You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman

A mouth was a means into a person, but it also offered one of the neatest ways out. Whatever entered that slick passage immediately began pushing through to the other side, emerging unrecognizable and many steps removed from itself. A mouth glistened with saliva, ninety-eight percent water and two percent suspended particles, which made it slick, odorous, corrosive. In my saliva and my boyfriend's rested enzymes that would break carbohydrates into sugars and fats as soon as food touched the inner walls of the oral cavity. Digestion begins inside the oral cavity, read the biology textbook I used in high school, in a section titled "How Do You Eat Meat?" What this meant was: Even in C loved me, even if he cared for me, even if he saw me as an equal and wanted only the best for me in my life, when he kissed me a part of him worked blindly to undo my body. When I put my own mouth on him, the material in my body sized up the material in his, checked to see if it was food or something other, something indigestible that would never truly penetrate.

The unnamed narrator of Alexandra Kleeman's You Too Can Have Body Like Mine is afraid that her roommate, B, is trying to become her. They already look a little alike, and B has taken to cutting her hair and using the narrator's makeup in order to seem a little more like her. The narrator's boyfriend, C, is no help; in fact, he's fed up with her trying to turn "solvable problems into unsolvable ones." He eats canned food and watches canned television, and generally lives a life bland unperturbability. (It's a mark of great restraint, I think, that Kleeman never describes the narrator as "A," though obviously that's who she is.) C, in fact, wants A to join him on his favorite program, That's My Partner!, a game show in which men and women have to pick their partner out of a lineup of physical decoys, with money for the winners and legally mandated separation for the losers. Duplicate bodies, physical slippages, these are the exact kinds of things that terrify A, on whom it is not lost that B has a habit of biting people. In a pique of retaliation, we watch as A unravels and swallows the lock of hair that B has cut off and handed to her.

Honestly, I loved this. I was a fan of Kleeman's Nothing New Under the Sun, a book I thought was really inventive and weird, but perhaps took on too much, and didn't live up to all of its many promises. That book gave me strong whiffs of DeLillo, and You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine even more so, beginning with its otherworldly "Wally's" grocery stores and the sacred, primeval importance of a nearly inedible snack food called Kandy Kakes. The avant-garde commercials which A recounts, which feature a desperate cartoon named Kandy Kat whose inability to capture and eat the impish Kake becomes a kind of eternal Kakfaseque torture, were some of my favorite parts of the novel. Like the Kandy Kat, A too seems unable to find the food that will nourish and satisfy her; the mere idea of food becomes strange and disquieting, a process by which one's own body is produced in the darkness of its own organs. At heart of the novel really is the fearful apprehension that one is one's body, not metaphorically but literally, and therefore one's self is material, friable, decomposable, and changeable. The hellscape of capitalism symbolism that surrounds her is not, as it is in DeLillo, a kind of distraction from these uneasy facts, but the commodification of them, and thus the reification of them.

A begins to lose it. Instead of Kandy Kakes, she finds strange pamphlets written by the "Church of the Conjoined Eater," a mysterious cult that believes that all people have two selves and the "Light" self can only be nurtured by eating foods with qualities of light. As A is abandoned be C, and flees from the attentions of B, she finds herself deeply entangled with this church, where everyone is mandated to where a sheet over themselves, with two holes for eyes, like a cartoon ghost. (The church, we learn, is also the culprit of a sociological phenomenon self-explanatorily called "Disappearing Dad Syndrome.") A struggles to keep up in the Church; her appointed "twin" self accuses and betrays her; the diet of Kandy Kakes on which she's placed begins to starve her. Only too late does she realize this last crucial fact: that the attempt to de-bodify oneself is symbolically akin to starvation, the denial of the body on putative behalf of the ghost within. I was worried that the novel wouldn't stick the landing, that too much would be explained, or that the parts would hang too loosely, but for the most part, I thought that Kleeman brought the whole strange box of parts together at the end into something remarkably coherent, but no less strange and surprising. For me, this was one of the better surprises of the year.

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

Certainly I have lived on the edge of the Port William community, and I am farther than ever out on the edge of it now. But I feel that I have lived on the edge even of my own life. I have made plans enough, but I see now that I have never lived by plan. Any more than if I had been a bystander watching me live my life, I don't feel that I have ever been quite sure what was going on. Nearly everything that has happened to me has happened by surprise. And whatever has been happening usually has already happened before I have had time to expect it. The world doesn't stop because you are in love or mourning or in need of time to think. And so when I have thought I was in my story or in charge of it, I really have been only on the edge of it, carried along. Is this because we are in an eternal story that is happening partly in time?

Jayber Crow is the semi-retired barber of the river town of Port William, Kentucky. Orphaned as a young child, he grew up in Port William with an aunt and uncle, and after their death, wandered peripatetically across the landscape of the state until returning right where he started and taking up barbering. Despite being a technical son of Port William, he never seems to have been fully part of it: he's too much of  a watcher, observing the life of the town from the vantage point of the chair--listening to his customers talk, looking out the window at who's passing by. In this way, Jayber Crow takes as its subject not Jayber himself so much as the town and its many citizens, who live through all the major upheavals of the twentieth century: two world wars and the Interstate Highway System.

Jayber Crow sits squarely in the genres you might call "regionalism" and "pastoralism." It reminded me of nothing more than Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, another book that is really a collection of stories about the people of a small Midwestern town. (Not that Port William is Midwestern so much, and I'm sure Kentuckians would bristle at the comparison, but it's funny to me how, for such a "regionalist" book, Port William doesn't have much local or specific character at all; it's neither Midwest nor South, but a kind of generalized small town. It could exist anywhere between Michigan and Arkansas.) The most compelling of these is the story of Mattie Chatham, with whom Jayber falls madly in love, and her no-good husband Troy, who takes his inheritance of Mattie's father's farm and wastes it on "improvements" that end up bankrupting him. It's a cautionary tale about the limits of "progress," but I enjoyed Jayber's private decision to consider himself married to Mattie, looking out for her interests in secret. It could have been creepy and weird (and probably would be if he ever said it out loud) but somehow seems disarming and noble.

Ultimately, I wanted to like this more than I did. There are moments of real impact, especially when Jayber/Berry begin to meditate on the passage of time, which flows by ceaselessly like the river on which Port William is situated. But even though the prose is appropriately Protestant and blond, this meditativeness comes on a little thick, and I found Jayber Crow to border on the twee.

The Doloriad by Missouri Williams

Agathe closed her eyes. Somewhere beyond the place where the dirt path vanished into the forest Dolores was still crawling, unable to catch up with them. When she got there they would harness her up like one of the big, lumbering animals from the schoolmaster's books, and Dolores would pull the wooden plow through the soil, her pale skin reddening with its weight. No--it would be too much for her; although they would poke her and prod her and call her names, she wouldn't move an inch, the plow falling forward and sinking into her soft shoulders; a white leviathan, smoking in the heat. It was no use. When Agathe opened her eyes again the field yawned before her and Dolores was nowhere to be seen.

Aren't you tired of post-apocalyptic stuff? The endless exposition... the world-building... the grimdarkness of it all? What if there were a post-apocalyptic novel with no world-building or exposition at all? What if instead it were about one weird incestuous family living in an abandoned hospital watching television shows where Thomas Aquinas solves personal problems? How does that sound?

The family of The Doloriad consists of the Matriarch and the Uncle (who turns out really to be her husband, I think--it wasn't quite clear to me), both of whom remember the world before the unnamed cataclysm, and two generations of children who have never known anything but isolation. The youngest generation are the children of the siblings of the older generation, because here there's no one outside the family--no one, that is, outside a legless old schoolmaster tasked with teaching the children... well... something. Among the children are Jan, the vicious farmer who is the family's true functioning leader, Agathe, who is sharp, suspicious, and observant, and Dolores, who is described as fat, stupid, and mute. When the book opens, Dolores is being carted in a wheelbarrow in an offering of marriage to a mysterious group of others who are suspected to reside beyond the family compound, in the forest. When Dolores makes her way back, it presents a bad omen and destabilizes a fragile status quo.

The Doloriad is, among other things, really upsetting. It is filled with incest and rape, and doesn't shy away from describing them. There is none of the sense here that some "post-apocalyptic" fiction has, that a new civilization might rise hopefully from the ashes. Whatever has happened to the world has left the Matriarch's family in a much vitiated state, morally and physically degraded. But it's filled, too, with strange and funny details that make the story unusual, like those tapings of the show Get Aquinas in Here! Like, what the hell is that? Are they watching tapes, or is there still somehow television? Or is it perhaps that there is some slippage between the degraded physical world and the mental world that allows these shows to appear on the television set? A character is murdered by being stabbed through with a metal pole, in a grisly reminder of a previously seen episode of Get Aquinas in Here where a cheerleader comes to her school counselor with the same affliction. Was the murder inspired by the episode, or was the episode somehow a foreshadowing of the murder? Williams suggests that Dolores, mute and insensate, might actually hold a kind of psychic power that has something to do with the TV show. Or at least that she is deeper and more knowing than she appears.

I could be misreading; The Doloriad is not an easy or simple read. But what actually impressed me the most is that so much of the book shouldn't work, but does; Missouri Williams is somehow able to make the impossible work. See, for example, the huge mound of motheaten cloth that the schoolmaster has made, thinking, somehow for some reason, that it will act like a cocoon that will give him the ability to reborn. Whatever--sure! It's hard to think of a book that's as viscerally unpleasant to read, but which is so impressive. I don't think it will make my year-end list--it's too aloof, too prickly and queasy, too difficult to penetrate--but I give it my highest praise, which is that I've really never read anything like it.

We Computers by Hamid Ismailov

Jon-Perse knew very well that even poets come in various shapes and sizes. Some of them are like Rimbaud and Mishrab: crazy, holy fools. They turn the world inside out and don't stop there; for them, there are no such things as rules, traditions, or customs, and if those things do exist, they're only there to be escaped, destroyed, or trampled upon.

Jon-Perse was not a crazy fool, and he believed that Hafez was not one either. They were in the class of poets who sought not to destroy tradition but preserve it, moderate it, refine it. That said, when Jon-Perse abandoned the whole intellectual world of poetry, he wanted to hand it over to Us. If that's not thumbing his nose at the poetry world, then what is?

Jon-Perse is a French academic and translator, named haphazardly after the poet Saint-John Perse. Through a friend, Abdulhamid Ismail (AI, haha), he becomes obsessed with a Persian poet named Hafez, and especially the form of the ghazal, a kind of love poem marked by its two-line "bayts." He builds a computer program that can analyze the poems of Hafez, as well as the French poets maudits, and generate poetry in the same style. Sound familiar? In a fun twist, it turns out that the novel is actually narrated by the computer program in the first-person plural, and "We Computers" seem to have their own misgivings about Jon-Perse's project. But like any computer programs, they do what they're told.

What a strange and complicated little book this is. It's interspersed with poems and stories, some by Hafez, and others created by Jon-Perse's computer program, and if you can't always tell them apart, well, I suppose that's kind of the point. Jon-Perse's obsession with Hafez emerges out of a life of personal turmoil and failure: left by one wife, tortured by another, wracked by grief. Perhaps, we think, an ancient poet is safer company, and the computer-generated version of the poet, who can create at the touch of a button, even safer. Though it's set in the 1980s, making the computer technology both charmingly antiquated and ahead of its time, Ismailov is thinking about the power of modern generative AI.

It's both surprising and interesting that the book seems not really anti-AI. Jon-Perse's defense of his computer program is that words precede even poetry and that they are the common property of us all; the computer program becomes a kind of commons for what we share. (This is, perhaps, the most inaccurate part of the vision, since modern AI seems to be more about the concentration of resources, if not meaning and legitimacy, in an increasingly small number of possessors.) It's there that the French and Persian poets intermingle and speak to each other. I found all this more interesting than enjoyable, and what I liked best is the book's end, which moves into a truly avant-garde space where Jon-Perse is made to account for his programs before a group of spectral Persian judges. It's weird and imaginative--and, interestingly, the part of the book where "We Computers" have been told to take over and finish the story.

With the addition of Uzbekistan, my "Countries Read" list is up to 125!

Subtraction by Mary Robison

I would say to myself that Raf kept me strung so tight I sometimes believed I felt the earth turning under my show soles. This is no gift that he brings, I would say, and remember how he came at me in bed--with such heat-as if each chance were our last on the very last night of the world. Every time with Raf, I would think--before he chased the thought away--"This is so scary!"

He had begun to disappear that spring just as the landscape was softening after the violence of Boston winter; just as green and gold and a little warmth were coming through the window screens. He'd be gone a week, ten days. then he'd be back, and he'd have new scars, new stories, no excuses.

Paige follows her wayward husband Raf from Boston to Houston, but he doesn't seem to want to be found. Her ally in this is Raf's friend Raymond, who has a few ideas where he might be, but in the search, Paige and Raymond become closer. While tinged with personal disgrace--an affair that has severed him from his wife and child--Raymond seems to have certain qualities, like responsibility and reliability, that the freewheeling, magnetic Raf lacks. Paige's search for Raf ends up turning her into something like him, dissolute, a wanderer, but back home in Boston she's a respected poet teaching at Harvard. When she finally does find Raf, things only get more complicated. In classic style, Paige struggles over whether to stick with this man who, while a complete piece of shit, she's deeply drawn to.

Subtraction is recognizably Mary Robison: it's fast-paced and wry, and very, very funny. Paige resembles in a lot of ways the protagonist (I forget the name) from the wonderful Why Did I Ever: frazzled, unlucky in love, torn between impossible choices. Subtraction is much more of a straightforward novel than Why Did I Ever, with its sections like stabs, or Oh!, with its broad family farce. For that, it suffers a little next to these stranger books. One thing that set it apart, and which I thought was interesting, were its class aspects. Paige the poet is out of her element in the seedy strip clubs and dive bars of Houston, but hell, Raymond and Raf met at Princeton. What are these intelligent, elite people doing slumming it in Texas, talking like roofers? Are they escaping not only their complicated love lives but versions of themselves that have grown burdensome and wearying?

When Subtraction really persuaded me was at the end, when Paige returns to Boston, hoping that Raf will follow her. She stays with her mother at a hotel she runs in the gloriously stupidly named "Cape Head" (some mash-up version of Cape Cod and Cape Ann), where a snowstorm kicks up. The storm pours dozens upon dozens of people into the hotel, lost and trapped, including a bus load of young people who play "theoretical music" without instruments. Even Raymond himself shows up. The only person who is unable to make it, in fact, is Raf, despite what seem to be honest efforts. I liked that: the way Robison sets up a roadblock to the easy resolution, the change of heart. 

The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy

Light pale as milk guided the old man's steps over the field to the creek and then to the mountain, stepping into the black wall of pine-shadows and climbing up the lower slopes out into the hardwoods, bearded hickories trailing grapevines, oaks and crooked waterless cottonwoods, a quarter mile from the creek now, past the white chopped butt of a bee tree lately felled, past the little hooked Indian tree and passing silent and catlike up the mountain in the darkness under latticed leaves scudding against the sky in some small wind. Light saw him through the thick summer ivy and over windfalls and limestones. Past the sink where on a high bluff among trilobites and fishbones, shells of ossified crustaceans from an ancient sea, a great tusk jutted.

Marion Sylder is a no-account moonshine runner living in East Tennessee during Prohibition. One day on the road, he kills a hitchhiker who has tried to kill and rob him. Later on, he befriends a young boy, John Wesley Rattner, who helps Sylder escape after crashing his car into a river. Neither of them is aware that it was John Wesley's father that Sylder killed, and whose body he dumped on the land of one "Uncle Ather," the Orchard Keeper of the title, who lives a life in communion with the natural forces of the Tennessee mountains. The moonshine in Sylder's car, however, attracts the local police, who set their sights on Sylder, John Wesley, and Uncle Ather.

The Orchard Keeper was Cormac's first, but it's my last. (Time to shed a single tear, briny with the atavistic salt of antediluvian seas in which chthonic beasts plied the formless deep.) Of The Orchard Keeper one can only say: yes, that's Cormac. His style comes out here more or less fully formed, the high Gothic register of words only attested once in the OED, though perhaps the simpler staccato rhythms of his Southwestern novels are still only a faint possibility. What must have seemed remarkable about The Orchard Keeper is the way that register is applied to the rustic lives of Appalachian white trash. I thought this was particularly true in the case of Uncle Ather, a simple guy whose only real companion is his dog (a tussle over what to do with the dog when Ather is arrested is probably the novel's only funny moment), whose life off the grid is ennobled by McCarthy's style. Like Ather, McCarthy has a remarkably detailed knowledge of Appalachian geology and botany, and it was a pleasure just to follow the Orchard Keeper as he walks across the faces of the mountains.

As a novel, it's close to Cormac's weakest, and I would say the weakest, if you're allowed to count the late-life duo Stella Maris and The Passenger as one. There's an interesting irony in the fact that neither John Wesley nor Sylder knows that Sylder killed John Wesley's father, but it's strange how little McCarthy does with the fact. It's most reminiscent of Suttree, another novel about working-class whites in East Tennessee that strikes many of the same notes more successfully. There's nothing much to Sylder or John Wesley. McCarthy contrasts Sylder's corruption and John Wesley's innocence, perhaps, as a way of showing the limited choices left to John Wesley if he can't get out of East Tennessee, but in the larger context of McCarthy's work they seem small, minor. The novel's best creation by far is Uncle Ather, who has a kind of stubbornness and rusticity that are very McCarthy, but still unique.

My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier

She moved away and picked up her candlestick to take to bed, and as she went from the room she said to me, "Good night, Philip, and God bless you. One day you may come to know some of the happiness that I knew once."

I heard her go upstairs, and I sat down and stared into the library fire. It seemed to me that if there was any bitterness left in the house it did not come from her, nor from Ambrose, but was a seed deep in my own heart, which I should never tell her of and she need never know. The old sin of jealousy I thought buried and forgotten was with me once again. But this time I was jealous, not of Rachel, but of Ambrose, whom hitherto I had known and loved best in the whole world.

Philip Ashley lives under the care of his older cousin, Ambrose. They are as physically alike as they are mentally: a pair of tall bachelors living in a kind of masculine paradise. That is, until Ambrose falls in love with a mysterious woman named Rachel during a sojourn in Florence, where he marries. The letters he sends back to Philip are entirely enamored, then desperate, even crazed--then word comes that Ambrose has died. Philip, having been bereft of his closest friend and idol, vows to hate Rachel, whom he suspects of driving Ambrose to his death. But when Rachel shows up at the Ashley estate, she's all together different from what he expected, not a sinister hag but a beautiful woman with a sharp sense of humor. As he begins to see in her what Ambrose saw, so clearly Philip begins to resemble Ambrose to Rachel. Soon he is--wouldn't you know it--deeply in love, but the question remains, which Rachel is the true one and which the false? Was he deceived when he thought her to be a cold and calculating killer--or is it the charming widow who is the deception?

My Cousin Rachel is even more tightly plotted than Rebecca (which, let's admit, relies on a lot of turgid unveiling at the end) and more ambiguous in its implications. I almost don't want to detail the plot too much, because to describe the book too much would be to give away its emotional upheavals. Suffice to say, du Maurier is deft in getting us to fall in love with Rachel, too. The first flirtations between the twenty-something boy and the widow in her mid-thirties are--I have to admit--incredibly erotic. When the "twist" happens, which is not so much a twist as something telegraphed clearly to us as it isn't to the callow, headstrong Philip, the change in the book's emotional tenor is so strong that it left me feeling almost physically sick. What I wasn't expecting was that du Maurier would twist that around again, so that we pass from one certainty to another into a kind of state teetering in apprehension. These "twists" are less plot revelations than sea changes in the book's emotional valence, and our attitude toward Rachel; and though the novel leads to a grand Gothic conclusion it also ends up in a place where Rachel is even richer for being perhaps both of the women we have suspected her to be.

That's all very vague, but I don't want to spoil anything, because I'd hate to deny anyone the chance to be experience My Cousin Rachel as it was meant to be read. I found it impossible to put down--in a class with Rebecca and my personal favorite, The Scapegoat. In the final balance, I wonder if it might be read as a subversive story about the legal and financial restrictions experienced by women. Ambrose's suspicion for, then pity for, Rachel relies on the fact that Ambrose wrote out, but failed to sign, a will that would leave his estate to her rather than Philip (who in turn becomes Rachel's heir). If Rachel is conniving, is it a way of carving out an independence in a world that keeps women under the paternalistic care of men? How should we read Rachel's "transformation" of the worn-down, hypermasculine Ashley home into a civilized Italianate estate? It's tempting to read it as a straightforward Eve-and-the-apple story, by which a woman (and an Italian, no less) infects a male Eden. More interesting, I think, to embrace the more complex version of Rachel that emerges at the end.

Reasons to Live by Amy Hempel

After the dog's cremation, I lie in my husband's bed and watch the Academy Awards for animals. That is not the name of the show, but they give prizes to animals for Outstanding Performance in a movie, on television, or in a commercial. Last year the Schlitz Malt Liquor bull won. The time before that, it was Fred the Cockatoo. Fred won for draining a tinky bottle of "liquor" and then reeling and falling over drunk. It is the best thing on television in what my husband, Flea, said.

With Flea gone, I watch out of habit.

My favorite story, I think, in Amy Hempel's collection Reasons to Live is "Nashville Gone to Ashes," about a woman whose veterinarian husband has died and left her with all the animals. The narrator, who came to the work of a vet reluctantly, is left with the parts of her life with Flea (his name is really F. Lee) that she hadn't chosen, and none of what she did. "I think it was that love that I loved," she writes of Flea's attention to his charges. "That kind of involvement was reassuring; I felt it would extent to me, as well. That it did not or that it did, but only as much and no more, was confusing at first. My love is so good, why isn't it calling the same thing back?" I was touched by this story, and the simple grief of what gets left behind. At the end, the narrator finds herself giving money to a homeless man begging for help for his dog, and turning around and seeing a man without a dog, begging for himself. Do we value animals too much? Or do we value them because they serve, unable to talk--except for Flea's mynah--as repositories of our own loves and passions?

Many of the stories in Reasons to Live focus on grief and dying. There's a lot of hospitals. There's one, for instance, in "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried," a story that comes up a lot when people talk about stories they love. The narrator, sitting at chemotherapy with an old friend, plies her with fun facts that are almost always wrong. (For instance--Bob Dylan's mother invented Wite-Out.) These facts come to stand in for something else, or nothing else, or the impossibility of finding something to give ground to a relationship that has lasted so long. But for me I preferred "Going," a slim little three-pager from the perspective of a reckless young daredevil who has miraculously survived a car accident while driving with his binoculars. The longer stories here feel no more "complete" or round than the flash stories; I often felt that Hempel offers only snapshots into stories--vivid and in bright detail, but only snapshots nonetheless. I thought this worked well in a pair of stories about fathers trying to keep their precocious children from experiencing a vague kind of familial unease that grips them: "Back to Celia" and "Today Will Be a Quiet Day." Other stories felt difficult to penetrate, too wispy or impossible to grasp.

John Adams by David McCullough

So much had happened in John Adams's life--he had done so much, taken such risks, given so much of himself heart and soul in the cause of his country--that he seems not to have viewed the presidency as an ultimate career objective or crowning life achievement. He was not one given to seeing life as a climb to the top of a ladder or a mountain, but more as a journey or adventure, even a "kind of romance, which a little embellished with fiction or exaggeration or only poetical ornament, would equal anything in the days of chivalry or knight errantry," as once he confided to Abigail. If anything, he was inclined to look back upon the long struggle for independence as the proud defining chapter.

OK--I guess we're doing this, huh. After reading Alexis Coe's biography of George Washington, here we are reading David McCullough's biography of John Adams. It's the second McCullough book I've read this year, after his book on the Johnstown Flood, and it shows the popular historian in full form: a big honking tome, well-written. John Adams can take credit for a renewed interest in the second president, who McCullough clearly suggests is underappreciated relative to his predecessor and successor, and resulted in the HBO miniseries starring Paul Giamatti. But McCullough's position is, I would argue, not just that Adams is underappreciated when set amidst larger personalities, but that there is a political valence to that underappreciation--that our historiography has been shaped by Jacksonian Democrats whose rhetoric of "liberty" and "states' rights" have prevented us from fully appreciating Adams as an advocate for a strong central government and opponent of slavery.

McCullough is a great writer, so in saying I was persuaded, perhaps I am saying that his style worked on me. But I do actually think McCullough's case is compelling. Firstly, he depicts Adams as the "voice" of the Declaration of Independence, advocating stormily for its passage during the Continental Congress during a time when loyalists reluctant to shake the wrath of Great Britain might still have won the day. As a diplomat, Adams secured loans and treaties from European powers in the face of powerful contempt. As president, Adams has the benefit of being a staunch opponent of slavery when every other president of his era, outside of his son John Quincy, either supported the institution's expansion or waffled on it hypocritically, as Washington and Jefferson did. (A nice detail here is that, by inviting a representative of Haiti's Toussaint to the White House, Adams was the first president to host a Black guest.)

I had a vague sense of all that before reading the book, but what I did not realize is that Adams successfully managed the "Quasi-War" with Napoleon's France and kept it from blowing up into a full-blown war of the kind that saw the White House burned just a decade later. This gained Adams no friends, because his own Federalist party (like Hamilton, who comes off here as an absolute conniving piece of shit that everyone hates) was drumming the beat for war and accused Adams of being cowardly, whereas the Jeffersonian Republicans were Francophiles who failed to see the extent of French provocations. This is sort of a key to understanding McCullough's vision of Adams, who successfully navigated both sides of the political arena, which kept the country safe and thriving but made him personally unpopular.

Adams was, it seems, kind of annoying on a personal level. His chief sin, in his own words, was "vanity," though one might add stubbornness, a short temper, and a rusticness inappropriate to the grand courts of Europe. But one person adored him--his wife Abigail, whose eloquence and intelligence set her apart among the First Ladies of the first American century, if not beyond. Adams is unique in that we have a huge trove of his writings, including the letters he and Abigail sent each other, giving us a sense of Adams' own perspectives and thought processes we don't have for other presidents. I was charmed by the thread of Abigail's love for this weird little man that most people seemed to have found unlovable, and it is one of two personal threads that undergird the book, the other being the close friendship with Jefferson that was sundered by their political differences, then stitched back together after both were out of office.

If John Adams has a flaw, it's that the book doesn't seriously deal with the Alien and Sedition Acts, an affront to the right of free speech that marked the low period of Adams's presidency. McCullough explains it away as a kind of product of the political pressures of the time, and shows that Adams later regretted it, but it's not clear exactly what those pressures were, nor why Adams, who seems to have such an iron spine when it came to doing unpopular things, embraced it. And yet, despite this, I came away with a renewed respect for the forgotten second president, "His Rotundity."

Transit by Anna Seghers

And yet although all this transit whispering made me feel miserable, it was amazing to think that even though thousands, no, hundreds of thousands, had died in the flames of the air raids and the furious attacks of the Blitzkrieg, there were many more who were born quite without being noticed by the consuls. They hadn't asked for letters of transit, hadn't applied for visas; they were not under the jurisdiction of this place. And what if some of these poor souls, still bleeding physically and spiritually, had fled to this house, what harm could it do to a giant nation if a few of these saved souls, worthy, half-worthy, or unworthy, were to join them in their country--how could it possibly harm such a big country?

Anna Seghers' Transit is set in the city of Marseille during the upheaval of World War II, where people from all over a Europe in turmoil converge, each trying to set sail for somewhere else. This makes Marseille a kind of continental waiting room where people linger for months, waiting for their visa to arrive, for their refugee status to be approved, making a temporary life for God knows how long in a place they have no intention to stay. That is, except for the +narrator, who arrives at Marseille wanting the one thing the authorities will not allow--to stay for good. Through a convoluted series of events I will try to outline here, he ends up using an assumed name: a friend sends him with a letter to a stranger, a semi-famous novelist who turns out to be dead. While trying to return the dead stranger's items to his wife at the consulate, the narrator is mistakenly identified as him, a misidentification he seizes upon in order to gain the transit visa that will allow him, ironically, to stay in Marseille for a time. This is all complicated when he meets the dead man's wife, Marie, with whom he falls in love.

Transit is a funny thing. It takes as its subject a painful stasis, and the book often seems not to be moving forward or toward anything in a way that mirrors this subject. It's hard to figure out the narrator, who is somehow both calculating and reckless. He promises to help Marie get her traveling papers--she has taken up with a handsome doctor who wants to emigrate with her, to make things more complicated--but of course, to do this would mean to take her away from Marseille, so he sort of half-does it and half-doesn't, manipulating her in order to keep her in his presence. Is he a hero, or a scoundrel? It may be that categories like these break down in the great waiting room of Europe. Either way, his voice is unique and magnetic, and he's an interesting character to follow around; a schemer making his way in a world of impenetrable paperwork. In part, it's a satire whose target is the absurd bureaucracy of Europe, whose rubber-stamping seems entirely inadequate to the gravity of world war. More than one person tells the narrator that they have decided to give up and return to the places of their birth, choosing violence and war over red tape.

In fact, it made me think a little of immigration in the United States today, the way, without even the upheaval of world war, we have created a system of perverse and obscure incentives that leaves people with no clear way forward. The strange motionlessness and circularity of Transit made it, for me, a little difficult to really embrace. But I did find it skillful and insightful, and certainly worth reading.