Category: Books

Reading & Viewing: Marriage, Race, & Religion

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MOMENTOUS WEEK

Sunday, November 8, 2020

The 2020 presidential election is one for the history books. For many women, it was an especially momentous one. After the long wait all week, the afternoon was suddenly brighter. Watching Kamala Harris deliver her first speech as Vice President-elect last evening was simply marvelous. Then, after President-elect Joe Biden’s stirring call for unity, the sky was lit with their names midst a smashing array of red, white and blue fireworks. With all of that, putting Harris’ image at the top of this post seemed just right.

RECENT NOVELS—MARRIAGE & RACE

Monogamy by Sue Miller
(lithub.com)

In this novel, bookseller Graham co-owns a store in Cambridge, Mass.  He’s a big man with big appetites.  Appetites for reading and meeting literati, for food, and for women.  He’s a gregarious guy, enveloping and dominating those around him.   This is his second marriage as well as Annie’s.  Annie, a professional photographer and his wife of thirty-odd years, is more reserved and inward looking than he.  Between them, there are two adult children: Lucas, son of his first wife Frieda, and Sarah, his and Annie’s daughter.  Comparing herself to Graham, Annie laments her own lack of feeling, sensing a sort of coldness at her core.  

When Graham dies unexpectedly, Annie is initially devastated.  She and the children separately struggle to fill the gaping hole he has left.  Strangely, Annie and first wife Frieda have been friends for years. They attempt to console each other.  When Annie learns more about Graham’s relationships with other women, her grief at first morphs into anger.  Marriages in this novel are not all monogamous.

I loved this novel and read it slowly to savor the richness of Miller’s prose and her profound grasp of human emotions. Here’s a passage I particularly liked.  Annie has been reflecting on her childhood friendship with Sofie and how they had drifted apart in high school and college.

     But the residue of that friendship lingered for Annie, lingered especially in the newly sharp eye with which she regarded her own family—that gift that often comes in adolescence, when you’re suddenly old enough to be conscious of how another family works, of the possibility of other rules, other ways of living, from those you grew up with.  That gift can open a window, a door, into the world.  Let air in.

    Let you out.

   As this gift was at work in Annie, she slowly came to understand that what she had been feeling in her family for a long time was I don’t belong here.  That had helped to free her, to end her puzzlement about her family and her place in it.  It had opened up her life, though she hadn’t known for years what that would mean for her.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Author Brit Bennett (the guardian.com)

A highly praised new novel, The Vanishing Half is about identity and race and takes place over several decades.  Identical twins, Desiree and Stella, grow up in a small Southern town.  In their late teens, Desiree convinces her sister to leave home with her. They run away to New Orleans.  For a few years, they both work in a laundry, but Stella bolts and Desiree loses contact with her.  Later, Desiree flees an abusive spouse with her little girl and retreats back to Mallard.  The twins are light-skinned, and the reader sees that Stella has chosen to re-make her life as a white woman.  

The book raises questions about how one identifies oneself, and about what is required to present one face to the world while inside living another.  Not only does the book concern itself with racial identity, but for several characters the gender assigned at birth is not the one they feel most at home in—or they relish the fluidity of moving back and forth between genders. 

 I found the first section, set in 1968, a bit slow and it didn’t flow.  Subsequent sections, which I’m now reading, are more engaging.  A thoughtful novel and one relevant for these times. (~JWFarrington)

VIEWING—TENSIONS IN THE MINISTRY

Greenleaf (Netflix)
Grace backed by father, mother, brother and aunt (tvovermind.com)

We happened upon Greenleaf when browsing streaming options and have now watched eight episodes of Season 1.  It’s about a Black mega church in Memphis and the Greenleaf family that runs it.  Bishop James Greenleaf is exuberant, manipulative, and rich.  His wife, son, brother-in-law, and other family members work for the church too. And the entire family lives together in a sumptuous mansion.  

When daughter Grace, also a pastor, and her teenage daughter return, family tensions escalate.  Grace has been gone for years, and her mother is not happy having her back.  Mae sees Grace as a threat and supplanting favored son Jacob.  Grace also puts some credence in the rumors of irregularities in Uncle Mac’s private life.  

Add in adultery, lies, and questions about church finances, and you have the makings of a complex drama with many threads.  Overall, the series is about religion and relationships peppered with lots of Bible-quoting.  At times, I find it uncomfortable to watch, but I am intrigued by Grace’s character. She stands apart from the family as both observer and somewhat reluctant participant.  

Greenleaf is an Oprah Winfrey production and Oprah plays Mavis McCready, Grace’s compassionate, non-judgmental aunt.  In all, there are five seasons.

Note: Header photo of Kamala Harris courtesy of APnews.com

View toward bridge to Lido Key

Potpourri: Viewing & Reading

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VIEWING OPTIONS

From New Zealand to Australia to Spain, I’ve been traveling the world in my recent TV viewing.  It’s marvelous to have so many new series from which to choose.

The Sounds (Acorn)

The Sounds is an adventure tale. It’s set in the fiords off New Zealand’s South Island.  Doubtful Sound or the better-known Milford Sound are favorite tourist destinations.  On a day-long or overnight cruise, one can go deep into a fiord and experience the eeriness of almost complete silence. 

If you read the comments on Facebook when considering this 8-part series, you might not watch it.  Is it plausible? Is Maggie a convincing character?  Nonetheless, the Chief Penguin and I watched it separately and found it consuming enough to keep us on the treadmill.

The Cabbotts (deadline.com)

Tom and Maggie Cabbott are escaping life in Canada and starting a sustainable fishery in the small town of Pelorus.  Tom is the black sheep in a wealthy family and goes ahead to set things up.  When Maggie arrives, there is immediate disgruntlement from a native woman, and it seems Tom has not filled in all the requisite boxes.  The next day he disappears in his kayak and a massive search effort begins.  

What are Tom and Maggie really planning?  What are police chief Jack’s festering secrets?  What is Zoe, Jack’s daughter, up to, and why is Pania so riled up?  Past crimes, suspicion, and big money are all intermixed in this complex stew of relationships. I recommend giving The Sounds a try.

Flesh and Blood (PBS Masterpiece)
Mary, Mark, Vivien and her children (radiotimes.com)

Flesh and Blood is full of tangled emotions, secrets, and surprises.  When their widowed mother, Vivien, begins seeing Mark, a retired doctor, her three adult children are concerned, puzzled, and then upset.  They think the relationship is moving too quickly, and they have questions about Mark’s past.  But Vivien’s offspring have relationship issues of their own from infidelity to lack of trust to secret affairs.  Add in nosy, but from her view, well-intentioned neighbor Mary, and it gets messy and threatens to explode.  Gripping with an unexpected ending!  Is it really the end or will there be a season 2?

Mystery Road (Amazon Prime)

This Mystery Road is a spin off from a movie of the same name, both starring Aaron Pederson.  Set in the Australian outback, the scenery is stunningly beautiful, a plus for a story that moves slowly.  Detective Jay Swan is dispatched to a small town to assist in the search for two missing young men.  Marley is an indigenous kid and rising football star while Reese is white and came from elsewhere to work on the cattle station.  Heading up the local police team is Emma James (played by Judy Davis), who co-owns the cattle station with her brother Tom.  As a Black cop, Jay is considered suspect by both the white and Black communities.  A man of extreme reserve, he and Emma work together to some extent, while he sometimes goes off pursuing leads on his own.  

(nytimes.com)

This first season is 8 episodes. In the beginning, it was so slow, I debated leaving it.  I persisted and then got caught up in the relationships between the various factions in the community. These are at least as important as the crime to be solved.  The concluding episodes are tense and exciting and worth the wait.   There is a season 2 which I have not watched.  Some reviewers bemoan the fact that Judy Davis is no longer in it.  (~JWFarrington)

SIBLINGS IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

Book Club Notes—The Dutch House

My local book club had a lively discussion about The Dutch House, Ann Patchett’s latest novel.  I had read it back in February and then skimmed it for this meeting.  I enjoyed and appreciated it even more on the second round.  

