Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality by Sarah McBride

 

    I’m going to start this review with a somewhat embarrassing confession. During my undergrad, I went to a screening of We Were Here, a documentary about the 1980s AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. The documentary included personal accounts from those affected by the epidemic, either as caregivers, patients, or partners. While my exact figures are unquantifiable, through about 80% of the film, I wept. I wept so hard I had to leave the theatre to try to compose myself. It was beautiful seeing peoples’ unconditional love and devotion to one another—and tragic to see that love be prematurely tried and ripped away by unpredictable circumstances.

    I’m not sure what led me to read Sarah McBride’s Tomorrow Will Be Different: a personal recommendation? A listicle of books about trans joy or activism? It’s hard to say, but it had much the same effect as We Were Here. Both focus on people who already face unfair treatment and challenges, who persevere and find love despite it all, and who lose that love due to the cosmic injustice of medical afflictions. This book, like the documentary, was heart-breaking.

    Tomorrow Will Be Different has three key terms in its subtitle: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality. Sarah McBride offers each in turn and in conjunction with one another. The memoir recounts Sarah’s early involvement in student government throughout high school and University. It recounts her coming out story, transition, the challenges she faced, and the advocacy she engaged in to help make the world safer, through legislation, for trans rights.

    Each chapter takes a particular focus, but woven through each of the other topics is McBride’s relationship to Andy. The relationship is characterized by its youthful exuberance and enthusiasm. McBride recounts the way they care for one another and the way they fight for change together. Sadly, though, Andy develops tongue cancer at an early age. There are some heart-string-tugging passages where Andy worries about not being able to speak following the partial amputation of his tongue—especially because talking was his main means to making political change. It’s painful watching the challenges they face as a couple unfold, despite there being some beautiful moments, like changing the vows to say, “for ever and ever” instead of “til death do us part.” The moment where he is declared cancer-free is wonderfully uplifting, and when the cancer returns it is devastating. McBride captures the ups and downs, and eventual loss of Andy, with an intimate tenderness that is further enhanced by the fact that she herself narrate the audiobook herself.

    If I have one gripe about the book, actually, it’s that we are invited into their relationship too intimately. Early in their relationship, Sarah and Andy give each other the nickname “bean,” which is presented as a cutesy humanizing detail. Unfortunately for McBride, I’m a curmudgeon and every time that “bean” was written into the book felt excessive—a too-close look into the silliness of a relationship not my own. Later in the book, they refer to each other as “bean” so often at critical moments that it feels like a shorthand for ‘emotional response’ rather than sincere. This is a minor complaint, of course, and one that others might find endearing, but I just didn’t like how close that nickname let us be to the experience.

    That said, I am left nonetheless crushed by the scene in which Sarah loses Andy. They have to have difficult conversations, like whether Andy wants to be maintained in a vegetative state or allowed to pass away. When Andy declines, he hangs on for longer than expected and McBride offers a comment about how people sometimes need to be given permission to pass. While Andy lay unconscious, struggling to breathe, Sarah gathered his friends and leaned in close to him, giving him permission to die. She tells him how nobody will be mad at him and that, while she’ll miss him every day, it is okay. It’s one of those moments where it’s so beautiful for being so full of love, and awful for having it be ripped away. 

    Overall, the emotional impact of the book shines through superbly—and sometimes for more joyful reasons. In one particularly powerful scene, Sarah goes to the courthouse to get her name changed. She gives some passing comments about the way the justice system denies trans identities, and so there’s a moment of suspense in the judge’s response. The judge clarifies why Sarah wants to change her name and then announces how grateful he is to be part of such a significant day in Sarah’s life. The moment is an excellent inversion of expectations that easily brings a tear to the eye.

    Of course, the book also outlines some of the key political issues concerning trans people. She discusses the push for trans equality bills, the process of convincing senators and other politicians to vote her way, and so on. Of course, the so-called Bathroom Bill takes on major significance in that respect. It was a well-articulated section that described how bathroom bills serve to legislate trans people out of public life. The idea of trans people using bathrooms is never the point (ahem…no reported cases of trans people assaulting cis people in bathrooms…), but the idea of making it impossible to be anywhere that other people might be. 

    McBride’s wisdom shines through in passing moments, as well. In the first chapter, she discusses how peoples’ predominant response to trans people, when she was growing up, was laughter directed towards them on sitcoms. She then uses that as a springboard to talking about her parents’ acceptance of her as trans and their anxieties, formed in part because there were so few “references for success,” which provided them comfort when McBride’s brother came out as gay. It’s a momentary comment that speaks to the importance of representation in media and beyond.

