Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin (2005)

  I don’t have too much to say about this book. It’s one of the last vestiges of my time teaching at GFS back in the day. The novel is a Young Adult text and deals with the subjects of premature death and what happens in the afterlife.

  In terms of delivery and focus, it falls somewhere around The Lovely Bones, Beetlejuice, and No Exit. I use the word “around” since it is nowhere near the quality or thoughtfulness of those other works.

 The notion that Elsewhere is the destination everyone reaches after death and is where we all become younger and younger until the point that we hit zero and are transported back to earth to be born echoes Platonic reminiscence and the soul’s infinite journey between the physical realm and the spiritual realm. As such, Zevin is courting some weighty ideas, but the novel falls short of the profound because it is altogether too trite, too superficial, too glib. It is a Young Adult text, so perhaps I’m doing it a disservice with that observation. I do feel that the author could have done more with the topic, however.

  One memorable element for me is the chapter, “Time Passes.” Inexplicably, Zevin has provided an homage to T.S. Eliot in that short chapter. As I was grinding through the narrative (a deal is a deal, Su), “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and maybe Four Quartets (“Burnt Norton” specifically) suddenly appeared. Perhaps that’s part of the reason I think Zevin could have done more with this topic. There are some thundering themes begging to be born in this tale, and she knows it, but they are stifled in utero, perhaps more ironically, post-mortem. Eliot is probably rolling in his grave or, if the premise of Elsewhere is to believed, approaching the age of 21 (as I write this) on his journey to zero. I just hope his "deaging" is proving to be less angsty than Zevin's protagonist's journey turned out to be.

Out of This World by Graham Swift (1988)

  This was a difficult book to get in to, to be honest. I loved his novel, Waterland, and I was excited to read this as a result. This one is simply not as good. (Well played marketing department for that front cover!)

 It is peripatetic on many fronts. Geographically, I found myself in America, England, Greece, Germany, Vietnam, and France amongst other locations, but without much of an authentic “feel” for those locations. Greece might be an exception, at a stretch. From a temporal standpoint, the novel bounces between events bookended by the death of Queen Victoria (1901) and the Falklands war (1982), but never in a linear fashion. There is even a reference to the Bronze Age that ties England and Greece in a quirky way. The various family crises engage both microcosmic and macrocosmic issues in that the Beech family endures death by car bomb, infidelity, and parent/child estrangement under the broader brushstrokes of universal questions concerning the morality of both munitions manufacturing and the function of wartime photography. And the narrative has two principal voices, Harry and Sophie, father and daughter. The swings of mood and temperament of each, Sophie’s particularly, exacerbate the sense of dislocation I felt through much of the book. I have to think that's by design knowing Swift.

 I read the novel in one sitting, though I did revisit some of the key sections just to get straight the various players and events. Sophie’s narrative is terse and caustic as she spools her story to a psychiatrist in New York (Holden, is that you?). Harry’s version of events is more measured in tone, perhaps numbed by the horrors of war he photographed over the years, including the death of his own father at the hands of IRA terrorists. I just wasn’t sure of Harry’s audience, and that troubled me. Both father and daughter are obtuse in their gradual unfolding, elliptical omissions or curtailments tended to obscure (understandably) the painful past. More dislocation.

  But as the waves of the narratives washed over me, informational tides coming in and going out (Waterland?), things started to coalesce. I still felt that the novel left a lot for the reader to do, rendering it more like poetry than prose in typical Postmodern fashion I suppose, but those universal themes suggested by the traumas suffered by the Beech family, those both self-inflicted and imposed, will resonate I am sure.

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan (2012)

 

 There’s a degree of irony in Su’s second choice of book for this project since it was part of my in-flight reading choices for my first ever trip to Thailand back in 2015. I even had the hotel key from my layover in Guangzhou, China that I’d used as a bookmark six years ago still inside the book.

  Although I’ve been a big fan of Ian McEwan’s work for a while now, and list his Amsterdam as one of my favorites, I picked up Sweet Tooth as an after-thought for that trip. I love McEwan’s style and turn of phrase, but most of his books are worth the read just for the unexpected denouements he springs on his readers. Sweet Tooth is no exception to that norm: an expectation of the unexpected.

  My initial feelings about his narrative were that it seemed at times a bit self-conscious, that it strained to meet many plausibility tests, and that it was riddled with distracting inconsistencies. I mean the premise of Serena Frome “(rhymes with plume)” (3), a young, good-looking woman in early 1970s England, a Cambridge graduate with a third in mathematics but with a hidden passion for English literature, the daughter of a Protestant bishop from East Anglia being hired by MI5 . . . well I suppose stranger things have happened, but not many.

  As with many of my reads, I began at the end of the book and the acknowledgments (I have been known to read entire last chapters first, but I’m glad I didn’t with this one!). The list of acknowledgments made me nervous. McEwan cited about 15 books on spying he’d consulted, I presumed as part of his research for the book. I worried that his fiction would smack of being learned, strained, or, as I stated earlier, a bit self-conscious. As a result, he was dealing with a skeptic right out of the gate.

  I started keying in on little glitches as I read such as his protagonist’s reference to a friend’s husband “who once kept goal for the [Nigerian] soccer team” (141). Those awful Americanisms probably weren’t part of the patois of 1970’s England, and I was further perturbed by “soccer” being replaced by the more fitting “football” later in Serena’s narrative. She even had an authentic reference to “rugger” for rugby which rendered the keeping goal in soccer more jarring.  

 And then there were the detailed descriptions of Serena’s peregrinations around the streets of London. They were replete with specific street names and landmarks, but just seemed to be trying too hard to create an air of authenticity. Those streets came across as tedious arguments of insidious intent, as the poet says.

  Finally, there was the clinical reference to Serena’s perineum being stimulated as she made love to Tom Haley (220). It seemed almost bookish or researched, and I heard myself say “perineum?” aloud as I thought of a more natural “p” or “c” word that may not be as PC, but certainly more authentic for the throes of passion.

  But for all that, Sweet Tooth drew me in. I should have trusted the path set for me by the author and just be entertained. What actually had me drop my critic’s guard and go with the flow of the narrative were the delicious little excerpts from Tom’s short fiction sprinkled throughout the middle sections of the novel. I found myself conjuring full-blown stories from the vignettes. They were intriguing insights to the creative process and were only revealed for what they truly were during the last chapter. Serena loves them, but they are not to be judged at face value.

  The apparent implausibility of the plot, Tom’s stories, and the designed inauthentic narrative subtly lay the groundwork for the crashing last chapter. Sweet Tooth is another must-read McEwan book and an excellent example of meta fiction. Yes, I'm still a McEwan fan.

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow (2004)

  Back in 2015, one of my colleagues from the History Department gave me a heads up that they were looking for a “sensible male” chaperone for an upcoming trip to New York; would I be interested? Newly divorced and with no immediate plans for Spring Break 2016, I said I would think about it. I’d had an unsavory experience on a chaperone trip at the all-girls’ boarding school where I’d taught many years previous, and I’d avoided all subsequent chaperone duties as a result. I liked my life to be simple, so I may have been actually formulating apologies in my head as she provided the details.

  During her pitch, however, she let me know that they were planning to take the students to see Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton at the Richard Rodgers Theater

 on Broadway. Those tickets were impossible to find at the time, even in 2016, since the original cast was still in place then, and the musical was wildly popular. Needless to say, I agreed on the spot.

  As a prelude to the trip, I picked up Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton (the inspiration for the musical), and I devoured it. I was happy Su picked out the book as my first official read here in Bangkok. I loved it then, and I love it more now almost five years later.

  One of the first things that struck me as I reread this biography was the age of the major players during America’s formative years. Hamilton and most of his fellow revolutionaries were in their 20s when they fought for American independence and subsequently shaped an entire country. Hamilton’s rags-to-riches story – from British West Indies bastard to what Reverend John M. Mason described as “’the greatest statesman in the western world, perhaps the greatest man of the age’” (714) – is stunning enough, but to have accomplished all he did before his death at age 49 is, I think, unparalleled. As a lazy writer myself, I’m shamed by the volumes that poured from his quill; it’s simply breathtaking and decidedly humbling.  

 I was also struck by how Chernow’s narrative expertly captured the humanity of these giants. Americans make a big deal of the tradition of the Founding Fathers, how their words in the Federal Papers (mostly Hamilton), in the Declaration of Independence, and in the US Constitution are held with almost Biblical reverence, the authors apotheosized in arguments around the law and what it means to be American. But these same authors were clearly just men. Hamilton, though brilliant, was flawed: jealous, adulterous, vindictive, proud, covetous . . . he has most of the 10 Commandments covered based on Chernow’s insights! For Hamilton, the instruction “thou shall not…” is frequently met with his, “hold by beer.” But I think that those very human traits outlined in this biography make Hamilton so appealing. He’s simultaneously a man amongst men and a human being, a god, but one imbued with all the petty foibles of the Ancient Greek variety of gods, and a giant of American independence but sometimes a very small man. We can identify with his humanity due to that duality. We are heroes and heroines of our own stories, but often our own antagonists at the end of the day.  

 As a Brit, I wasn’t schooled in the nuances of American history, so I was fascinated to learn the political history of the US through Chernow and move beyond the jaundiced eye we Brits tend to cast back to 1776 and all those traitors. It stunned me, therefore, to discover just how similar our modern-day political feuds in the US are to those of the 18th century. States’ rights on the Republican side with Johnson conflicting with the perfect union promoted on the Federalist side with Hamilton could just as easily be imagined in the 21st century with Florida determined not to mandate masks during a pandemic (Governor DeSantis) and the federal government looking to implement a nationwide vaccination strategy (President Biden). I found myself making modern connections throughout the governmental sections of the biography (the role of the federal government, the absurdity of the Electoral College, the animus between the North and the South, and the disparity of wealth); Chernow provided insights not just on the life of Alexander Hamilton and the early years of the Republic, but also on why the current tensions in today’s America are so deep-seated. I mean, what could be more immediate than the depiction of John Adams petulantly skulking away from Thomas Jefferson’s inauguration?

  Hamilton’s untimely death at the hands of Aaron Burr brought a tear to my eye both in New York in 2016 during the musical and here in Bangkok in 2021 rereading Chernow at my desk. It was such a colossal waste of a life, a frustrating nixing of potential, and all for a matter of honor. Chernow skillfully wove Burr into the fabric of his biography, so he was always a simmering presence in the text, a denouement slowly bubbling to the surface. Despite not being schooled in the nuance of American history, it was an English education, so I knew enough that Burr was the ultimate instrument of Hamilton’s destruction. Even knowing it was coming, however, I was wishing for a different outcome in those closing chapters, even now! It was like that retrospective on a journey that led to misadventure: if only I’d left 10 minutes later, or if I had just taken that right instead of the left.

  In the last months of his life, Hamilton had ample opportunity to change course, but infuriatingly, perhaps characteristically, he did not. My frustration was magnified to outright anger by the progenitor of his death: “an affair of honor,” a duel. Even in Hamilton’s times, many condemned the whole dueling business. Not only was it illegal in most of the country, which necessitated a wink and a nod to those directly involved in the proceedings (messengers, seconds, doctors, boatmen and the like) to make plausible a claim of ignorance about what was going on, but there was also a palpable negativity about this silly but deadly game in the general population. Sir Richard Steele, for example, wrote frequently about the absurdity of the code in The Tatler at the beginning of the 18th century, albeit from London. Chernow’s depiction of the inflamed populace of New York posing a significant threat to Burr after the murder, and it was called such, speaks at least in part to the negativity felt about duels in America. And all my anger was there even before I factored in the stupidity of Hamilton throwing away his shot when ranged before an opponent quite clearly bent on murder.

  Despite the poignant end to the book, however, Chernow’s biography is a celebration of a great American that didn’t disappoint once again. I was enthralled by my read in 2015, giddy to see it performed in New York in 2016, and moved by my reread in 2021 on the other side of the world where it sparked a multitude of emotions about the life and times of a singular genius, Alexander Hamilton.