The characters are richly developed and the sibling relationship between Danny and his older sister Maeve, the strongest and most critical one for both of them.  Maeve is the light around which this story, called a fairy tale by several reviewers, revolves.  She is sister, mother, guide and even goad (think medical school) to Danny.  They survive and thrive under the attention and care of the two women who ran their father’s household.  He was often absent, their mother abandoned them, and their stepmother threw them out.  It’s a carefully crafted novel with straightforward prose.  Still highly recommended!

The Wright Siblings—Maiden Flight

Recently, I commented here on the new novel about Katharine Wright, younger sister of Wilbur and Orville, entitled The Wright Sister.  Reading that work prompted me to read the earlier novel, Maiden Flight, by Harry Haskell.  It’s about Katharine’s late life love affair and marriage to Henry Haskell.  Author Haskell is the grandson of Henry Haskell and had access to letters and documents housed in several library collections. 

His approach is to alternate the relation of events in the voices of Katharine, Orville, and Henry, with the occasional interlude by another friend.  The voices are distinct and capture their personalities.  And his telling bears out Orville’s estrangement from the sister who was often viewed as a spouse in her care and attention to him.  Haskell also reinforces the complex triangle that was Katharine, Orville and Henry, and the delicacy with which Katharine approached each man.  This makes the novel worth reading, but it suffers from an excess of detail on some matters. An example is the long drawn out struggle to have the Wright brothers’ plane displayed at the Smithsonian.  Perhaps Mr. Haskell felt he had to include every bit of information in his source material.  

Like Danny and Maeve in The Dutch House, Orville’s most important relationship was with his sister (and for many years, hers with him). When Katharine married, Orville couldn’t forgive her and never saw her again until her death.

Note: Header photo is Sarasota Bay looking toward the bridge to Lido Key by JWFarrington.

Yellow orchid blooms

Tidy Tidbits: Tropical Blooms & Exotic Settings

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When you can’t travel to new destinations, then it’s best to enjoy what’s local and watch or read about other times, other places. We did some of both this past week.

ORCHID SHOW—LOCAL COLOR

For their 45th annual orchid show, Selby Gardens honors founder Marie Selby and celebrates the 100th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote.  Entitled, Women Breaking the Glasshouse Ceiling, the displays in the conservatory feature purple, white, and gold, the colors most closely associated with the suffrage movement.  The orchids are beautiful as always, and this year, some of the arrangements revolve. There’s even a mobile of orchids and cut-outs.

Gold orchids

 Music from the 1920’s and period furnishings provide an appropriate backdrop. It’s all quite stylish.

The show runs until November 29 and is definitely worth a visit. There’s much more to see besides this exhibit.   For a a video preview, click here.

Creamy white orchids
Everyone must wear a mask!

EXOTIC LOCALES—VIEWING AND READING

The White Countess (Amazon Prime)

With a star-studded cast including Ralph Fiennes and Natasha Richardson as the principals, plus Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave, this is Merchant Ivory’s last film.  It’s set in Shanghai in 1936, and former American diplomat Todd Jackson is a recluse.  Now blind, his life marred by tragedy, he aimlessly whiles away his nights in sleazy clubs.  He’s well off, but a displaced family of Russian emigres lives crowded together in the ghetto.  

Among them is former countess Sofia, who works as a dancer and prostitute to support her young daughter Katya.  Sofia becomes Todd’s muse and inspiration for creating his own elite nightclub.  Watching these lost souls cautiously connect before the Japanese invade is a long drawn out process.  The overall great cast makes this an enjoyable escape from the everyday. Thanks to my friend Mary for recommending it!  

Singapore Sapphire by A. M. Stuart

Set in Singapore in 1910, this is the first in a series of mysteries featuring Harriet Gordon, a young widow and former suffragette, and Inspector Robert Curran.  Harriet is a relatively recent arrival in Singapore.  She volunteers at the English-style boys’ school headed up by her brother and takes on freelance typing jobs.  

When Harriet goes to retrieve her typewriter from a recent client, Sir Oswald Newbold, she finds him dead and his study ransacked. Curran, a former military policeman and cricket star, is assigned with his team to find the killer.  Other suspicious deaths and disappearances follow and Harriet, both curious and restless, gets involved too.  Add into the mix, art and artifacts, ruby mines, and gem dealers and you have an engaging, even exciting, plot.   (~JWFarrington)

Note: Photos ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved).

