A Tribute to Novelist Sue Miller

Although this happened more when I was younger, I occasionally run into an author who so impresses me that I know I will read all of her work as soon as I can get hold of it. Sue Miller is just such an author.  I have now read all but one of her long list of excellent novels including her memoir of her father, The Story of My Father. 

The recurring themes in her novels had already convinced me that much of her fiction is autobiographical, and her memoir of her father solidified that conviction. It is as if she has stirred together a cauldron of her memories of her several marriages and her life as a parent, and then spills them out in the pages of her novels. The Arsonist, one of her latest novels, is as usual, a close description of the everyday life of her characters. While the title suggests it is a novel about arson, turns out that the arsons and the arsonist are of minor importance to Miller while the major theme is how relationships go wrong and occasionally go right. 

The Boston Globe says of this late novel, “Entertaining…Fantastic sizzle both sexual and spiritual.” While sexual sizzle is no longer an issue for me, the spiritual sizzle of her work hits me hard and stays with me. 

Many years ago I read and reviewed her first, and most famous novel, The Good Mother. And then, only this past summer did I pick up an early novel, While I Was Gone. Having just traveled to my home for a final visit with my last living sibling, and while there involved in an intense discussion with my oldest male friend about choosing death while still mobile and cognizant, I found myself arguing for life and possibility. My brother died while I was on the train coming home, and his death added to the impact the novel had on me. The heroine of the novel is married when she has kind of mystical experience in which she feels outside her life, indeed, outside her body. She then goes through a series of reflections on her life regarding her marriage and family. She wonders if she has chosen well, and begins a flirtation with an old lover which very nearly derails her marriage. What occurs is that she begins to think about alternate lives she might have lived and alternate relationships she might have pursued. In short, she considers all that seems bland and repetitive in her present life, and only at the last moment begins to realize all that is good about her family life and her life with her husband. It takes a shock and a crisis to jolt her into this new appraisal.

Another of the recurring themes in her books is Alzheimer’s or other debilitating diseases. In The Story of My Father, she recounts the slow dissolution of her father as he struggles with and finally succumbs to the disease.  While the book is sad, Miller is brutally honest about her own feelings, her resentments mixed with fear and deep loyalty to her once brilliant, academic father.

Although there are plots and story-lines, it is what happens in the interior life that really interests Miller and creates the spiritual sizzle of her words. While she has immense respect and admiration for her father’s intellectual pursuits, she also comes to realize how his intense interests in many ways distanced him from his wife and children.

There was an impartiality, and therefore a distance, in even my father’s closest and most loving attention…I certainly knew him to be capable of forgetfulness of what to him seemed mundane or unimportant, and this occasionally included obligations he’d undertaken to one of us or to my mother…the nightmare side of living with someone whose first allegiance is elsewhere, is other worldly. You are left, you are abandoned. You have no real importance in the great scheme of things.

So far I have said nothing about Miller’s conflicted relationship with her mother, and her self-doubts being a mother, who, like her father, needs huge amounts of time to write and reflect, too often to the detriment of her children.

There is so much more to say about the complex emotional reflections of this brilliant author. I will content myself with a final comment about Miller’s unabashed love of men. Of course she is critical of the non-domesticity of many/most men, but her descriptions of her father and of the husbands in her novels leave no doubt that she admires so much about good men, good fathers.  Perhaps there is a book, The Good Father, in her future.

Horse by Geraldine Brooks

I know next to nothing about horses and am, at best, a sloppy historian. Geraldine Brooks knows tons about horses and is a superb historian. Her 2022 book, Horse, fascinated me from the first page to the last. Her character Jess, in 2019, is an articulator, i.e. a combination artist and zoologist who puts together skeletons. She is hired by the Smithsonian Museum to dis-articulate and then re-articulate a famous horse skeleton. Dr. Catherine Morgan is a scientific researcher whom Jess has been assigned to assist. 

Says Catherine:

One of my areas of interest is the effect of conformation on the locomotor biomechanics of the horse. Basically, I’m trying to determine what bone structure allows them to run fast while avoiding injury. To do that, I’m measuring and describing all the great racehorses whose skeletons are still available.

Catherine stepped up to the exhibit label on the plinth and drew out her reading glasses. “Horse!” She read. “I can’t believe it. I don’t suppose you people have the Mona Lisa stashed somewhere, labeled Smiling Girl?”

“Not just Horse,” she said. THE horse. What you have here is the greatest racing stallion in American turf history.

Jess’ story is just one of the threads in this magnificent historical novel.  Warfield’s Jarret is a slave on the farm of a famous horse breeder, not given a last name, but identified by his owner’s name. Thomas Scott is a not well known artist who is commissioned to paint a portrait of Darley, a racehorse who has been given to Jarret’s father, Harry, who has bought his own freedom. The horse is given to him in lieu of a year’s wages, and yet it is against the law for a negro to own a racehorse, let alone to race him in stakes races. So, the horse must be officially registered in  Warfield’s name. 

It is Jarret who raises and trains the horse, and in a manner that differs in  important ways from tradition. Unlike today’s thoroughbreds who are raced as two year olds. Darley is not even ridden until he is much older. 

“When can we ride him? She asked.”

“Long time yet, miss Clay. His bones got to grow. Best let that happen in its own good time. Harry, “didn’t hold with the newfangled idea of racing two-year-olds.”

Instead the horses are not raced until they are four or older, and they are trained to run four mile heats, sometimes three such heats in a single day.

Alongside the story of Darley the racehorse, there is in this carefully researched novel another more serious  strain regarding slavery and the perilous lives of slaves who can be bought and sold on the whim of the owner. Jarret’s father intends to buy his son out of slavery, but he has already depleted his funds in buying the freedom of his wife, and is counting on the purses from races to buy Jarret’s freedom.

Jarret is close to horses from his infancy. “Look at him…He’s half colt himself.”

The first bed he could remember was in a horse stall. He shared straw with the two geldings in the carriage house while his mother slept in the mansion, nursemaid to the mistress’s infant. Jarret hardly saw her. His first language had been the subtle gestures and sounds of horses. He’d been slow to master human speech, but he could interpret the horses: their moods, their alliances, their simple wants and many fears. He came to believe that horses lived with a world of fear, and when you grasped that, you had a clear idea of how to be with them.

Much of this novel is about the mounting sense of rebellion among the slaves, wanting to run and to be free, but so aware of the consequences if caught. Theo, the Englishman horse painter is well aware of how negroes are depicted by artists, and is writing  a dissertation on the depictions of Africans in British art. 

He planned to write of Coon caricatures, Oriental fantasies, the decorative enslaved servant in ornate livery, proffering fruit or waving peacock-feathered fans for a White master. His thesis argued that these paintings were never meant to be viewed as portraits of individuals, merely status signifiers of the privilege, wealth, and power of the White sitters. The reality of quotidian Black life didn’t merit depiction…

This is a superb novel on so many levels, and the journalist, historian Brooks juggles the various stories with the same craftsmanship that won her the Pulitzer prize for her earlier book March.

Monogamy by Sue Miller

He’s been much more careful in his marriage to Annie. More careful and more faithful.
    Yet not entirely faithful.
    Which is partly what’s making him remember the end with Frieda. 
Because he’s done it again.

Sue Miller has done it again: written an astounding novel about family life and all of its complexities. 

In her newest novel, Monogamy, published in 2020, Miller undertakes to describe in meticulous detail the marriage of Graham and Annie. I will not be spoiling the novel for you readers by telling you that the anatomy of this marriage is described after Graham dies in his sleep of a heart attack. Viewed as an ideal couple by those who know them, Miller shows us the underside of the marriage as Annie begins to deal with her grief.

Both Annie and Graham have been married before. During the 70s Graham and Frieda had decided to experiment with an open marriage.

An open marriage. They’d agreed on it at first. It had been that era—the world was shifting and changing rapidly around them, and Graham had stepped into this altered universe eagerly, along with what seemed like half of Cambridge, compelled by all the things it seemed to promise—among them a different meaning for marriage, for sex.