    -–Incidentally, an interesting statistic in the book is how until relatively recently more Americans reported having seen ghosts than having known a trans person—

    I can’t speak to McBride’s political career. All politicians have their flaws, and I am always somewhat suspect of people admiring even the good ones. That said, she demonstrates some great insight into the importance of formal legislation. In trying to pass an equality bill, McBride petitions a politician personally known to the family to sponsor it, who says that it is too soon because the public isn’t educated enough on the issues. It essentially comes down to the argument that “the public isn’t ready” because they are not yet educated enough. McBride offers the rejoinder that “people are losing their jobs and their homes. Without these protections, transgender people don’t feel safe stepping out publicly. It takes a huge risk to educate.” I had never really considered the full implications of trying to educate the public before. The idea of framing it as a risk is a really powerful observation.

    The book, while insightful, is not particularly fact-driven. Or rather, facts are not the primary focus. McBride offers personal stories that are more likely to humanize trans people than would abstract numbers on a page. For that reason, it’s a great entry point into the discourse. If you’re looking for an academic text about enacting change, there are other options out there. If you’re looking for an engaging collection of anecdotes and a tragic love story that serves as a launching pad for activism, then McBride’s Tomorrow Will Be Different is a much better choice. 

    Happy reading—I hope that your reading is one more step towards changing tomorrow.

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

    Depending on how you count it, Norwegian Wood is either the ninth or tenth Haruki Murakami book I’ve read. I can’t expect everyone to remember, much less track, my previous reviews of Murakami’s work, so to sum up: the more I read of his work, the more it felt the same and the more uncomfortable I was finding his way of writing about sex and women. I felt like he was delivering cheap tricks, essentially on autopilot. 

    Ironically, Norwegian Wood strikes me as one of Murakami’s more literary works—ironic because this book was, as I was informed by the biggest Murakami enthusiast I know, the book that shot Murakami into superstardom status (at least so far as it exists in the literary realm). I have it on good authority that Norwegian Wood is the book most often cited by angsty teenagers. I can definitely see the influence of works like The Catcher in the Rye, so it makes sense.

    And yet.

    Norwegian Wood stands out to me as one of Murakami’s more finely wrought works. For one, it provides more lush description of setting, often to surprising effect. In one scene, Murakami establishes a picturesque girls’ school: “Midori Kobayashi and I sat on a park bench together, looking at the building where she used to go to high school. Ivy clung to the walls, and pigeons huddled beneath the gables, resting their wings. It was a nice old building with character. A great oak tree stood in the schoolyard, and a column of white smoke rose straight up beside it. The fading summer light gave the smoke a soft and cloudy look” (59). The description reads to me like a cloudy painting or even a vague watercolour. It’s lovely on its own, but what really enhances it is Murakmi’s immediate inversion of the scene. Midori asks the narrator, Toru Watanabe, if he knows what the smoke is. When he does not know, she tells him they’re burning sanitary napkins: “Sanitary napkins, tampons, stuff like that [...] It is a girls’ school. The old janitor collects them from all the receptacles and burns them in the incinerator. That’s the smoke” (59). The characters then break down the math, figuring how many girls had started their periods, how many are having them at the same time, how many sanitary napkins that would require, and the impact that would have on the old janitor. I found it beautiful that the lovely scene is peeled back and provided an additional layer of meaning.

    In many ways, Norwegian Wood is a setting-driven novel. A large portion of it takes place at, essentially, a sanatorium—-Toru is reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which serves as a pretty clear influence, as well. Given how dependent key moments are on the setting, it is all the more surprising when the novel’s final passage pulls the rug out from under the reader: “Gripping the receiver, I raised my head and turned to see what lay beyond the telephone booth. Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere. Again and again, I called out for Midori from the dead center of this place that was no place” (293). What a magnificent finish! This moment of total disorientation comes at just the right time. Rather than resolution, we’re given an ambiguous moment, completely charged by its uncertainty. If I were a better academic, I would write an essay about the epistemic value of place—I’d draw on Heidegger, talk about thrownness, and discuss how Murakami exemplifies setting-as-knowing.

    But I’m not currently that academic, so instead let’s continue to delve into the descriptive language of the text. It extends beyond just setting. The details Murakami includes—or doesn’t include—create a chilling tone with more emotive power than I’ve experienced in most of his novels. Early in the text, a seventeen year old boy commits suicide. The description is precise, if sparse in description, and it feels more heartbreaking than it had any right to. Another suicide is alluded to later in the text, referenced merely in passing, which makes it even more tragic that nobody seems to give it much thought. By contrast, a third suicide in the novel is provided with an extensive description. Naoko offers a lengthy account of being the one to find her sister dead. It’s provided with rich detail, equally as haunting as the lack of it for other suicides in the text: “In autumn when I was in the sixth grade. November. On a dark, rainy day. My sister was a senior in high school at the time. I came home from my piano lesson at six-thirty and my mother was fixing dinner” (145). It begins by setting the stage, and framing it through the eyes of a young person just makes it worse because you have the layer of perception and the layer of truth. Naoko “figured she was probably sleeping. [...] She was standing by the window, staring outside, with her neck bent at a kind of angle like this. Like she was thinking” (145). Knowing what has happened makes her ignorance hit harder, and the appropriation of ostensibly lovely imagery for darker purposes establishes the haunting atmosphere perfectly. She continues:

