Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel

I really had not intended to be reading Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven right in the middle of the Coronavirus pandemic. It just turned out that way because I checked the book out of my local library almost six weeks ago, and only just realized a few days ago that it is due back there this week. So time was running out on me. But now that Station Eleven will be forever connected in my mind with the Coronavirus, I know this is one I will remember for a long, long time – for lots of reasons.

Station Eleven is a beautifully constructed dystopian novel that spans the two weeks just before, and the 15-20 years following, the outbreak of a virus so deadly that it wipes out almost the entire population of the planet. The story begins during a Toronto production of King Lear during which the lead actor collapses and dies on-stage of a heart attack. Arthur Leander’s death, as it turns out, will be a prophetic one because almost everyone else in the theater that night will themselves be dead within just a few days. Two people who were in the theater, paramedic Jeevan Chaudhary and child actor Kirsten Raymonde, do survive to become major characters in the novel.

As the author describes it:

            “There was the flu that exploded like a neutron bomb over the surface of the earth and the shock of the collapse that followed, the first unspeakable years when everyone was traveling, before everyone caught on that there was no place they could walk to where life continued as it had been before and settled wherever they could, clustered close together for safety in truck stops and former restaurants and old motels.”

And rather eerily, there is the scene during which an epidemiologist goes on a television news program to describe how the virus manifests itself:

            “Aches and pains. A sudden high fever. Difficulty breathing. Look, it’s a fast incubation period. If you’re exposed, you’re sick in three or four hours and dead in a day or two.” (At which point, the newscaster decides it’s time for a “quick commercial break.”)

Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven is largely set in the two decades following the outbreak of the deadly flu, and it features a group of characters somehow connected to Arthur, the actor who dies on stage at the beginning of he book. For instance, Kirsten, the young actor who was on stage with Arthur when he died, is now part of a small troupe of actors and musicians (called the Traveling Symphony) that walks from settlement to settlement performing Shakespeare and playing music for entertainment-starved people. And Jeevan finds that his paramedic training makes him the closest thing to a real doctor that anyone living around him will ever see again. Too, all three of Arthur’s ex-wives and his son play major roles in the novel.

What makes Station Eleven particularly poignant is the way Mandel uses flashbacks to show what the lives of her characters were like before their world ended in a whimper the way that it did. The flashbacks are especially affective when they occur only hours before the pandemic onset and Mandel makes it a point to note that a character was enjoying his second-to-last cup of coffee or some such thing.

Bottom Line: Station Eleven is an impressive dystopian novel that will (unfortunately) strike a particularly familiar chord with future readers who have experienced the Coronavirus outbreak for themselves. The novel cleverly pulls together a series of characters and stories that all come together, full-circle, by the novel’s end. Station Eleven ends pretty much where it began, in fact, leaving the reader with a lot to ponder. Reading this one right now may not be for everyone, but if you do read it now, I guarantee you that it will stick with you and give you plenty to think about. I highly recommend this one.

So More Reading Time Means Less Reading?

I'm about 200 pages into Station Eleven, the 2014 dystopian novel by Emily St. John Mandel that focuses on a worldwide pandemic that kills off most of the human population in about 48 hours. 

This is probably not the wisest reading choice right now considering our own situation, but it is getting harder and harder for me to put this one down because it is so beautifully constructed. At first, it's a little hard to keep up with the key characters, and the way that the story intersperses  flashbacks with present-day activity, but once you start to understand how the characters relate to each other (even if they don't always know it), it all gets pretty intense. 

I can't see this one having a particularly happy ending, though, so here's hoping we do a good bit better for ourselves in the real world. 

As a change of pace, I'm also reading The Blues Don't Care by Paul D. Marks, a novel set in WWII era Los Angeles. This one's kind of a light mystery (although the murder victim does appear to have been hanged) centered around a young white musician who is trying really hard to catch on with a popular (otherwise) all black jazz band. The whole vibe of this one reminds me of those 1940s black and white movies starring the tough-guy actors of the day. It's fun.