The problems was that Graham had been happy in this new world, and Frieda hadn’t. She tired, she dutifully had a few lovers in the first year or so. But then she got pregnant with Lucas and realized that she’d really never wanted any of it.

As was so often the case, men jumped at this new freedom while so many women simply went along with it, or pretended to, in order to preserve their marriages. It is Frieda who steps away from the marriage, taking Lucas with her. Eventually, Graham and Frieda become friends and share custody of their young son. Frieda also, though not by choice, assumes the role of confessor for Graham, and he confesses to her his infidelity with a recently divorced woman in their circle of friends, Her name is Rosemary, and he also tells his oldest male friend about his new ‘slip’. 

The problem is that Rosemary—Rosemary Gregory, the woman he’s slept with maybe four maybe five times—has started to behave as if there’s some kind of commitment between them, as though she has a claim on him...He needs to end it, but that’s something he’s never been good at—disappointing people. At being, as he sees it,  unkind.

After his death, Annie discovers that both his best friend and Frieda knew of the infidelity, and it seems as if perhaps everyone knows but Annie.  

What is most amazing about Miller’s writing is how completely she develops her characters and how thoroughly she describes their lives. Although describing only an incident here and there, a memory of the past, an anticipation of the future, it feels to the reader that they are being told everything in detail.  Philosophers who called themselves phenomenologists argued that philosophy should be a description of lived life, and as Iris Murdoch has pointed out, if this is, indeed, the task of the philosopher, then novelists are the very best at doing this. And Sue Miller is of the first rank in this description of the lived inner lives of her characters. 

In the past couple of months I have read four of Miller’s novels, all close descriptions of marriages and family life. The Senator’s Wife equals the exquisitely detailed description of the slow dissolution of a marriage. While I Was Gone also displays the immense emotional intelligence of Sue Miller.  

It is hard to do justice to her novels by reviewing them, since their greatness is in the magnificent description of the relationships. She does not preach, and tells us that she has no great insights about monogamy or marriage. But I think you will disagree with the author’ own assessment of her work if you swim into her wonderfully articulated stories.

The Taste of Ginger by Mansi Shah

Preeti Desai is a successful corporate lawyer who has, in her estimation, finally achieved the assimilation into American culture that she had striven all of her life to achieve. But then a horrible accident involving her brother and sister-in-law, call her back to India, and she realizes how much she still walks like and elephant. Her mother has told her this so often. “I was around nine years old when I realized she wasn’t calling me fat. She meant that I wasn’t demure and obedient—qualities ever good Indian daughter  should have.”

And so begins this fascinating, sometimes heartbreaking story of an Indian family that has immigrated to the U.S. and parents who desperately want their two children to assimilate and succeed as Americans, but also want them to retain Indian values and culture. Mansi Shah, with her incisive and lovely prose lays out this story in her 2022 novel, A Taste of Ginger.

Preeti has not talked to her mother for months:

Not since she found out that my boyfriend—now ex-boyfriend—and I had been living together in Los Angelas. Cohabitating with a dhoriya was, in her opinion, the most shameful thing her daughter could have done. Living with a white boy was right up there with marrying someone from a lower caste or talking back to your elders.

Preeti and her brother, Neel, have been striving since childhood to sluff off Indian clothes and habits in order to succeed in this new home in Chicago.

Despite living in America for over twenty years, my parents didn’t have any friends who weren’t Gujarati. Much to my chagrin as a teenager trying to fit into this new country. Devon Avenue gave my parents the option of living in the West without giving up the East, and expecting their children to do the same.

When her brother and pregnant sister-in-law are seriously injured in a rickshaw truck accident in India, Preeti must fly ‘home’ although she risks losing her job at the law firm where she works 60+ hour a week. And there she finds as an NRI (non-resident Indian) that she is as singled out and foreign as she has been in the states. Unlike in Los Angela, in India she looks the same as those around her, but is immediately set apart.