“The room was dark, the lights were out, and it was hard to see anything. [...]  That’s when I noticed that she looked taller than usual. [...] Did she have high heels on? Was she standing on something? I moved closer and was just about to speak to her again when I saw it: there was a rope above her head. It came straight down from a beam in the ceiling—I mean it was amazingly straight, like somebody in had drawn a line in space with a rope above her head. It came straight down from a beam in the ceiling—I mean it was amazingly straight, like somebody had drawn a line in space with a ruler. My sister had a white blouse on—yeah, a simple white blouse like this one—and a grey skirt, and her toes were pointing down like a ballerina’s, except there was a space between the tip of her toes and the floor of maybe seven or eight inches. I took in every detail. Her face, too. I looked at her face. I couldn’t help it. I thought: I’ve got to go right downstairs and tell my mother. I’ve got to scream. But my body ignored me. It moved on its own, separately from my conscious mind. It was trying to lower her from the rope while my mind was telling me to hurry downstairs. Of course, there was no way a little girl could have the strength to do such a thing, and so I just stood there, spacing out, for maybe five or six minutes, a total blank, like something inside me had died. I just stayed that way, with my sister, in that cold, dark place until my mother came up to see what was going on.” (145)

The ballerina imagery in particular strikes me for its horrific implications. There’s a kind of grace in her death, an ethereal quality. The slowness of the scene, though, and the way Naoko ceases to respond to the experience, provides the horror a quiet stillness. It’s hard to expand on, but this is among the most chilling scenes Murakami has written, at least so far as I can remember.

    You may have noticed how much this novel draws on suicide as a motif—and I haven’t even mentioned all of them! Murakami often explores the inner contradictions of our collective psychology, but his efforts here seem more sincere and fleshed out in Norwegian Wood than some of his more recent work, like Killing Commendatore. His approach has a Dostoyevskian quality (cf. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in particular), which emerges most in the conversations between the central characters. The highlight to me comes through in a conversation Toru has with Midori, who outlines her expectations for love:

“I’m looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don’t want it anymore and throw it out the window. That’s what I’m looking for. […] And when I do it, I want the man to apologize to me. ‘Now I see, Midori. What a fool I’ve been! I should have known that you would lose your desire for strawberry shortcake. I have all the intelligence and sensitivity of a piece of donkey shit. To make it up to you, I’ll go out and buy you something else. What would you like? Chocolate mousse? Cheesecake?’” (76).

In my opinion, this passage could have been plucked from Dostoyevsky directly, were it not so particular about cheesecake. The extremes of passion and the entailing contradictions are so perfectly captured here; it’s a simple story that reads like an allegory—maybe not on the level of Dostoyevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor”, but powerful enough to etch itself into my memory. Once in a while, I tell you, Murakami strikes gold.

    Elsewhere, Toru narrates, “Letters are just pieces of paper [...] Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish” (292). I’m not sure if Murakami is a Derrida fan, but I feel like his wisdom is informed by Derrida’s discussion of the pharmakon—writing as both poison and its cure. This enigmatic line again points to the contradictions at the core of Murakami’s work.

 

    If my central thesis is that Norwegian Wood is more literary than some of his more recent texts, I’ve already established the imagery and the philosophy as core principles. I’d add, also, the historical influence. There are some passing references that help to establish the milieu. It’s around 1970 and Watanabe outlines how:

“During summer break the university called in the riot police, who broke down the barricades and arrested the students inside. This was nothing special. It’s what all the schools were doing at the time. The universities were not so easily ‘dismantled.’ Massive amounts of capital had been invested in them, and they were not about to dissolve just because a few students had gone wild. And in fact those students who had sealed the campus had not wanted to dismantle the university either. All they had really wanted was to shift the balance of power within the university structure, a matter about which I could not have cared less. And so, when the strike was crushed, I felt nothing.” (47) 

The milieu is not directly connected to the central conflicts in the novel, but it does add a touch of realism that helps ground the rest of the text. Moreover, it seems to have a thematic connection to other aspects of the novel. In particular, the way that the university is both broken down and not, that the riots both exist and not, reflects the fine balance between life-and-death Toru and his associates tightrope across throughout the book. The indeterminacy between states of being is sprinkled throughout the novel—even when it comes to imagery of smoke and fire.

    The story is somewhat lacklustre, as is sometimes expected from Murakmi. Very little happens by way of events and most of the powerful moments occur through dialogue between characters. The novel is replete with short stories, narrated from one character to another. As I mentioned, there’s a Dostoyevskian flare. Midori, for example, talks about her experiences in school and the class difference she experiences. She outlines the troubled relationship she had with her parents, who put a lot of pressure on her: “I had to listen to them grumble to me every time the school asked for a contribution, and I was always scared to death I’d run out of money if I went out with my classmates and they wanted to eat someplace expensive” (61). The passage humanizes her beautifully, offering an account of those oh-so-relatable anxieties when you don’t quite measure up. (Elsewhere, Midori’s inappropriate questions and outbursts are also humanizing, but I won’t retranscribe them here).

    Since the detail won’t fit elsewhere, now is as good a time as any to mention Midori’s father, as well. He is unwell in the hospital, unable to speak. Nonetheless, Watanabe forms a special bond with him. What I really like, though, is that the old man both doesn’t and does speak. Murakami puts his dialogue between chevrons rather than quotation marks: “Her father moved his lips. <Not good>, he said, not so much speaking the words as forming them from dried air at the back of his throat. <Head,> he said” (181). It’s these little touches that help make the characterization shine.

    There’s another story that Reiko tells Toru about giving piano lessons. Reiko is a woman in her thirties that provided lessons to a young woman, a compulsive liar with the face of an angel. The whole account has an ominous quality and eventually it turns down a dark and sexual path. Wildly inappropriately, the young girl takes advantage of her piano teacher, who finds herself unable to resist—until she does, and slaps the young girl across the face. The scene is extremely uncomfortable. After Reiko slaps her, she says, “I got out of bed and put on my robe and told her to leave and never come back. She just looked at me. Her eyes were absolutely flat. I had never seen them that way before. It was as if they had been painted on cardboard. They had no depth. After she stared at me for a while, she gathered up her clothing without a word and, as slowly as she could, as if she was making a show of it, she put on each piece, one at a time. Then she went back into the room where the piano was and took a brush from her bag. She brushed her hair and wiped the blood from her lips with a handkerchief, put on her shoes, and went out. As she was leaving, she said, ‘You’re a lesbian, you know. It’s true. You may try to hide it, but you’ll be a lesbian until the day you die” (156). It’s a strange and unsettling scene—and not just because Murakami comes across as a creep when writing about sex. The “lack of depth” in her and the way this child can turn off all emotion establishes her as a memorable character, though her storyline ends abruptly after her lies about Reiko circulate enough to ruin her life.

    I have not yet commented on the relationships between characters, though they are the fundamental element of the novel. The novel is comprised of triangles: triangles everywhere. The dynamics of three people in conjunction are well-encapsulated throughout Norwegian Wood. Whether it is Toru as a the third wheel of his friends’ relationships, the trio of Naoko-Reiko-Toru, or the love triangle of Naoko-Toru-Midori, Murakami is able to capture the way this structure of connection changes who people are, how they perceive themselves.

    There’s a theatrical component in this structure. When Harold Pinter delivered his Nobel Prize speech, he outlined his process for writing plays. He notes how he always begins with character A, B, and C. The rest of the play explores the way those three elements interact. Murakami seems to use that triangular structure, though his dramatic influence may lie elsewhere. When Midori’s father in the hospital, Toru outlines ideas about Greek theatre, and specifically comments on the controversy with Euripides:

“What marks his plays is the way things get so mixed up the characters are trapped. Do you see what I mean? A bunch of different people appear, and they’ve all got their own situations and reasons and excuses, and each one is pursuing his or her own brand of justice or happiness. As a result, nobody can do anything. Obviously, I mean, it’s basically impossible for everybody’s justice to prevail or everybody’s happiness to triumph, so chaos takes over. And then what do you think happens? Simple---a god appears in the end and starts directing traffic. ‘You go over there, and you come here, and you get together with her, and you just sit still for a while.’ Like that. He’s kind of a fixer, and in the end everything works out perfectly. They call this ‘deus ex machina.’ There’s almost always a deus ex machina in Euripides, and that’s the point where critical opinion divides over him” (190).

The thoughtfulness of Murakami’s commentary is another layer that provides Norwegian Wood a literary quality. In some ways, Norwegian Wood seems to delineate the controversy of deus ex machina as a device. For instance, the love triangle between Toru, Midori, and Naoko is somewhat “solved” by Naoko’s suicide (though, of course, that is contestable). The end of the novel is particularly indeterminate, giving the impression of a rejection of Euripedes’ approach. Wherein Euripides, a god comes and tells everyone where to go (the metaphor of directing traffic is significant), the end of Norwegian Wood has Toru in a place that is no place—that is, he has nowhere to go because he does not know where he is.

    I suppose that moment exemplifies Murakami’s approach above Euripides, but the moment is still indeterminate. Has Toru been told “you just sit still for a while”? Or has he not been directed at all, overlooked by the powers that be in resolving conflict? I’m inclined towards the latter, but in either case we’re left on a pause, rather than a solution. Euripides, who?

    With some Murkami works, I feel that there’s only so much to say. Surprisingly, Norwegian Wood is wonderfully layered, if at times slow in its progression. The fundamental elements of the text are interwoven nicely, and the commitment to realism provides the many moving moments of the novel with a greater weight than I find in his more surrealist and explicitly magical moments. For Murakami, reality is itself charged.

    And sometimes that is enough.

    Happy reading!

The Meaning of Relativity by Albert Einstein

    The length of this review will be proportionate to my understanding: that is, minimal.

    The Meaning of Relativity by Albert Einstein delineates his theories and provides the mathematical proofs for how things exist throughout space and time.

    When Einstein is explaining the broad strokes of the implications of relativity, I can somewhat follow, but within a few pages his maths becomes germane to me. Mathematics becomes a language with which I am unfamiliar; symbols I’ve never seen before populate the pages. Thank goodness for Einstein’s occasional Englishly-written comment to illuminate the premises of his theory. There are sometimes, for example, succinct phrases that highlight the premises and consequences of his work: “the theory of relativity does not make the assumption that the shape of bodies with respect to a space of reference is independent of their motion relatively to this space of reference” (35). Fair enough.

    The central premise that I take away from the book as a whole is that time is defined relatively to other measurable objects, and that the selection of time markers is arbitrarily defined. Our units of measure can shift. The line between mathematical and philosophical boundaries quickly diminishes.

  

    Actually, the parallel to philosophy is probably what I’m most qualified to talk about. Needless to say, I’ve never read a book like this before—where the author is proving an argument using mathematical formulas. I can’t help but notice a similarity, though, with the progression of arguments in logical philosophy. Premise A and Premise B lead to Conclusion A. That conclusion then allows for another premise to emerge, leading to another conclusion. Einstein’s argument progresses in much the same way as logical philosophers and so the book reads like an extended, multi-layered syllogism, offering over a hundred equations to help justify his theory. I find it encouraging that science and arts-based argumentation can find such common ground in the pursuit of truth.

    Unfortunately, I am not nearly well-versed enough in science or math to confirm the validity of The Meaning of Relativity. That said, I’ll stand on the shoulders of giants Isaac Newton-style and recognize that Einstein’s legacy seems pretty solidly established. 

    Despite not understanding much, I’m comfortable with accepting the conclusions of others on this one—I’ll take Einstein on trust.

Alone in the Classroom by Elizabeth Hay

    We’re going to take the circuitous route to the 1920s Saskatchewan schoolhouse in Elizabeth Hay’s novel Alone in the Classroom. We’re going to start instead with Alice Munro’s short story “Open Secrets” from the 1994 collection of the same name. Of Munro’s work, I find “Open Secrets” the most compelling for its imagistic quality and ambiguous conclusions. The premise of story is that a girl scout goes missing (is murdered?) while on a hike in the woods. While it’s been a while since I’ve read it, I still remember all these little moments that suggest some level of knowledge or culpability in the event: a man pumping water from the house to wash away evidence? A woman lowering her fingers onto the burner of a stove—to burn away her fingerprints? At the end of the story, it seems everyone is aware of what has happened, but Munro never gives the audience the satisfaction of knowing, but instead feeling like they maybe know.

This is largely the feeling imbued by Alone in the Classroom. The premise here, at least initially, revolves around some seeming impropriety at a rural schoolhouse. Connie is a new teacher working under principal Parley, who also happens to lead the drama club. Feeling consistently uneasy by Parley’s presence on her walks home, Connie (narrated through Anne—disregard for now) instils mistrust for Parley with the audience. The school starts staging a production of Tess of the D’Urbervilles [first of all: in elementary? really?], and a bright young girl acts in the titular role. One day, leaving the classroom after being alone with Parley, little Susan, seems upset, changed. The rumours start, Susan stops attending school, and it seems pretty clear that something inappropriate happened. Decades later, Parley admits that he was hard on her, but not much else.

The creepiness is pervasive. It’s an unsettling book from the very start, and it becomes more explicitly terrible when Susan dies in a house fire. While she is at home off school, her house goes up in smoke with her locked in her room, the key apparently in her father’s pocket. The moment is loaded with the same ambiguity as Munro’s story: a lamp in Susan’s room hints that perhaps the fire was self-inflicted, though there are later suggestions that her brother Michael set the fire by accident—more on that later.

Incidentally, the central character, Connie, goes to great lengths to help Michael Graves learn to read. He’s dyslexic (remember: the b is the headboard, the d its footboard). He improves, but it doesn’t really take. The main impression it left on me, though, as an educator, is how creepy the whole thing feels. Connie judges Parley’s relationship to Susan, but her relationship to Michael seems hypocritically perverse, as well. Her special interest feels inappropriate, which made it hard for me to really connect with any of the characters as likeable, and it doesn’t help that a few years later, Connie pursues a romantic relationship with Michael, which goes on for a number of years.

I’ve alluded a few times to time passing. Hay’s novel does, in fact, jump around between the decades. I mentioned Anne as the narrator, and she forms a kind of frame narrative around the rest of the text. In fact, in the ‘present’ at the start of the novel, there’s another young girl who has been raped and murdered with inconclusive results. Parley hovers around the periphery, and comes to the defense of the man accused, Johnny Coyle. There’s an engaging ambiguity here, as well: the accused man, requiring a cane, does not seem to have been capable of the motion required for chasing the girl in the woods; the hair in her hand only somewhat matched his sample, and so on. All things considered, I am inclined towards his innocence, but he is sentenced to death by hanging—later to be acquitted. The way this case plays out, and given its Canadian context, the parallels to the Steven Truscott case seem hard to ignore and an engaging intertext.

