some of the converted to greater engagement in problem-solving.

I can’t help feeling, however, that Pinker continues to be flummoxed that his rational arguments don’t carry the day, ignoring or discounting the streak of irrationality embedded in human nature. He seems nonplussed, for example, that even the most coldly rational people have trouble dismissing the existence of a higher power.

It’s not surprising. No matter that humanity and its attendant self-awareness is the random and improbable outcome of a long evolutionary trail, or that each of us is simply one of 108 billion creatures to be born human to date. Each of us still harbors that innate longing to know it is we who are special.