Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel, Exit West, considers the plight of the thousands of modern refugees being forced to flee their homes by internal violence that has become the new normal in so many countries around the world in recent years.  As their countries succumb to political and religious civil wars, hundreds of thousands of people flee their homelands with nothing but the clothes on their backs and whatever little they can carry with them.  Hamid focuses on two young people, Saeed and Nadia, who are forced to run for their lives before it is too late – but he gives his story one surreal little twist.

Much like Colin Whitehead did in The Underground Railroad, Hamid interprets the escape mechanism of his refugees literally.  Whitehead’s Underground Railroad was literally underground, complete with train stations and tunnels that connected certain cites in the South with those further north.  Hamid’s characters cross borders by using literal doors that magically appear in buildings all over the world.  Those crossing the thresholds of the doors have no idea what country they will magically step out into until they arrive, but the transportation is instantaneous.  And, as long as the doors remain “open,” anything is possible.  Some refugees, at least for a while, even go back and forth through the doors in order to bring supplies back to family members who prefer to remain in their home country.

Mohsin Hamid

Saeed and Nadia live in an unnamed country that is falling apart before their eyes.  The young Muslims are not married and have to be very careful about how they conduct themselves in public - and even in the privacy of their own homes – if they are to continue to fly under the radar of militant Muslims who would gladly punish them for their “sins.”  Marriage is not practical under the circumstances, and when Saeed and Nadia step through their first door out of the country, they do so single. 

That first door opens into Greece, but for many reasons, Greece will not be the last stop for Saeed and Nadia.  Native populations resent being overrun by refugees whose cultures are so different from theirs, and violent clashes with police and private citizens become more and more common as refugee populations grow in number.  The two decide to move on, finding things to be much the same whichever country they step into, and the constant search for food and medical care adds to the fear of violence that Saeed and Nadia already feel.  Before long, their relationship begins to suffer under the stress, and neither seems to have the will to fix the problem.

Although Exit West is told from the refugee point-of-view, Hamid does not paint a black or white picture of his characters based upon which side of the border from which they originate.  Not all refugees are good people; not all citizens of the receiving countries are bad.  The author chose to focus on the mindsets of his characters, and the use of magic portals to get them instantly from one country to the next allows him to do just that.  Exit West, while not exactly an eye-opener, is a moving novel that deserves to be read.

A Fugitive in Walden Woods

Norman Lock is no stranger to historical fiction and A Fugitive in Walden Woods is, in fact, his fourth in what the author calls his “The American Novels” series.  The first three books in the series are: The Boy in His Winter (based upon Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn); American Meteor (an “homage” to Walt Whitman and William Henry Jackson); and The Port-Wine Stain (the author’s tribute to Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Dent Mütter).  Lock uses each of the books in the series to remind the reader that the greats of the past he writes about were human beings just like the rest of us, people who struggled with their own weaknesses and circumstances just as mightily as we all do in this more modern world.  Doing so reminds readers just how special were the accomplishments of Lock’s central characters, and will likely lead to a renewed and even greater appreciation of their work and lives.

A Fugitive in Walden Woods features a handful of American transcendentalists in the mid-1840s, men like Henry David Thoreau, Nathanial Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Lloyd Garrison.  Among these greats of their time, the author inserts a runaway slave from the South, one Samuel Long, a man so desperate for freedom that he is willing to chop off his own hand rather than to remain shackled to the fence post to which he is bound.  Lucky enough to stumble into the hands of the Underground Railroad, Long eventually lands in Massachusetts where he is placed into the care and protection of Emerson.

With Emerson’s help, Samuel Long is installed in a shack in Walden Woods, a relatively remote location that Emerson and his friends hope will keep Long safe from the “man-hunters” who have made a brutal art of returning runaways to their owners in the slave states.  As luck would have it, Long’s nearest neighbor is none other than Henry David Thoreau who is living alone in Walden Woods as he prepares the journal that will soon enough become Walden, Thoreau’s much-studied classic account of that experience. 

A Fugitive in Walden Woods primarily focuses on the relationship between Long and Thoreau.  Understandably, Long is slow to trust the motives and hidden thoughts of white men, but almost despite himself, the slave develops an admiration for the almost innocent honesty with which Thoreau expresses himself and presents himself to those he encounters along the way.  Thoreau, on his part, admires the strength and courage he sees in Samuel Long and treats the man as his equal, nothing more and nothing less.  As the relationship between the two men develops over the months, Thoreau’s time in Walden Woods comes to life for the reader just as Samuel Long himself comes-of-age in his own new world.