All of these mysteries proliferate throughout the first half of the book and the tragic, poetic tone draws nicely from Tess, which Hay’s narrator describes as more effective as a poem than a novel. That poetry works its way through Hay’s novel, as well. Alone in the Classroom is beautifully written, both in terms of descriptive detail and the dynamics of the sentence structures. There’s a quality to the work, if not rhythmic then lyrical. The way Hay establishes the imagery and the way she develops character is consistently powerful.

That being said, around the mid-point of the novel I started to lose interest. The book does not deliver on its promises: there is no resolution to the storylines of murdered little girls and no conclusive findings about guilt and innocence. I can handle all of that. I love ambiguity, but it ceases to gain in layers partway through for a prolonged period of time. Instead, the book reads like a series of character sketches: a trope of early Canadiana suitable to the milieu, but lacking the linchpin that makes it all click. Connie’s relationship with Michael takes a predominant focus which, as I’ve said, makes me so uncomfortable that I couldn’t bring myself to romanticize it. The same is true when Anne, a woman far too young for him, takes an interest and ‘steals’ her from Connie. Again: too inappropriate for me to feel invested in.

Substituting personal histories for the intrigue offered a number of opportunities to weave some central themes together, but the book requires more cerebral attention than heart. At many times, I was not up to the challenge.

Where the book really restores my attention is towards its final act. Hay reveals that Parley was a playwright and his play runs largely parallel to actual events. This is where, a hundred pages after the fact, a bit of doubt is cast onto Michael. It’s implied that Michael, feeling slighted by his teacher Connie, attempted to set fire to the schoolhouse, but wind carried the flames to his house across the street, killing his sister. The possibilities here remain ambiguous but allow us to reevaluate other moments in the text: Michael giving fire safety advice to children, for one. Or, perhaps it’s a more metaphorical moment through which Parley found he could displace his own feelings of guilt. Does his fictionalized play offer a projection? A contradiction? The truth?

Similarly, Anne finds connection between her mother and Parley. When she discovers Parley’s grave, covered in particular vegetation, it brings her back to a memory of her mother’s painting, which had the same vegetation. Ending the book with a moment like that offers a whole new realm of heretofore unconsidered possibilities. Is there, for instance, some kind of impropriety that her mother was victim to? Or, did she have a special love for Parley that had to be unexpressed due to all the mystery that surrounds him?

When I consider the book as a whole, there are parts of it that I find simply masterful. Yet, I didn’t feel the same personal connection that I did when reading Hay’s book Late Nights on Air. In that book—the only other of Hay’s novels I’ve read so far—the human connections were what held the book together. Alone in the Classroom is a book where its questions are the driving force—that’s where I felt invested. The human connections are once again foregrounded here, but they seemed more of a distraction than an enrichment of the text. 

Unlike some other writers, Hay at least has the defence that when the plot gets slow, or when the focus drifts, the writing is at least beautiful enough to make the novel worth reading. I just can’t help but feel that I needed some more layers to peel back, to have a bit more of a foothold on the core mysteries of the text. One of Parley’s plays was about a nice young man visiting an elderly one in the hospital. At the end of the play it’s revealed that the young man is culpable for something truly horrific. The implications of the premise are intriguing: what did Parley know? About whom? Again, is his guilt being displaced? Is he projecting it onto someone else rather than facing his own culpability? These mysteries need just that little bit of extra. 

Overall, in Alone in the Classroom, the meandering path, while often beautiful, just needed some more landmarks along the way.

Happy reading!

The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins

    American journalist Vincent Bevins has a history of covering, well, …history. In The Jakarta Method, Bevins takes a particular focus on Cold War politics and the fallout of the capitalist crusade against communism around the world. In particular, he examines the actions of the CIA in fighting communism in Indonesia and makes the case that that served as a template for their other excursions in South America, Europe, and beyond.

    The milieu is a fascinating one and Bevins paints the broad strokes of the anticommunist campaign effectively. The book is at its best when highlighting the CIA’s specific initiatives and is particularly entertaining when highlighting their failures. For instance, Bevins describes some especially embarrassing plans for the CIA to kill Fidel Castro: exploding seashells, spore-infused scuba gear, and so on. Strangely, the CIA also strove to paint communists as hypersexualized or sexually deviant (e.g. making use of sex workers, faking sex tapes with poorly disguised body doubles, etc.). It seemed that the CIA often misunderstood the cultures they were working to subvert, and you almost get the impression that they blundered their way into success.

   

    That being said, the anticommunist campaign in general was extraordinarily effective. Bevins essentially makes the case that the violence and mass murder of civilians is what ultimately won the day. Early in the book, Bevins makes the claim that this process found its foothold in Indonesia. The mass murder of communists in Indonesia serves as a template for future initiatives, say, in Chile or Brazil.

    An area that I find the book not particularly effective is in drawing that connection explicitly. There are parallels, but I think Bevins hasn’t yet fully expounded to highlight the true importance of Indonesia. Perhaps making more frequent reference to the parallels might have been the way to go, or perhaps structuring the book differently might have helped. In many ways, the text reads like a history book, outlining events and dates and names of note. In turn, the data sheet, at times, lacks the narrative thread that would string it all together. I could imagine the book reading differently by structuring the chapters around core concepts and tactics, like Disinformation, Propaganda, Violence, and so on.

    Alternatively, taking a more narrative approach might have helped me connect with the material more thoroughly. In the final chapter to the book, Bevins refers to his follow-up interviews with prevalent communist figures and victims in the war against it. The format had a compelling, more personable approach that was a great way to humanize the history book. It framed the discussions in terms of what their hopes for a new world had been and how things had actually turned out. That allowed Bevins to explore the human impact on individuals and avoid delving into the facts and figures of the anonymous dead. My central concern with the book is that it reads like a straight-up history book, where names are essentially empty referents, and this final chapter is an effective contrast. Seeing that thread throughout would have been a nice way of discussing the more tangible impact of the CIA’s crusade.

    Despite the fact that I enjoyed the final chapter, there’s somewhat of a disappointing ambivalence in Bevins’ assessment of the successes and failures of the communism dream. One would anticipate that, given the abuses of the world’s biggest capitalist enterprise against the majority of the globe, it would be easy to choose sides. I think Bevins’ feelings on the subject can largely be inferred, but he seems to aim for a sense of balance at the end that feels somewhat unwarranted.

    However, perhaps I’m falling prey to the same impulse for extremity displayed by the anticommunists. The fascist campaigns against communism were explained as follows: first, kill the communists; then, kill those who expressed sadness over those deaths; then, kill those who mention it; finally, those who aren’t adamant enough in supporting it. To Bevins’ credit, he largely demonstrates the inner logic of ideological crusades and draws from a variety of voices—both perpetrator and victim. 

    Despite The Jakarta Method being a good, informative book, there are still so many stories to tell. At one point, Bevins alludes to General Electric’s interference in countries and then continues to the larger narrative. The moment passed and I felt a sense of something akin to intellectual FOMO: what do you mean General Electric interfered in other countries? Tell me more!

    I suppose that’s the structure of historical research in general: there is always more to unearth and more to explore. When you consider the global impact, every person in every country has a story. I feel like Thanks to Bevins’ book, I think I’ve got a good handle on the broad strokes of the war against communism—but each country needs (at least) one book to document how it all played out, and it would take an extraordinarily long book to document the far-reaching impact of capitalism’s global takeover.

    And in the hopes that that might be reversed, happy reading.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

    One night, I had a dream that I was reading or had read The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, which I took as a sign that I should, after a decade of it sitting on my shelf collecting dust with a bookmark fixed at page 26, actually read it. Sadly, the prophecy ought to have been read as an omen because never before have I wanted so badly for a book to end; never before have I wanted so badly for a book to start.

    On figurative paper, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is up my alley. Ostensibly a Bildungsroman, Sterne inverts the tropes of a story which dictate that the author detail the main character’s life from childhood to marriage or death (what other options are there for a novelist, anyway?). Sterne instead begins the story of Tristram Shandy’s life before his birth, with a preface appearing on page 153 [cf. my semi-recent review of The Pale King by David Foster Wallace] and with Tristram Shandy being born somewhere around page 230. The nonlinearity of the narrative has all the marks of a postmodern tale, despite being written in the 1700s, and I should like it.

    On literal paper, though, I cannot get past Sterne’s narrational style. The work is divided into nine books and further sub-divided into chapters on a range of inane topics that lift or plagiarize from Sterne’s similarly grotesque referents: Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel and Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Methinks there is something of The Arabian Nights and The Decameron in the mix as well, though I would say it’s not nearly as successful. In The Arabian Nights and The Decameron, there are more thoroughly established plot threads and, while digressive, they (generally) ultimately return to the central plot. Sterne, however, revels in the digressions—at first, it’s funny in its excess, but there’s never any payoff that justifies it. In that regard, Tristram Shandy is master of the anti-joke.

    Late in the text, Sterne illustrates the spirals and digressive turns of his plot explicitly, but I think it’s much more clever when Tristram Shandy includes a tangent about Copernicus early in the text. Sterne writes, “By this contrivance the machinery of my work is of a species by itself; two contrary motions are introduced into it, and reconciled, which were thought to be at variance with each other. In a word, my work is digressive, and it is progressive too, —and at the same time” (58). Outlining this approach to literature first, Sterne then illustrates it by going into a discussion of earth’s motion: two contrary motions—literature and astronomy—reconciled: “This, Sir, is a very different story from that of the earth’s moving round her axis, in her diurnal rotation, with her progress in her elliptick orbit which brings about the year, and constitutes that variety and vicissitude of seasons we enjoy” (58). Sterne then justifies his work: “Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; —-they are the life, the soul of reading; —take them out of this book for instance, — you might as well take the book along with them” (58). In my mind, that passage is the most successful of Sterne’s style. The parallels between literary digressions and the retrograde motion of Earth are well-established and justify their inclusion in the work. For Sterne, the digressions are the point. 

    Once in a while, the digressions are, in fact, funny. There’s a section in which Sterne offers a vague dedication and then solicits its purchase to whomever might pay. It’s an amusing concept to have a blank dedication, particularly since Sterne is emerging from a literary tradition in which seeking courtly approval was the only way to justify writing as a noble profession. Here, it seems wilfully obtuse, even to the extent of breaking down the price into its separate components: you pay 20 guineas for style, 14 for its content, and so on—and for that low low price you can pretend that you’re the person to whom the work is dedicated. 

    This notion of projection is also critical to the work. Sterne satirizes the relationship between the author and reader. On one page, an unpredictable design emerges as a result of the printing process and Sterne essentially tells the reader to interpret it like a Rorschach test. In navigating the licentiousness of the work, Sterne leaves asterisks to censor the more explicit details. In one section, he leaves two pages blank: the audience can only imagine the scandals that transpire—that is, until Sterne offers up the official record a few chapters later. Sterne leads his audience on that risqué line throughout the text; in one lengthy digression about nose sizes, it’s pretty clearly a substitution for penises, but he pretends to correct the audience’s dirty minds throughout. It’s a little funny, but also goes on for what feels like 100 pages, so it gets tiresome.

    I’ve already referred to some of the literary influences Sterne draws from (though I omitted Don Quixote, which is actually a wonderful book). I also picked up on a number of Shakespearean references, and in particular Tristram Shandy is peppered with phrases from Hamlet. As such, I can’t help but feel that Sterne’s novel is narrated entirely by the long-winded Polonius. Sterne’s lengthy and circular sentences are reminiscent of Polonius trying to define madness and being interrupted by Gertrude, who says, “More matter with less art.” That remark summarizes my attitude towards this novel.

    I can’t blame Sterne for this in particular, but since his novel jumps around so too shall my review. If Sterne gets a chapter on buttonholes and a chapter on lines, I offer here a chapter on footnotes. I am curious how certain footnotes come to be, particularly allusive ones. For instance, various items are glossed as references to notable people of Sterne’s time. A horse is named Patriot, which is glossed to Lord Whoever the Third—but the footnote never explains how that reference was deduced. Elucidate! Other times, the footnotes gloss words that are obvious while other times they gloss challenging items with equally challenging synonyms. I’m also curious how and when people identified the allusions. Were Sterne’s contemporaries familiar enough with Burton to know he was lifting passages from The Anatomy of Melancholy? Or do we just have the benefit of time to track down these allusions? I think the answer to that question is significant for the reception of Sterne’s work.

    While I have to commend its influence on postmodern literature and media, I got almost nothing out of Sterne’s novel either intellectually or emotionally (or does rage count?). To me, the novel is entirely bound up in its conceptual project. What is interesting to me is where Sterne’s literary thread gets picked up. I think you could make the argument that Marcel Proust borrows something from Sterne, though where Proust is in search of lost time, Sterne is in the process of actively wasting it. Both projects are, in some ways, a series of reflections but where Proust has his madeleine, Sterne has Tristram Shandy’s Uncle Toby’s groin injury. It’s an unlikely juxtaposition, but you might trace a through-line from Sterne to Seinfeld, as well. Famously a “show about nothing,” Seinfeld borrows something from Tristram Shandy’s generative digressions.

    While I have almost nothing to say about this book, I nonetheless feel compelled towards a digression of my own. In my first year, I had a TA that I quite liked and in my third year she had become a part-time professor for a Restoration Literature course. She loved Restoration Literature, and she was a wonderful instructor, but to this day I can’t understand its appeal. Perhaps it’s because so much of Restoration Literature is rooted in satire — Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, etc. —- but the humour just doesn’t land. Humour changes over time. The audience’s frame of reference changes. What counts as pushing the boundaries changes (sure, Sterne can offer a nose-penis joke, but there are way more explicit dick-jokes now that deflate the titillating risqué nature of a 17th century work). We might still appreciate the craftsmanship of a joke: set-up and punchline, tonal delivery, etc., but the content no longer seems to connect. In turn, we can appreciate the joke from a theoretical standpoint, but not from the heart. Many people have theorized why tragedy occupies a more privileged standpoint in the hierarchy of the arts, and I think what it comes down to is this: sad things stay sad; humour changes much more rapidly. The world moves on, but the words on the page stay static. To borrow from Sterne’s metaphor about Copernicus, our orbit drifts away and our relative position to the humour becomes so vast that it’s not worth looking across space and time.

    I must say, I’m quite disappointed that (likely) my last read for the summer felt like such a time suck. Luckily, there are a number of people I know and respect that love this book, so hopefully they’ll be able to explain its appeal and why I’m such a dope for getting nothing from Tristram Shandy—but good luck getting me to re-read it.