The Imperfects by Amy Meyerson

I saw a review of The Imperfects, Amy Meyerson‘s second novel sometime since I’ve been working at home and put it on my library eBook holds list. It came up in my account over the weekend, and proved a good summer read (or Coronavirus and bad news all around read). It’s absorbing in the way I hear coworkers talk about certain streaming or TV series about dysfunctional families, because Meyerson’s characters, the Millers, can’t seem to be in the same room without getting into an argument.

But that, in and of itself, would not for me be very entertaining. Fortunately, there is a page-turning mystery at the center of this feuding family. Helen, the matriarch, has died and in her will, she surprises everyone by leaving her house to her daughter, Deborah, a somewhat flaky new-agey grandma who has failed at three dozen business ideas, can’t keep to her vegan diet, and seems to have had a string of equally flaky boyfriends. Helen also surprises them by leaving a brooch to Deborah’s daughter Beck.

The rest of the book is the breathless story of Beck’s realization that the brooch is not only a valuable heirloom, but also includes a diamond that was probably part of the Habsburg crown jewels, lost since the earlier 1900s. Having no idea why on earth her grandma had such a thing in her possession, she gets to work trying to determine its provenance and how it came to be Helen’s. And to determine how to stave off the many legal claims to the diamond once news breaks.

Because the siblings can’t keep their mouths shut. Beck’s brother Jake, a screenwriter whose one hit capitalized on his family’s dysfunction and caused a major rift, spills the story to his stoner friend as soon as he gets back to California. Worse, her sister Ashley, a Greenwhich housewife and former marketing executive, takes a valuation report to an auction house. And some of the people Beck trusts to help the family are less than helpful.

Helen’s story, and the story of the jewels she came to own drive the book. There is some interesting backstory about the end of the Habsburg empire, and then later, an effort to get fifty Jewish children out of Austria before the Nazis ship most of the adults off to concentration camps. Which Meyerson says in her author’s note is based on a real story of a Philadelphia couple who really rescued fifty children. That was all interesting.

Less interesting, to me, were some romantic (or at least lustful) side plots for each of the Miller family, which I think are included to round them out as characters, so they don’t just look like bickering siblings. I could imagine my grandmother suggesting these interludes were not needed, which is why I gave it some thought and tried to imagine why Meyerson included them. There are also some other non-romantic partner minor characters who play small but key roles, like Karen, the kind and honest HR person at Beck’s firm, Rico, the solid stoner friend, and Clara, a librarian who takes an interest in helping Ashley.

If you’re looking for a distraction, this book has mystery, history, and family histrionics. I read it in an afternoon and evening (and admittedly, late into the night to finish, because I wanted to know how it would end.

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Miss Garnet’s Angel by Salley Vickers

Yes, this seems like something completely different. I’m a discerner in the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross, and this novel, Miss Garnet’s Angel, is on the reading list. It was Salley Vickers‘ debut, and tells two stories: one about Julia Garnet, a retired schoolteacher whose longtime friend and housemate, Harriet, has recently died, and the other, the Book of Tobit. Tobit is found in Catholic and Orthodox bibles, and in the Apocrypha in Anglican bibles, as well as in the Septuagint, which is the oldest translation (into Greek) of the Hebrew scriptures.

Julia decides to sublet her apartment and spend a few months in Venice. She is a British communist (like Vickers’ parents) with few friends and no living relatives. As her story unfolds, she comes out of her longtime shell and in a process of self-examination, socializing purely for enjoyment (rather than school functions or party meetings), and immersion in the art and music of Venice, she softens. And regrets the strictness that prevented her from being as kind as should could or should have been, and that has left her lonely.

One of the first things she sees in Venice is the facade of the Chiesa dell’Angelo Raffaele, and carvings of the Archangel Raphael with a boy carrying a fish, and dog in front of them. You can see it here. She later visits the church to view the art inside (including a series of paintings featuring this boy and his dog and the angel), and learns that the boy is Tobias, son of Tobit. A friend she meets, Carlo, tells her the whole story of Tobit, a Jewish exile in Nineveh, and Tobias, who cures Tobit’s blindness and saves his betrothed from a demon, with the help of the Raphael and a dog.

Vickers interweaves a retelling of the Book of Tobit alongside Julia’s story, and adds to the narrative of her personal growth some small mysteries Julia works out, about a painting in another church (Chapel-of-the-Plague), and about the English twins she meets there who are doing restoration work, as well as a mystery about her friend Carlo. It’s not a cozy novel — Julia’s self-reflection is painful at times, and the mysteries she deals with are as well. There are references to the plague years in Venice, to anti-Semitism, and to WWII. It’s not a light read. The story of Tobit is also on the surface just somewhat fraught. There is also a somewhat abrupt and bittersweet ending.

But there is a deep vein of truth running through both, and Julia’s transformation is ultimately uplifting, as is the story of the boy who with an angel’s help, overcomes evil. Vickers’ research shines through and is fascinating, without being “in your face” — it’s woven neatly into the story because Julia has an affinity for learning more about the things she is seeing from books and from friends (including an elderly Monsignor who is, like all of the supporting characters, interesting).

And there is a longing for meaning, for faith in something beyond humanity, something that surpasses the imperfect execution of ideals that Julia realizes she’s observed in British communism. I think that makes Miss Garnet’s Angel a timely read, despite the somewhat quaint circumstances of Julia’s life. As we look at the not-so-solid — in some cases actually crumbling — edifices of our ideals as they crack open to reveal the long history of willful ignorance on the part of many people and outright greed on the part of the powerful, don’t we too long for meaning, and healing, and love?

I enjoyed this and I will look for Vickers’ other books.

 

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The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale

My son (former Teen the Elder, for longtime bookconscious readers) recommended I read The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale after he and his sister (former Teen the Younger) gently disabused me of the idea that police are basically good, and there are just “bad apples.” They recognized that I was conditioned to this idea by our culture and my schooling. They, having been freed from “schooled” thought by their unschooling, had no such illusions. I can’t take credit; other than choosing to unschool them, I had little to do with the amazing humans they became.

Forgive me for digressing. I’ve got to say that if you don’t have any twenty-somethings or teens in your life you should seek their counsel online or via friends. While I have long thought of myself as social-justice oriented, I have learned more in the past few weeks from discussing current events with my young adult offspring than I did on my own for a few decades. Case in point, I had no idea police are not, in their mission or intent, “good.” To be clear I’m not talking about individuals. I still hold that there are good people who unwittingly enter into a career in the police force believing they will bring about good in their communities. I (and Vitale) am talking about the institution of policing, which, as part of our overall elitist capitalist society, serves mainly to enforce the norms of power and wealth at the expense of the poor, people of color, and those with disabilities.

If you are not shocked, or just disagree, with the idea that capitalism is hurting more people than it is helping, then you will at least be shocked by Vitale’s illuminating discussion of how police at best do a disservice to and at worst, outright exploit, the disabled, especially those with mental illness. I was shocked and sickened by two cases described in the chapter on political policing by people who are mentally disabled who were coerced by police into “terrorism plots” that were just meant to ensnare Muslims, who are now serving lengthy prison terms. In our names, as Americans.

Reading The End of Policing in the week leading up to the Poor People’s Campaign “digital assembly” this weekend helped me connect the dots between the social justice issues that have concerned me and policing. Vitale notes that if we actually invested the billions spent on police budgets (including military gear like tanks and grenade launchers that are used in communities’ and even schools’ police presences around the country) in the communities that allegedly need the most policing, many of the criminal and disruptive behaviors the police claim ti be solving would be eliminated. He cites evidence that where housing, education, health care, or other basic needs are met, policing is much less necessary.

And if we’re all equal, whether you come to that belief via the founding documents of our country or the sacred scriptures of any of the major world religions, shouldn’t we all have access to safe, clean, secure, affordable housing? Clean water? Nutritious and affordable food? A living wage and paid time off to care for sick family members or just recharge? Health care? Quality education? The right to vote? The right to peaceably protest? No matter our race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, immigration status, or any other identity? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Vitale points out that “Our entire criminal justice system has become a gigantic revenge factory. Three-strike laws, sex-offender registries, the death penalty, and abolishing parole are about retribution, not safety.” That’s a lot to take in. But when you dive into these, it’s true. They don’t make us safer. They just make it harder for people to return to society, receive mental health care, and become healthy, functioning members of their communities. Vitale goes on to say “Real justice would look to restore people and communities, to rebuild trust and social cohesion, to offer people a way forward, to reduce the social forces that drive crime, and to treat both victims and perpetrators as full human beings.” Yes.