The real beauty of books like A Fugitive in Walden Woods can be best expressed in a quote Samuel Long recalls in conversation with Emerson or Hawthorne – he is not entirely sure which it actually was: “Reading is our recompense for having only one life to live.”   Norman Lock has given his readers the chance to live a different life than the one they know best.

(Review Copy provided  by Publisher)

Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta by Richard Grant

The state of Mississippi has long fascinated me because of its rich Civil War history and its remarkable literary tradition – two key interests I have enjoyed my entire life.  I first started exploring Mississippi by car in the late 1980s and I have continued to do so to this day, often spending many of my vacation days driving the state on self-directed Civil War tours, or ones designed to hit as many of the state’s wonderful bookstores and literary landmarks as I can manage in a week or ten days. 

As everyone knows, though, Mississippi has its dark side, a legacy from the darkest days of slavery that continues to haunt the state to this day.  Look at all the standards by which American states are generally measured, and you are likely to find Mississippi near, or actually at, the bottom of every single one of them.  But then consider some other measurement, such as which states produce the highest number of prominent writers (per capita or otherwise) and Mississippi probably stands near the top of the list.  Let’s just say that as much as I love the state, I don’t always feel safe driving its back roads on my own.

Richard Grant’s Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta portrays Mississippi and her people through the eyes of a British adventure/travel writer, a man who first became acquainted with the state while “interviewing elderly blues singers in the mid-1990s.”  Grant was charmed by Mississippi, particularly by the city of Oxford, while on that initial project and would return periodically to visit his Mississippi friends.  On one of those visits an old friend brought Grant to the Mississippi Delta region to show him her “home ground,” and Grant so fell in love with an old plantation house (near Pluto, Mississippi) belonging to his friend’s father that he impetuously offered to buy it – without first mentioning anything to his New York City girlfriend.  Luckily for Grant, his girlfriend was as ready to get away from New York City as he was, and after looking at the house she agreed to give the Delta a shot.

Thus begins the Mississippi Delta adventure of two people who could hardly have been any more different from their new neighbors if they had tried.  Richard and Mariah were liberal left-wing progressives for whom being politically correct in speech and thought was simply a way of life.  For their neighbors, shall we say, it was not.  But in the next few months, Richard and Mariah would make some of the closest friends they had ever had, and would explore the Delta in a way that outsiders are seldom permitted to do. 

Richard Grant

Grant would learn just how tricky race relations still are in Mississippi, a state with so large a black population that blacks can be said to hold as much (or even more) political clout as whites.  He would learn that many Mississippi blacks would not look him in the eye when speaking with him; that even if he considered them a friend, many blacks preferred to speak with him outside or to enter his home from its rear entrance; and that there were many places his black friends did not think safe for a white man to visit – even in their company.  Grant, though, because he wanted to tell Mississippi’s story, was persistent and he managed to get both his black friends and his white friends to be honest with him. 

Along the way he meets some of Mississippi’s most colorful people and some of her most famous, including actor Morgan Freeman who still lives in Mississippi when not working on a film, and owns (with partners) what is perhaps the state’s most famous blues club.  He explores the often bizarre world of small town Mississippi politics (in which gunfire and threats sometimes play a key role), the blues legacy being left behind by a generation of blues pioneers now steadily dying off, and the improving but still delicately balanced relationship between the state’s black and white populations.

Dispatches from Pluto exposes a side of a state that has been underappreciated for too long.  Mississippi is rich in history, music, and American culture in a way that many other states cannot claim to be.  Maybe a few more books like Dispatches from Pluto will finally expose what is still a well kept secret: Mississippi is a great place to visit – for a lot of good reasons.

Commonwealth by Ann Patchett

Most of us have wondered at one time or another how our lives may have turned out differently if only one particular event had never happened.  What if we had never met one certain person, or taken a particular class, or had that temporarily crippling accident?  Who might we be today?  How different might our lives have turned out to be?

Ann Patchett explores precisely that question in Commonwealth, her latest novel.  What if deputy district attorney Bert Cousins had not decided to crash a co-worker’s christening party because he couldn’t stand the thought of spending another Saturday at home with his own three children and pregnant wife?  As it happens, two families are torn apart, re-formed as new blended families, and six children grow up barely knowing their fathers.  Would the six children and four adults have been happier and more successful people if Bert Cousins had stayed home that Saturday afternoon?  Patchett doesn’t speculate about that much, but as the next fifty years or so of her story unfold, that question will frequently cross the mind of her readers.

