Divergent by Veroinca Roth

In this age of electronic games and devices, I’m always glad to see or hear that young people are reading. I have a niece, Kate, who, like I, is an avid reader. Knowing that I love books, she gave me for Christmas a favorite book of hers, and I read it in a couple of days over the holidays. Since I have almost never reviewed what might be called teen fiction, I decided to talk about this book today. I am so proud of her as a studious reader, and expect her to be a good member of the world she finds herself in. 

The book is titled Divergent and was a first novel for Veronica Roth. From what I hear, it will soon be made into a movie, and is the first of a trilogy that will have a very large following among young people. Besides being quite an interesting adventure/mystery, I think the moral questions and dilemmas presented in the book make it much more important than simply an interesting page-turner.

The plot is a fairly complicated one, and there are many surprises in the end, none of which I have any intention of divulging, but I will lay out the general theme of the book and say why I think it is a good read for serious-minded young people (and quite entertaining for us older folk as well).

The novel is a futuristic (dystopian) description of a rigorously stratified society divided into five factions: Abnegation, Candor, Erudite, Amity, and Dauntless. Reminiscent of  Marge Piercy’s 1976 novel, Woman on the Edge of Time, at the age of sixteen all children go through a choosing ceremony, at which time they may either remain in the group they have been raised in, or leave their families and choose a new group.  In Pierce’s overtly political and feminist novel, adolescents choose a new name for themselves and leave their families in a kind of coming-of-age ceremony. After that time, they may choose to continue to relate with their families, but no longer as parents or sons and daughters, but simply as equal members of society.

The sixteen year olds in Divergent take an aptitude test shortly before the choosing ceremony, and are told then which group  they have an aptitude for. However, they are not bound by the results of the aptitude test, and may freely choose a group other than the one they have been born to or the one the aptitude test suggests. The names of the groups describe roughly their roles. The lead character, Beatrice (who changes her name to Trice) comes from an Abnegation family. Abnegation folks are selfless and do service work for the community. They wear gray clothing, do not call attention to themselves in either dress or action. Candor are straight-forward and apt to say whatever is on their minds, quite willing to debate with any who hold opposing views, and quite willing to give critical appraisals. "Their faction values honesty and sees the truth as black and white, so that is what they wear." The Erudite class are the intellectuals who study hard and are supposed to serve the community in planning decisions. The Dauntless are the warriors who protect the fences that border the cities and are known for their bravery. They are tattooed and have body piercings; they jump onto and off of moving trains and perform other acts of rather reckless bravery. The Amity are less clearly defined, but are often described as laughing and singing and wearing colorful clothes (red and yellows). There are also some who are factionless, either because they have been kicked out of their chosen faction or have failed to choose. The factionless are left to fend for themselves, and it is clearly dangerous and daunting to be without a faction.

As Beatrice tells us early in the book, the Choosing Ceremony is an important and sometimes frightful time for the young. "I will decide on a faction: I will decide the rest of my life; I will decide to stay with my family or abandon them." Although it is possible to have a bit of time with family on Visitor’s Day even if one chooses a different faction, there is tremendous pressure to treat faction over family, and the chances for any meaningful connections with family if one chooses a different faction are minimal.

Much to the surprise of their Abnegation parents, Both Beatrice and her brother Caleb choose to leave their family and faction. Trice chooses the Dauntless faction, and Caleb the Erudite. Although Caleb re-enters the action late in the book, it is Trice’s initiation into the Dauntless faction and the daily life that it involves that is described. The reader also realizes early in the book that Trice's aptitude test has indicated quite divergent results, although a kind tester saves her from actually being labeled Divergent, since Divergents are seen as threats to the existing order, and if discovered, punished by becoming factionless.

What I find uplifting about the book are the moral dilemmas Trice is faced with because of her divergent aptitudes and her love for her family. Eventually, she comes to believe that "Selflessness and bravery aren’t that different," and instead of shunning her divergent tendencies, she embraces them. Along with a brave boyfriend (who is a trainer for the Dauntless initiates, and also shows divergent aptitudes), they uncover a sinister plot hatched by a power-hungry Erudite who has found a way to electronically brainwash the Dauntless and use their fearlessness to her own ends. 

I also found the portrayal of the relationship between Tobias and Trice to be a good and wholesome one. While there are mild sexual overtones to the book, rather than appealing to a teenage audience by sensationalizing the sexual element, Roth accentuates fidelity and genuine caring for the other rather than focusing on sex. 

I was often reminded of Plato’s distinction between genuine courage and foolhardiness as I read this book. There is a plea for tolerance to be found in its pages, and a clear warning against allowing peer pressure to get in the way of morality and truth. All and all, were I a parent of a teenager, I would recommend this book to them, as I recommend it you. Indeed, I have to admit I will probably see the movie when it comes out, although I rather doubt I will read the other books in the promised trilogy.

The Enchanted by Rene Denfeld

I want to talk to you this morning about a sensational book by a local author; the book will be published in March of this year. The author is Rene Denfeld; she calls the book a novel, and it is a novel, but one that she could only have written because of her work in prisons and for men on death row. Besides being an internationally known author and journalist, she has worked as a Mitigation Specialist and fact investigator in death penalty cases. 

The title of the novel is The Enchanted, and it begins with a narration by one of the death row inmates who tells us, “This is an enchanted place. Others don’t see it but I do. “

The most enchanted things happen here—the most enchanted things you can imagine. I want to tell you while I still have time, before they close the black curtain and I take my final bow.

To say that it is a sad book would be an incredible understatement, but given the insights and compassion of its author, the sadness is dwarfed by the importance of the content. The lead character, who is always referred to simply as “the lady", works for attorneys who represent men on death row. Her task is not to get these men out of prison, but simply to get them off of death row and back into the general prison population. The other central characters are the men themselves, a defrocked priest, and a warden whose wife is dying of cancer.

The descriptions of the inside of the prison, and especially of the dark, windowless hall of death row are detailed and horrific. 

Back so long ago, when they built this enchanted place, they killed men in three ways: they waited for them to die, worked them to death, and they hanged them. 

Not much has changed. Instead of working men to death, there is a slow starvation of the body and soul. And instead of rope they use a machine.

But while the lady works with and for a single death row inmate at a time, she is not at all blinded to the atrocities some of them have committed and for which they are on the row. Over and over she tells the reader that she has more sympathy for the victims of these men than for the men, but still she in some sense understands them and advocates for them. 

Her clients rarely walk to freedom—that is a myth. She can count the truly innocent clients she has had on one finger. Most of the men she works with are guilty. They may not be guilty of all they were charged, but they are guilty of more than enough. Many are guilty of even worse, the crimes that were suspected and never proven.

No, the dream of the death row client is to escape execution for a life behind bars. They want to escape the dungeon into the rest of the prison. They want a visit from their mom that involves a touch. They want to stand in the sun, to play a game of ball, to eat at a table with other men, to see the sky and feel the wind. Those are their dreams, maybe small to others, but huge to them. It is a modest dream, in a sense, and yet one that is amazingly hard to achieve for a man on death row.

The lady digs into the pasts of these men. If they give her permission to do so (and often they refuse) she interviews family members and past acquaintances hoping to turn up facts that will lead not to their freedom, but simply get them off of death row. The lady’s own very difficult past helps her to realize what may be relevant for the attorneys working for these men. She also knows about the guards who profit by helping selected inmates to smuggle drugs into the prison, or by providing frightened boy prisoners for them to do with as they will in the rape shed. 

She knows of the corpse valets, prisoners selected by a corrupt guard named Conroy. He selects men who know how to be quiet—how to keep secrets.

And the secrets are so many. How bodies end up dead in cells with signs of strangulation or broken necks and the guards clear their throats and say natural causes. How others are shot and others die in heaps of blood all erased by the dawn. How no one ever dies here of abuse, of rape, of being killed by the guards. How the records—what record? A prison is a place without a history.

But while the book talks extensively of corrupt guards and privileged prisoners, the portrait of the warden is all in all a sympathetic one. True, he thinks of the lady as an enemy, but he also really tries to expose corrupt guards and to treat inmates fairly. 

But after seeing the lady he can’t help getting angry. He takes his job seriously. Every day he protects inmates from each other and society from inmates. He wants to tell the politicians to try policing three thousand men who spend their lives trying to disembowel each other with shanks made out of sharpened table knives. Get back to me on how it goes.

And then the lady comes in and pulls a few tearjerkers for judges who have never stepped foot inside a prison, who have never even met the victims or their families. And the next thing he knows, she is walking another man away from his deserved death. 

He knows there are too many black men on the row. He knows there are too many men who had Grim and Reaper for their defense attorneys. He tells his new guards there are more than enough guilty men to go around, we don’t need to invent more. He is the first to admit the system needs fixing.  

When he thinks about what men like York and Striker and Aden have done, he is firm in his truth. Enough years of being the jailer—of seeing men kill each other in prison riots, of holding the hands of rape victims as they testify in front of parole boards—he knows that some men deserve to die. He can chat with a man like York, and he can even show kindness to a man like Arden, but he knows in his heart they deserve to die. Such men are like diseased dogs, or demented animals. You can bemoan what made them killers, but once they are, the best thing is to put them down with mercy. 

He stops himself. No, he thinks again, the lady does know those things. She talks to the men’s families, she plumbs their lives—she has to know the pain they have caused. Yet she still tries to get them off and this he cannot figure. This is the part that makes him mad.

What is she to do if she runs into a prisoner who doesn’t want to be saved from execution? Suppose what she has in a file is enough to save a man from death row, but he insists that she not show the file to the attorneys? Should her loyalty be to her employers or to the man she is allegedly trying to help? And can she go on doing the work if she refuses in this case to reveal what she has uncovered?

If there is an answer to her question, perhaps it will come from one of the death row inmates. 

I sit under the cover for an eternity before I decide the lady is strong enough to have seen me. Someday she will see the monsters for what they are, and stop questioning herself about why she seeks them. She will stop feeling bad about wanting to make castles for them. Even monsters need peace. Even monsters need a person who truly wants to listen—to hear—so that someday we might find the words that are more than boxes. Then maybe we can stop men like me from happening.

The lady has a gift, and I hope she keeps using it. It is the gift of understanding men like me.

This is a courageous book. Ms. Denfeld, especially given her continuing work, was so brave to have written it and to have lived the life that allowed her to write it. I commend her for her superb writing and for her courage and her gift.

Someone by Alice Mcdermott

Ever since being stunned by the quiet elegance of Alice Munro’s writing, I have greatly admired what I call quiet writers—quiet in the sense that there is very little overt drama in their stories, no rich-famous people or earth-shattering events. Instead, the focus is on ordinary people who, when looked at carefully and with compassion, have quite extraordinary inner lives.  

In recent years Munro has been joined (or I have joined her) with other writers who write about ordinary people who become quite extraordinary when seen through the lens of a great story-teller. Elizabeth Strout is one such writer, and Alice McDermott another. Today I’m going to talk about McDermott’s newest novel, Someone. She could as well have titled it Anyone since she is so intent on describing the life of a woman others see as plain and quite uninteresting. 

Like all of McDermott’s novels, this is a story of Irish-American families living in east coast cities. We meet seven year old Marie, the lead character in this novel, sitting on a stoop in Brooklyn observing carefully, as she always does, the bustle of life going on around her. Describing herself, Marie says, “At seven, I was a shy child, and comical-looking, with a round flat face and black slits for eye, thick glasses, black bangs, a straight and serious mouth—a little girl cartoon.” From this beginning, the short novel hopscotches between descriptions of her early life as an awkward child to her old age senility, the agonizing birth of her first child, the early death of her much loved father, her loyal and devoted brother’s brief stint as a priest and the constancy of his love for Marie throughout their lives. The actual chronology of her life much less important than the stitched together frames McDermott describes for us. 

In her first foray into romance, Marie meets a man who breaks off with her as soon as he finds a woman more attractive and with better economic prospects. He says he is doing it to give his future children the best chance he can, “It’s the best-looking people that have the best chances.” Marie is not really surprised by his defection, but it is devastating nonetheless.  

I sat on the edge of the bed. I wanted to take my glasses off, fling them across the room. To tear the new hat from my head and fling it, too. Put my hands to my scalp and peel off the homely face. Unbutton the dress, unbuckle the belt, remove the frail slip. I wanted to reach behind my neck and unhook the flesh from the bone, open it along the zipper of spine, step out of my skin and fling it to the floor. Back shoulder stomach and breast. Trample it. Raise a fist to God for how He had shaped me in that first darkness: unlovely and unloved.

As their Brooklyn neighborhood decays and most who can flee to the suburbs, Marie remains to care for her mother who fears a move, and finally fears even to leave her apartment in their battered brownstone. She and her brother lean on one another as they care for their widowed mother, and the quiet love they share is touchingly described, though always understated. If there is a love-angle in this novel, it is the relationship between brother and sister.

Marie is all in all a dutiful child, her teenage rebellion mild compared to most; it takes the form of refusing her mother’s attempts to teach her how to cook. “Well, I don’t want to learn.” I said. “Once you learn to do it, you’ll be expected to do it,” and was amazed at the way my own words clarified for me what had been, until then, only a vague impulse to refuse. They looked at me over their knees, this gaggle of girls; a lifetime of hours in the kitchen bearing down on us all.” 

McDermott has an incredible talent with words, moving her readers quickly from the mundane (a sight or smell) to a rich memory and a complex life. Alice Munro is asked by a journalist why she writes stories; she replies that she wants to move people—that she wants her readers to be different people after finishing one of her stories. I am certainly moved my McDermott’s stories, and I would add that I feel I am a different person after reading one of her novels. Events in this novel (and in all of her stories) are often sad, as true to life stories often are, but I have to say I feel uplifted by her stories. I feel that I have been changed for the better by having read her. 

Rather than attempting to further describe her writing, let me end with a quote. Marie and Gabe, her brother, decide to walk together after Marie’s hurtful rejection by her boyfriend, much as her father had taken long walks with her to assuage some childhood grief. 

The air was a wall. The heat was a reminder of what I had glimpsed when my father was dying, but had, without plan or even intention, managed to forget: that the ordinary days were a veil, a swath of thin cloth that distorted the eye. Brushed aside, in moments such as these, all that was brittle and terrible and unchanging was made clear. My father would not return to earth, my eyes would not heal. I would never step out of my skin or marry Walter Hartnett in the pretty church. And since this was true for me, it was true, in its own way, for everyone. My brother and I greeted the people we knew walking by, neighborhood women, shopkeepers in doorways trying to catch a breeze. Each one of them, it seemed to me now that the veil was briefly parted, hollow-eyed with disappointment or failure or some solitary grief.