And then there's The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri about a family of refugees from the Syrian civil war that makes its way to England. It's another gloomy book that I probably don't need to be reading at the moment, but it is very well written - and the audiobook is so well read by the narrator that I'm really enjoying it (although I do feel a little bad about using the word "enjoy" in this context).

All of this "social distancing" stuff is already starting to get on my nerves even though I know it's the best way to protect someone my age from becoming a health department statistic by the time this is finally all over with. Surprisingly, even with all the extra hours available for reading and blogging, I find myself accomplishing less than I was prior to the Coronavirus finally being taken seriously. For whatever reason, it's harder for me to concentrate right now. I haven't finished a book in almost a week now, and I'm at least two days away from finishing one. That's something that almost never happens to me.

And speaking of "social distancing"...went to the grocery store this morning to pick up some dairy products, breakfast cereal, and a couple of other items. I wasn't interested in picking up water or any of the worth-its-weight-in-gold toilet tissue at all, but I decided to cut across the aisle that normally has toilet tissue in order to make my way out of the grocery section and into the pharmacy area. Well, there was one four-pack of toilet tissue still on the shelf, and as I approached approached it, not even slowing down to give it a second look, a thirty-something woman crashed head-on into my cart so that she could grab the four-pack before I could (she thought) go for it. I looked at her as if she were crazy, I suppose, but she didn't bat an eye. Just tossed the stuff into her cart and ran off at a near-trot, never acknowledging me or the crash we had just had. I swear that some people have LITERALLY lost their minds over this whole virus thing.

So maybe, a little social distancing will turn out to be a blessing. My right forearm has been throbbing ever since the cart-crash, and I'm pretty sure that the pain is going to be with me for a while. Better to socially distance myself than to turn into one of the nuts out there.

So how's your week going?

On Reading "Station Eleven" During the Coronavirus Pandemic

We really do live in interesting times, don't we?

This seems to be the week that people in the U.S. are finally starting to realize just how disruptive to daily life the Coronavirus is going to be. The last 24 hours has seen things like the immediate suspension of the NBA season, the announcement that Tom Hanks and his wife are being treated for the virus in Australia, the acceleration of the already rapid decline in the stock market, the closing of the U.S. capitol to tourists, the European travel ban, and the decision of several U.S. lawmakers to self-quarantine themselves after learning they had shaken the hand of someone who later tested positive for the virus.

Closer to home, the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, an event that has a huge impact on the economy of this city, has been cancelled after only a few days, and local universities are extending this year's spring break for a few extra days while school administrators try to figure out what to do when the break ends. There are panic-driven shortages in essential items like bottled water and bathroom tissue to deal with as people try to find enough of each to last them the next 4-6 weeks. Shelves are literally empty in most stores, and the only way to find the products is to be lucky enough to be there when a new truckload of the stuff has been placed on the shelves overnight. 

And that brings up the impossibility of finding hand sanitizers anywhere in this city (country? world?) Last weekend I decided to brew up a batch of sanitizer based upon the formula found on the internet: 1/3 Aloe Vera gel mixed with 2/3 70-91% Isopropyl Alcohol. But that's not easy to do if you have neither of those ingredients on hand. Although it took me four stops, I finally did manage to find enough alcohol and gel to brew up a good-sized batch of the stuff that I bottled up and gave to members of my family. But home-brewing is no longer much of an option because it is impossible now to find alcohol anywhere that I've looked.

It's rather amazing how much time all of this has taken, and how little reading I'm being able to work into my schedule these days. Even more disappointingly, I was really looking forward to attending the San Antonio book festival on the first weekend in April, and that is not going to be happening now, even if the festival is not cancelled, because I'm in that age-group most susceptible to dying from the virus. Just not worth the risk, small as it actually may be.

Oh well, back to my current book, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. Fittingly, that's the 2014 novel about a terrible flu pandemic that practically wipes out the planet, leaving only scattered communities of survivors. This should be fun. Maybe I'll learn something useful from it.

Land of the Wolves - Craig Johnson

Land of Wolves is the fifteenth novel in Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire series, a series that began in 2004 with The Cold Dish. Johnson has treated Longmire fans pretty well over the years by publishing a new novel every year since that first one introduced the character. But it gets even better for fans, because Johnson published Longmire novellas in 2013 and 2016, and short stories or short story collections in 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2016. That’s a whole lot of Walt Longmire material in just fifteen years – and that’s not even to mention the very popular Netflix multi-season series based on the Longmire books and characters.

The Land of Wolves sees Longmire still trying to recover from the almost-fatal injuries he sustained in Mexico in the previous book, Depth of Winter. The sheriff is still struggling with some painful physical wounds, but more disturbingly to Longmire (and to his fans), is how negatively the near-death experience has affected his mental state. For the moment at least, Longmire is questioning his future and is not sure that he wants to be the sheriff of Absaroka County much longer.

But the bad guys are not going to sit around and wait for Longmire to recover.

Soon after being called to the scene of what appears to be the suicidal hanging of a sheep herder, Longmire begins to doubt that the man really killed himself. His investigation soon leads him back to one of the oldest families in the county, a family headed up by a Basque grandfather whose own father once used a shotgun to blow off the leg of Longmire’s predecessor in the sheriff’s department. As Longmire keeps pulling on lose threads, things get so complicated that the ailing sheriff starts to wonder if everyone he speaks with is part of some kind of vast conspiracy to keep the truth from him forever.

The title of this one comes from the lone wolf who seems always to be in the shadows wherever Longmire’s investigation takes him in the more remote parts of Absaroka County, Wyoming. The graying wolf becomes kind of a stand-in for graying Walt Longmire, a man who knows he’s past his prime and wondering how much longer he will be physically capable of doing the job he once loved so much.

Craig Johnson

Longmire fans were, I think, looking forward to Longmire coming home to Wyoming for his next case. The Mexican setting for Depth of Winter was interesting, and the plot was a real thriller, but it took Longmire out of his element and didn’t leave much room for the rest of the revolving cast of characters to have much interaction with him. Fans will be somewhat disappointed to learn that even though Land of Wolves takes place entirely within Longmire’s home county, only Ruby and Vic Moretti, of all the secondary characters, have much of a presence in the novel. There is almost no Henry Standing Bear at all, Lucian Connally is around only briefly, and Longmire’s daughter, Cady, only communicates with her father via a terse email or two. Longmire is hurting and confused, and it shows in his relationships.

Craig Johnson is guilty of the cardinal sin of “telling – not showing – what happened when it comes time for him to wrap up The Land of Wolves, something that never fails to annoy me as a reader. And, to make it even worse, Johnson has Longmire do all of his “telling” to the one deputy who has been close to him during most of the murder investigation, Vic Moretti. That Moretti is also Longmire’s love interest in the series, makes it even harder to believe that she would not have already been aware of most of what Longmire reveals to her.

Bottom Line: It’s always good to spend some time in Wyoming with Walt Longmire and the crew, but this one is a bit of a disappointment because not all of my old Wyoming friends showed up for our annual reunion. Here’s hoping that by the next book, Walt is more his old self and that the secondary characters all make the cut. And, please, enough with the passive, conversational-recap endings.

Oprah Was Not Quite as Cowardly as I Accused Her of Being

(This was written to record my reactions to the show while watching it for just over one hour - sort of a live streaming of my immediate reactions.)

As it turns out, and I just found out about this ten minutes ago, I was a little hard on Oprah Winfrey in Saturday's post about her handling of American Dirt on her Book Club television show (as shown exclusively on Apple TV). 

I've just learned that there is a second part of the broadcast, a segment of just over an hour, during which Oprah interviews Jeanine Cummins in detail. I'm watching that interview as I write this post, and it provides some insights into the author's struggle to write the book and why she wrote it. Cummins was stalled and about to finish her "second failed draft of the book" when her father died suddenly at the dinner table. The author then went into a period of deep grieving that ended only months later when she began to write a new draft, the first half of which she completed in eight days, with the second half taking her another eight months to complete.