Yellow trumpet flower

Tidy Tidbits: Reading & Culture

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THOUGHT-PROVOKING MEMOIR

Self-Portrait in Black and White: Family, Fatherhood, and Rethinking Race by Thomas Chatterton Williams (2019)

Even before his marriage and the birth of his first child, Williams straddled, or at least experienced, both the white and the Black worlds.  His father is a Southern Black and his mother a white woman, and while mixed race, he identified as Black.  His writing career gave him opportunities to work abroad in Berlin, but mostly in Paris. Subsequently, he married a white French woman.  In France, he felt he was received first as American and then as something other than white.  

When his daughter Marlow arrived blond and blue-eyed, Williams’ views on race were upended.   Forced to confront his own sense of race, he explores how other writers and philosophers have described race—and how some have dealt with it in their own lives.  

Williams & daughter (Virginia Quarterly Review)

Given the mixed context of his own extended family, he asks the question, “What is race if a man, at various stages, can be either ‘black’ or ‘white’?  In my own family, when  I can look to my mother’s side and I see my aunt Shirley’s Facebook posts about our immigrant ancestors diligently pulling themselves up and out of German, or to my father’s side on Ancestry.com and stare into the abyss of chattel slavery, I concur that race is hardly more than the difference between those who descend from the free and those who do not.”  

He goes on to state that, “mental liberty, inner, mental freedom, is never something another person can give to you but rather something hard-won that anyone interested will have to take for herself, will have to seize with conviction, if she will have it at all.”

Reading his book, I found myself puzzling over the fact that if I meet another individual and I can’t immediately assess whether they are Black or white, it becomes a matter of concern.  As if I had to peg them in a particular slot before I could move on to any extended interaction.  Intermingling the scholarly with the personal, Williams has given us a thoughtful meditation for our polarized times. 

Williams also wrote the initial draft of the now much discussed “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” signed by more than 150 public figures and published in Harper’s Magazine.  (~JWFarrington)

CULTURE NOTES—THE NEW YORKER FESTIVAL

I am somewhat late to the game in taking advantage of lectures and concerts available online.  This week that changed.  I registered and paid for tickets to two events in the annual New Yorker Festival line-up.  

Anthony Fauci (abcnews.go.com)

New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter interviewed Dr. Anthony Fauci. In the course of the interview, he played a few audio clips of Dr. Fauci’s involvement with earlier epidemics.  Specter and Fauci have known each other a long time which was evident from their warm interaction.  The technology worked, and it was an informative and enjoyable program.

Margaret Atwood (curtisbrown.co.uk)

The conversation between Margaret Atwood and Jia Tolentino was less successful.  It was a treat for me to see and hear Ms. Atwood, a long favorite author.  But, Ms. Tolentino had problems enabling the audience to hear the author, resulting in several long delays.  And she came across as a less skilled interviewer, with long-winded questions and not always giving the author time to finish her thoughts. Fortunately, Ms. Atwood was gracious and patient. She shared her insights into the current political climate vis-a-vis her novels on the Gilead dystopia and why she signed the Harper’s letter mentioned above.

HOPE FOR A DYSTOPIA

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (2019)

(amazon.com)

I read The Handmaid’s Tale when it was published years ago and have not watched the TV version.  I purchased this sequel several months ago, but it has been languishing on a stack of other to-be-read volumes.  Prompted by the upcoming conversation with Atwood, I started it.  Why did I wait so long to read it?  

I found it utterly fascinating, even gripping.  Once the linkages between Baby Nicole, taken to Canada and raised there; Agnes Jemima, a Supplicant and aspiring Aunt; and the elderly Aunt Lydia, keeper of a secret journal, were clear, I became even more immersed.  How will these women fare?   What happens to Gilead, the corrupt totalitarian society that has taken over the United States?  It is a magnificent novel and a more than worthy successor to its precursor.  And it can be read on its own.   Highly recommended!  (~JWFarrington)

Note: Header photo of yellow trumpet flower ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved).