The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout

I’ve often wondered what it must be like for a writer to suddenly, unexpectedly, have a book explode into a best-seller and prize winner. Wonderful, no doubt, for the moment, but what about when s/he returns to the hard work of writing another book? We know in retrospect that it had a paralyzing effect on J.D. Salinger when Catcher in the Rye zoomed to fame, and the success of Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man seems also to have had a similar effect on his subsequent writing. Elizabeth Strout cannot have expected her little book, Olive Kitteridge, to become a best seller, let alone win a Pulitzer, but her success has not led to anxious inactivity. Her 2013 novel, The Burgess Boys, is a wonderful book told in the same straight-forward and simple way as her earlier works. 

Most of the novel is set in a small town in Maine, Shirley Falls, and is about people who live quite ordinary lives. Like the great short story writer, Alice Munro, Strout seems intent on showing her readers that what appear from the outside to be quite ordinary lives are, viewed from inside, and through the eyes of a compassionate and wise story-teller, quite extraordinary. 

As the title tells us, the story revolves around two boys-become-men, Jim and Bob, the Burgess boys. Jim has become both rich and famous, first as a small-town prosecuting attorney, then as a defense attorney who takes on the case of a famous rock star accused of murder, and finally as a member of a prestigious New York law firm that specializes, in Jim’s words, in white-collar crime. Bob, the younger brother, is a legal aid attorney who lives in the shadow of Jim’s fame, idolizing his older brother, but verbally and emotionally abused and belittled by him. Of the three Burgess children, only Bob’s twin sister, Susan, has remained in Shirley Falls, and it is a thoughtless and silly act of her high-school aged son, Zach, that brings the Burgess boys back to Maine and to a confrontation with a tragic accident from their past that left them fatherless and mired in guilt.

To me, what shines forth in this novel is Strout’s compassion and moral insight, not only in her understanding of the Burgess children and the past that unites them, but her understanding of how small towns in America have suffered from economic downturns and the flight of young people from such towns to the big cities. Add to this flight a rather sudden influx of displaced people from a different culture, and the story begins to take shape.

The displaced people in this case are Somalis, driven out of their own country by wars, and then escaped from camps that are as or more dangerous than the country they have fled, and finally to this (and other) small American towns where they huddle together for safety. The reader can hear Strout wondering about how odd and frightening it must be for people who, for the most part, don’t speak the language, whose dress and diet and lifestyle are radically different than those of the people they are quite suddenly thrown into daily contact with. Difficult, certainly for the immigrants, but difficult also for the townspeople who find these strangers in their midst, who both desire and shun assimilation. 

The silly and senseless act that forces a kind of showdown in this little Maine town is Zach’s prank of throwing a frozen pig’s head into the makeshift Mosque the Somali’s use for community prayer. Zach is so ignorant of the ways and culture of the Somalis that have flooded his little town that he doesn’t even understand significance for them of the pig’s head. Why did he choose a pig’s head? Because, he explains to his attorney uncles, there were no cow or sheep heads at the slaughterhouse where his friend works and from which he stole the head. He had meant at first to use the head in a Halloween prank, but various complications have led to an alternative act that, quite apart from his intentions, have sinister implications and draw national, even international scrutiny and serious charges of a hate-crime.

Although the plot could have been treated in sensational ways, and in other hands, the novel could have been layered with mystery and violence, I was not surprised that Strout reins in the sensationalism. She is what I call a quiet writer, concerned less with outward action and mystery than in the internal monologues of her characters. And she talks not only through the Burgess boys; she also gives us inside views from Helen, Jim’s wife, from Pam, Bob’s ex-wife, Susan, the little sister, and for brief snatches even the inner lives of some of the Somali characters. Like Olive Kitteridge, which is really a series of short stories that are tied together by an appearance of Olive in each story, this novel, too, reads like a series of stories. And it seems that each story could have been a novel in its own right. 

The violence in the story is really limited to the verbal attacks and abusive language of Jim, usually directed towards his adoring younger brother, or his abandoned little sister, or his unfortunate and naïve nephew. It is obvious that Strout has known men like Jim, and even her treatment of him is, in the end, compassionate; she wants her reader to understand his excesses, and provides mitigating if not exculpating circumstances for his temper flairs. 

Although this novel has already gotten a lot of press and has been named one of the best books of the year by prestigious journals, I can’t say that I would rank it with her Pulitzer winner, Olive Kitteridge. She seems intent on finding and showing some level of development for each of her characters, some form of enlightenment or redemption. For me, this results in a kind of sentimental summing up, a packaging in the end that is a bit too neat, too sweet. That said, I am certainly glad to have read it, and I eagerly await any other offerings she has for us. She is a superb story-teller and a deeply insightful social commentator. There is a goodness and sincerity that literally shines through her work, and there are few who can match her word-weaving skills.