The conversation between Jeanine Cummins and Oprah Winfrey lasted for about 18 minutes before three of the author's critics were brought on stage to join the conversation. Jeanine Cummins admitted that she made some mistakes, and that some of what she said in her "Author's Note" was insensitively worded. I have to say that Cummins appears to be in a bit of shock during some of the conversation, and that she is obviously hurt and saddened by the personal attacks she has received since January. 

I found it a bit ironic to hear the word "saddened" used by two of her critics when they expressed how the publication of American Dirt made them feel. In their cases, they say they were hurt because they have written similar stories themselves and almost no one noticed their efforts. I get that. But one of the critics said that her goal is to keep American Dirt off of bookshelves - and that is simply wrong. I don't get that, and it saddened and angered me to hear her say it.

The book's publishers were also in the audience and they fielded a number of questions from the three Latina authors sitting on stage with Cummins. In fact, the publishers were strongly challenged on why the book tour promoting American Dirt was said to have been  cancelled because of "safety concerns." The three authors claim that assertion makes any criticism of the book look like something coming from an angry mob rather than from serious critics - and from this point onward, the publisher took the brunt of the criticism from the three women. I had to shake my head a bit when one of the women stressed that anyone has the right to write any story that touches the heart, only to immediately turn to Cummins to tell her that the way she wrote American Dirt proves her incompetence on the subject. 

Overall, Oprah Winfrey did a passable job here of covering the controversy (and herself) by handling the discussion the way she did. The critics of American Dirt had their say, and Jeanine Cummins had the guts to sit there and listen to their points. The publishers, to their own credit, said that the criticism should have been directed at them rather than at Cummins - and from the look on her face when they said it, Cummins probably agrees with them. Surprisingly (to me, at least), when personally criticized for her choice of American Dirt for her book club, Oprah buckled immediately and admitted that she was guilty of everything they charged her with (mostly negligence when it comes to choosing LatinX authors as book club picks) -  but NOW she promises to do better.

Questions/statements from audience members were largely supportive - as one look at the faces of the authors on stage with Cummins could have told you even with the sound off. I was, however, surprised that one particularly childish and vindictive comment that was personally directed at Cummins was not edited out of the program because it did nothing but taint the whole conversation. Too, some of the questions directed to Cummins from on stage near the end of the program made clear just how much the three authors seated near her dislike Cummins and how much contempt they have for her. 

Jealousy is an ugly thing, but even though Cummins sometimes had that deer-in-the-headlights look on her face, I think she handled herself well here. It's time to move on. It's time for publishers to be more aware of LatinX (a term I see no real need for) authors because they deserve a wider audience. It's time for readers to search these writers out and to read their work. 

But the conversation should not be specifically about Jeanine Cummins and American Dirt. It should be about the lack of diversity in publishing and it should be directed at publishers, not the author of one book. The truth is that Jeanine Cummins's critics (especially that shrill smart-ass from L.A. who was not on this panel) owe Cummins a debt of gratitude for making the whole lack-of-diversity-in-publishing conversation possible. Without the success of a book like American Dirt, none of this would be happening right now.

So thank the woman. She deserves it after what you've put her through. 

American Dirt - Jeanine Cummins (Reviewed and Defended)

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins is so controversial a book these days that it is impossible to review the novel without acknowledging the supposed outrage associated with it. That means I will be doing both of those things in some detail here, but here’s the condensed version just in case you don’t want to read any further:

·      American Dirt is a very fine chase/thriller novel about a Mexican mother and son running for their lives and hoping to find safety and a new life in the United States.

·      The criticism about the author’s writing style is totally misplaced.

·      The criticism about the author’s right to tell “the story” of Mexican migrants wanting to cross illegally the border into the United States, the whole “cultural appropriation” argument, is dubious at best.

