Out and About in my (Almost) Back Yard

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A walking tour of the architecture and sculptures on the Princeton University campus is an enticing event. I’ve taken this kind of tour many times, but this one promised something new. Typically, it began at easy-to-find Nassau Hall, the largest building in the American colonies at the time of the Revolution and briefly, even, the nation’s capital. Some walls on the inside still bear pockmarks from British cannonballs fired during the pivotal Battle of Princeton.

Our guide, Jeanne Johnson, a docent at the Princeton Art Museum (closed temporarily for a construction project that will double its gallery space), is a dedicated gardener. So she was eager to point out the Beatrix Farrand quadrangle, recently renamed in honor the university’s long-time landscape gardener (her preferred term).

While we were there, Jeanne pointed out that two of the dormitory buildings framing the quadrangle are named for alumni who died during The Great War, Howard Houston Henry and Walter L. Foulke. Those buildings and the triple archway that connects them (shown) are considered the apogee of collegiate gothic architecture, a style popularized in the late 1800s and early 1900s when American universities went to great lengths to look as permanent and substantial as their English counterparts. The architect of these dormitories personally oversaw the cutting and placement of every piece of stone, alternating red, grey, buff, and other colors. A completely pleasing effect.

These popular sites dispensed with, Jeanne trotted us to an area of south campus where two new colleges (as Princeton terms sets of dormitories) have sprung up, seemingly overnight—Yeh College and New College West. The 15 or so members of our group all said exactly the same thing, “We’ve never seen this before!” This new area includes several whimsical outdoor sculptures, including the enormous coral-pink concrete sofa.

Finally, we looked at the construction site for the new museum, which will two new floors, doubling the space for exhibitions and study but retaining the same footprint as the original. It’s due to be occupied in March 2024 and open to the public that fall. Fingers crossed. The architect is David Adjaye, whose firm designed the Smithsonian’s museum of African American history and culture and many notable buildings around the world.

All this new construction is being done in the midst of a huge project to make the university environmentally sustainable, with respect to energy consumption, landscape practices, stormwater management, waste reduction, and reduced water use. It’s hard to walk anywhere on campus without encountering the construction of these new environmental systems.

The University may date to 1746 (and one of my ancestors was in its first graduating class), but there’s always something new!

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The Brooklyn Book Festival: A Washout

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Following the book promotion dictum to “say ‘yes!’ to everything,” I volunteered to help out for an hour at the Brooklyn Book Festival yesterday. What fun (it should have been)!  Alas, the windy weather put people and tents and books at risk, so as much as possible was moved indoors, and the Mystery Writers of America and other booths in the Marketplace were cancelled. I’m looking forward to next year now.

Sunday was day seven of the eight-day festival—a free event, being held on the street and in the parks and plazas surrounding the Brooklyn Korean Veterans Park (at the entrance to the pedestrian access to the Brooklyn Bridge), all the way down to Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. It advertises “more than 100 literary events over 9 days.” And that’s not even counting my planning to be there to sign copies of Architect of Courage, a major missed opportunity (yes, I’m kidding).

With the goal of celebrating published literature and connecting readers with authors and booksellers, the festival began in 2006 as a one-day event involving some 300 authors. Except for today, it also hosts a Marketplace with 250 book publishers and literary organizations, including Mystery Writers of America. My would-have-been co-hosts at the MWA booth were Tim O’Mara (Crooked Numbers, Sacrifice Fly) and Phillip Cioffari (novels, story collections, a movie, and plays). Sorry to have missed becoming acquainted with them.

Sunday was Festival Day, a highlight of the event. Included were US and international authors, including such well-known names as Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn, The Feral Detective), Gary Shteyngart (Our Country Friends, Lake Success), Jennifer Egan, (The Candy House, A Visit from the Goon Squad), Geraldine Brooks (March, Horse), and many, many others.  

Getting into Brooklyn from where I live in Central New Jersey takes some time—an hour plus on New Jersey Transit, then connecting to the subway to Borough Hall in Brooklyn. Just enough enforced sitting to work up a good appetite. For excursions like this, my friend Joanne is often my companion and chaperone, and we’d worked out a good schedule and picked an enticing place for lunch. Next year!

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On Stage: The Caretaker

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Fans of Harold Pinter should make a point of seeing The Caretaker at The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey. The production, directed by STNJ artistic director Bonnie J. Monte, opened September 23 and runs through October 9. Monte deserves considerable credit for bringing such a challenging play to the stage—and so successfully.

Like many absurdist plays, The Caretaker has its moments of commingled comedy and tragedy and a slapstick scene reminiscent of Godot or the Marx Brothers. Mick (played by Jon Barker) has set up his older brother Aston (Isaac Hickox-Young) in a derelict apartment, which Aston is supposed to be renovating, but clearly isn’t. One night Aston brings home the garrulous tramp, Davies (Paul Mullins), whom he rescued from a fight. Davies is full of complaints and always searching for an angle, trying desperately and unsuccessfully to get on the same wavelength with first one brother then the other.

Each brother, separately, suggests to Davies that he become the caretaker for the building, though, he admits, he “has no experience in caretaking.” The brothers each have a job description in mind, and both include tasks Davies is unable and unwilling to perform. His sole preoccupation is getting a roof over his head and doing as little work as possible.

The three actors’ performances are impeccable. Barker is always a master at physical movement and repartee, and Mullins—whining, wheedling, looking out for number one—is simultaneously endearing and repellant. Hickox-Young doesn’t come to the fore until the second act, when Aston describes his mental hospital experience in an affecting monologue.

All three characters spin their wheels in ways both familiar and outrageous, and their flashes of humor and insight illuminate a great many truths. As Pinter himself said, “These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other.” The Caretaker lets audience members pursue their own truths, amidst the clutter of Aston’s apartment.

Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey productions are hosted at Drew University in Madison, N.J. (easily reachable from NYC by train). For tickets, call the box office at 973-408-5600 or visit the Box Office online.

South American Literary Adventures

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Three books I’ve read lately take place in the countries of our neighbors to the south. There Are No Happy Loves is the third in a series by Sergio Olguín that features irrepressible and libidinous investigative reporter Verónica Rosenthal. This time she tangles with a shady adoption ring run by the Catholic Church. Annamaria Alfieri’s historical mystery, Invisible Country, is set in Paraguay, a country whose history I knew less than nothing about, so appreciated the care with which she described that world. And, finally, The Lisbon Syndrome, by award-winning Spanish writer Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles, is not much about the Portuguese capital, but instead about the chaos in Venezuela, home to a large group of Portuguese émigrés.

There Are No Happy Loves Once again, Rosenthal happens upon a potentially outrageous crime in which the pursuit of justice starts her reportorial juices—and reader interest—going. Once again, her love affair with the lawyer Federico sputters along tantalizingly. Two of the three vignettes that begin the book turn out to be intimately related. A children’s book author named Darío Valrossa is driving his extended family home one night, when a terrible three-vehicle crash occurs involving a fuel truck. Everyone but the author dies at once, and he is left with terrible scars, the worst of which affect his mind and spirit. And, Federico, part of a team on late-night stake-out at the port of Buenos Aires that expects to confiscate a large cocaine shipment, instead seizes a truck filled with a grisly cargo. The previous two books in the series, also reviewed here, were The Fragility of Bodies (2019) and The Foreign Girls (2021). Translated by Miranda France.

Invisible Country Alfieri’s story, set in 1868, describes the meager lives of a small village as the Paraguayan economy is devasted by its disastrous war with its much larger neighbors, Brazil and Argentina, as well as Uruguay. Most men ages eight to eighty are dead. The village priest suggests the local women should abandon the conventional religious strictures and have sex with whoever is left, in order to repopulate the town. You can imagine the reaction. Meanwhile a murdered body is found in the church, and everyone is afraid the blame will be assigned based on politics, not evidence. In the midst of everything, young love finds a way to thrive. (The painting is from the war’s Battle of Tuyuti by Cándido Lopez.)

The Lisbon Syndrome In this novel, set in the near future, Portugal is hit by a giant asteroid and essentially disappears. The many Portuguese who have relocated to Caracas are heart-broken, knowing they can never go home. As a consequence, the disruptions and violence of the dysfunctional Venezuelan government rankle all the worse. It’s a time of student unrest in Caracas, and a popular theater teacher must figure out how boldly to oppose the ruling forces. Critics note the book’s wry humor, and call it “the most trenchant contemporary novel to offer a glimpse of life and death in Venezuela.” Worse than you thought. Translated by Paul Filev.

Tried the New Shepherd.com Reviews?

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Shepherd.com is a book review site that wants to make the search for a new book part of the fun. One of their ways is asking authors to recommend five books that fit a theme. The themes can be broad or incredibly niche. As an example, you might want to check out “the best mouthwatering reads for foodies” (I know I do!) or “the best books about historic Coney Island.” Hmmm. There could be a possible duplication there, if there’s a book about Nathan’s Famous.

The theme I picked is one of my favorites: “ordinary people in extraordinary situations.” Shepherd gives me the chance to explain why I picked it and to describe my own recent book, Architect of Courage. If you’ve read it, you’ll know it’s definitely built on that theme.

Here are five terrific thrillers that also show the kind of unexpected trouble people fall into and how they fight their way out of it!

  • The World at Night by Alan Furst – Reading Furst’s books was what made me think about how much this theme resonates with me. His thrillers are set in the months leading up to World War II, and his characters are trying for “business as usual.” Not a chance.
  • Disappeared by Bonnar Spring – In this new thriller, two American and two Moroccan women are trying to escape the country. For the Americans, all the social rules are upended. Not only are the authorities no help, they’re actually pursuing the women too.
  • Cover Story by Susan Rigetti – This is a jigsaw puzzle of a thriller, and I’ll bet you’ll be surprised when that last piece clicks into place. I was! The main character is a naïve young college dropout who wants to succeed in fashion publishing. You’d just like to shake her and wake her up.
  • Razorblade Tears by SA Cosby – A Black landscaper and white alcoholic ne’er-do-well find themselves an uneasy team when their gay sons are murdered. The police are getting nowhere in finding the killers, so the dads have to try. Awesome in audio.
  • Fierce Kingdom by Gin Phillips – A mom and her son have to hide in the zoo after hours, in the dark, because a pair of killers is stalking the grounds. Keeping a four-year-old quiet for hours challenges every maternal instinct this remarkable woman has!

You can read more about my five picks here or search for recommendations around your own favorite theme on the Shepherd website.

“Just One More”

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Michael Venutolo-Mantovani has written a riveting piece for the October 2022 issue of Wired, “Just One More.” Late on the night of August 15, 2021, Worth Parker’s North Carolina cell phone received a Facebook message about the chaos in Afghanistan. It read: “Sir. I hope you are well. By any chance do you know any Marines who are on the ground right now?” Having retired from the US Marines as a Lt. Colonel six weeks before, Parker thought he’d cut those ties.

The message described the plight of the sender’s brother and father who had both worked for the US military in Afghanistan. With the American pullout scheduled for the end of the month, their lives were in increasing peril. The sender, Jason Essazay, had also worked for the US, but had obtained a Special Immigrant Visa for his service and was living in Houston. “Parker was Essazay’s last resort,” Venutolo-Mantovani writes. At the time the pullout was announced, 81,000 Afghans had pending applications for a SIV. US intelligence reports predicted it would take several months for the Taliban to take Kabul, but as we now know, the fall of Kabul occurred only days later.

When Parker read that the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit was helping with the evacuation, he called an old friend in the unit who said he’d try to help. Working in the eye of a fast-moving hurricane of fragmentary information, changing requirements, and coordination difficulties involving violent extremists and desperate families, Parker’s initiative succeeded.

Three days before Essazay’s contact with Parker, Joe Saboe, who’d left the Army 20 years earlier received a call from his younger brother, wanting help to get a friend and his family out of Afghanistan. Saboe didn’t know how he could help, but “tried the closest thing to a Noncombatant Evacuation Operations tool he had: Facebook. His post asking for help generated a message from a friend of twenty years before also trying to rescue someone. The two men strategized. Soon he heard from more veterans, each worried about a single contact. By August 17, Saboe had a group of volunteers working on the cases of 128 potential evacuees. A story in the Military Times generated more than a thousand contacts from Afghans looking for help and Americans wanting to provide it.

Parker, the former Lt. Colonel, enlisted his high-powered connections in the military establishment to form a group calling itself “the Graybeards.” Learning about Saboe’s operation, Parker hoped to convince Saboe’s volunteers to support the Graybeards’ efforts. “But almost immediately, Parker realized (the younger generation) was comically more tech savvy” than the retired military and civilian leaders. “It was time to reject the chain of command that had been drilled into him from the minute he joined the Marines.” He put the Graybeards’ Project Dunkirk in direct support of Saboe, giving him “some of the best-connected people in the US military and intelligence worlds.”

Heroic efforts were made in a fluid and increasingly dangerous Kabul. They achieved the rescue of more than 1,500 Afghans and, even today, more people continue to be evacuated in ones and twos. Each is a victory, but, collectively, they represent only five percent of Saboe’s database. Volunteers continue to chip away at that list, trying to save, as Project Dunkirk’s motto has it, “Just one more.” This whole inspiring and infuriating article is well worth a read.

Promotion, Promotion

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Yesterday, The Writer’s Workshop at Authors Publish sponsored a pre-launch event for author Jennifer Givhan to talk about the development of her soon-to-be-published novel River Woman, River Demon. She was joined by Isabella Nugent, a publicist for Givhan’s publisher Blackstone, and the two discussed the publicity strategies they developed for the new book.