Look At Me by Jennifer Egan

To what extent is image tied to identity? Would others see me as the same person were my image to change markedly? Would I? These are a few of the questions Jennifer Egan asks in her complex and ambitious novel, Look At Me. Chances are if you’ve heard of Egan, it is because of her 2011 Pulitzer winning novel, A Visit from the Good Squad; today I want to talk about her earlier 2002 novel Look At Me, which I see as even richer and more philosophically interesting than her prize winner, though both are superb. 

There are so many characters in this novel, each narrator of his or her story, that it’s almost difficult to pick a lead character. And yet certainly it is the model, Charlotte Swenson, who is the pivot point. The reader meets Charlotte shortly after she has been involved in a horrific auto accident, one in which she is pulled from the burning wreck by a good Samaritan, and then quite literally put back together. Her broken arm, leg, and ribs almost incidental to the reconstructive work on her face whose crushed bones are reassembled with eighty titanium screws and then another surgery a year later to fine-tune her broken face.

For reasons the reader will learn as s/he reads the book, the accident occurs close to Charlotte’s hometown of Rockford Illinois, where much of the subsequent action occurs, although Charlotte returns as quickly as she can to her New York apartment and hopefully to her life as a model. Apparently, the reconstructive surgery is remarkably successful in that she is still a beautiful woman, but she soon discovers that she is literally unrecognizable to the circle of models and agents whom she has lived amongst for well over a decade. 

…I’d postponed…reckoning with the world for the simple reason that I still didn’t know what I looked like. I’d spent as long as an hour staring through the ring of chalky light around my bathroom mirror; I’d held up old pictures of myself beside my reflection and tried to compare them. But my sole discovery was that in addition to not knowing what I looked like now, I had never known. The old pictures were no help; like all good pictures, they hid the truth. I had never kept a bad one—this was one of my cardinal rules, photographically speaking. One: never let someone take your picture until you’re ready, or the result will almost certainly be awful. Two: never keep bad pictures of yourself for any reason, sentimental or otherwise. Bad pictures reveal you in exactly the light you wish never to be seen, and not only will they be found, if you keep them, but invariably by the single person in the world you least want to see you that way.

The question of identity, of how we see ourselves and how we are seen by others, is crucial in this tale not only for Charlotte, the model, where image is everything, but for all of the other main characters as well. Moose, the older brother of Charlotte’s childhood friend Ellen, metamorphoses from an easygoing, dashing and sought after athlete in high school into a morose and enigmatic professor understood by none, and shunned by most because of his startling and unpredictable behavior. He wanders his hometown of Rockford seeing the future by studying the past of this one-time industrial hub reduced now to a kind of ghost of its former self. Muttering the phrase, “We are what we see,” and fascinated by the invention of clear glass in the 1300s, he searches for someone to whom he can pass on his insights, his foresight, his scorching epiphanies. “For Moose had sensed that a terrible reversal was in progress, a technological disaster whereby the genius of the Industrial Revolution would be turned on people themselves, whereby human beings would be assembled from parts just as guns and boots and bicycles had been once.”

Moose thinks perhaps his niece, Charlotte, almost certainly named after his sister’s childhood friend, is a candidate for carrying on his nearly unbearable prophesies. But it turns out that the sixteen year old Charlotte is attempting to find her own identity by starting up a sexual relationship with a much older man who is himself a shadowy figure whose identity is less certain, more plastic, than either of the Charlottes, or, for that matter, than anyone else he encounters. 

Add to the list of identity casualties an alcoholic private detective, cut loose from his past by events he refuses to disclose, and the cast of characters is almost complete.  Egan mixes in one more, a reporter who wants to interview Charlotte not because of an interest in fashion, but as an instance of a person whose appearance has changed drastically. 

I’m interested in the relationship between interior and exterior, how the world’s perception of women affect our perceptions of ourselves. A model whose appearance has changed drastically is a perfect vehicle, I think, for examining the relationship among image, perception and identity, because a model’s position as a purely physical object—a media object, if you will—is in a sense just a more exaggerated version of everyone’s position in a visually based, media-driven culture, and so watching a model renegotiate a drastic change in her image could prove a perfect lens…

What is personal identity? What is the truth, about the past, about the future, about ourselves? And who is discover and untangle it? 

There is so much in this book that I cannot in a short space even begin to lay out the issues, the mysteries, the questions. And to add a final element to the tangle, there is a character named simply Z who is adept in languages, changes identities as easily as changing a coat, and who remains always in the shadows. He has come to this country from somewhere, no one knows quite where, searching for the conspirators and for the plan of subjugation that allow America to rule the world. Finally in America, “standing in their midst, {he} felt the peculiar dizzying pleasure of hating a thing so purely you’ll do anything to destroy it, anything, a pleasure that was indistinguishable from the wish to be destroyed himself. Consumed.” 

A mystery, a tragedy, and in some remarkable ways a comedy as well—this is an excellent novel written in language that is as sharp-edged and contemporary as the world she describes. It is a fine example of my favorite sort of fiction, stories about us, here, now.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

Sometimes a book can be hilariously funny, bitingly critical of contemporary society and businesses, and wholly unpredictable. Maria Semple’s 2012 novel, Where’d You Go, Bernadette, is all of these things and more. I have to admit that I picked up the book because of its cover, and because I was looking for something humorous. The first time I started reading it, I put it down quite quickly when I discovered that it consisted mostly of letters, memos, directives to employees and all manner of communications without, apparently, a central narrator or a plausible theme. I don’t usually care for novels that consist primarily of letters between the main characters. However, once I gave the book a chance and read into it fifty pages or so, I couldn’t put it down.

Turns out there is a central narrator; she is a middle school student named Bee Branch, and her mother, Bernadette, is a celebrated architect who no longer designs houses, or anything else for that matter. Her father, Elgie, is a computer whiz who has already built a computer company and sold it to Microsoft for a very handsome profit; he is also famous for a TED talk (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) and a member of a very elite team at Microsoft working on a hush-hush project that requires almost all of his time.

Bee is an only child who has already survived a number of heart surgeries as an infant and young child; she is a bristlingly bright girl who has achieved perfect grades in middle school and has requested as her reward a family trip to Antartica. Her parents have told her she could have anything she wanted if she graduated from middle school with straight As, and extraordinary youngster that she is, she has requested the trip to Antarctica. Unfortunately, her mother Bernadette is not only agoraphobic but also given to extreme seasickness, and her father finds it difficult to take a day off of work, let alone the weeks, even months, that the trip will require. And thus the plot thickens.

Because of Elgie’s position at Microsoft, the family has had to move from their home in California to Seattle; Bernadette has not only had to move from a home she is famous for having designed, but has been forced to move to a city she despises—a city she sees as full of ridiculously overzealous moms, overly polite drivers, and much too close to Idaho (not to mention Canada). The combination has brought her nearly to a nervous breakdown, and she has had to hire a virtual assistant in India to help her plan the trip to Antarctica and to deal with even the basic tasks of day to day living. 

After some bitter (and very funny) fights with neighbors and moms from her daughter’s school, and some serious problems that crop up with the alleged virtual assistant in India, Elgie thinks it appropriate to have his wife committed involuntarily to a mental institution, at which time Bernadette simply disappears. Hence the title, Where’d You Go, Bernadette.

The first annoying thing is when I ask Dad what he thinks happened to Mom, he always says, “What’s most important is for you to understand it’s not your fault.” You’ll notice that wasn’t even the question. When I press him, he says the second annoying thing, “The truth is complicated. There’s no way one person can ever know everything about another person.”  

Mom disappears into thin air two days before Christmas without telling me? Of course it’s complicated. Just because it’s complicated, just because you think you can’t ever know everything about another person, it doesn’t mean you can’t try.

It doesn’t mean I can’t try.

Don’t suppose that I’m giving away too much about this delightful book; what I’ve quoted above occurs on the first page, so the reader knows immediately that Bernadette will disappear, the only question is when, and what leads up to it. 

Bernadette calls the overzealous moms “gnats,” and she treats them with offhand contempt that she does not even try to hide from her daughter. Nor does she hide her opinion of the private school her daughter attends and its unceasing efforts to attract what a fundraiser calls “Mercedes Parents.” The fundraiser urges the parents to emancipate themselves from “Subaru Parent mentality”, and to aim at the $200K+ parents whose children are about to enter kindergarten. 

Besides the quite hilarious barbs directed towards snobby private schools, Semple also has plenty to say about Microsoft and the elitist mentality of its think-tank employees. If their work is not their purpose-in-life, their mission, they don’t last long.

Without telling you more about the twists and turns in the plot, I will mention Bee and her dad make it to Antarctica, which provides the reader some astute commentary on the very expensive guided tours and the companies that arrange them. 

All in all, the novel is full of surprises, totally unpredictable from page to page, and hilarious throughout. Semple is a wonderful writer. The brilliant, dyspeptic Bernadette and her  equally bright and candid daughter keep the reader both laughing and thinking! I’m not sure I could articulate what I learned from reading this novel, but I know that I enjoyed it, and I think you will too.