Before the christening party is over, Bert Cousins has not only become attracted to Beverly, his host’s wife, he has shared a sexy kiss with her while holding the woman’s newly christened baby between them - and the die has been cast.  In what seems like no time at all, Bert, Beverly, and Beverly’s two daughters are living in Virginia - and the girls’ father, Bert’s wife, and Bert’s four children have been left behind on their own in Torrance, California. 

The first third or so of Commonwealth, covers the painful aftermath of that Virginia move as the children are forced to cope with summers spent traveling across the country to spend a few weeks with the fathers they otherwise never see.  The children, who are not always particularly crazy about spending time around even their blood-siblings, now have to find ways to put up with the stepbrothers and sisters they seldom see other than on the summer trips.  Beverly, though, may be the person who most dreads the summer visits because she suddenly goes from caring for only two children to being responsible for six – and Bert Cousins is still a man who refuses to spend time around children – his or anyone else’s. 

Ann Patchett

Commonwealth, though, goes on for another fifty years during which Patchett explores the lives of the children from young-adulthood to their own fifties and shows how they were shaped into the relatively responsible adults they now are – a process that included learning to appreciate each other and the blended sets of parents they shared.  Would they have been the same people if Bert Cousins had not been enough of a jerk to crash a baby’s baptismal party to avoid the company of his own children?  Probably not, but when they consider how much they have come to mean to each and think about all the shared experiences that resulted from their changed circumstances, they understand how much they would have otherwise missed out on. 

Bottom Line:  Much of Commonwealth reads like a train wreck you can’t avoid staring at, but in the end, it is – good and bad – all our stories.  We are, after all, what life makes us, and we do not get to choose the circumstances of our childhood.  The childhood Patchett describes in Commonwealth sounds very much like the one she has described for herself over the years.  She has even said that her brothers and sisters were even wilder and more unpredictable than the children portrayed in Commonwealth.  Readers can rest assured that she will likely be mining that childhood for years to come.

Goodbye, Vitamin

Rachel Khong’s Goodbye, Vitamin is about one family’s experience with an illness that regularly devastates families all over the world.  Alzheimer’s, perhaps because it does not offer its victims the relief of the quick death that more deadly illnesses provide, is one of the most feared diseases that we face today.  Rather than a quick way out, its victims can linger for most of a decade with little idea of whom or where they are.  It ultimately becomes a toss-up as to who suffers most from Alzheimer’s: the patient or the family members tasked with his care.

The novel recounts the year that thirty-year-old Ruth spends in the care of her history professor father, a man who is steadily losing the fight with Alzheimer’s to maintain his self-identity.  Ruth’s parents have been married for decades but close observers would be hard-pressed to define2 theirs as a close relationship.  Over the course of his successful teaching career, Howard has more than once strayed from his marriage vows, a fact of which Ruth’s mother is well aware.  Even though Howard is not capable of teaching classes at the university now, he can still claim a loyal circle of students and friends from his teaching days who are willing to go out of their way to make Howard’s remaining lucid days as comfortable for him as possible.  Howard, though, would be the first to tell them that those days are limited.

Rachel Khong

Rachel Khong tells her story in short segments (with even shorter sections within each segment) that represent individual days in the year that Ruth spends helping her mother cope with her stricken husband.  The book, which runs from one Christmas to the next, uses humor and irony to tell a very sad story in a way that endears each of its main characters to the reader.  It begins this way:

 Tonight a man found Dad’s pants in a tree that was lit with still-hanging Christmas lights. The stranger called and said, “I have some pants?  Belonging to a Howard Young?”

            “Well, shit,” I said.  I put the phone down to verify that Dad was home and had pants on.  He was, and did.

As it turns out, Ruth and her father are both involved in a struggle to figure out just who they are.  Ruth’s personal life has taken a turn she never saw coming: her fiancé is a thing of the past, and at thirty, she still has no idea what she wants to do with the rest of her life.  Her father is, of course, faced with a more literal struggle to figure out who he is and what his legacy will be.  The beauty of Goodbye, Vitamin is that if they are lucky, they still have time to help each other through the process.