Attachments by Jeff Arch

This is primarily a love story, a love triangle between two best friends and one girl loved by both. But it is an incredibly complex story full of lies and secrets. Stewart Goodman, known by all as Goody and Santamo Piccolo, known as Pick, are unlikely best friends. Goody is a quiet and reflective boy who ponders all the big questions, while Pick is brash, cynical and dismissive of all things spiritual. Laura is Pick’s girlfriend and the love of his life. The three become fast friends at the boarding school all three attend.

Years after the three leave the school, a teacher, Griffin, becomes the  dean of the school, and as the story begins Griffin is felled by a stroke, and his last conscious words uttered to his secretary who sees him fall are, Pick and Goody. Throughout the book, Griffin is suspended between life and death, on life support machines. There are other characters who sometimes act as narrator, but I’m not going to try to sum up the story. The author jumps from time to time and character to character in a dizzying manner, that makes the entire novel read as a kind of stream of consciousness.

I’m more interested in conveying a theme returned to again and again in the novel which I will call a struggle, a tension, between clear cold reason and spirituality. I see it as the author’s argument with himself about this tension. Much like Ian McEwan’s wonderful little novel Black Dogs, in which it is clear that McEwan favors the life of reason his philosopher brother defends , but feels the pull of  that which reason seems not able to explain. The black dogs represent the two sides; we might even say the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Plato uses a similar metaphor in his description of the tripartite soul: the black steed of passion or appetite, the white steed of spirt and reason as the charioteer.

Pick has a no nonsense view of all things, while Goody seems open to all religions. At one point, Pick takes Goody to task for talking admiringly of Jesus, though Goody is a Jew.

“They want you to behave a certain way,” Pick went on, “so they throw Jesus at you.  Look at history, for Christ’s sake”

Goody shook his head. “It wasn’t propaganda when it started though.”

“You think he was the Son of God?” Pick asked. “I didn’t think you guys were allowed to”

Goody crumbled up some more hash and dropped it into the pipe bowl. “To me, Jesus is...he’s like the older brother, you know? Like the ultimate older brother”... I mean God is the father, right? Everybody at least agrees with that.

“Everybody who believes in God.”

Goody looked at him, to see if he could actually mean that. “Well when you’re a kid, you know, your father...he’s this powerful thing.

“He’s this force,” Goody went on. “And he’s above you and he’s mysterious and everything comes from him. And then Jesus, he’s like your older brother—he explains your father to you. He’s off to the side, just a little. And from there he interprets things. So that you can understand what the hell is going on sometimes.

Pick looked at him. “That’s what the Jews think?”

“I don’t know what they think. Nobody ever talks about him.”

While I am clearly on the side of reason and defend atheism, I have a sense for what both McEwan and Arch are wrestling with.

This is a truly beautiful love story. The love between Goody and Pick is lovely and both characters are drawn fully and carefully. The love Laura has for each of the boys in turn  Is beautiful rather than trashy or deceitful. The love of Griffin for his wife and son, all of these loves are described so well. 

Because of the many narrators and the sudden, unannounced shifts of  time and place this is not an easy novel to follow. Added to that  is the obvious fact  that Arch is most comfortable as a screen writer, so almost all of the text is in the form of monologue or dialogue. 

This is just a beautiful book, and as touching an examination of the many kinds of love as i can recall. This is not a book I would have picked up as a matter of course, but it fell into my hands from one of the readers in a small group of friends who pass along books to each other, and I was deeply touched by it. 

In many ways Griffin, who never speaks for himself, is the glue that holds the book and the characters together. Does he survive the stroke and return to his school and his family? That is something  readers will have to determine for themselves. 

Take What You Can Carry by Gian Sardar

It’s 1979,  Olivia Murray, who is a secretary at a Los Angeles newspaper,  has aspirations of becoming a photojournalist.  Out of the blue, she has a chance to go to Iraq with her Kurdish boyfriend, ostensibly for a weeding of his cousin, but also because he needs to reunite with his family. And so begins this remarkable 2021 novel by Gian Sardar, Take What You Can Carry. 

In her acknowledgments at the end of the book, Sarder explains that "... Kurdistan is spread over four countries, so isolation has been both geographic as well as political." While Sardar is quick to point out that her book is a work of fiction, it is based on true events. Sardar’s father is from Kurdistan, and her mother an American. She explains that her father’s tales about his life in Kurdistan provide the kernel of the story she tells in the novel. “Growing up in Kurdistan of Iraq, my father and his family endured atrocities I could never fully capture with words.”

In  many ways this novel is a love story, Olivia and her Kurdish boyfriend, Delan, find their love and their very lives in danger. Delan has called his parents in Iraq to tell them he might show up for the wedding, but they must speak in code, since the family is political, and they know the government taps their phones, and he is not sure from their coded conversation whether his mother is telling him to come, that it is relatively safe, or  whether instead she is telling him not to come, that the risks are too great. 

Even before his trip to Iraq, Delan agitates in the U.S to inform his friends of the plight of the Kurds in Iraq. 

The United States and Kissinger had encouraged and funded them in a rise against the Iraqi government, as a favor to the Shah of Iran, but abandoned them when they no longer served their purpose...They never wanted us to win. That’s what the committee found. They wanted us only to fight and keep Baghdad busy. We were a pawn. Kurds quit their jobs, school, you name it. Everyone joined in to fight and to die in a battle we were never allowed to win.

More than two hundred thousand refugees when they abandoned us, when we were being slaughtered, and not one dollar of humanitarian aid from the United States. Our leader, Barzani, he begged Kissinger for the United states to help.

There is a lot of drama in this novel, and I don’t intend to give much of the plot away. Delan has a brother, Soran, who is a passionate gardener, and who says he must stay out of the fray, since he has an adopted daughter, Lailan, to care for. At one point Olivia questions Soran about his habit of bathing at night. He replies:

People in our family, they’ve always been political. So even in peace we had problems, Arrests. Imprisonments. But then the the kingdom was toppled in ’58  and the republic created. From then on no Kurds had peace. And the government bombed during the day.” He stops, as if this is all that needs to be said, but then sees that’s not the case. “Imagine, not having clothes on when the sirens go  off or when the ground starts to shake and you have to run. Imagine soap in your hair when you see the shadow of the plane.

We learned to live at night. To work, to bathe. When the time came, you had to run. Take what you can carry to the mountains. That is where we would go. The mountains to be safe.

Olivia learns to hear the common saying, Head for the Hills, in a new light.

Juxtaposed with the harrowing arrests and raids and constant fear, Sardar manages also to describe the colors and sounds and smells of Iraq, and to understand the history of that ancient land. She describes the vibrant colors of the dresses at the wedding they attend, so different than the bland whites of American weddings. 

In the field, she catches a flash of silver: the bride’s sisters and friends are dancing with knives. “They’re dancing with knives” 

He turns “They’re about to cut the cake. That’s to let him know they can handle knives. That he should be good to their sister. That they will protect her. 

There is so much color and excitement in this novel, and while it is often sad and frightening, there are also moments of great beauty and courage. Delan is known for his spontaneous kindness and generosity which is often impulsive and even dangerous. But one of his acts of kindness, turns out to save the family when there is an attack by government forces. This incident is one that Sardar explains is based on a real events in her Kurdish father’s life.

This is a wonderful book and I am so grateful that it fell into my hands. I was all set to review a different book, The Five Wounds, by, KIrstin Valdez Quade. But I read that book weeks ago, and it was already vanishing from memory, so I decided on this novel that I had just finished.