The Lion's Den by Anthony Marra

Published digitally by Amazon on December 19, 2019

Amazon commissioned five stories for a series it calls Inheritance. The stories are unconnected to each other except by the broad theme of family secrets. In a departure from its usual format, Tzer Island will review one story in the Inheritance series each day this week.

“The Lion’s Den” is an exceptional story about the evolving relationship between a father and son, told from the son’s perspective as he recalls his father’s death. Michael’s only accomplishment in life has been to write a vengeful tell-all memoir of his father, commissioned by a rightwing publisher that resented the rehabilitation of his father’s reputation in the public eye. Michael’s father, a combination of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, leaked documents revealing the extent of government surveillance of American citizens. For that he was vilified as a traitor and then heralded as a hero (often by the same columnists) after the Bush administration fell into disfavor. After six years in prison, he was pardoned by Obama.

Michael’s family suffered financial ruin after his father’s arrest. Michael resented his father’s refusal to profit from his actions by selling the rights to his story to Oliver Stone. “Moral heroism in America usually has the longevity of celebrity marriage,” Michael explains, “yet my father’s caught fire and kept burning, in no small part because he refused to speak of it at all, declining every opportunity to explain himself.” Hence Michael’s decision to profit from his father’s life and help his family by writing the memoir.

The story’s focus is the day Michael takes his father to see the lions at the zoo and the following day, when Michael serves as an emergency replacement speaker at the ethics symposium hosted by the Catholic grammar school he attended. He is replacing a securities trader who has been arrested for fraud and less savory crimes, making the trader a poor choice to speak about ethics, although the school had always been more concerned with a speaker’s name recognition than good character. Unfortunately, it “couldn’t afford the speaking fees of those uncorrupted by power.”

Low-key humor permeates the story. The ethics symposium is one example. Here’s another: “My mother, the most devout Catholic among us, didn’t believe in divorce, which was problematic in that her husband didn’t seem to believe in marriage.” And the thought that “parents love empty gestures,” in this case a school honor code, because “It’s about feeling that your children are decent, honest, and virtuous, rather than doing the work to make it true.”

Anthony Marra packs a surprising amount of characterization into this relatively short story, including Michael’s observation that he and his father conduct their emotional lives through newspaper clippings and “torn-out articles. Our conversations followed similar patterns of recycled factoids.” Despite their difficulties, there is something touching about the relationship, about the father’s jovial lack of resentment concerning the memoir, about the mundane truths (the father’s fame, the shadow in which the son lives) that had become life-defining family secrets. Even more touching is the gesture — in this case, not an empty gesture — that Michael makes at the story’s end, creating a fleeting tribute to his father that only Michael will understand.

RECOMMENDED

Everything My Mother Taught Me by Alice Hoffman

Published digitally by Amazon on December 19, 2019

Amazon commissioned five stories for a series it calls Inheritance. The stories are unconnected to each other except by the broad theme of family secrets. In a departure from its usual format, Tzer Island will review one story in the Inheritance series each day this week.

“Everything My Mother Taught Me” is told from a child’s point of view. Adeline Ivey is only twelve for most of the story, but in the tradition of fiction told from a child’s perspective, she is wise beyond her years. Perhaps her wisdom benefits from hindsight, although Adeline’s age at the time she tells the story is unclear. The narrative voice is distinctly Alice Hoffman’s and it does not match a twelve-year-old whose education has been minimal. It is therefore fair to assume that Adeline is telling the story at a later stage in her life. Still, Adeline portrays herself as having a deeper understanding of human nature than would be typical of a child raised in relative isolation.

The story is set in 1908, a time when women who felt unconstrained by the bounds of matrimony might have been termed promiscuous, or worse. Adeline tells us that her mother Nora “ruined my father’s life, and mine, and she didn’t seem to notice.” Nora did so by keeping company with men in the local tavern rather than her husband, who dies a quiet death while his wife is enjoying the attention of other men. None of Nora’s boyfriends want the burden of supporting a widow, so Nora is forced to take a job as a lighthouse keeper on a small rocky island near Boston.

For reasons of her own, Adeline stopped speaking after her father died. Her silence does not seem to trouble the island dwellers, some of whom she befriends. Eventually she gives advice and comfort to a married friend named Julie, who for some reason decides to confide in a mute twelve-year-old, perhaps because muteness assures that her secrets will not be revealed. In any event, the heart of the story concerns a conspiracy between Adeline and Julie, largely planned by Adeline, to save Julie from her abusive husband.

Alice Hoffman writes with quiet grace. The story ends in a satisfying way that instills warm feelings toward Adeline without relying on contrivances to manipulate the reader’s emotions — save perhaps for Adeline’s willful muteness, a character trait that is surprisingly unoriginal. In all other respects, however, I admire Hoffman’s restraint. “Everything My Mother Taught Me” does just enough to make its point — even a child can make and implement a life-altering decision, one that the child will intuitively know to be correct — without trying to do too much. I didn’t entirely buy Adeline’s silence or the setup, but I nevertheless enjoyed the story, and that’s what counts.

RECOMMENDED

Can You Feel This? by Julie Orringer

Published digitally by Amazon on December 19, 2019

Amazon commissioned five stories for a series it calls Inheritance. The stories are unconnected to each other except by the broad theme of family secrets. In a departure from its usual format, Tzer Island will review one story in the Inheritance series each day this week.

“Can You Feel This” is a mundane story about the anxieties of a new mother who, in childbirth, recalls a traumatic experience that she has hidden from her husband. Julie Orringer hints at the traumatic incident before it is revealed near the story’s end. Until then, the story’s focus is on childbirth, territory that has been explored in countless stories about the anxieties experienced by new mothers. Orringer does nothing new or special in this story’s examination of the fear of motherhood.

Emily is understandably freaked out about the bleeding that won’t stop. Recalling her doctor’s warnings, she fears losing her baby. As her husband Ky drives her across a bridge to Manhattan, she’s also freaked out because she sees a different bridge where her mother died 28 years earlier. Apparently, Emily has never become acclimated to traveling from Brooklyn to Manhattan via a bridge.

Against her wishes, Ky takes her to the hospital where she saw her mother’s dead body. Emily feels very alone because she has no living parents, notwithstanding the presence of a patient husband who drove her to the hospital and stayed in her room during her C-section, as well as three friends who visit during her brief hospital stay. Emily is a bit fragile.

Doctors stick Emily with needles and repeatedly ask “Can you feel this?” Hence the title, which presumably also refers to all the other things the protagonist does or doesn’t feel. How very literary.

Since it happens quite early, it isn’t a spoiler to report that the baby is delivered alive and that he smells like wildflowers. Alyssum, in particular. Orringer goes on about new-baby scent for just a few sentences, but that’s a few sentences too long for my taste.

The bulk of the story explores Emily’s endless stream of anxieties: her reluctance to enter a state of motherhood because of her unhappy experience with her unstable mother; her attempts to figure out how to operate her newborn. Neither her husband (who stays dutifully in the background) nor her supportive visitors lessen her self-absorbed anguish. Why Emily insists on feeling sorry for herself in the midst of all this love and attention is a bit of a mystery. Emily seems to think she needs her long-dead mother to tell her how to raise a baby, a task that women have been doing forever, despite getting advice and instruction, not to mention helpful pamphlets, from hospital staff. If she needs coaching, she can also turn to another visitor, a “powerful” West Coast neuroscientist who is the mother of three children and one of Emily’s long-time friends. So why all the fuss?

The story works its way to a denouement after Emily leaves the hospital and must again confront a scary bridge, (presumably) symbolic of a bridge between pre-mommy life and her new-mommy status. In second-person prose that is (presumably) meant to connect the reader more closely to Emily, we learn the source of her life-shaping trauma. I rejected the traumatic moment as ridiculously manipulative and, in any event, I had little sympathy for Emily’s three-decade long refusal to confront her past. Nor was I moved by the suggestion that childbirth will finally give Emily reason to change.

Orringer’s prose is fluid. Emily is the only character who is given even the slightest substance (all that can be said of her husband is that he seems like a nice guy), although it isn’t unusual to shortchange secondary characters in short fiction. I found no offsetting virtues to overcome my dislike of a contrived motherhood story about an annoyingly fragile character. Readers who enjoy obvious emotional manipulation or, for that matter, stories about anxious new mommies will likely have a very different reaction.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Dawn by Selahattin Demirtaş

Published in Turkey in 2017; published in translation by Hogarth on April 23, 2019

Selahattin Demirtaş’ preface explains that he is a human rights lawyer and a dissident who is held in a Turkish prison. He wrote these stories while awaiting trial for acts of opposition to an authoritarian government that classified his speeches as criminal provocations. Americans who chant “lock her up” either have no idea or do not care that they want political opposition to be criminalized in the United States just is it is in the world’s most oppressive nations.

Demirtaş was a Turkish politician before (and even after) his arrest. The last story in this collection describes a utopian society that is presumably his vision for what Turkey can become. Many of the stories explain how far the nation is removed from that utopian vision.

In “The Man Inside,” a prisoner watching sparrows building a nest imagines them standing up to law enforcement sparrows that want them to tear the nest down. “Seher” tells of a girl who must keep her date with a man a secret, lest her father break her legs. When she is raped, she receives a punishment commanded by her father (in the name of defending the family’s “honor”) that is even worse. “The Mermaid” is about a woman who flees from Hama with her daughter and comes to an unfortunate end.

“Nazan the Cleaning Lady” is arrested after being injured by people fleeing tear gas that the police used to break up a demonstration. She imagines what kind of vehicles the people she meets drive based on their social status. “Greetings to Those Dark Eyes” considers the consequences of villages that promote child labor and child brides. One story is written in the form of a letter to the prison guards who read letters written by prisoners.

While the stories lack the complex subtlety that a more experienced writer might provide, the subject matter is inherently powerful. Demirtaş’ best story uses indirection to reinforce the impact of violence on innocent lives. “Kebab Halabi” is set in a marketplace where a man who is famed for his cheese-filled pastry künefe feels doomed love for a woman he cannot have, not realizing the woman is doomed to die at the hand of a suicide bomber. The emphasis on the normalcy of life with its simple joys and longings, contrasted with the sudden violence that rips those lives apart, makes the story memorable.

When Demirtaş departs from the theme of oppression, his stories are less successful. A story about a love triangle that does not end well is mundane. “As Lonely as History,” about a couple who learn a lesson about placing work and wealth ahead of love and family is pleasant but contrived. It is so obvious that it might be considered a parable rather than a literary story.

I could not find the point in “Asuman, Look What You’ve Done,” in which a bus driver tells a telenovela-type story to a young passenger and years later hires the passenger as his son’s lawyer. The stories of growing up told in “Settling Scores” also fail to impress.

The collection features one strong story and several stories that illustrate Turkey’s human rights violations. Collections like this are always an important reminder that authoritarian governments endure, and that free countries must always be vigilant to guard against leaders who mimic authoritarian rulers. I recommend it for the political stories; the others are less interesting.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Sing to It by Amy Hempel

Published by Scribner on March 26, 2019

Several of the stories in Sing to It are the shortest of short stories. Perhaps discerning readers will appreciate their depth of feeling or discern their hidden intent. Most of them left me cold. The title story, just a few sentences long, begins with “At the end, he said, No metaphors.” The story is, I guess, a metaphor, but not one that I grasped.

Amy Hempel’s style is to convey intense feelings using as few words as possible. That’ an admirable goal. When she uses too few words, however, I find myself missing all the rich flavor that she seems to have excised in order to get to the story’s core. I’m not sure that all of these stories are really stories at all, but I know that Hempel is popular in literary circles and that other readers are likely to disagree with me about the value of her brief glimpses of life.

As for the longer stories, I loved “A Full-Service Shelter,” which has the indirect storytelling feel of “The Things They Carried” in its heartbreaking description of how dogs perceived the volunteers at a humane society shelter. No dog lover could read the story without being moved.

The longest story, “Cloudland,” is told by a teacher who did cocaine with her students and moved to Florida to make a new life, although not the kind of life that depends on ambition. The protagonist has an abundance of random thoughts and memories and she isn’t shy about sharing them with the reader. Her most substantive memory is about giving up a child for adoption. “For safekeeping. For peace of mind.” Some of her current thoughts are fantasies about seeing or spending time with her daughter; others are about the emptiness she feels. In contrast with Hempel’s other stories, “Cloudland” might have been told more powerfully with fewer words.

The women in these stories are not living happy lives. The narrator of “The Chicane” tells the story of an an American woman who got pregnant by a French actor, then married a guy from Portugal and labored to turn him into an American after she got pregnant again. Neither relationship works out well for her. “Greed” is narrated by a destructive woman whose husband has an affair with an older woman. In “The Correct Grip,” a woman who was attacked by a man with a knife chats amiably with her attacker’s wife.

Only one of the stories in this collection appealed to me, so I cannot recommend the volume to readers who share my tastes. Your mileage may vary. Other than “A Full Service Shelter,” I was largely indifferent to the book’s contents. Even the stories with more substance, such as “Cloudland,” came across to me as pointless. Maybe pointlessness is the point, but it isn’t a point that makes me want to read story after story. The quality of Hempel’s prose, on the other hand, made the stories easy to read, even when I lost interest in the narrative.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS