Sara Paretsky’s Writing in an Age of Silence

This nonfiction collection of essays, each related to the theme of freedom, fascinates and challenges thought.

Freedom as a theme seems to have dominated Sara Paretsky’s life, judging from her Introduction, a memoir of childhood and education, which impressed me with admiration, perhaps awe, of her courage and intelligence. As a child within her family she fought for herself with rare determination and skill.

And she won through to a (state) college education, though not attendance at the first rate eastern university she wished for. She didn’t win her father’s respect or approval and she may not have won his affection; he seems not to have won hers. The consequences of this channeled her into the woman’s movement, with which the second chapter deals. She’s still angry, and she still blames men for holding women in exploitation, sexually and economically, and politically.

I don’t. I blame our genes—the kind of animal we humans evolved to be. And I feel that human males are as much the victims—prisoners—of that evolution as we women. Ants and honey bees evolved a system of life organization in which females operate their society, males being used exclusively for breeding. Are female ants dominating male ants, or are they and male ants dominated by their evolution?

But surely in western civilization we are seeing women struggling, in part successfully, to override their evolutionary impulses by taking control of their lives. The struggle costs the freedom fighters in exhaustion, punishment from the group—often from their own families—that sometimes includes assault, rape, and poverty. Paretsky’s first chapter, “Wild Women Out of Control or How I became a Writer,” movingly deals with that struggle and its consequences.

In her second chapter (or essay), “The King and I,” she moves on to social freedom: the civil rights movement as she encountered it in Chicago. She was young, young and inexperienced enough to be surprised as well as shocked by the racial hatred and rage she saw. This was the Chicago of the civil rights explosion, the king of the chapter’s title referring to Martin Lewis King, Jr. Paretsky poured her personal rage and her youthful strength into the battle, and learned from her efforts:

The children from our day camp were often anxious; outings to the beach started with black children throwing stones as we waited at Ashland Avenue for the bus, and often ended with an emergency dash home before the next round of riots began. The first time we took the children to Wrigley Field to see a baseball game, they wouldn’t sit next to a black person on the train, standing for the hour-long ride while half the seats on the car were empty. We told the kids they would forfeit the right to go on outings if they did it again, and, eyes wide with fear, they would perch on the edge of a seat, terrified of being assaulted by the tired middle-aged women next to them….That summer changed my life forever.

Paretsky’s women’s rights issues, beginning with the near-death of her roommate from a “coat hanger” abortion layers with the memoir of her mystery reading that helped push her into writing in chapter three, “Not Angel, not Monster, Just Human.” She writes of her series’ protagonist:

V I’s emotional involvements do sometimes cloud her judgments. That is a fact of life for men and women both. V I has lovers, but her sexuality does not prohibit her from making clear moral decisions and acting on them. V I isn’t flawless. Merely she is an adult, with the same freedoms that men have to act, to move, to make decisions, to fall in love, experience sex, even to be wrong, without any of those things making her a monster.

Religion in American public life and our mythic love of independent self-sufficiency occupy her fourth chapter, “The iPod and Sam Spade.” Her view of the perennial, perhaps unresolvable conflict between the human impulse to attend to personal needs against the impulse to care others is worth reading.

All contemporary American writers owe it to themselves to read “Truth, Lies, and Duct Tape, the book’s fifth and final chapter dealing with free speech and the state of oppression produced by current publishing practices. Hey, gang, this is you she’s writing about.

Her chapter end notes cite specific cases, and are a delight.

I particularly recommend reading this book in tandem with the recently republished first novel in her series (originally published in 1982), titled Indemnity Only. Its introduction is valuable reading and the novel itself great fun and a provocative glimpse of how she practices her theories and ideals.

Ellen Litman’s The Last Chicken in America

Read an excerpt.

Both a collection of short stories and a novel, its covers hold stories of individuals, each different from the other, particular, strongly flavored. And yet the stories add up to a novel about one culture crash landing into another, the recipient culture unaware and indifferent to the accident. But the expectations, hopes, and illusions of the entrants crack at contact, some bursting into flames; many of the immigrants quickly and desperately wishing to go back “home.”

The travelers were Russian Jews, successful professionals in the country of their birth who took their leap for reasons that aren’t ever clear. Is it to escape a restrictive government, chronic anti-Semitism, an anticipation of worse in Russia to come, or belief that the U.S. has a superabundance of dollars ripe for the plucking?

Pittsburgh, the site of their crash landing, or spot they soon crawled to, had no professional jobs for them, only few, sporadic jobs of a poorly paid, low status, service sort—care taking, janitorial, and other such.

Language loomed a barrier to efforts to improve their situation, for some an almost insurmountable barrier. In America, though they are trying to learn English, they are most comfortable and most often speaking Russian.

Most of the immigrants arrived as families—parents and children, siblings, cousins, huddling in Squirrel Hill, creating something very like a ghetto blocked by invisible but almost impenetrable walls.

Failure, rage, depression eats at family affection and bonds. Everyone seems to demand too much; no one is capable or willing to give enough.

The novel deals with this culture unraveling under stress and these people’s attempts to build a hybrid, functioning culture in this strange land, America. Litman shows glimpses of individual endeavors without abstracting the process, which can only be obtained by the readers’ epiphanies and slowly accumulating understanding.

The stories are of individuals, their each one’s unique response to the common dilemma.

My favorite character is the teenager Masta, who is as close to protagonist as the novel owns. Torn, unconsenting from her home in Russia, where she had a promising future, she struggles to make a place for herself, despite her failures in Pittsburgh’s schools, her growing antagonism to her parents, her fumbling attempts to manage newly sprung sexual needs, and muddling work performance. Masta combats her difficulties without the shield of delusion. She is clear-eyes about those she loves and her own, often flinching and desperate attempts to make a life for herself. But flinch though she does, she’s no quitter. Again and again she throws herself into new opportunities. And when moments of comfort an joy come she has the ability to throw aside resentment and embrace them.

Litman’s older and old people demonstrate time’s stiffening of flexibility. Their successes are slow-coming and few; their failures many; some are wonderfully cranky, some pulled under by depression.

One critic called Litman’s prose luminous. I call it sturdy and serviceable. Here’s a taste for you to judge:

This is our everyday route. Me at the wheel, my dad in the passenger seat. We start at Wendover Street—it’s where we live. I adjust the mirrors the way he tells me to. To my left, the road. To my right, the curb, littered with tilted garbage cans. The sidewalk and five almost identical apartment buildings, brick with tarnished trimming. There’s one with all the crazies: at night they come out, sleepwalking and howling. Joe Berman, who lives across the street, says they give him nightmares. Joe studies for his Ph.D in Russian. Some nights, I see him sitting outside in his Tercel, listening to the songs by Vertibnsky: I am madly afraid of your shimmery shackles. Sometimes I sit with him and translate.

AND

Sweryoza and Olya miss the bus. First they miss the one that stops at the corner of Phillips and Murray, in front of the hardware store. It shows up early and passes without pausing—no potential passengers in sight. Seryozha and Olya see it as they round the corner.

“See? Unreliable,” says Seryozha. “Cabs and buses, all unreliable, but buses especially so.”

Adept at both first person and third person, she conveys the impression of broken English without making an obstacle of it.

It’s her characterization that is luminous. She’s clear-eyed, unsentimental, and very affectionate in capturing her characters on paper. What impressed me most was how much of her characters’ behavior I had seen among my own non-immigrant, typically American friends.

The Last Chicken in America provokes thought, refusing to be dislodged from memory, despite my dyslexic breakdowns with the Russian names. My largest and rather surprising inference is how humanness withstands cultural washing. Reading this collection is often like looking in a mirror.

Books for The Winter Term

Stoner by John Edward Williams, 278 pages.












Returning To Earth by Jim Harrison.











See also:

A detailed analysis of Returning To Earth in the Writing section of Anne's Archives, Spring, 2007.

Middlemarch by George Eliot (nom de plume of Mary Anne Evans)

This work, listed by some as numbering among the ten best novels ever written, is the subject for the Autumn Tuesday Class.

The book, first published in 1871, has gone through more editions than the number of excuses given for the California budget.

Middlemarch now resides in the public domain, where a number of online editions are available for download. The BBC made an adaptation for television in 1994. A new production is due out next year as a major motion picture.

Free electronic versions of the text are available from Fullbooks.com, the University of Virginia Electronic Text Center, The Farlex Free Library, and Project Gutenberg, which also provides an MP3 audio version read by the robot voice of Steven Hawking. A somewhat better commercial version is available from Amazon, read by Harriet Walter. Another edition from Blackstone Audio is read by Nadia May.

LibriVox, an opensource project, has an audio version of Middlemarch project in progress. The finished portions are indexed here.

Tape and CD versions of the work are available from the public library, as are old-fashioned, printed versions.

Most, if not all, hand-held electronic-book readers have available versions of Middlemarch. The Sony Ebook reader, for instance, offers an edition through its CONNECT Reader Software. Other electronic ebook readers offer versions as well.

A PDF version of the book is available from Planet PDF. Many e-readers--the Sony Ebook Reader, for instance--will display PDF files.

Amy Bloom, Away

What a treat, another novel from Amy Bloom. Her first Love Invents Us is one of my favorites.

This new one, Away, is completely different in everything but the art of writing, her playing with time.

Away begins in the novel’s present time, July 3, 1924, at an audition in the Goldfadn (Yiddish) Theatre. By a very brash and slightly unfair move, Lillian Leyb, thirty-five days in this country catches the approval of the theatre’s owner, Reuben Burnstein.

A blink of three pages later, readers find themselves in Russia during pogram. It’s her nightmare, and oh, so real:

She’s blind, too. All she can see is a bursting red inside her eyelids, as if she’s on her back in Turnov’s farthest field on the brightest day in June, closing her eyes to the midday sun.

What follows is a massacre that will haunt you, as though you were Lillian and it was happening to you.

A page later, readers are back in Brooklyn in the home of Lillian’s refuge, Aunt Frieda, learning that Lillian is prepared to do anything—anything!—to survive.

The peep in Yiddish theater life and just what anything entails is fascinating. So are the people Lillian moves among. Most fascinating is watching them manipulating, using, and loving each other all at once.

Just as it seems Lillian has survived, found a warm if tricky place for herself, she learns that her daughter, whom she believed not to have survived the massacre, is alive and being taken to Siberia.

Immediately she decides to return to Russia, go to Siberia, to Sophie. Her new family won’t help her. A friend challenges her reason for going:

“Because she belongs to you? Is that why?”

Lillian is horrified.

“No. Because I think they are not nice. Or maybe they are dead and there is no one to care for her. Because she a little, little girl. Not that she is mine. That I am hers.”

Can a Jewish immigrant, an all but penniless female, still a bit shy of English, who could barely navigate from Brooklyn to Manhattan, find her way across this continent, up to Alaska and across to Siberia to track down her daughter?

Finish the novel and discover.

In addition to details of the trek you’ll meet those Lillian encounters in her effort. Amy Blood was a fine short story writer before she became a novelist, and these meetings become short stories, little biographies, of the encountered. Her father had claimed for her that she was lucky, but she wasn’t lucky on this trip; nothing you read will make you long to follow in her footsteps, reading about them is painful enough.

But the characters emerge in living color. Amy Bloom, a psychotherapist when she isn’t writing or teaching writing, sees people keenly and sees through people. And the action scenes are fast paced and breath-tasking.

This novel allows you to test whether your particular taste is for action or intimacy in fiction. The New York Times’ book reviewer Louisa Thomas, wrote of it, “In its second half, however, it takes off…. With every passing mile, “Away” (sic, newspaper style) gains traction.” But I found myself muttering, “Enough!” I wanted one less terrible character and much more of Lillian’s reaction to whom she met and what she slogged through. These scenes felt announced by a very good sportscaster. I’d lost my closeness to Lillian, and she, after all, was what the novel was all about.

I’m hungry for your reaction; please read the novel and give me your take.

Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

Have you ever wanted to do something you knew was dangerous? Dangerous enough maybe to kill you?

That’s where Scarlett Thomas put Ariel Mato, lusting after a book which “was known” to have killed those who read it. Not only lusting, but by page ten, buying the book. Reader, it’s in her hands.

The title of this literary temptation is The End of Mr. Y, and as you’ve already noticed it’s also the title of Thomas’s novel.

One way to categorize this novel is as a mystery: what happens when Ariel reads Thomas E. Lumas’s novel? Because, of course, you know she’s going to do it, wouldn’t you?

It’s also an intellectual novel, exploring at length in dialogue and narration, philosophy and the philosophy of quantum physics.

I think about Heidegger again, and realize there’s so much I don’t know. From what I can remember, Heidegger’s special word for consciousness (or, at least, the kind of consciousness that most humans seem to have) is Dasein literally a kind of being that is able to ask questions about its own being. For Heidegger, being cannot be considered without the idea of time. You can only be present in the present, and therefore only exist in the sense you exist in time. Dasein can recognize and theorize about its own being. It can wonder, Why am I here? Why do I exist? And what is existence, anyway?” And Dasein is therefore constructed out of language: logos, that which signifies….

"Imagine that some mutation happens in our computer simulation. The little characters become conscious. Now what would their thoughts be made of?"

I visualize my laptop sitting on a desk, with this game playing out on it. I imagine what it would be like o be one of these digital, binary characters. How many dimensions would you be aware of? How would you interact with other characters? I think about what this world is made of—basically zeros and ones—and then I realize that in this little world everything would be zeros and ones. The little characters may not be able to see them, but everything, including their thought, would be made from the same thing.

“Their thoughts would be made from the same code their world is made from,” I say to Lura. “Zeros and ones.”

Yes, very good. Yes—if it was a contemporary silican machine, which would obviously be coded in binary.

So it would be up quarks and down quarks, if it was a quantum computer.”

Now she smiles. “You do know something about science,” she says. “Except you’re not quite right. Up and down quarks are still a binary system. The whole point of quantum computing is that the quarks can be in a combination of different states, and can therefore carry out more than one calculation at once.”

But I’m already feeling sick, because I think I know where this is going.

“Now tell me,” she says. “The grass and trees in our binary world. What are they made from?”

“Zeros and ones,” I say.

“And the houses, and the water and the air?”

“Zeros and ones.”

"And what happens to thoughts in this world once it has happened? Does it
disappear?"

"It gets stores on the hard drive." I pause, thinking about temporary caches and the difference between RAM and ROM. "Does it?"

Don’t despair; it’s also an action novel with plenty of chase scenes in both dimensions.

It’s also a novel of speculative fiction because Thomas creates a detailed new dimension she’s abstracted from those philosophies and places her protagonist, Ariel, (and others) in it.

Not to forget a romance: love at first sight, the approved male, an ex-priest, who at one point even appears deus-ex-machina-like. And a porno-ish novel with some graphic “dirty sex,” of an S & M persuasion, about which Ariel, who also has been addicted to cutting herself, feels both guilt and shame but can’t leave alone because she enjoys it, which makes her feel more guilty still.

But do not expect Ariel to be a piece of street scum. She’s a university-educated young woman whose earned her doctorate and is working on her doctoral thesis, driven by a must-scratch curiosity about the fictional novel; its author and her thesis supervisor, Saul Burlem, who first put her on Lumas’s trail, both disappeared.

So now here I am, unsupervised, like an experiment with no observer—Fleming’s plate of mold, perhaps, or an uncollapsed wave function—and what am I doing? I’m reading Lumas. I’m reading The End of Mr. Y, for God’s sake. Fuck you, Burlem.

Thomas reminds me of Richard Powers. She’s not as lyrical or plum-pudding filled with literary quotations and allusions, but like Powers’ Galatea 2.2 and Plowing the Dark, The End of Mr. Y seems to have been created for the purpose of making real (in fiction) her intellectual constructs and imaginary world. Much more than from its romance or sex, Scarlett Thomas is turned on by words.

No fan of philosophy, I had a grim time hanging in there through long discourses on Heidegger and gang, but the adventure’s delight and her constructed world was worth it, like those camping trips in which it rained, but what but what lures you back was the adventure, the thrill of doing.

Try it. At the very least you’ll find it amazing and memorable.

Hillary Mantel, Beyond Black

A ghost story, unlike, I’d wager, any ghost story you’ve encountered before, Beyond Black is a study of two clashing personality types. Alison, Al, is a “sensitive” who had acquired, reluctantly, a spirit guide, an ugly dwarf ghost, at a very young age and has been stuck with him ever since. Both abetted by and in addition to Morris’s manipulations, numbers of those “who had passed” presented themselves to Al, informing her, complaining to her of the past and sometimes of the present. Finally Al concluded, since she wasn’t suited (what with distraction and mischievous practical jokes by Morris) for any conventional employment to become a professional revealer of the beyond to paying audiences. She was a natural, quickly skilled in working audiences, assuaging both coarse and disbelieving humor and grumbling dissatisfaction at what she told them.

Unsurprisingly she, Colette, her spirit guide, and a few “sensitive” friends elect to go to Princess Di’s funeral, half expecting that the dead princess will join them:

“S’funny,” Colette said. “It’s only a fortnight ago, those pictures of her in the boat with Dodi, in her bikini. And we were all saying, what a slapper.”

Al opened the glove box and ferreted out a chocolate biscuit.

“That is the emergency Kit-Kat,” Colette protested.

“This is an emergency. I couldn’t eat my breakfast.” She ate the chocolate morosely, finger by finger. “If Gavin had been Prince of Wales,” she said, “do you think you’d have tried harder in your marriage?”

“Definitely."

Colette’s eyes were on the road; in the passenger seat Alison twisted over her shoulder to look at Morris in the back, kicking his short legs and singing a medley of patriotic songs. As they passed beneath a bridge policemen’s faces peered down at them, pink sweating ovals above the sick glow of high-visibility jackets. Stubble-headed boys—the type who, in normal times, heave a concrete block through your windscreen—now jabbed the mild air with bunches of carnations. A ragged bedsheet, grey-white drifted down into their view. It was scrawled in crimson capitals, as if in virgin’s blood: DIANA, QUEEN OF OUR HEARTS.

Good at ghosting, she was no business woman. Her accounts were in disarray, her taxes unpaid, her income barely matched her outflow, with no care directed toward retirement and hard times. Into this breech comes Colette, fast with numbers, organized to the “T,” practical but willing to take Allison’s word for the “people” she could see though Colette couldn’t. Colette’s marriage to the grumpy, indifferent Gavin was tottering toward separation, so the two women joined forces in business and living arrangements, Colette becoming Allison’s organizer, gofer, and occasional foot massager so effectively that Allison quickly moved from insolvency to nicely fixed.

But of course their personality differences quickly had them stepping on each other’s toes. Al’s fatness (she was amazingly obese) became more and more repugnant to Colette, who was skinny and stringy in body and hair.

A bitter humor arises from the their platonic relationship’s resemblance to many marriages in its disintegrating spin. And a certain anthropological interest emerges from the novel’s many, many glimpses into the professional experiences of British psychics. Hilary Mantel also shows her readers the underbelly of English lower-class life, which is as sordid and painful as the underbelly of its royals but lacking in their accoutrements.

Mantell’s skills in dialogue and dialect are part of the novel’s rewards. Beyond Black is almost a must reading for writers in its demonstration of the necessity of good structure. Its deficiency of a well designed plot line gives Mantell’s events the feel of standing waves, going up and down but not getting anywhere. Her surprises are too foreseeable to surprise; her resolution lacks satisfaction.

Still its unusual subject matter is likely to hold your interest, but bail out when the impulse strikes because, while it doesn’t get less interesting, it never gets more interesting.