Another point Vitale makes better than I can paraphrase: “We don’t need empty police reforms; we need a robust democracy that gives people the capacity to demand of their government and themselves real, nonpunitive solutions to their problems. . . . Instead of asking the police to solve our problems we must organize for real justice. We need to produce a society designed to meet people’s human needs . . . .”

Vitale traces the history of policing, and then breaks down its failures, mostly in the U.S. but also in some international contexts, broadly and in particular areas such as homelessness, the drug war, sex work, the school-to-prison pipeline, the border, gangs, and political policing. I sped through the final chapters after tuning into the Poor People’s Campaign for a few hours yesterday, and it really all clicks. Bringing about a more just, equitable society will secure our future, and the future of our children and grandchildren. Anything less will mire us in the kind of fear, mistrust, misinformation, economic inequality and political paralysis that we currently enjoy.

I highly recommend you read this, and also that you read with care the Poor People’s Campaign’s moral budget. Maybe tune into the rebroadcast of their digital assembly. Think about what you grew up learning about policing and whether it jives with what you know of the world as an adult. And listen to the young people in your life. I have no doubt they will lead us, out the mess we made for them.

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A Glass of Blessings by Barbara Pym

I’ve had a couple different people suggest Barbara Pym as pandemic reading. I’d read Jane and Prudence, albeit quite some time ago. I was hunting all over for it, thinking I’d re-read it, and never found it. Tonight I realized, when I looked back at my review, that I took it to my grandmother!

Anyway, after a spate of more serious reading, I decided to take a look at whether any of Pym’s novels were available as an eBook through my libraries. I was able to find A Glass of Blessings and have enjoyed it. Pym’s work is not plot-heavy. Instead she explores the inner life of her main character, in this case Wilmet Forsyth, and the time they live in. Wilmet is a woman in her thirties, a former Wren, living in London in the late forties or early fifties.

Wilmet is married to her wartime beau, Rodney, and they live with his mother. Rodney works at an unnamed ministry. They have no children, and Wilmet is self-conscious about having little to occupy her time. She attends an Anglo-Catholic church, and has a few friends: Mary, a fellow parishioner who briefly explores a religious vocation; Rowena, her best friend from their Wren days, Rowena’s brother Piers. Wilmet, over the course of a year, entertains the idea of taking a lover, flirts with Rowena’s husband Harry, tries to flirt with Piers, and worries that she is “a horrid person.”

But she isn’t. She’s kind to her mother-in-law. She worries about Mr. Bason, who wasn’t any good at his ministry job and becomes the cook and housekeeper for the clergy at Wilmet’s church. She is concerned for Piers, who hasn’t settled into regular work and seems to be going through a low period. She befriends Pier’s flatmate Keith, even though he is a bore. She cares about Mary, who is grieving as well as determining what to do with her life. Wilmet simply can’t see all the ways she is helping people.

Pym captures Wilmet’s feelings, her thoughts, the way our minds work. In one scene, where she is visiting Mary, Wilmet can’t get to sleep. She thinks, “It seemed as if life had been going on around me without my knowing it, in the disconcerting way that it sometimes does, like the traffic swirling past when one is standing on an island in the middle of the road.” And a few sentences later, “I tried to remember our time in Italy, but all that came into my mind were curious irrelevant little pictures — ” The pictures get tangled up with her current life’s pictures as she drifts into sleep. That seemed to me one of the more accurate descriptions of lying awake fighting an active brain that I’ve ever read.

The other striking thing about the characters in A Glass of Blessings is that none of them seem likely to be people whose lives would garner enough attention to be recorded in fiction. A bored housewife. A young, religious woman unsure of her future. A man who doesn’t have the kind of job or apartment expected of someone like him. A widow living with her son and daughter-in-law, with an amateur interest in archeology. A man with a talent for cooking and a taste for “beautiful things.” But Pym makes this mosaic of ordinary people doing ordinary things — living — into a lovely, quiet, and reflective story about who we are to each other.

I also thought it felt quite contemporary in another striking way: Wilmet and Mary are regular churchgoers but the rest generally don’t go, even at Christmas. There are any number of interesting Anglican issues of the day alluded to — the Oxford Movement, the question of the Church of South India (which I had to look up), the question of priest celibacy. There is also a sense of unreality reading something set at a time when ordinary people could afford to live in London.  All of that made A Glass of Blessing an interesting diversion. Probably not to everyone’s taste, but a nice, calm antidote to today’s reality.

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War & Peace

I’ve been reading War & Peace since March with the Tolstoy Together plan the folks at A Public Space, in particular Yiyun Li, assembled so that people around the world could read their way through this lengthy classic in manageable chunks (about 12-15 pages a day). I’d read some shorter Tolstoy (although I don’t seem to have written about it here; I’ve read Anna Karenina, What Men Live By, and The Death of Ivan Ilyich). I always admire these kinds of efforts at collective reading and #TolstoyTogether attracted worldwide attention. It seemed at the time so nice to imagine that we’d get through coronavirus by reading together.

That was before we all realized the full extent of how ill prepared the U.S was for a pandemic, how crazy our leadership is, and how disproportionately the poor and people of color have been impacted by the disease. Now we’re in the midst of reopening even though we are still a long way from being done with COVID-19, and Black Lives Matter protests make something as silly as taking time to read a long Russian classic about how powerful egomaniacs can bring their countries’ people to their knees while celebrating how great they themselves think they are seem pointless.

I wrapped up a few days early this afternoon. The main characters in the book are almost all Russian, French, or other European aristocrats. While they grapple with matters of faith, financial “ruin” and war, their problems are not too bad compared with the problems of the few peasants and serfs who appear in the story. Such as being owned by the rich characters. Or being mistreated or harmed. For example, Platon Karataev, who is a peasant and all around good person, has one of the more horrific things in the book happen to him.

Tolstoy interjects several times throughout the novel with nonfiction sections where he holds forth on various topics, mainly the meaning of history and man’s role in it. He points out that if a great man says he’s great but doesn’t actually pay attention to good and evil, he’s not so great, for example. And he notes at the end of the book that trying to make sense of history through these “great” men’s lives (because when he was writing no one would have bothered making sense of history through women’s lives, even noble women) you miss the fact that the story of humans is really stitched together from little stories of individuals, and that because of free will, many of those stories are not great. And therefore, making a grand study of themes of history without considering the illogical acts of willful people, whether historical figures or ordinary people, is fruitless.

At least I think that’s what he was saying. By the time I got to the end I was a little irritable from following actual 2020 egomaniacs with no consideration for good and evil and contemporary illogical acts of willful people in the news. I got a little tangled up in the idea that because of free will, mankind is not free — I get it, I think? The free will of the powerful keeps us all under their thumbs, so the rest of us have free will but only to a point because of the systems that keep us all in place, but is that really what Tolstoy, himself one of the rich and influential who historians credit with the course of history, meant? I am sure if I thought harder about it I’d make more sense of it, but again, since that truth (whether it’s what Tolstoy meant or not) is making itself all too known at the moment in the real world, that’s enough to process right now.

The novel itself was enjoyable enough. Pierre is an interesting character, and Princess Maria. I found it annoying that the kind and good hearted Sonja, an orphan whose true love ends up marrying someone else for money (although he comes to love a rich woman who is also good hearted), is left without a family of her own, more or less waiting on the young and old in the family who raised her.

But that’s probably realistic, and Tolstoy seems to have enjoyed demystifying people and showing them as they are. Even the good hearted have their moments of scheming and/or feeling selfish. And he doesn’t generalize — not all aristocrats are self-absorbed jerks and not all peasants and serfs are good like Karataev. People in War & Peace are mostly excitable and foolish when they are young. Things don’t always go to plan. It’s not a fairy tale, by any means, and Tolstoy is certainly not a fan of neat and happy endings.

I am glad I read it, and I appreciate the efforts of those spearheading #TolstoyTogether. Especially the reminder that everyone can find 30 minutes to read, and if you do so, you can read even a doorstopper of a classic like War & Peace. It’s just not necessarily as fun to read Tolstoy during a global existential crisis as I thought it might be.

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