Be Mine by Richard Ford

Published by ‎ Ecco on June 13, 2023

Thrillers and other genre novels often follow a character who stars in a series of novels. Literary fiction has fewer recurring protagonists. Off the top of my head, my favorites are Jim Harrison’s Sunderson, John Updike’s Rabbit, and Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe.

Bascombe was a sportwriter when he debuted as a protagonist. He later became a real estate salesman. Now he’s retired and thinking about death. Not so much his own, although at 74, “with a modest laundry list of ailments and sorrowing memories,” he knows his end is approaching. He thinks about his mother’s lifeless face, about a son who died at the age of 9, about the death of a former wife, about friends who have passed away. But mostly he thinks about his son Paul, who has ALS (“the bad kind”) and will soon stop breathing. Frank knows “there aren’t many chances left to do things right.”

Paul is 47. He has always been annoying and a mild asshole, or at least Frank has seen him that way, probably with good reason. Paul is unfriendly, sloppy, snarky, and alienated. He makes unfunny jokes with his ventriloquist’s dummy but he moves his lips, making him a failure at comedy. Approaching death hasn’t improved his disposition. Paul has always taken an unserious approach to life. In that regard, he is closer to his father than Frank would like to admit.

On the other hand, Paul loves puns and quirky language. He asks whether steeple jacks are all named Jack, whether civil servants are always civil, whether daredevils are really devils. He views life in relative terms, as “contingencies, bemusements, sly looks, and the unexamined way being all there is.” Frank always thought Paul was an odd boy who would grow up to be normal. It never happened and now it never will.

Frank fears that he has been less supportive, less loving, than he should have been during his son’s life. Since he refers to his son by such terms of endearment as “dimwit,” it is easy to understand those fears. Frank doesn’t like his son much but, to be fair, he doesn’t like his daughter either. Frank numbers Paul’s faults — the number is high — and chides himself for wondering how this man can be his son. Yet Frank’s strongest experience in the face of his son’s illness is helplessness.

The plot takes Frank on a journey to Minnesota so that Paul can participate in a clinical trial for a new ALS drug at the Mayo Clinic. Frank decides to rent an RV and take Paul on a father-son trip to Mount Rushmore, perhaps not the wisest destination in February. It’s a late and lame attempt at bonding time, but Paul goes along with it because Paul goes along with everything.

Paul fills the trip, as he has filled his life, with snarky commentary. The highlight for Paul is the Corn Palace. It’s particularly suited to his desire to embrace the absurd. A place where he can buy corn sunglasses is his idea of Heaven. He appreciates Mount Rushmore because it’s “completely pointless and ridiculous.” Frank feels the same way about the monument, creating a bonding moment — one of the few he’s ever had with his son. He thinks it is better to bond over the ridiculous than to bond over approaching death. Frank believes that growing old is “like having a fatal disease, at least insofar as I’m no more ready than my son to give up on comfort, idleness, and taking grave things lightly.”

Ford paints a mesmerizing and sometimes dismal portrait of the landscape, small towns, billboards, tribal casinos, and oddities of South Dakota. “There are scarcely towns at all — land and sky merging at a far distance, stitched by a jet commencing the polar route.” Rapid City is a “soul-less splat of mini-malls, tower cranes, franchise eats, car purveyors, and new banks” — in other words, a cocondensed version of Los Angeles.

Ford introduces motel owners, tourists, waitresses, and the other people everyone meets on a road trip, making the kind of connections that occur when Americans “conduct an earnest but inconsequential exchange” with a stranger. One stranger admits to being from New Jersey; the other describes something that happened to him in New Jersey. It’s not a great connection, but it’s a connection, a reminder that we’re all part of the same plot.

The novel is haunting in its honesty. Frank’s reaction to his son’s death is almost nihilistic. He doesn’t see his son as a hero for clinging to life (not that Paul makes much of an effort). Frank refuses to wish that Paul will live an extra hour or day or month because he knows that the wish would be futile. Frank views continued existence as a product of luck, or something genetic, something we don’t understand and mostly can’t control. He is happy that his son will die within a year after his symptoms begin, as other sufferers of ALS endure a much slower death, living as a mind trapped in a body that over a period of years loses its ability to move, to speak, and eventually to breathe. There is nothing good or bad about death; it’s inevitable. Only the circumstances can be graded on a relative scale.

The novel ends with a discussion of “true happiness”: how young writers try to define it and tie it to its causes, joining it to guilt and tragedy. Frank finds it a waste of time to worry about causation; most causes are obvious, at least in retrospect, but that knowledge has limited value when planning a lifelong road trip to happiness, given the detours that cannot be foreseen. As an old man, Frank’s best road to happiness is one that is free of worry and planning. Sleep, eat, enjoy encounters with beauty. Sit on a couch. Walk a dog. Don’t think about how life will end, lest you make the ending more difficult than it needs to be.

Along those lines, the book’s most important message is summarized in its final pages: “that the most important thing about life is that it will end, and when it does, whether we are alone or not alone, we die in our own particular way. How that way goes is death’s precious mystery, one that may never be fully plumbed.” It amazes me that such a depressing story about two seriously flawed people can be so enriching, but over the years, I’ve come to expect amazement from Richard Ford.

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Code of the Hills by Chris Offutt

Publlished by Grove Press on June 13, 2023

“The country’s gone to hell since Johnny Cash died,” observes one of the characters in Code of the Hills. His complaint is that chain stores don’t sell baling wire. How that relates to Johnny Cash is something that only hill people understand.

Linda Hardin is a sheriff in Eastern Kentucky. Johnny Boy Tolliver is her deputy.  Linda is investigating the death of Pete Lowe. Pete’s body was found in his home, dead from a bullet to the head. Before he was killed, Pete hid his best fighting rooster with a friend. The friend was living in a chicken coop — a fancy one — for reasons that only a hill person could understand.

Linda’s brother Mick recently returned home after serving his twenty years in the Army. He was a criminal investigator during most of those years. He plans to live in France for a while because he expects to feel out of place wherever he goes so why not France? By virtue of hanging around his sister for a few days, Mick gets sucked into the investigation of Lowe’s murder. While he’s helping Tolliver, the investigation leads him to another body. Almost immediately, a third body turns up and his sister takes a bullet.

Deputized by the deputy who is now the acting sheriff, Mick is uncertain about returning to law enforcement in the civilian world. He identifies a couple of criminals but finds their motives to be righteous and is reluctant to arrest them “for things he’d do himself.” Arresting them would be contrary to the code of the hills. Tolliver eventually confronts a similar choice between following the code and following the law.

Military life left Mick with little discretion. He followed orders and let someone up the chain of command make decisions. Civilian life empowers him to do what’s right. Having responsibility puts Mick in uncomfortable positions that add depth to the story.

Code of the Hills is filled with colorful descriptions of a life that will be unfamiliar to most readers. A woman cuts the testicles out of a boar after urging a bystander to distract the boar by beating it with an axe handle if it comes untied during the operation. I can understand why the boar might become upset at the woman’s decision to save herself a veterinarian’s bill.

The plot isn’t burdened with complexity. For that reason, it moves quickly. Mick doesn’t back away from fights but this isn’t a tough guy novel. He’s a decent guy who is making a transition in life and doing the best he can to find a new direction. He treats people well, even when they might want to kill him. Linda is also likeable. She doesn’t understand why she likes men. “Men were morons who abused women and killed each other.” Maybe she doesn’t like them at all but just gets lonely. Strong characterization and an atmospheric, fast-moving story make Code of the Hills a good beach read for crime novel fans.

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Translation State by Ann Leckie

Published by Orbit on June 6, 2023

As liberals and conservatives argue about whether the constructs of male and female are inflexibly determined by biology at birth or have a gender identity component that might be more important than external genitalia, Ann Leckie continues to project the argument into the future. In her future, humans have largely moved beyond what it means to be male or female and are contemplating what it means to be human. Is human identity, like gender identity, a product of a deep inner feeling or does it depend only on genetics?

As Leckie’s fans know, the Presger are not human. They are driven to eat humans and members of other species. A treaty with the Presger took humans and some nonhuman species out of the Presger diet. To communicate with humans, the Presger and the Radchaai (the most powerful group of humans) created Translators — sort of a hybrid of Presger and human — who go through a growth and maturation process that teaches them to interact with humans without eating them. Qven has gone through that process without being eaten by his peers and is approaching the next stage of a young Translator's life.

But then there’s Reet Hluid, the apparent offspring of a human and Presger Translator. He was adopted by a human family after he landed on Zeosen. He has recently been suspected of being a Schan, a lost scion of the ancient rulers of a branch of humans called Hikipi who have long been exploited by a branch called the Phen.

Reet doesn’t think of himself as a Schan or as a Presger Translator, although he comes to accept that a Translator might have been his biological parent. He liked to bite when he was a child but it’s under control now, apart from an occasional urge to rip someone to shreds. Is he human or Presger? Does anyone other than Reet have the right to answer that question? And should he be forced to choose between being human or a Translator? Can’t he choose to be himself?

The parallels to contemporary debates about the right to be who you believe you were born to be are obvious, which is one reason sf fans on the far right are so disdainful of Leckie. After all, the traditional sf hero is a straight white male human who protects weak human females from dangerous aliens who are bent on conquest. There is little room in that mythology for stories that value women or members of other racial/ethnic groups, much less changing notions of sexual identity. Leckie freaked out those fans when she started writing award winning fiction that played with pronouns. It’s ironic that a genre based on opening minds to unexpected possibilities has a vocal minority of fans who believe they are defending tradition by keeping their minds firmly closed.

A number of humans (Hikipi in particular) don’t believe the Presger even exist. The Presger Deniers believe the Radchaai invented the Presger to control the rest of humanity through fear. Perhaps Leckie is mocking people who refuse to believe any fact that is politically inconvenient. The Hikipi seem to have invented a conspiracy theory to explain away facts they don’t like. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

In any event, the Presger Translators must decide what to do about Qven, who has reached an age where he can match (or merge) with another person in a process that— well, as I understand it, the two beings eat each other until they recombine as a single entity that occupies two new bodies. Qven began that process (against his will) with another Translator juvenile and is now regarded as defective.

The Translators would like to dispose of Qven, but they would have to admit that his lineage was a failure and other members of that lineage are loathe to make that concession. They decide instead to give him a chance to match with Reet, whose half human parentage might give him unique insights into human behavior. Neither Qven nor Reet are keen to match with anyone, but they feel comfortable with each other in a way they don’t with anyone else. The theme of feeling isolated as an “outsider” who doesn’t belong to a recognized group is advanced through certain nonhuman characters, as well.

Reet petitions the diplomats at the Treaty Administration Facility to recognize him as a human and to shield him from the Translators. Qven likes that idea, declares himself human, and adds himself to the petition. If people cannot decide upon their own identity, Leckie seems to be asking, does the government have the right to choose their identity for them? Ron DeSantis seems to think the answer is yes.

A Presger Translator argues that if Reet is allowed to live among humans without matching, his offspring may be unable to develop the self-control needed to keep them from eating humans. The story calls to mind objections to interracial marriage, spiced with beliefs that members of certain groups are too uncivilized to let loose in society.

The other key character is Enae Athtur. Forced to uproot after the death of an elderly relative for whom she was caring, Enae is given a cushy job investigating the disappearance two hundred years earlier of a Presger Translator. The Translator, of course, is Reet’s biological parent, a circumstance that eventually puts Enae and Reet together in the Treaty Administration Facility. The novel works its way to a conclusion after the hearing to determine whether Reet is human is disrupted by an assassination attempt and a threatened Hitipi attack upon the facility.

Leckie is an amazing storyteller whose stories of the future reveal important truths about the present. Despite her detractors, it’s heartening that Lecke has so many admirers. She is an imaginative, original writer whose characters are easily relatable (even to many of us cisgender white male readers) because they ask the question that is central to science fiction and perhaps to all literature: What does it mean to be human?

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August Blue by Deborah Levy

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on June 6, 2023

As a foster child, Ann Anderson was adopted by Arthur Goldstein, a famous piano teacher who lived near London. She has always refused to read her adoption file and does not know the identity of her biological parents. Arthur changed her first name to Elsa (her middle name is Miracle) and trained her until she attained critical acclaim as a concert pianist.

After dying her hair blue, Elsa messed up while playing Rachmaninov during a concert in Vienna. For two minutes and twelve seconds (a time frame that recurs throughout the novel), Elsa played something that was in her mind, not on the sheet music, something that one listener regarded as remarkable. Elsa then walked off the stage and fled to Greece, where the novel begins.

A woman who looks very much like Elsa purchases some small mechanical horses that Elsa wanted to buy. Elsa seems to have stolen the woman’s hat. Elsa believes she saw the same woman in London. She sees her again in Paris. The woman throws her cigar into Elsa’s drink and runs away. Elsa regards the woman as her psychic double. Could it be that Elsa is seeing herself? Is she seeing the mother who gave her up for adoption? Elsa doesn’t smoke cigars but a student tells her that she smells like cigar smoke. Maybe an English lit professor will read the book and explain it to me.

Elsa gives piano lessons to rich kids during the pandemic as she contemplates whether her career is over. She almost makes love in Greece with a man named Tomas but ultimately pushes him away. Elsa teaches piano to a mentally fragile girl of sixteen in Paris, returns to London, and finally reunites with Arthur on his deathbed in Sardinia, where he is being attended by a longtime friend who has always disliked Elsa. She finds the answers to some of her questions in Sardinia but realizes that her piano teacher has always given her the answers she needs.

While Elsa’s questions are to some extent answered, the reader’s are not. Elsa meets her doppelganger again — they chat and smoke cigars — but the woman’s identity remains a mystery. Elsa comes to wonder whether the woman is her opposite: knowing, sane, and wise, while Elsa is unknowing, crazy, and foolish. Yet they enjoy the same lip balm and both love pets. Whether the woman is real or imagined is presumably unimportant; her role is to force Elsa to think about who she is and who she might become.

I like Deborah Levy’s use of repeating rhythms in her prose, a technique that makes sense in the story of a musician. I like her riff on Montaigne’s “Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man may lay his head.” Elsa would prefer the comfort of ignorance (as do so many people who live in an alternate, fact-free reality), but she forces herself to confront truth before the novel ends. Just what that truth might be is a bit ambiguous, but at least she’s moving toward it. While the novel’s ambiguity is a bit much for me, the story is interesting and Levy’s prose is seductive.

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The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende

Published simultaneously in Spanish and English; published in translation by Ballantine Books on June 6, 2023

The Wind Knows My Name tells the stories of three American immigrants who were forced to leave their homelands to escape oppression. A Jewish child who escaped from Austria in 1938 thrives in the US. A Salvadoran child who entered the US in 1969 makes a happy life for herself. During the pandemic, a child from El Salvador whose mother fled domestic violence is at risk of being deported. The story is a powerful reminder that America is shirking the role it once embraced as a sanctuary for those who are “yearning to be free.”

The novel begins with the stories of two children who survived attempts to exterminate their communities. Samuel Adler’s parents send him from Austria to Great Britain before they die in the Holocaust. Leticia Cordero is in a hospital, away from her village in El Salvador, when the village is destroyed by soldiers who believe that its inhabitants might be harboring insurgents. Her father, the lone survivor in her family, smuggles her into the US.

Samuel grows up to play the violin in the London Philharmonic, although his true love us jazz. On a visit to New Orleans, he meets the rebellious Nadine LeBlanc. They might not be a perfect fit, but she is the love of his life. They are together and apart at various stages of their lives, but Samuel explains that they “invested so much into our relationship that it was always worth saving.” The need to accept the inevitability of change is one of the novel’s themes.

As an adult, Leticia’s father and husband die within months of each other. A friend helps her begin a career as a cleaner.

The third set of principal characters includes Selena Durán, a social worker who deals with migrant children at the Mexican border. She recruits a prestigious law firm to help Anita Díaz, a blind child whose mother was denied asylum (the gunshot wound in her stomach wasn’t enough to prove her life was in danger). Anita is being held with other detained children while her lawyer, Frank Angileri, fights to win her asylum claim. Frank and Selena also search for Anita’s mother, who wasn’t officially deported but doesn’t seem to be in the country or in the refugee camps on the Mexican side of the border.

The lives of characters intersect as the novel progresses. Some fall in love. They cope with misfortune in different ways. Leticia smiles and rumbas and refuses to be gloomy. Anita has long talks with her dead sister.

The stories are tied together by the theme of oppression and survival. The Holocaust, the destruction of villages during the Salvadoran Civil War, the Maya genocide, the Salvadoran femicide, and the plight of refugees who are denied the right to make a case for entry into the US all contribute to that theme. These are big themes, but they are explored through the lens of small stories, personal stories, one way in which fiction distinguishes itself from history.

Perhaps connection is the novel’s strongest theme. Characters are connected by family bonds, shared experiences, and employment. Three characters who are not related to each other in any meaningful way eventually live together as a family, illustrating the changing nature of what the word “family” means. Samuel’s marriage to Nadine was long but unconventional; Selena resists the white-picket-fence domestic life that her fiancé envisions and might want a different kind of family.

Characters are also connected by shared values that so many Americans have lost, including the belief that the government should not separate families. As Selena remarks, too many Americans only value white children. Beginning with slavery, keeping nonwhite families intact has never been an American priority. It is nevertheless a priority to characters who are bonded by their shared experience of forced separation from parents.

Isabel Allende gives a fullness to her characters that should be expected from literary fiction. Samuel, near the end of his life, embraces the pandemic because it allows him “to distance himself from people he didn’t like and free himself from obligations that no longer interested him.” He disguises those standoffish traits with a façade of friendliness and a reputation for eccentricity that comes with his British accent. At the same time, Samuel is a compassionate man who is moved by the experiences of Leticia and Anita, experiences of being uprooted that parallel his own.

Although key characters are victimized by villainous people — human traffickers, men who rape and kill women — the villains are collateral characters in the story. The novel focuses on positive responses to evil rather than evildoers. This is a moving story about the things that should bring us together at a time when culture warriors strive to tear us apart. The Wind Knows My Name is a truly enriching novel that probably won’t be read by the people who would most benefit from its message

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