MEGAN STAFFEL

 
 
Birnam Wood is the new novel by the New Zealand writer, Eleanor Catton, a literary author who crosses into mystery and suspense.  Her previous novel, The Luminaries, was a brick of words weighing in at 800 pages that enthralled me from beginning to end when I read it ten years ago.  That was a historical novel, set in 1865 New Zealand, while Birnan Wood is thoroughly contemporary.   Characters wrestle with climate change from both agrarian and commercial perspectives, and human greed, sacrifice, and curiosity generates action.   I'm being vague here because part of the great pleasure of reading this novel is getting swept into the story as it unfolds, so I won't even give an overview.  Instead, I'd like to discuss how Catton creates multi-faceted characters that are able to deliver whopping surprises. As in any literary novel, these characters drive the plot, so they must be developed with enough complexities to thwart reader expectation and motor us through the four hundred pages of this more average-sized book. 

 

There are four major characters.  Their personalities are formed from layers of qualities described in a direct, up-front manner so that, for each character, we know the sources of the tension they hold internally, giving us insight into the character's strengths and vulnerabilities from the beginning.  We know their weak spots; we are aware of their flaws, and so, as they step into increasingly complex character-generated circumstances, we worry. 

 

Mira and Shelley are the prime movers behind a gardening collective called Birnam Wood that's fervently anti-capitalist and anti-corporate.  They create gardens in unused and unclaimed spaces, turning abandoned areas into productive, food-growing plots of land.  They are a rogue organization, dedicated to the vision of a greener, more equitable economy for New Zealand. 

 

Mira is the visionary who conceived of Birnam Wood and Shelley, her good friend and roommate, attends to its daily functioning as bookkeeper and problem solver.  Early in the novel when Mira senses that Shelley is about to defect from both the enterprise and their friendship, the reader knows that she has correctly intuited Shelley's intentions.

 

Mira knows she's taken Shelley for granted and wishes she had been more involved in their relationship.  The reason she wasn't is complicated.  Mira has always sought out "the company of men.  Her favoured[sic] style of conversation was impassioned argument that bordered on seduction, and although it was distasteful, not to mention tactically unwise, to admit that one enjoyed flirtation, she never felt freer, or funnier, or more imaginatively potent than when she was the only woman in the room" (51).  As she braces for Shelley's defection, "[s]he wished more than anything that she could reverse her course, convey more gratitude and sympathy, show more interest in Shelley's inner life, confess, as she could still barely confess to herself, that the air of fearless self-assurance she projected was merely an imposture, a front devised to ward off intimacy and to banish her immense uncertainty and moral guilt.  She wished she could tell her friend the honest truth,…that in her own monumental stupidity and self-absorption, she had only just figured out that" (51-52) she needed her and she loved her.  

 

To introduce a woman who is not only smart and motivated, and then state directly, that she has a seductive, flirtatious nature, is to plant a seed of chaos.  Yet, Catton doesn't stop there.  It would be a simplification to give the reader only these two qualities: her seductive nature and political dedication.  So, she adds an interesting complexity.  As the reader witnesses Mira's self-critique, learning the many ways she regrets her treatment of Shelley, the enterprise of Birnam Wood is subsumed until these lines at the bottom of page 52: "One of the reasons that horticulture held such strong appeal for Mira was that it offered a respite from the habit of relentless interior critique.  When she made things grow, she experienced a kind of manifest forgiveness, an abiding moving-on and making-new that she found impossible in almost every other sphere of life." 

 

This took my breath away.  It showed me a more gentle and kinder aspect of this ferociously principled woman.  It restored my respect for her even though there was a time in my life when I too could have offered the same self-critique.  (Many young women, I think, could admit the same weakness.) For the novel, it ratchets up the tension.  Yes, Mira is vulnerable to men, but she's not going to be an easy mark.  Her dedication to Birnam Wood grows from her own true and necessary kinship with the earth.  That makes her powerful despite her weakness, but it also provides an insight into the workings of Birnam Wood.  Though it's a collective, it is Mira's energy that moves it forward. Should Mira get distracted, it wouldn't take much to tip it into chaos.

 

The American billionaire, Robert Lemoine, meets Mira and finds her so impressive he offers financial support to the collective.  The other characters try to uncover his true intentions but he's a chameleon.  Sly and cunning, he takes on different personas to hide his true activities.  The other quality that makes it hard to pin him down is his hobby.  He is a pilot.  And because he owns a plane and has unlimited funds, he can disappear and reappear at will, travelling great distances easily.  In addition, he can spy on others from the cockpit, sweeping over the landscape, noticing anything suspicious.  He is passionate about flying in the same way Mira is passionate about gardening.  "Nothing in the world compared to the liquid thrill of piloting a craft through three axes of movement, feeling the vertical, the lateral, and the longitudinal as divergent possibilities curving away from him through air that was tactile and elastic and textured with a warp and woof.  When in flight…he began to hear his own breath through his headset, and to feel his heartbeat magnify within his chest; he achieved, at altitude, a profound sense of his own proportion, of the sheer scale of everything he could be, everything he had been, everything he was…" (77-78).  For him, flying creates a heightened sense of his own potential.  Just as Mira needs to have her hands in the earth, Lemoine needs to rise above the ground.  This would make them appear to be allies.  But then, here too, Catton is not satisfied with a simplified rendering of her character's motivations. 

 

Almost two hundred pages later, the reader learns why Lemoine became a pilot when he tells Mira that flying reduces everything below to a diorama.  "Because everything's so small, you see.  It's manageable.  You hold the figures in your hand.  You can see the whole scene" (268).  Clearly, it's the confession of a man who needs to control others.  Forty pages earlier the reader learned about an incident from Lemoine's childhood that provides the motivation for everything he has achieved since then: his business, his vision for the future, his plan for expanding his operations.  That is the seed of disorder.  It's the key to who Lemoine really is, and it tells us why he needs to make a landscape manageable, why he needs to create a diorama.  It's the final layer to a multi-layered antagonist, a man who needs to hide a deeply illegal activity.  That activity forms the beating heart of the novel.

 

Few people write long short stories these days and one of the reasons may be that they are so hard to get published.  Many quarterlies prefer to publish briefer stories to showcase more writers.  And with the disappearance of Alice Munro from the world of contemporary short fiction, the novelistic story that she was such a deft and prodigious practitioner of, has become exceedingly rare.  All of which makes Yoon Choi's remarkable collection, where the average story is 35 pages, a publication that deserves attention.
 