·      That some of the characters do not strike the book’s shrillest critic as being “credible Mexicans” is ludicrous.

·      American Dirt is nothing more than a convenient target for a group of Mexican and Mexican American authors to use to make the proper case that it is harder for people of color to break into print than it is for others.

·      Perhaps, the resentment associated with all of this is as much about the money that Jeanine Cummins stands to make from American Dirt as it is about anything else.

·      Even if the book is not a perfect representation of a “credible Mexican,” I am better for having read it, not worse.

So let’s start with the book.

Lydia Quixano Pérez lives with her son and husband in Acapulco where she owns and runs a small bookstore. Lydia’s husband is a newspaper writer who has taken an interest in the increased drug cartel activity in their city, especially in the leader of the newest cartel to hit town. Their son, Luca, is a bright eight-year-old who loves to spend time with his mother in the bookstore.

The bookstore is Lydia’s passion in life, and even though the store is not exactly thriving, she enjoys getting the right books into the hands of the right readers. So one day when a new customer brings a number of books to the cash register, including two of Lydia’s all-time favorites, she cannot resist befriending him. By the time that Lydia figures out that Javier, her new friend, is the very cartel kingpin being investigated by her husband, the two have developed a solid friendship that makes it difficult for her to believe what her husband tells her about him. But when a few weeks later the newspaper reveals Javier’s true identity in a detailed exposé, the cartel jefe decides to take his revenge by wiping out the journalist’s entire family during a family celebration. Now, Lydia and Luca are running for their lives.

What follows is a thrilling race to the U.S. border during which Lydia and Luca struggle  to stay one step ahead of Javier and his men. Along the way, Lydia befriends a group of young migrants who are trying to cross the border for reasons of their own, and she soon realizes that they all have a better chance of survival if they stick together than if they travel as individuals. Lydia’s new family includes two beautiful fourteen and fifteen-year-old Guatemalan sisters forced to flee a drug dealer who wants to claim them as his own and a young Mexican boy who has spent his whole life as a garbage dump scavenger. Over time, the five of them become so dependent on each other that it is sometimes hard to tell exactly who is taking care of whom.

Jeanine Cummins

Some have claimed that the character of Lydia, an upper middle class Mexican, is the only kind of migrant that Jeanine Cummins and her white readers are capable of identifying with long enough to write or read about. Those critics miss the point that Cummins is not trying to represent Lydia and Luca to be anything remotely like the typical migrant. On page 94 of the book, Cummins addresses Lydia’s own shock at the realization that she is now a “migrant”:

            “…like a thunderclap, Lydia understands that it’s not a disguise at all. She and Luca are actual migrants. That is what they are. And that simple fact, among all the other severe new realities of her life, knocks the breath clean out of her lungs. All her life, she’s pitied those poor people. She’s donated money. She’s wondered with the sort of detached fascination of the comfortable elite how dire the conditions of their lives must be wherever they come from, that this is the better option. That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn’t even want them.”

No, Cummins is not representing Lydia as a “typical” migrant, and she makes sure that her “white readers” get that point. Then she begins to surround Lydia and Luca with the more typical migrants who are following the same path to the U.S. And guess what, critics? We got it. And we sympathized with those migrants in the story every bit as much as we pulled for Lydia and Luca to make it.

And then there’s this on page 166, a passage during which one of the Guatemalan sisters and Luca are talking:

            “…he (Luca) starts to understand that this is the one thing all migrants have in common, this is the solidarity that exists among them, though they all come from different places and different circumstances, some urban, some rural, some middle-class, some poor, some well educated, some illiterate, Salvadoran, Honduran, Guatemalan, Mexican, Indian, each of them carries some story of suffering on top of that train and into el norte beyond.”

Or this from page 212:

            “Lydia is constantly reminded that her education has no purchase here, that she has no access to the kind of information that has real currency on this journey. Among migrants, everyone knows more than she does. How do you find a coyote, make sure he’s reputable, pay for your crossing, all without getting ripped off?”