The inspiration for River Woman, River Demon, Givhan said, was a series of personal upheavals. She gives credit to both the strength and spirit of family for helping her weather these challenges and giving her a profound sense of herself as a person. This carries over into her book publicity strategy, where she looked for activities compatible with how she sees the world. It was an important idea that an author’s marketing activities have to be true to them as a person, in order to feel authentic (and doable). Otherwise, they can be awkward and unpersuasive.

This leads naturally to the notion that the author and the publicist need to develop a strong, mutually respectful, partnership. There are many ways to publicize a book, and the publicist has to hear it when the author isn’t comfortable with something.

The whole strategy development process for River Woman, River Demon took about nine months to plan and carry out. One of the first tasks was to cast a wide net for blurbs from other authors that then could be used to garner media publicity. During downtime, as the book was getting ready for market, Jenn made it a point to respond “yes” to as many requests for blurbs or other assistance from other authors as she could. Giving other writers uplift, she believes, not only makes her feel good, but in the long run will be of benefit to the larger writing community, herself included.

She recommends teaming up with other authors for publicity—doing readings together, interviewing each other, and so on. Authors working with smaller publishers may have a somewhat easier time making connections with their “sibs.”

Jenn also invested in an outside publicist, interviewing a great many, which resulted in some free consultations, even though she was up-front about her budgetary constraints. Even staying within budget, this extra help was useful. Jenn and Isabella talked about the importance of identifying all the different sets of contacts Jenn has. She is a novelist, but she’s also a poet, and those connections in the poetry world have led to some unpredictable good results and cross-promotions. “You don’t know who all of your readers are, and ultimately, they may connect.” I’ve certainly found that in promoting Architect of Courage. Reviews, help, invitations end up coming from all sorts of wonderful places!

Related
I describe my promotion strategy for not driving myself crazy right here.

Book Review: Jewish Noir II

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Just in time for the High Holidays, comes Jewish Noir II, edited by Kenneth Wishnia and Chantelle Aimée Osman. In his lively introduction, noted crime writer Lawrence Block says you can sum up every Jewish holiday in three sentences: “They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat!” While great food is an essential part of Jewish holiday celebrations, Block points out that the first two sentence are even more tied to the Jewish experience and, as he says, make the combination of Jews and noir almost inevitable. And timely, I’d add, given current trends.

This collection of twenty-three short stories, many of which were written by prize-winning authors, are clustered in six themes: legacies, scattered and dispersed (stories from the diaspora); you shame us in front of the world (embarrassment and dishonor); the God of mercy; the God of vengeance; and American Splendor (stories that could only happen in the United States). Editors Wishnia and Osman point to a subtext of many of the stories: fear amidst the stresses of modern life. Fear of the past, fear of loss, fear of anti-Semitism, fear of violence. Fear that is another signpost on the road to noir. Even with that common thread, the stories themselves are wildly diverse, and readers will find many that appeal, regardless of stylistic preferences. This review tackles only three of them, from across the themes mentioned.

“Taking Names,” the opening story by Steven Wishnia, sits perfectly in the sweet spot between past and present. It begins with the commemoration of a notorious tragedy, the 1911 fire at New York City’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. In that calamity, scores of young women jumped nine stories to their deaths, rather than be burned alive. Because of the business owners’ negligence, 146 people—mainly Italian and Jewish immigrants—died. The issue of worker safety is brought up to the present day by reporter Charlie Purpelburg, who’s covering union efforts to increase worker safety in the construction industry. Once again, risky conditions affect the most vulnerable employees—undocumented workers, this time around. They’re not only caught in the political machinations of Jewish developers skirting safety regulations, their wages are being stolen. Enter the social media trolls. Where does all this racial hostility end? No place good.

Craig Faustus Buck’s “The Shabbes Goy” is another tale of exploitation, this time of an elderly woman by her ultra-religious husband, who fills their apartment with gloom and domination. How three members of the younger generation ally to thwart him is quite satisfying. Funny and horrifying, all at once.

“What was I thinking?” is the first line of “The Nazi in the Basement” by Rita Lakin. An elderly Jewish woman living in California returns to New York for a funeral and decides to do the unfathomable. She visits her old neighborhood in the Bronx for the first time in decades. When she lived there, the residents were mostly Jews, Irish, and Italians, and now, before she can park the rental car, she encounters teenagers from Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Hong Kong, and Bangladesh. They wheedle most of her life story out of her. But she doesn’t tell them the ending, the tragic events that produced in her “the scars masquerading as memories.”

Many of the remaining stories address the issues of younger generations of Jews and people living in other countries. Still, it is today’s elderly, grandchildren of the immigrants from the last century who have witnessed the massive social changes of upward mobility, and who, at this point, may be most caught between past and present.

The Malleability of Time: Javier Marias

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Award-winning and much-translated Spanish novelist, translator, and short-story writer Javier Marias died September 11 from complications of Covid-19. You have to admire someone as dedicated as Marias, who began seriously writing as a young teenager, and at 17, ran away from home to join his uncle in Paris so he could write his first novel. Despite writing 15 novels and three collections of short stories, he considered himself “more a reader than a writer,” or so I learned in an interview conducted some years ago.

The main characters in his three-volume novel, Your Face Tomorrow, took what could have been a risky path, in that they were based on real people—one of them (even chancier) his own father, including his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, and Sir Peter Edward Lionel Russell of New Zealand, Professor of Spanish Studies and Director of Portuguese Studies at Queen’s College, Oxford. Russell also experienced the Spanish Civil War first-hand, on assignment from British Intelligence. He further served the Intelligence Corps of the British Army during World War II.

In his conversations with the two men, Marias believed they were hopeful the books would be published (they died before the third and final volume appeared). In an interesting way, Marias’s fiction, based however loosely on their own stories, gave them an opportunity to live slightly altered lives Wouldn’t we all like to go back and handle certain people and events differently? “Mistakes, I’ve made a few,” sings Sinatra.

Rethinking one’s history is another example of Marias’s preoccupation with manipulating time, touching it, in order to bring out the important moments that get washed away in the ceaseless flood. In part he has tried to accomplish this by way of numerous digressions. At one point in Your Face Tomorrow, a sword is about to fall, and he makes a left turn to talk about different kinds of swords and their history. Meanwhile, the reader is maybe thinking, “enough already. Get on with it.” But Marias believed the experience of what the sword ultimately does is different if readers have those moments of swordly contemplation.

I’m thinking about how much Riku Onda packed into Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight which is a novel of moderate length that takes place all in one night and, simultaneously, over decades, as twins review their relationships, their suspicions, and the reasons they cannot keep living together. There’s so much more in there than the highlight reel you’d hear if you asked one of them about that night a year, a month, maybe even a week later.

Even experimenting with the elasticity of time, it seems Marias was a pantser (writing by the seat of his pants, rather than carefully plotting in advance). He said, “I’m not the kind of writer who knows everything before I start writing a book, or even while I’m writing it.” When he said, “what I really like, in a way, is to find a story out.” I think of that as “the experience of discovery,” and it’s what makes writing exciting for me too.

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Book Clubs are Authors’ Friends

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So far, three library book clubs and one “unaffiliated” club in three states have decided to read my mystery/thriller, Architect of Courage, and give their members a chance to ask me questions about it. The first one of these occurred last week, when my “home” club—the mystery book club at Princeton Public Library—read the book.

This is one of those activities that Zoom has made much more doable! The group not only includes ten or so members from the Princeton area, but one of us has moved to Maine, one is here now but for some months was based in Richmond, Virginia, and I think one or two of us are Florida snowbirds.

Group leader Gayle Stratton and I agreed that, in the interest of candor, the group would have about 45 minutes to discuss the book before I joined the call for the second half of our meeting. That apparently was an unnecessary precaution, because it seems they were unanimous in reporting they enjoyed the book! Their questions covered plot, intent, research strategies, publishing, favorite characters—a whole array of issues.

In promoting the novel through interviews and book events, I’ve found I most enjoy the q&a. It’s always fun to see how different people interpret the same things. It’s a challenge authors frequently face. They have to walk the fine line between explaining too much and explaining too little. Although I work hard to make the text clear, questions still come up. In general, I’m a big believer in trusting the reader. When I’m reading, I hate the feeling I’m being spoon-fed. If an author tells the character’s dog died, she doesn’t need to tell me the character stayed in bed all day because she is sad. I know why she did that.

Just after Labor Day, I spent two days at the Library of Virginia genealogizing, and saw a big poster for its book group. The club was planning to discuss SA Cosby and Razorblade Tears on September 14. I’ve listened to the audiobooks of Razorblade Tears and its predecessor, Blacktop Wasteland, both of which delve into what Cosby has called “the holy trinity of Southern fiction—race, class, and sex.”

This was an opportunity not to be missed! Another Zoom success, I thought; I could call in from New Jersey. Disappointingly, he wasn’t on the call, so I missed my opportunity to ask whether part of his process is reading his books out loud. His dialog is so spot-on perfect, I figured he must do that. Then his publisher hires the genius narrator Adam Lazarre-White for the audio versions (highly recommended). I’ll just have to wait for another chance to ask Cosby my question.

If your book club reads fiction—be in touch!