Having been born in a higher caste, her family had lived a relatively wealthy life in India with servants to care for their daily needs; in America her engineer father is not recognized for the educated man he is and must take on what for him is menial labor. It is not until she returns to India that she really realizes how much her parents had given up to come to America. Neither had she really understood the Indian caste system, which she is forced to recognize when she has the audacity to associate with an Indian photographer who is of a lower caste. And finally, she did not realize that her mother had been unhappy in this country, yearning for her old life in India, but unwilling to go back.

As an immigrant child of immigrant parents, I grew up knowing my future had to be their future. That meant getting the best grades , going to the best college, and getting the best job to ensure the sacrifices they had made for us were validated.

While her brother Neel has also had to work hard to assimilate, he has been able to retain some core Indian values. He marries a very traditional Indian girl who seems to easily balance the two cultures. Preeti admires but also resents her apparent ease as she reverts to Indian values.  “You guys are among the lucky few that have a love marriage that fell within the biodata matches of the arranged system, and you have to protect it...You have to give me hope that someday, somewhere, i will be able to find that kind of happiness too.”

Although her sister-in-law survives the accident, the baby does not, and it turns out that Preeti must stay in India much longer than intended to help her loved brother re-unite with his grief-stricken wife.

Shah develops her story and her charters slowly with a keen eye and forgiving heart. Over the  time there, she finally manages to reconnect with her mother, and to realize how she has struggled in her American life. She also comes to understand how limited her knowledge of the caste system is.

During my Indian childhood and infrequent trips back, I had never had occasion to be around anyone from another caste outside of servants and vendors, and I wasn’t familiar with the differences in lifestyle between them. It hadn’t occurred to me that there were public schools here because I’d only known people who went to private ones. What I knew of India applied only to the upper caste, and I realized I knew nothing of how most of the country lived.

Breaking Clean by Judy Blunt

Judy Blunt wrote these lovely snapshots of thirty years of life on wheat and cattle ranches in northeastern Montana as memoir. It stuns me that I had not run across this book before, finally gathered together as a book in 2002. Many, even most, of my reader friends had read this long ago. I’m happy I discovered the volume on a friend’s bookshelf during a recent train trip to Salt lake City.

In August of 1986, I left Phillips County with a new divorce and an old car, with three scared kids and some clothes piled in back.  We followed the sun west for hours, climbing mountain passes, crossing river after river, until we spanned the final bridge into Missoula. The kids started school the next morning, and within days I started my freshman year at the University of Montana, the four of us holding hands and stepping together into a world of mountains and shopping malls.

I have to suppose the title is ironic, since the break was anything but clean. First, at thirteen, she fought against turning into a woman, then married a man twice her age whom she started dating at fifteen and married at eighteen. A marriage more of inevitability than choice. 

I was eighteen when I walked down the aisle on my father’s arm. The groom was almost thirty, a man of simple tastes and few passions, staunch honor and little experience. I joined  him at the alter, bristling with independence yet eager to please, desperate for attention yet filled with fierce energy born of old anger—a riddle behind my homemade veil.  From my parents to the unwitting hands of my husband I passed the terrible power of judgment and reward, the absolute authority I connected with love.

Blunt understand how two edged the praise was for tough ranch women. ‘allowed’ to do men’s work, but never to own land or livestock. 

In my real-life, out-west community, the depressing sequel was being written as i watched, and the work parts were harder to skip. I knew women savvy to the working of cattle and horses, women who rode the hay rake in June and took to the fields at harvest. But without exception, they picked up a thank-you and walked back to tackle the work that was theirs alone. Women’s work. If I learned nothing else in my early years, I learned the scorn that twisted those words into insults.

The prose in this book is simple but so beautiful. Hard to believe she did not really start writing until she was in her thirties. I could easily make this review simply a string of quote from the book.

Womanly arts be damned. I wanted the ease, the power, of my mother, horseback. I wanted the real myth, and I set out to get it. 

That fall, as I turned twelve, the sole member of my peer group defected. My cousin Lois turned thirteen and despite our blood-sister oath forbidding such things, she put on a bra, ratted her hair into haystacks and kissed the hired man. I worked on my own appearance with grim determination. I spit and crossed my legs like  field hand. , I peeled my nails off with my teeth, and kept my hair bobbed away from my face. I preferred stacking bales and working cattle, and ducked house chores when I could. I climbed trees, rode the milk pen steers to a standstill and strung frogs ten-deep on a willow spear. I read myself into the strongest characters  of  half the Malta library. I made it last a year. And when, in the inexorable process of time, as my body betrayed me, my rage was terrible....Dark brown hair, sun-faded to the color of  hay, ear length and shaggy, needing a wash. A big, raw-boned girl my mother said. Tall for twelve. A square, horsy face, I thought, yet hidden by owlish glasses, chin jutting like a shoehorn, my father’s chin and his wolfish teeth wrangling for space behind my tight lips...That night I tiptoed to the bathroom, selected a clean sock from the laundry basket and gripped it in my teeth, just in case. After dabbing my bare chest with alcohol, I attempted to lance my breast buds with a darning needle.

Unable to prevent either her periods or her budding breasts, she finally succumbs to adulthood. While many of these little vignettes are sad or frightening, they are not without humor and and told as only a born storyteller can tell them. 

I loved this book. It returned me to the simple joy of reading. Judy Blunt is a tough and brilliant woman who finally broke clean in her thirties and pursued the education she had always dreamed of. She had to defy her husband and her community to do it. She shows us a tough ranch-women’s brand of feminism built in the crucible of hard work and  bearing children.

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Elizabeth Zott is a brilliant chemist who, perhaps unfortunately, is also beautiful.

Once a research chemist, Elizabeth Zott was a woman with flawless skin and an unmistakable demeanor of someone who was not average and never would be.

The main character in Bonnie Garmus’ delightful 2022 novel, Lessons in Chemistry is as stubborn as she is brilliant. She refuses to be seen as simply an extension of her Nobel Prize nominated boyfriend whom she lives with but refuses to marry. Her hiring by a scientific think-tank is already viewed by the male workforce as due to the influence of her famous boyfriend. And she realizes that no matter how brilliant her work is, she will be seen as riding the coat-tails of Calvin Evans.

Elizabeth meets Calvin when he discovers her stealing beakers from his lab, which she explains is due to a lack of funding for her research. 

“The problem, Calvin,” she asserted, “is that half the population is being wasted. It’s not just that i can’t get the supplies I need to complete my work, it’s that women can’t get the education they need to do what they’re meant to do. And even if they do attend college, it will never be in a place like Cambridge. Which means they won’t be offered the same opportunities nor afforded the same respect. They’ll start at the bottom and stay there. Don’t even get me started on pay. And all because they didn’t attend a school that wouldn’t admit them in the first place.”

The action in this novel takes place in the 60s, but Garmus thinks not much has changed since then.

Garmus creates some really funny and delightful characters including a dog who understands a very large number of words and a precocious daughter “who could hum a Bach concerto but couldn’t tie her own shoes; who could explain the earth’s rotation but stumbled at tac-tac-toe.”

The plot of the novel is less important than the commentary on science and society that Garmus provides. Briefly put, Calvin dies, and Elizabeth is fired from the research institute soon after his death. Out of a job and nearly broke, she has little to do but work on her already very accomplished cooking skills. Cooking she insists is like chemistry, in fact it is chemistry at the practical level. Eventually in this whacky story, Elizabeth becomes the reluctant star of a cooking show, Supper at Six. Unexpectedly, the show is a huge hit, and she soon has a devoted following. Between recipes, Elizabeth provides running commentary on the absurd exclusion of women from science, making them stay at home and make babies in a form of legalized slavery.

The all-male workforce at the institute sees Elizabeth’s research project as unimportant and bound to go nowhere, and after she is fired, her work is simply stolen by one of her male colleagues. Only Calvin recognizes her brilliance, and he is no longer there to defend her. 