But it is this whole thing about “cultural appropriation” that I fail to comprehend. No, Jeanine Cummins is not Mexican, but she is something like one-quarter Puerto Rican, and she married an illegal immigrant in 2005. She knows what it’s like to be stopped by authorities and not have the right paperwork on hand to ensure that your husband is not about to be deported. And she spent four years researching and writing about the migrant experience.

So what if she is not perfect in her use of Mexican slang or in her description of everyday life in Mexico? Would I, a white reader, be more understanding of the dangers migrants are willing to face today and why they are willing to do so if Cummins had used a more correct word here or there? Would the book’s critics prefer that I not read American Dirt at all and remain blissfully ignorant of (and less sympathetic about) the dangers faced by the migrants headed our way?

If so, they confirm my theory that their criticism is based more on jealousy and money than it is about “cultural appropriation.”

And even before the contrived controversy, the “Author’s Note” (I know this is long) had this to say:

            “…the final, most significant factor that influenced my decision to tackle the subject. It took me four years to research and write this novel, so I began long before talk about migrant caravans and building a wall entered the national zeitgeist. But even then I was frustrated by the tenor of the public discourse surrounding immigration in this country. The conversation always seemed to turn around policy issues, to the absolute exclusion of moral or humanitarian concerns. I was appalled at the way Latino migrants, even five years ago – and it has gotten exponentially worse since then – were characterized within that public discourse. At worse, we perceive them as an invading mob of resource-draining criminals, and, at best, a sort of helpless, impoverished, faceless brown mass, clamoring for help at our doorstep. We seldom think of them as our fellow human beings.”

…

“So I hoped to present one of those unique personal stories – a work of fiction – as a way to honor the hundreds of thousands of stories we may never get to hear. And I so doing, I hope to create a pause where the reader may begin to individuate. When we see migrants on the news, we may remember: these people are people.”

…

“And yet, when I decided to write this book, I worried that my privilege would make me blind to certain truths, that I’d get things wrong, as I may well have. I worried that, as a nonmigrant and non-Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among migrants. I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it. But then, I thought, ‘If you’re a person who has the capacity to be a bridge, whey not be a bridge.’ So I began.”

Cummins even sought the opinion of prominent members of the Latino community, such as Norma Iglesias Prieto, who told her, “Jeanine. We need as many voices as we can get, telling this story.” And both Sandra Cisneros and Julia Alvarez wrote glowing blurbs for the book’s back cover…along with Stephen King, Don Winslow, Ann Patchett, John Grisham and Kristin Hannah.

Finally, that brings us to Oprah Winfrey, who chose American Dirt as one of the books to be highlighted in the 2020 version of “Oprah’s Book Club.” To her credit, Oprah has not succumbed to the pressure to apologize for and change her selection. But anyone who has seen the televised version of the book club (on Apple TV) that supposedly features American Dirt is going to have a lesser opinion of Oprah’s courage. The book is barely mentioned, the author is barely allowed to speak. Instead, three or four migrants are allowed to tell their personal stories in great detail, including video footage taken on location. Of the approximately thirty-nine minutes the program lasted, I would estimate that Cummins spoke for less than two of them – and that was mostly in response to Oprah’s leading question about Cummins having now learned something she hadn’t known before writing the book.

Oprah Winfrey is, as it turns out, a politically correct coward.

Bottom Line: I’m happy to have read the book because I did, in fact, learn more about things I didn’t really understand before reading American Dirt. I don’t care at all that a few details may be wrong or distorted. That did not change the message I received from the novel, and it had no impact on my enjoyment or understanding of it at all. Don’t let the politically correct robots out there intimidate you and decide what you can and cannot read. Read American Dirt and decide for yourself


Edit of Monday, March 9, 2020:

I have just learned about a second segment of Oprah's Book Club during which Jeanine Cummins is interviewed for about 18 minutes before some of her critics are brought on stage to join the conversation. Please see that post for more detail.

I decided not to edit this original post because it would, in my opinion, be unfair of me to do so.