The eight stories in "Skinship" examine the experience of Korean Americans living in the United States, pulled between the two often opposing cultures that frame their lives.  Whether narrated in a third or first person voice, the stories move with practiced and compelling grace, so much so that when they glide elegantly to a finish it feels more like a pause because the characters she has so thrillingly brought to life will not stop breathing.  This is a writer who knows where to find a story's natural ending, just like a cook who knows where to cut the joint when turning a whole chicken into parts.  Her well-chosen details, deft manipulation of time, attention to the sounds and rhythms of speech, whether American or Korean American, are the many qualities I admired.  The challenges each central character faces take on a richness that feels dimensional and compelling.  In addition, Choi harnesses mystery in an unusual fashion, using it not to draw a reader into a story, but to reflect a character's ignorance of the world beyond their experience.  Nowhere is it used to better effect than in the stand-out story at the center of the collection, "Solo Works for Piano."
 
The story opens when Albert Uhm meets Sasha, a woman who was part of his peer group in the unnamed music program where they were both students.   Albert Uhm never had the brilliant career he seemed destined for as a teenager prepping for major competitions, and instead, is buried in oblivion teaching out on Long Island at Hofstra.  Sasha no longer plays the piano at all; she is married and with a child, and that child is the reason she's contacted her old friend.  Her daughter is a musical prodigy, and she thinks Albert may be the only person who can understand the roller coaster of her child's emotions. 
 
Sasha is thoroughly American, never having given up the youthful expressions and gestures of excess that once, in Albert's eyes, defined her: 
 
     "'It's Moore now.  Sasha Moore.  I haven't been Sasha Silber in forever!'  She laughs.
      That laugh.
     'How long's it been, Albert?  Like a million years?'
     'Twenty-two years come June.'
     "He can't quite orient himself, as though both Sasha and her memory have entered the room, and he doesn't know which way to look. He             instantly remembers—witnesses—her slightly antic gestures.  Her rhapsodic, careless way of speaking: ages, miles, forever.  Her habit of    laughing and apologizing.  Always laughing and apologizing" (111-112).
 
Sasha brings on the memory of Yegor Zorkin, the master they studied under, and that in turn allows him to relive the time when Zorkin sat down at the piano in a moment of instruction focused on Sasha directly, but indirectly, on all of them, and played a medley of music borrowed from many sources to make the point that all music deserves focus, attention, and respect, not just the classical canon.  Those memories unlock others and soon we have a fuller picture of the ossified routines of Albert's lonely, ascetic life contrasted with Sasha and her wild, almost feral daughter who plays for Albert, in a spontaneous and absorbed manner, a Zorkin-like medley of music that excites him to his core.  But is she teachable, he wonders.
 
The narrative line, which at first seemed straight forward and simple (two friends meeting again after many years), twists and bends with the addition of surprising developments in backstory and the reader watches as Sasha's arrival challenges the precise and disciplined Albert. The wild and primitive being she has brought into his studio upends his careful existence.  More than that, it recalls his student days when he was distracted by the confusing relationships with his fellow pupils, when he felt as though the people around him spoke in a code he couldn't quite translate.  The reader sees how his self-reliance put others on edge, how his severity of purpose and need for precision is at odds with people whose emotions are foregrounded.  Even when they were students, he found "[t]he ever-presentness of whatever [Sasha]was feeling…rather miraculous" (115).
 
Though the third person point of view is limited to Albert's narrow perspective, it's inclusive in other ways: it stretches across time, revealing his experiences in music, love, and sex and additionally, his persistent sense that he is missing something that others can perceive.  This is the mystery I was speaking of: he feels surrounded by meanings and messages he will never fully understand.  When Sasha says of her daughter, "She's like the next Albert Uhm,"(136) Albert doesn't know how to respond.  "What is he to make of this?  He feels this is complicated nonsense" (136).  Yet as always, he returns to his solitude with a consoling thought: "He does not mind knowing of himself that he is a person who retreats" (145).  When Sasha's daughter runs out of the studio and the lesson comes to an abrupt stop, Albert says, "What's wrong with her"(140) and Sasha replies, "Don't you know?  Can't you tell?" (141), questions he repeats to himself later that echo similar questions asked in different ways by other people throughout his life.
 
But when they're thrown at him by Sasha they finally breach Albert's fortifications.  Who is he and who is that little girl?  That's the mystery he's faced with, and that's when he knows he must articulate an answer.  What he discovers, and what the reader discovers through him, is nothing less than the meaning of art.  It is also the answer to Sasha's agonized cry, "Have you been happy?  Is it, is it possible" (148)? 
 
 

Using an image to convey what a character is feeling.
 

 Most of the stories in Hilma Wolitzer's newly published collection were written in the nineteen seventies, but the humor and wit that electrifies each one feels timeless, and relative to our present, necessary and important.  They are about the many ways the extraordinary inhabits what appear to be ordinary lives.  Her brilliance, as a writer, is the deft and easy braiding of the internal with the external so that a reader's knowledge of a point of view character quickly becomes intimate.  Not only do we know what the character thinks and says, we also know, especially in "Bodies," my favorite story in the collection, what she sees.  All of these stories are written in a close third person perspective, but "Bodies" is the darkest and the richest in visuals.
 
Images become the language of the story.  They express Sharon's unspoken feelings in a way that never feels labored or attenuated because revelations, when they occur, are pictures.  They are shape and color and reveal the author's signature irreverence.  Though "Bodies" plumbs a well of darkness, Wolitzer's narrative pace is still light and quick footed, so that in this 25 page story, we know not only what the problem is by page 3, but also that it's one that will challenge the basic trust that Sharon, the point of view character, has in Michael, a man she has been married to for many years.  You're thinking that he had an affair.  Not at all, and that is the other reason I love this story. 
 
What Michael did elicits an entirely different kind of shame, panic, and anger in Sharon. We are told that as a child, he suffered severe privation in the care of an ailing, sadistic father because his mother, who worked as a traveling nurse, was often absent from the home.  But as an adult, he seems to have emerged from that early abuse unscathed.  He works as a social worker and is a good and dependable husband.  When his mother dies, he flies to Ohio to take care of business and while he is there, he is arrested.  Sharon gets a phone call telling her that he has been jailed for exposing himself to a woman in the parking lot of a supermarket. 
 
This news, of course, is deeply unsettling.  She flies out with their good friend, who is a lawyer, for the arraignment, and as she contemplates seeing Michael for the first time when he is brought into the courtroom, she wonders if she will experience "a complete failure of love, even of charity" knowing what he has done (111).  That question is posed at the mid-point of the story, setting up the expectation that it will be answered by the end.
 
But how can such a question be answered without sounding heavy and pedantic, which is everything Wolitzer's style is not.  Has she set up a difficult, maybe impossible challenge for the story?  If she uses a direct expression of feeling, everything that the story has achieved—its mystery and shock--would be lost.   But Wolitzer shows us that there is another way to report on what a character is feeling: describe what she sees.  It is more surreptitious and maybe even more efficient.  And so, from the first page, Wolitzer prepares us for the role images will play in this story.
 
We are told that Sharon is an artist; her currency is visual language.  Appropriately, the story begins with an image from a Lenny Bruce performance in which he describes a flasher "who opens his raincoat and displays a bunch of lilacs instead of a penis" (95).  (An aside: "Bodies" was published in 1979, before streaming, before YouTube, before even computers were ubiquitous.  Lenny Bruce performances were saved on records.  My parents had one.)
 
But that image, gentle and harmless as it is, does nothing to assuage her horror at the fact of her husband's act.  She remembers "the singing corduroy of his trousers as he walks, that yellow shirt" (100), but the familiar fails to create a generous feeling.  She tries to minimize the aggressiveness of his act.  "Other men did that sort of thing in subway passages, or in dark alleyways.  The parking lot of a supermarket seemed foolishly domestic" (102).  Hopeful maybe, but not forgiving. 
 
The story takes us through the process of Sharon getting herself to Ohio and staying in the same motel where her husband had been arrested.  The police found him because the woman in the parking lot reported the license plate on his car and his car is still parked outside of the room he had rented, a fact that, by itself, causes a shiver of feeling the reader shares with Sharon.  Other images appear.  Growing up in a household of females, the first time Sharon saw a naked man was when she stumbled into her friend's parents' bedroom and caught a glimpse of the father she had always been afraid of sitting naked on the edge of the bed.  "In that quick and brilliant moment—she is sure she remembers sunlight in the bedroom—she saw his melancholy in the droop of his genitals, and felt a rush of knowledge and anguish" (108).  Wolitzer takes care to deliver a complete image, giving us the man illuminated by a ray of light, and though anguish is a big abstraction for such a brief glimpse, this is how children operate, they pick up any ragged, awkward clue that will help them traverse the inscrutable adult world.  And, indeed, maybe it has, gaining sophistication as she's grown up, guiding her to this moment with Michael.
 
Another image comes towards the end of the story.  It becomes the foundation for the final image that will answer the question the story posed mid-way.  In her motel room, Sharon reads in the newspaper that an infant has been born with his heart in the wrong place, outside rather than inside his chest.  "Sharon…thinks about men and how they always wear their parts on the surface of their bodies, indecently exposed and vulnerable, appendages of their joy and despair.  She realizes that she has never regretted being female, as a girl or as a woman" (119).
 
That misplaced heart focuses our attention and prepares us for what Sharon will discover about herself.  Her feelings could go either way.  But we also know, by this point, that when her husband is brought out of the holding cell, Sharon's reaction will take the form of an image, something we will see with her, that will tell us what she's feeling. 
 
Is the marriage doomed?  Or will she feel the possibility that love will join them once again?  The image will give us the answer.
 
 

Wolitzer, Hilma.  Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket.  New York: Bloomsbury. 2021.

 

I just discovered Goldie Goldbloom's 2019 novel, On Division, about a Chassidic woman who discovers she is pregnant at age 57, when she already is a grandmother.  It takes the reader into the mysteries of Orthodox Jewish traditions while maintaining a strong connection to contemporary life in a big city.  To an outsider like me, the Chassid seem to exist simultaneously in two different countries and time periods, the small nineteenth century Yiddish speaking community in Williamsburg and Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and the contemporary Brooklyn and New York City that surrounds them.  And because I live in Crown Heights, it was a privilege to be taken into the private lives of people living so close to me.

 

Surie is at the center of this riveting third person omniscient novel, a woman the reader comes to know intimately.  Already a large woman, she successfully hides her pregnancy from her beloved husband.  She procrastinates telling him that they are expecting yet another child when they both assumed they were finished.  It shames her to wear the visible evidence of the pleasurable, and, because of their age, unsanctioned love-making that keeps their marriage strong.  That shame brings up an earlier shame, the suicide, many years ago, of their gay son, Lipa, who left their home in Williamsburg to escape to San Francisco. 

 

Surie feels as though her pregnancy is linked to this deceased son.  She sees him sitting in the corners of the rooms she occupies and decides that she can't reveal her condition to her husband, Yidel, without first talking about what happened with Lipa.  The difficulty she has in starting this conversation means that she gets closer and closer to her due date.  Only the midwife, the one non-Chassidic woman in Surie's orbit, has seen what Surie is hiding beneath her voluminous clothes. 
 

"Surie stirred in her chair.  A wave of coldness ran from the crown of her head down her ribs and all the way to her feet.  She was acting just like Lipa, holding onto an explosive secret, one that had the potential to rip her from her community, even kill her. Like Lipa, she wanted to tell someone but was deathly afraid to do so…. She had wondered what it felt like to be Lipa.  Well, now she knew" (69.) 

 

Conflating Lipa with her pregnancy is something Surie does naturally.  And though shame is the only thing that links the two situations, it has a psychological honesty that feels accurate.  Surie knows that she will not be able to mother her babies, she is expecting twins, until she understands how she failed Lipa. This merging of the two most difficult situations of her life is irrational, but this is why this novel is brilliant, tender, and wise.  In the loneliness of self-doubt the irrational makes sense. And in terms of narrative momentum, the pregnancy provides the catalyst for Surie to question how she and Yurie treated Lipa.  She tells the midwife that she had a gay son and says, "[I]f I had the chance again, I would bring him home and put him to sleep in the best bed, and I would tell him to bring home his boyfriend and I would tell all of my children and my grandchildren to smile at him and to love him and never to stop…" (126).

 

Linking the pregnancy to Lipa's death, showing how Surie believes that she must keep her condition secret from her husband until she speaks to him about their lost son, Goldbloom creates the conditions for a dramatic escalation of narrative tension. There is the ticking of the clock as the due date draws closer, the swelling of her body as the twins grow, the brief sightings of Lipa's ghostly figure in the corners of rooms.   And there is the ticking of another kind of clock as she ventures into the world of contemporary midwifery, learning how to be an assistant and translator at the birthing center where she has been hired to help the midwife care for the Chassidic women in her practice.  So, along with the ticking of the pregnancy clock, there is the accumulations of experience as she works in healthcare.  It is another ticking mechanism, drawing the reader into the rich complexities of her dilemma.  Will Surie choose to take on more responsibilities at the clinic and drift farther and farther from her community?   Or will she give the clinic up and remain within the boundaries of a traditional Chassidic marriage?  The life of this deeply private character contains such weighty conflicts the reader doesn't know which way she will go until the very end.

 

Goldbloom, Goldie.  On Division.  New York: FSG, 2019.
 
 
 
 

 

In this powerful, many-layered novel, Bennett explores the role of identity in six connected lives, considering race and gender as her characters wrestle with truth.  Some are looking for the truth about someone else and some are actively hiding their gender or racial origins.  This is a novel of ideas, which is a surprising thing to say about a novel that is as deeply and fully absorbing as this one.  Yet everything springs from concept, beginning with the African American town of Mallard, Louisiana, a place where all its inhabitants have such pale skin that in 1938, when a young priest arrived from Dublin, he thought he was lost.  This couldn't be the "colored town" he had been assigned.  In this place, everyone was "fair and blonde and redheaded. Was this who counted for colored in America, who whites wanted to keep separate? Well, how would they ever tell the difference" (6)?
 
The first central characters we meet are Stella and Desiree, identical twins who grew up in the racially homogeneous town of Mallard.  Desiree chooses to remain true to her black identity, marrying a man whose skin is dark and birthing a daughter who has her father's color.  Her sister Stella wants a secretarial job, and the only way she can get one is to pass for white.  The role seems to come to her naturally, so she chooses to play it in all aspects of her life even though it will mean she must leave Desiree, her mother, and the town of Mallard behind forever. She marries her boss, moves to LA, and births a blond-haired daughter.

It is when Kennedy, her daughter, is growing up that the complexities emerge.  Kennedy feels her mother's tension whenever she asks about her childhood and notices she never gets full or satisfying answers.   Who is her mother, she wonders.  It's not surprising later, that Kennedy drifts into acting and finds she has a talent for it, taking after a mother whose entire adult life is a performance.

Jude is Desiree's daughter, and when she and her mother return to Mallard, the dark skin she inherited from her father keeps her socially isolated.  But she thrives academically and moves to California for college where she gets a job working for a caterer.  It is at one of those catering events that she spots her mother's missing twin and is so shocked she drops a bottle of wine on the floor.  It is a powerful moment, but Bennett keeps it in check because this is the tightened spring from which the rest of the novel will unwind.  Jude learns Stella's name and then pursues Kennedy, keeping the knowledge that they are cousins to herself. 

The tension grows steadily, always building the reader's desire to know more, as the omniscient perspective cuts a scene at a high moment, moving its focus from character to character, widening the circle to include Jude's transexual boyfriend Reese, and Early, Desiree's lover, a gifted private investigator famous for finding the whereabouts of even the most cleverly disguised criminal.  Yet in all the years of their relationship Early never succeeds in finding Stella. 
 
Place is of minimal concern to this author even though the setting moves from Mallard to New Orleans to Los Angeles to New York City.    Instead, Bennett narrows her attention on another narrative quality altogether: theme.  The theme of hide and seek is everywhere, finding different forms and iterations, and my greatest pleasure in reading this novel was discovering each new expression.  Perhaps Stella's secret is what motivated Kennedy to become a professional actor, yet, when acting ceased to fulfill her, what led her to real estate?  Was it, again, an awareness that her mother was not the person she seemed to be? Here she is at an open house:
 
"She would disappear inside herself, inside these empty homes where nobody actually lived.  As the room filled with strangers, she always found her mark, guiding a couple through the kitchen, pointing out the light fixtures, back splash, high ceilings. 

 

'Imagine your life here,' she said.  'Imagine who you could be'" (300).

In the same oblique way, the other cousin takes on her mother's preoccupation.  She goes into medicine, a field devoted to revealing what's hidden.  Here is Jude dissecting a cadaver:

"People lived in bodies that were largely unknowable.  Some things you could never learn about yourself—some things nobody could learn about you until after you died" (328).

Echoes, patterns, reverberations.  This is how the theme plays out.  The original stone thrown into the water--Stella's decision to live the life of a white woman--sets in motion the ripples that constantly move outwards in this riveting story where nothing is static, nothing comes to a resting place. 

I do believe that children have an inchoate awareness of the secrets their parents keep.  In my own family, my mother was happy to bury her New York Jewish identity when she married my German Texan father, and over the years I've met other people with similar stories.  The children always know. 
 
 
 Bennett, Brit. The Vanishing Half.  New York: Riverhead, 2020.

This novella by the Irish writer, Claire Keegan, is a small masterpiece.  The story centers around Bill Furlong, a coal merchant, as he makes deliveries during the Christmas season in Northern Ireland in 1985.  During one of his stops he encounters, at the town's convent, an ugly truth about the nuns' treatment of the unwed mothers who live in their care.  In spare, sturdy prose that is as rhythmic and sensuous as music, Keegan tells the story of this long-married father of five, a good provider for his family, a fair and generous employer who runs a steady, dependable business making an uncharacteristically reckless decision that will endanger everything he has achieved.  The reader is privileged, in this deeply interior and beautifully observed story, to see out of Furlong's eyes as he drives about town.  It is a third person narrative that chronicles a man's journey towards a dangerous action.   Central to this journey is his backstory.  Furlong himself was born to an unwed mother who worked as a domestic.  He never knew his father and routinely goes through the possible candidates, yet one evening he stumbles upon the answer when he stops to visit a friend and that information satisfies a hunger he's had since boyhood.
 
You can read the novella in an hour, but if you're like me, you'll want to read it a second time merely to experience, once again, the seamless transition from interior rumination to a final, irrevocable action that will unravel all of the seams Furlong has carefully stitched into his life and the lives of his wife and children.  Keegan's remarkable accomplishment here is the believable, utterly engrossing journey Furlong makes towards his decision.   After he has done what his conscience bid, he walks through the town on a snowy Christmas eve past all of the celebrating people.  It may be the most triumphant march in all of contemporary literature.  And because Furlong feels not just pure joy, but a mixture of joy and fear as he contemplates what might come next, it rings true. 
 
How does Keegan make us believe this change in a man's personality?  The first thing she does is establish the basis of Furlong's character, the circumstances of his birth and childhood, his role as employer and delivery man, and his orderly family life with five daughters and a protective, hovering wife.  But more important than that, is the quality of Furlong's perceptions.  He's a man who looks out at the world and sees details that a less outward-directed man would miss. 

It is the time of "The Troubles."  Money is in short supply.  People don't have enough to eat.  "Furlong had seen a young schoolboy drinking the milk out of the cat's bowl behind the priest's house...the dole ques were getting longer and there were men out there who couldn't pay their ESB bills, living in houses no warmer than bunkers, sleeping in their overcoats" (13).
 
One evening he tells his wife that he gave the young son of the town drunk his pocket change and a lift in his lorry and she replies, "'You know some of these bring the hardship on themselves?'

'Tis not the child's doing surely.'

'Sinnott [the boy's father] was stotious at the phone box on Tuesday.'

'The poor man,' Furlong said, 'whatever ails him.'

'Drink is what ails him.  If he had any regard for his children, he'd not be going around like that.  He'd pull himself out of it.'

'Maybe the man isn't able.'

'I suppose....Always there's one that has to pull the short straw'" (11).
 
The conversation ends there, but it's a defining moment because it establishes Furlong as a man who can feel empathy and his wife as a woman too focused on propriety to feel the suffering of others.  Though that dialogue may be the only time we hear his wife speak, it establishes her hardened nature, but in an elegant, casual manner, without making a direct statement.  The "one that has to pull the short straw" is all the reader needs to understand her sense of the natural order of things.
 
The conversation also sets up the essential argument between two intimately connected people, letting us understand that as Furlong performs the charitable act that he will never be able to undo, he is risking his marriage. The great kindness that was shown his mother when she gave birth to him means he cannot turn away from the suffering of an unmarried girl with a baby.    And because the woman who offered safe harbor to him and his mother risked social condemnation herself, Furlong understands he must choose the same path.  He will not be able to live with himself if he doesn't.
 
Though Keegan skillfully guides the reader, she is artfully indirect, always, providing clues in body language and detail so nothing interrupts an atmosphere of escalating menace.  At the convent, when Furlong knocks on the door, having found a young girl locked in the coal shed when he was making a delivery, the reader is shown multiple levels: the spoken words that convey one meaning and the body movements and facial expressions that reveal the opposite.  The Mother Superior performs a show of concern, even a false cheerfulness, yet there's no mistaking the warning snaking beneath her graciousness.
 
The powerful last chapter ends with a Christmas Eve walk through the snowy city.  When Furlong meets celebrating people he has known "for the greater part of his life"(111) he doesn't try to explain.  White snow and black coal are in dramatic contrast as he runs the gauntlet towards home.  He has done what he knew was necessary, but now the future is unclear.  Still, he carried "on along with the excitement in his heart matched by the fear of what he could not yet see" (111).
 
Keegan, Claire.  Small Things Like These. New York: Grove Press, 2021.
 
 

 

Do not miss Mrs. Palfrey at The Claremont, by Elizabeth Taylor, originally published in 1971, but recently re-issued by New York Review Books.  This stunning novel takes us into the world of the liver-spotted, fall-prone, lonely occupants of a resident hotel in London where well-heeled men and women live their lives out in what they perceive as upper-class dignity, avoiding the infirmities of old age because they are not allowed to die there.  If incontinence strikes, they are whisked off to a nursing home.  Only invisible suffering is allowed, and for most of them, that's loneliness. 

 

Mrs. Palfrey finds a passable life there among the five or six other elderly residents.  Her days consist of walks, meals, writing and posting letters to her absent daughter, and listening to and sometimes contributing sage or wry remarks to the conversations going on around her.  You might ask, how could a novel with such a sleepy plot and cast of limited characters create any emotional intensity?  Yet this "quiet" novel achieves tremendous intensity because people who assume they are closer to death than others possess an urgency those others lack and it's that liminal state Taylor writes about.

 

Mrs. Palfrey is well-mannered and socially skilled, yet she is mildly alarmed that she should be living in one of these places.  With daily lectures to herself that renew her courage, she manages to keep her alarm in control.   She is only recently a widow and neither her grandson, who lives close by in London, nor her daughter in Scotland have come to visit. 

 

Out for a walk one day to post a letter, she falls.  It is a residential neighborhood, the sidewalk is empty, and it has started to snow.  But in the area below her, a door opens and a young man who saw her through his window, comes to help.

 

"He took her in his arms and held her to him, like a lover and without a word, and a wonderful acceptance began to spread across her pain, and she put herself in his hands with ungrudging gratitude" (25). 

 

This is a long and somewhat awkward sentence, the string of clauses are linked by "and," which makes it mellifluous until those two hard 'g's in ungrudging and gratitude, break the flow.  They slow the reader down, and the awkward rhythm creates the awkward and ridiculous reality Mrs. Palfrey herself is feeling. She is not a woman who stumbles, much less falls, and certainly never in public, so she is new to this kind of neediness.   But the man rescuing her lifts her up and brings her to her feet, and she recognizes the tenderness that has been missing from her life.  The word used to describe her feelings is the more removed and polite "gratitude," but the reader knows better because "he took her in his arms like a lover" has already done its work and though Mrs. Palfrey is never anything but civilized and appropriate, she has fallen under the man's spell.  He takes her into his small ground floor apartment and as he ministers to her wound the romantic language continues:

 

"She was rather shocked by the sight of the towel, but this shock came too soon after a greater one to make much difference, and she submitted.  She was completely in his hands and glad to give herself up.  She felt no sense of outrage when he lifted her knicker elastic over her suspenders and unfastened her stocking.  Most tenderly he swabbed her and dabbed it with the dirty towel.  She felt no pain.  Her leg seemed not to belong to her.  He fetched a handkerchief from a drawer and tied it round her knee, drew up her torn stocking again and then sat back on his heels and looked up at her and smiled.
'I could make you a cup of tea,' he said."

 

It helps that as an American woman in the twenty first century I don't recognize these undergarments.  Knicker elastic?  Suspenders?  But even if I could picture this stocking arrangement, I couldn't miss the sense of undressing and lover-like ministrations.  

 

The rescuer is Ludovic Myers, Ludo for short.  He is a penniless, aspiring novelist, and as he is always looking for people and situations he might borrow for his work, he has brought her into his impoverished domain, washed the blood from her leg, made her a cup of tea, and then lets her gather strength and composure until she feels capable of walking out to the taxi he hails for her.  Mrs. Palfrey not only gives him money in thanks, but invites him to dine with her at the Claremont.  Scouting for material, and never well-fed, Ludo accepts. 

 

This is the beginning of Mrs. Palfrey's infatuation.  She lives for each Ludo encounter, her always circumspect behavior belying the intensity of her true feelings.  His youth and his masculinity have revived the ache of loneliness her husband-less condition has imposed.  And the physicality of their first encounter, when he held her to his chest "like a lover," and then tenderly addressed her wound, permitted forgotten emotions to thrive. The language of that embrace lets us see it from Mrs. Palfrey's point of view and although this novel is narrated in an omniscience that takes us into the points of view of several characters, including Ludo, the reader experiences the rescue from the perspective of this lonely old woman.

 

There is only one elderly man at the Claremont, misogynistic Mr. Osmond who tries to pal around with the male help at the hotel, whispering dirty jokes under his breath and very obviously sitting apart from the women who inhabit the lounge as they knit, write letters, or talk amongst themselves.  Gradually, Mr. Osmond begins to feel "an alignment" with Mrs. Palfrey.  It surprises him as well as the reader.

 

"During his time at the Claremont there had been no rapport with anyone--attempts at it with waiters, porters, even the manager, but all one-sided, the attempts forced on others, and rejected. Women he usually tried to avoid, but Mrs. Palfrey looked so wonderfully like a man, and had an air of behaving like one.  Trivia (one of his favourite [sic] words) she appeared to scorn"(125).

 

Sure enough, in this environment, his feeling of alignment with Mrs. Palfrey escalates into an obsession and he invites her to the Ladies Night at the Masonic Lodge where in a blur of alcohol fueled optimism and rage at being a widower he asks her to marry him.  It is a remarkable scene, funny and heartbreaking as two people at cross-purposes, Mr. Osmond awash in fantasies of a second married life, and Mrs. Palfrey, loyal to her first husband, gently reprimands and then switches to a firmer and more aggravated response.  And just as the reader felt Mrs. Palfrey's grateful acquiescence to Ludo's touch, here the reader feels Mr. Osmond's equally one-sided fabulist musings. 

 

"Mrs. Palfrey lifted a hand.  'Mr. Osmond, I beseech you: I shall never marry again'" (167). 

 

She can't be any clearer or firmer, yet he pays no attention. 

 

"'We could entertain in a modest, pleasant way.  Small dinner party, the odd cheese-and-wine set-to.  I've often read of them and wondered why we did not think of it in our day.  Informal, simple... a couple of decent wines, a Sancerre, maybe; or a Quincy--do you know that?  No, it's not widely appreciated'

 

"He seemed to be talking against disappointment, obstructing her. Filibustering.

 

"'And a red one...you can leave that to me.  And the cheeses, no old Claremont mousetrap or chalky Camenbert for us.  Black Diamond with a bite in it, a wedge of Brie, half a Stilton if we can run to it'"(168-9).

 

Taylor's blending of two vehemently opposed viewpoints in one dialogue is masterful and as in the scene with Ludo, the reader feels the claustrophobia between two people who are physically close, but miles apart in their objectives.  To reveal such opposed intentions underneath a surface of polite exchanges means that the writer has achieved transparency.  We can see that words and actions don't mean what they're supposed to mean because underneath, the inventive mind is creating a great, billowing fantasy.  First it was Mrs. Palfrey with Ludo, and then it is Mr. Osmond with Mrs. Palfrey. 

 

Because Elizabeth Taylor creates scenes that reveal the raging, raw desire below polite conversation, the reader is face to face with the grim realities of old age.  It is not a "quiet" novel.  Mrs. Palfrey at The Claremont is about the madness of the restrained and civilized mind.   

 

At the beginning of their evening together, when  Mr. Osmond and Mrs. Palfrey drove off from the Claremont in a taxi, two separate people with their private histories, one was prepared with a marriage proposal, the other prepared to submit to a tedious evening, the jealous Mrs. Post stood on the porch and waved goodbye.

 

"Mr. Osmond looked out from the cab and raised a hand vaguely.  'I thought for a moment she might have a bag of confetti,' he said, then blushed, unnoticed"(162).

 

It is another Britishism, like knickers held up by suspenders. In England apparently, they shower newlyweds with confetti, not rice.

 

Taylor, Elizabeth.  Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont.  New York: NYRB Classic, 2021.

 

Until I read The Family Chao, my favorite novel by Lan Samantha Chang was All Is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost (2010), a story about two poets who meet in grad school and maintain their friendship into adulthood, despite the very different paths their lives take.  It's a novel that explores intimate feelings about love, success, and writing as one poet, a humble and deeply private man retreats into a solitary lifestyle and the other, more ambitious and entitled, follows a career into the bright lights of literary success.   It is a stunning book, and for anyone interested in writing, it provides an illuminating glance into grad school where work and relationships are shaped in the high heat of extreme devotion to craft, mentors, and shared insight.
 
The Family Chao is another stunner.  Published recently, it has more links to Chang's first novel, Inheritance, an expansive, family-centered story set during turbulent times in China that ends with emigration to New York.  While The Family Chao is not geographically expansive like Inheritance, it is similarly centered on Chinese culture and family, in this case, Chinese American families living in the small city of Haven, Wisconsin.   It achieves the same intensity of place as All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost, yet instead of a grad school dominated by a seductive and brilliant mentor, relationships are forged in the heated context of a restaurant dominated by the abusive and arrogant patriarch of the family, Leo Chao. 
 
Abuse is the theme of Chang's latest novel, the racial abuse experienced by Chinese immigrants that shapes their lives as they make their way in this midwestern city, as well as the constant verbal abuse Leo Chao heaps upon his wife, sons, and restaurant workers.  What one takes in, one puts out: that is how it worked with Leo Chao, and in this affecting portrayal of  the Chinese diaspora, Chang is additionally inspired to create events that are as suspenseful and dramatic as the best crime thriller, in this case, a murder and a trial.  Yet this is not a genre novel.   First of all, there are no guns.  But there is a weapon, and it's clunky and far from sexy, though it is introduced in the classic Chekhovian manner. Here the pistol hanging on the wall is an outdated freezer room in the basement of the Fine Chao restaurant. Everyone in the family has been inside it and everyone knows that the only means of egress is a key on an interior shelf.  If that key were missing, a simple errand to grab a few packages of frozen broccoli would be fatal.  That hasn't happened, and every year the code violations are overlooked by a compliant inspector.  When James, the youngest of the three Chao sons, enters the freezer, he is careful to make sure the key is there.  This is how we are trained, as readers, to expect deadly mischief and this is the means through which a low voltage suspense is introduced and then slowly brought to a boil, making this a novel that is difficult to put down.
 
The reader follows the trial through the eyes of a young Chinese American girl who is writing an opinionated, extremely unprofessional report for her journalism class, and this is another inspired departure from genre standard, but what keeps this novel firmly rooted in the literary tradition is the way the characters drive the plot.  The youngest of the three brothers is James and though the omniscient narrative enters the minds of all three, it is James the reader has a soft spot for.  He has returned from college still a virgin, the only child who feels tenderness for the father his brothers have turned against.  It's not because Leo Chao deserves his regard, more that James is an innocent.  He doesn't know how to nurture hatred and perhaps this is because James lacks the competitive edge his brothers possess in abundance.  In a rare moment of dialogue with his father he confesses that his only ambition is "to be small, to be a part of something larger than himself"(214), and as the only male in this family who professes any kind of humility, his character balances the volatility and desperation of the others.  He becomes the reader's touchstone and as he enters a first sexual liaison with a young woman he has known and loved since childhood, a dalliance of great tenderness and affection, he notices that he is beginning to change.  Every time he makes furtive plans for their next assignation, "he's aware... of a depth and cunning he never knew he had.  With each successful machination, he stretches the reach of his inheritance: Chao wiliness, Chao secrecy, Chao cunning.  Still, he's surprised when things work out"(173-4). 
 
James is a voice of calm in a novel where all the other males of the family speak and act with an intensity James lacks.   We watch Dagou, the eldest, cook an elaborate feast to impress his white girlfriend and show his father, who has retired from the kitchen, that he is the rightful heir of the restaurant.  And we watch Ming, the middle son, who early on escaped the racist confines of Haven, Wisconsin to become a successful financier in New York City, as he makes a frenzied appearance and then quickly exits from the family event that has brought all of them back to Haven, only to turn around and reappear again.  And though we have glimpses of the pressures that were heaped on these Chinese American sons as they grew to adulthood in this white, midwestern world, we also know the hatred that burns in their core: hatred for their father, a man who declaims with such rancor and venom every one of his words burn. 
 
James is the necessary cool to the overheated emotions of the others.  As a character, he is the counterweight that keeps the narrative balanced.  It makes me realize that every successful novel must in some way achieve a balance between these extremes: hot and cool, intense and calm, dramatic and mundane, and The Family Chao shows that one way to achieve this balance is through character.  James is the antidote to Leo's volatility, Ming's bitterness, and Dagou's frantic but brilliant cooking. 
 
Chang, Lan Samantha. The Family Chao. New York: W.W. Norton, 2022.
 
 
 
 

 

Steven Schwartz brings a fresh vision to issues of marriage and family in his recent fiction, developing characters that claimed my allegiance because I empathized with their problems and admired their determination to develop solutions that never compromised their needs and desires.  I began with his story collection, Little Raw Souls and then moved on to his just-published novel, The Tenderest of Strings.
 
In the stunning final story, "The Theory of Everything," a grandfather faces the loss of the grandchildren he and his wife have rescued from the chaotic household of their emotionally unstable son and his addicted wife.  When the parents claim their lives have stabilized, the grandparents are skeptical, but they lack the legal authority to keep the children. Inevitably, their son's household spirals into chaos again, and the worried grandparents search for a way to become the children's full-time guardians. 
 
The grandfather, who owns rental properties, has a light touch when negotiating the thorny problems that crop up with his tenants.  He is a wise reader of people and a savvy businessman, but no match for a problem of this magnitude.  The reader expects defeat when he asks to meet with his daughter in law, but this elderly man has devised a solution that will allow everyone to get what they want without shame or punishment.  It is a bold piece of action and a brilliant coda to these well-plotted stories.  And by well-plotted, I mean that events never feel arbitrary.  They are inextricably linked with the characters' habits and desires.
 
The Tenderest of Strings, Schwartz's new novel, is about a middle-aged couple, Reuben, the owner of a small-town newspaper, and his wife Ardith, the mother of their two high school aged sons.  Complications arise when Ardith has an affair with their close friend, the town's family doctor, a man named Tom who is beloved of many.  Tom seems to be above reproach in all aspects of his life; he is a great doctor, athlete, and an affable and easy-going friend, and Ardith falls deeply in love and becomes pregnant.  The reader expects that a divorce or abortion will follow, but Ardith has other plans, and this is why the novel is utterly compelling.  Each new plot turn raises false expectations and time and again, the reader's assumptions about the way people should act under the circumstances turn out to be wrong.  Ardith is such a memorable character she stayed with me long after I turned the last page.
 
Early in the novel, the reader sees why she's vulnerable to the charms of another man and it's everything to do with her daily life living in the chaos of the half-remodeled house Reuben is in the process of never finishing.  Tom's strong, affable personality attracts her because he's an orderly man who is firmly in charge of all aspects of his life, or at least he seems to be. 
 
In the same way, the reader also understands why Ardith makes all the unexpected decisions that grow from this affair, including the major ones, not to abort and not to divorce the other man she loves, her husband Reuben.  From one life-altering event to the next, the novel is beautifully paced and for fiction writers, is a great example of the ways character determines plot.  Ardith and Reuben take on the three dimensions of flesh and blood people because their actions and words are grounded in concrete experience.  The events that roil their lives, some of them becoming headlines in Reuben's paper, are similarly grounded in concrete experience.  
 
Early in the novel, Ardith is relaxing in a deep tub at Tom's house after lovemaking, and the peace and cleanliness of his environment soothes her as she thinks about Reuben:
 
"Despite his cries of wanting the simple life, he thrived on keeping matters unresolved, all of which offered him the familiarity of his angst and the comfort of entropy.  Things had to get worse before they could…get worse.  Completion was the enemy" (28). Her insight is significant and for the reader, makes the affair understandable.  But Schwartz knows that offering this abstract revelation is not enough; it must be felt through details that are realistic and specific to their situation.  We need to see that the affair is firmly rooted in her own desires and marital struggles.  Still in the tub, she continues:
 
"It was no coincidence that [Reuben] was a copyeditor, a checker of other people's work.  The truth was he couldn't finish anything of his own, couldn't set the same deadlines and standards for himself he enforced as an editor for others.  When Ardith went to the Sentinel and saw the fractured disarray of his desk,…it looked exactly like the house's torn up front and back porches with their splintered boards so spongy and rotted from the hot sun and cold winters that they sagged like foam rubber when you walked on them.  Bags of nails, lumber, rolls of insulation, drop clothes, cans of paint had all been delivered and stationed around the yard among the pried-up boards, the duct-taped mailbox, the rusted pipes, the ripped-out shingles.  Inside, displayed along the perimeter of the living room like a showroom for interior design, waited product samples: kitchen tile, cabinet doors, carpet folios, bathroom fixtures, and paint strips with exotic and inspirational sounding names like vanilla mirage, tangerine surf, and (simply) hope.  She had no idea where to begin.  They couldn't pay one hundred and fifty thousand to 'do it right,' or seventy-five to do it half-right.  So it would all remain in preparatory chaos.  Nothing would change" (29).
 
This list, so familiar to anyone who has lived through the horrors of renovating an old house, is well-chosen, and the entire picture, interior and exterior, contrasts with the comforts of Tom's house and is more revealing than dialogue or character-focused exposition.  The bags of nails and stacks of lumber, the sink and toilet sitting in the living room among all of the cabinet doors is the reason Ardith fell in love with another man, and because they're things I can see and touch and smell, I am there, fully engaged, ready to follow the surprising twists and turns her affair creates.  Moral judgement is irrelevant.  I've been so deliciously manipulated by the author I can inhabit Ardith's point of view and cheer her on.
 
 
Schwartz, Steven.  Little Raw Souls.  Pittsburgh, PA: Autumn House.  2013.
Schwartz, Steen.  The Tenderest of Strings.  Raleigh, NC: Regal House Publishing. 2022.

 

Ghosts of New York by Jim Lewis is an unusual novel because it lacks a central character and a plot.  Some might argue that New York City is the protagonist, but what engaged me more consistently were the characters.  The reader is introduced to many, most of them only for a short while, while others make return appearances.  What they share, across chapters, is location, and while most of these lives take place in what feels like contemporary times, some do not.  So, what gives Ghosts of New York cohesion?  Why is it appropriate to call it a novel?  And what is it, in this remarkable book, that satisfied my need for story?
 
 Jim Lewis is in love with people, their variety and unpredictability, and his sentences are precise; they probe and reveal like a surgeon opening that part of the body that hurts. I became intimate with each character's defining qualities.  Over and over, his insights into behavior felt true.   Never self-conscious or manufactured for effect, they were expressed in ordinary diction that allowed me to view the character in a private and endearing fashion.  Here are some examples:
 
"There was a slender silver chain around her neck, and dangling from it there was a cross, though just the very top was visible.  She was bare where it hung. He started to think of her lace and elastic, but he stopped himself, wondering how he had come to be so coarse—that wasn't like him at all—and wondering, too, if she could tell, if she could see it in his eyes, as she must have seen it in men's eyes all her life. He should be better than that: he wanted to listen to her, but the mind of a man in the first stages of love's grief can hear little more than want, want, want, like the pulling sound of oars in the water" (92).  This is Benny meeting a woman named Jillian.  Later: "His bed, now with double the weight on it, had ridden low on the night, like a boat in shallow water.  The smell of her skin was perfumed and powdery, with just the faintest edge of agreeable rankness; the smell of her breath was like a wet animal" (97). What appeals to me is the unsentimental tracking of a man desiring a woman, revealing the intimate things that snag his attention.  It is eavesdropping at its very best.
 
The following is from the longest chapter in the novel, and the only chapter narrated in the first person.  The narrator is named Mickey and he has just met a man named Johnny who comes from a tangled family history overseas.  Johnny is the speaker. "Everything that's best about this country is represented in its language.  Do you know what my favorite word is? I waited while he basked in anticipation, a little too long: Johnny always did have a bad sense of timing.—Sure, he said at last.  I love this word, he said.  Sure" (117).  At this point, the reader knows that Johnny is a formal person, a survivor of difficult times, more worldly and experienced than Mickey, and his pleasure with such a casual word as "sure" reveals his hunger for the easy life Mickey has in New York.  Mickey and Johnny are both students at Columbia and they frequent a "pitch-dark bar on Broadway and 125h street, underneath the elevated subway tracks….We called it Rusty's because that was the owner's name; he was a solid and slow man, Harlem born and bred, who poured shots with the parsimony of an elderly woman fishing in her change purse.  Still, they only cost a dollar a throw, and we got drunk by the thimbleful, night after night."  This is what I mean by precision: that elderly woman fishing in her change purse is not only vivid but, when held up against a Harlem man standing behind the counter in the dark bar he owns, it's also absurd, but that visual disorder is exactly what gives the description the specificity the reader needs to be able to feel his presence.
 
It occurs to me that all of the examples I've chosen are from the point of view of male characters, and though the novel is full of women, I believe there is only one, a photographer who roams the city at night taking pictures, who is also a recurrent point of view character.  Another who reappears, yet is never a point of view character, is Bridget, a woman Johnny and Mickey meet at Rusty's one night.  Bridget comes into Mickey's life in a casual way, but then settles in for the long term.  "There was a density to her, a gravity.  She always seemed to be standing with her back to a corner, even when she wasn't, because the corner was her territory."  Again, the mixture of something slightly off-kilter, the idea that someone gravitates to corners, combined with more practical words like gravity and density, creates a potent and visceral feeling about this woman.  Later in the novel, we will hear Bridget in orgasm, and it is truly a corner woman ripping out of a dark place and taking her rightful position in the world spectacularly. This orgasm has no equal in all of literature, I guarantee it.
 
It seems counterintuitive that a novel with so many unconnected moving parts, where the only stable piece is the setting, could cast such a spell, but these sentences, like the ones above that reveal characters in relationship to one another, have a quality of witness that stretches beyond the barriers of separate bodies.  Lewis' characters actively engage in the process of making connections with one another, trying to pass through the doorway into the other's life.  This is exciting to be a part of, and it feels especially nutritious now, in this time when so much human interaction happens in the flat space of screens.  But readers are always hungry for this, it's why we go to novels.  And in Jim Lewis's deeply felt Ghosts of New York, we follow the author's zig zag path from building to street to alleyway to park, going from one pocket of human activity to another, looking for the characters we've already met and want to be with again.
 
Returning to the questions I posed in the first paragraph, my answer is that the cohesive force that holds these stories together is the momentum created by chaos and disorder. That's what these lives mean within the container of New York.  Unlike other novels, the narrative doesn't impose meaning or order.  That's impossible here because the view is wider, the narrator more democratic, and the memorable opening and closing pages hint at something eternal.
 
Lewis, Jim.  Ghosts of New York.  Morgantown: West Virginia University Press. 2021.