Darwin had long ago proposed that life sprang from a single-celled bacterium, which then went on to diversify into a complex planet of people, plants, and animals. Zott? She was like a bloodhound on the trail of where that first cell had come from. In other words , she was out to solve one of the greatest chemical mysteries of all time, and if her findings continued apace, there was no question she would do just that.

As her fame blossoms as cooking-show host, Elizabeth has only one real friend, Harriet, whom Elizabeth has hired as her assistant. They agree on most things, but not on one essential point. 

According to Harriet, men were a world apart from women. They required coddling, they had fragile egos, they couldn’t allow a woman intelligence or skill if it exceeded their own. “Harriet that’s ridiculous,” Elizabeth had argued. “Men and women are both human beings. And as humans, we’re by-products of our upbringings, victims of our lackluster educational system, and choosers of our behaviors.  In short, the reduction of women to something LESS than men, and the elevation of men to something MORE than women, is not biological: it’s cultural.

I did not choose this book for its political significance, but simply because it sounded delightful and it is. Bonnie Garmus has worked widely in the fields of technology, medicine and education, and she shows off her considerable talents in this wonderful comedic novel. Like her zany character Elizabeth, Bonnie decides, “Don’t work the system. Outsmart it.”

If you as a reader sometimes read a book just for the delight of reading it, this is a book for you, easily the funniest and most clever book I have read this year.

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

Teacher seeks pupil. Must hast have an earnest desire to save the world
Apply in person

This ad enrages the narrator of the book, Ishmael. Although he has in the past sought a teacher, he is now disillusioned, and angry at the naive audacity of the ad. He answers the ad simply to expose the person who wrote it as a fake. Imagine his response when he discovers just who that is.

Because it was backed by darkness, the glass in this window was black—opaque, reflective. I made no attempt to see beyond as I approached. I was the spectacle under observation. On arrival, I continued to gaze into my own eyes for a moment, then rolled the focus forward beyond the glass—and found myself looking into another pair of eyes.

I fell back, startled. Then recognizing what I’d seen. I fell back again, now a little frightened.

The creature on the other side of the glass was a full-grown gorilla.

And so begins one of the most captivating and insightful books I have read in years. Actually the book had gone through several iterations until Quinn published the current version in 1992.

I’m surprised it took me so long to discover this brilliant treatise on human’s destruction of the earth, quite a fitting topic for our earth-day show.

Yes, he is being interviewed by a gorilla and a very clever one at that. A poster on the wall reads

WITH MAN GONE

WILL THERE 

BE HOPE

FOR GORILLA? 

This koan recurs many times in the book. The gorilla announces, “I am the teacher,’ and so begins an incredibly complex discussion of how we got to where we are, and how we might save ourselves and the rest of sentient life forms on earth.

Once you learn to discern the voice of Mother Culture humming in the background, telling her story over and over again to the people of your culture, you’ll never stop being conscious of it. Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you’ll be tempted to say to the people around you ‘How can you listen to this stuff and not recognize it for what it is?’ and if you do this, people will look at you oddly and wonder what the devil you’re talking about. In other words, if you take this educational journey with me, you’re going to find yourself alienated from the people around you—friends, family, past associates, and so on. 

There is a whole philosophy of history spun out in the gorilla’s lessons, from creation myths to a tracing of the history of agriculture. The story of The Leavers and The Takers. The story is too complex to simply overview, nor am i anything like as clever as Quinn and the gorilla. 

“And so your account of creation ends, ’And finally man appeared.’

“Yes.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that there was no more to come. Meaning that creation had come to an end.”

“This is what it was all leading up to”

“Yes.’

“Of course. Everyone in your culture knows this. The pinnacle was reached in man. Man is the climax of the whole cosmic drama of creation.”

“Yes.”

“When man finally appeared, creation came to an end, because its objective had been reached. There was nothing left to create.”

“That seems to be the unspoken assumption.”

Ishmael is a wise if impatient teacher and he does not simply lay out his theory of how we came to this precipice we are on, he proceeds in Socratic fashion, urging the narrator to dig out the story, and play his part in discovery, to bring out of concealment the story of our own destruction.

At first I thought that the author must have read The Sixth Extinction, and was playing off of it, but if anything, it is the other way around since this novel predates the publication of The Sixth Extinction and centers more on economic history than on scientific data.

In essence, the world was made for man, and man was made to rule it. But since the world would not meekly submit, man had to conquer it.

“I’m saying that the price you’ve paid is not the price of becoming human. It’s not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It’s the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.“

Martin Heidegger tells a similar story in his essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in which he claims that the present worlding, the world we are bringing  into existence, treats nature as standing reserve, that which stands in reserve for us to use and use up. Quinn’s version of the story sis far less pompous than Heidegger’s and far more entertaining.

Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson

Black Cake is a sprawling, brilliant debut novel by Charmaine Wilkerson. It is hard to believe it is a debut novel, since the writing is so rich and complex, but she has been writing for a long time. 

Benedetta Bennet (known as Benny), and Coventina (Covey) have been best friends for life, and their voices are two of the most important narrative voices in this novel, although there are a host of narrators representing generations of families. The chapters are split between then (1965) and now (2018). Benny and Byron, once super-close siblings have drifted apart as they matured, but the death of Eleanor Bennett, their mother, brings them together, and the narrative she has left behind for them shows them that Eleanor was not the person they or others thought she was. Benny and Byron, or B & B as their mother likes to call them, have been summoned to Eleanor Bennett’s attorney’s office and are given a handwritten note and a USB drive. The note says simply “B and B, there’s a small black cake in the freezer for you. Don’t throw it out.”

As Wilkerson tells us in her Author’s Note:

It was my personal familiarity with a particular Caribbean food, black cake, that led obliquely to this book. It started me thinking about the emotional  weight carried by recipes and other familial markers that are handed down from one generation to the next. Then it had me writing about characters who must hold fast to their sense of self when they learn their lives have been built on a dubious narrative.

What we call holiday fruit cake is as close as most of us come to black cake. But the Caribbean black cake is made with fruit that has been soaked in alcohol over long periods of times, and is especially treasured as a wedding cake.

Not everyone sits down to write a book but everyone is a storyteller, in one form or other. As I wrote this novel, a lifetime of anecdotes and fleeting impressions shared by the Caribbean members of my multicultural family helped me to develop some of the fictional characters and scenarios from the 1950s and 1960s. The scenes from the unnamed island in the Caribbean reflect some of the geography and history of Jamaica...The fictional town where members of the book’s older generation grew up is inspired by the northeast coast of that island and uses a mix of actual and invented locations.

Without telling you much of the story that unfolds as B and B listen to the story their mother tells them, one of the two best friends is given by her father as a bride to a much older and powerful money-lender. Benny, who is a great long-distance swimmer helps Covey to escape the island and the marriage, but must then escape and change her own identity because of the long reach of the money lender and his family.

While B and B slowly learn the real history of their mother, scores of other characters are introduced. Covey eventually becomes a kind of food anthropologist telling family stories via food traditions. Benny becomes s world famous open-water distance swimmer, and eventually marries and moves to the United States.

In many ways Wilkerson displays the dangers for Blacks living in white communities., and in this way the novel seems very current. A black man pulled over for a busted tail light, and while trying to get his wallet, the officer pulls a gun on him.

What was the kid supposed to do if he was asked to show his driver’s license?

How is a person supposed to reach for their wallet? Are black people in America not allowed to have hands?

Byron would like to believe that this epidemic of mistreatment, this bullying of unarmed black men is just that, an outbreak, though prolonged, that can be brought under control. He wants to keep believing in law enforcement officers, to respect the risky work that they do, knowing that every day they step into unknown territory. He wants to know that he can still pick up the phone and call the cops if he ever needs to. There’s a lot of anger out there. A lot of hurt. Where  are they all gonna end up—black white, whoever—if things don’t get better?

Good question, and Wilkerson is a master at spotlighting this and so many contemporary issues. This is a wonderful novel, one of the best I have read in the past two years, and a fitting tribute to Women’s History month. 

The Invisible Life of Addie Larue by V.E. Schwab

Try to imagine what it would be like to not be remembered by anyone. Adeline Larue has made the mistake of praying to the dark gods to be free and to live without fear of death. The title of this Faustian tale is The Invisible Life of Addie Larue, by V.E. Schwab.

The author warns us in a prefatory note which she attributes to Estele Magritte, 1642-1719:

The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle , unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling  them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price. And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.

I am not a big fan of fantastical literature, but this novel raises so many fascinating philosophical questions  about personal identity and its link to memory that I continued to ponder the questions long after I had finished reading the story, a story which stands on its own even without the philosophical meandering, but which is so much better as a book because of the reflections on personal identity.

Adeline is a girl who lived at the cusp between 1698 and the eighteenth century. Much loved by her father, a woodworker, he always takes her with him when he takes his wares to market. “Adeline is seven, the same as the number of freckles on her face. She is bright and small and quick as a sparrow.” She continues to leave her small village three times a year to go to the city of Le Mans, but when she turns twelve, her parents decide she should no longer be allowed to go to the large town, that it is unseemly for a young girl to wander the market. 

“You are not a child anymore.” 

And Adeline understands and still does not understand at all—feels as if she’s being punished for simply growing up.

And then she is sixteen and, against her will, betrothed to a man more than twice her age.

I do not want to marry.

“I do not want to belong to someone else,” she says with sudden vehemence.  The words are a door flung wide, and now the rest pour out of her. “ I do not want to belong to anyone but myself. I want to be free. Free to live, and to find my own way, to love, or to be alone, but at least it is my choice, and I am so tired of having no choices, so scared of the years rushing by beneath my feet.  I do not want to die as I’ve lived, which is no life at all.

This she tells to a shadow, a handsome man with dark curls and green eyes, a man she comes to call Luc.

The novel jumps from France in 1714 to New York City in 2014. Addie’s wish has been granted and she has lived for over three hundred years. The curse for her freedom and apparent immortality is that no one remembers her. She is forgotten simply by turning her back or walking away. If she takes a man to her bed, she knows he will awaken in the morning startled by the stranger in  bed with him. Although she can get money, usually by stealing, landlords will not rent to a lone woman. It is only when she begins to wear trousers and a buttoned coat, a hat that is pulled down over her face  that she can roam freely. 

The darkness claimed  he’d given her freedom, but really, there is no such thing as freedom for a woman, not in a world where they are bound up inside their clothes, and sealed inside their homes, a world where only men are given leave to roam.

I will return to the story in a moment, but  let us first ask about the connection between memory and personhood. Oliver Sacks describes a man who has no short-term memory at all, but only a hazy recall of a distant past. If philosophers are right, memory is a necessary condition of personal identity, of being the same person over time. Sacks tells of tricking a client (he does not like the word “patient”) into looking into a mirror and seeing not the person he thinks himself to be, but a much older man. He is horrified and confused, and Sacks chides himself for such a cruel trick.

I agree with Sacks and others that memory is crucial to personal identity. But what of Schwab’s clever trick of asking whether a person not remembered is really a person. Will they feel as Addie does, that she is really invisible because unknown.

Eventually, Addie wanders into a bookstore, The Last Word, and steals a copy of The Odyssey, in Greek no less. She knows that even if the clerk sees her theft, by the time he confronts her on the street, he will have forgotten who she is and what he is doing with her. Imagine the shocked surprise when she returns to the shop a few days later asking to exchange to book for an English copy, and the clerk says, “I remember you” and scolds her for her impudence in trying now to exchange the stolen book for another. But all Addie can hear are  his words, “ I remember you.”

Finally she is known, remembered, but how can this be so, how can the clerk, Henry, remember her in spite of the curse? To discover the answer to that question as well as the fates of Adeline and Henry, you will have to read the book.

While this novel will more than stretch your ability to suspend disbelief, I think it will also enchant you and lead you to ask  questions about your own identity and what it depends on.