Tag: fiction
Patti Davis: A New Novel Helps Bury Old Wounds

Patti Davis: A New Novel Helps Bury Old Wounds

Her life now, more artist than rebel, is on a Santa Monica street under pine trees, where Patti Davis wrote a luminous new novel that seems to break like a wave, reporting ahead of the news.

The daughter of Nancy and Ronald Reagan, Davis creates a canvas of “a broken city” in The Earth Breaks in Colors. The city is Los Angeles, her sprawling hometown, which she knows by canyon, by beach, by freeway.

The iconic Republican president’s daughter is just as liberal and engaged as ever in the questions of the day. But the public voice she speaks in is largely the written word, as the author of 10 books. Ages ago, she was known for being a sharp critic of her father, a breach that has since healed.

In The Earth Breaks in Colors, Davis anticipates the racial unrest that began in Ferguson, Missouri. An interracial friendship between two girls, Whisper and Odelia, is the mainstay of the story, which encompasses many character and complications, and families with bitter histories. Davis does not flinch from raw racism, addictions, abuse, silences, violence, death.

It’s all there, woven in prose that also captures the stark grandeur of Southern California.

Davis said the girls’ friendship was at first portrayed in a state of innocence: “It was beautiful and clear. The world had not intruded yet.”

Then comes the fearsome power of nature shaking the city. This is a plausible event — expected any day now — yet the author lends it a fresh urgency as a day of reckoning.

“It took me where it wanted to go,” Davis says of the story. “When the earthquake happened, all the characters were scattered.”

The trembling changes and clarifies everything, freezing the characters in place amid the jams, closures, collapsed roads and chaos. One scene is based on what actually happened in Topanga Canyon in a mudslide years ago. Davis once lived in that storied canyon, a haven for artists, writers and musicians.

The narrative’s span is wide, even for one who knows the vast, dry reaches of Los Angeles. “You learn an awful lot about this city, how divided it is,” Davis said. For many residents, downtown is almost another country.

In the end, the author brings a vision of peace to the deep conflicts between characters in this ensemble. Shattered in the quake, their eyes, too, are opened. They see what and who really matters most. Out of time, suddenly past and future are one, and they choose to reconcile. The world is better, sweeter.

Forgive does not mean forget, however, in Davis’s telling: “No matter how carefully we mend what’s been broken, there are scars. Evidence of the past always remains — on the shattered face of a clock. … And on the heart.”

This outlook is a nice rhyme, an authentic tie-in with Davis’s own life. She has practice at reconciliation, most of all with her own father, the president of the United States. The word for him, she said, was “elusive.”

A conversation about her colorful life and family make the past seem close enough to curl up on the coach where we are sitting. The simple house is white, with candles, green trim and a writing room. Keeping us company is a pug named Gracie, about whom Davis has written a playful book.

The willowy woman — a Californian in every way — speaks of “the Reagans” with reserve. (She took her mother’s maiden name.)

Then she lights up.

“He was the guy who taught me how to bodysurf and how to ride a horse,” she says. “He put me on his saddle in front.”

For a moment, the private man, Ronald Reagan, is in the room with us — reflected in her eyes.

“So you were the apple of his eye?” I ask.

“My mother was the apple of his eye,” she answers.

Much of her rebellion as a young woman had to do with craving attention from her cheerful, yet distant father.

There was an irony in speaking at peace rallies, she says, “when I was at war with my dad.” In the 1980s, she says, she was more jaded. She regrets the way she expressed her protests.

In his last years, Davis found refuge from all that with her father.

“A lot of healing took place in total silence,” she says. Her father’s blue eyes said a final farewell.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit Creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2015 CREATORS.COM

Photo via Wikicommons

Woman’s Face On U.S. Currency Shouldn’t Be A Politician’s Face

Woman’s Face On U.S. Currency Shouldn’t Be A Politician’s Face

Whoever the woman is on the next $10 bill, here’s who it shouldn’t be:

A politician. A Cabinet member. A First Lady.

Put a poet there. A scientist. A musician with a social cause. A social worker. A teacher. A suffragette. An abolitionist.

But, please, not someone primarily associated with politics.

Since Wednesday, when the U.S. Treasury Department announced that a woman will finally star on our paper money, opinions have heated up over who that woman should be.

The excitement is fun to watch, even if this is hardly an advance on par with the first moon landing.

In fact, it’s a bit of a letdown to some people. The honoree will be on a $10 bill instead of on a $20, a disappointment to those who wanted to oust Andrew Jackson.

The lucky winner won’t have the whole bill to herself either. She’ll have to cohabit with its current occupant, Alexander Hamilton.

And the redesign won’t arrive until 2020.

Still, it’s a breakthrough. As others have cracked, a woman is about to shatter the cash ceiling, at least for the first time since Martha Washington, wife of George, appeared on a silver certificate in the late 1800s.

But which woman?

A few women in the political realm are strong contenders.

One is Frances Perkins.

Perkins was U.S. Secretary of Labor under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She fought for child-abor laws. She established the country’s first minimum-wage and overtime laws. I’ve heard her referred to as kickass, and she was.

If she became the face on the next $10 bill, I’d be proud to carry that cash.

But the new currency is the perfect opportunity to think beyond Washington, D.C., to consider the fact that people with power and courage exist beyond the narrow political realm.

That’s why First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, grand as she was, wouldn’t get my vote.

When I was thinking about this topic, someone asked me why we put people’s faces on our money at all.

Why not put an excerpt of the Constitution instead?

Why not birds or butterflies, the way the Costa Ricans do?

Why not pizza?

The best answer, I think, is that people contain stories. Through individual stories we get to tell our bigger, collective ones.

As Jacob Lew, the Treasury Secretary, put it, “America’s currency is a way for our nation to make a statement about who we are and what we stand for.”

Who we are extends into art and culture, the environment and education, social work, and while all of those overlap with politics, they’re different too.

Other countries have acknowledged that fact on their money for a long time.

The women on the Swedish krona include an opera singer and a Nobel Prize-winning writer. Turkey, Mexico, New Zealand and Australia all have women on their paper money. England plans to put the 19th-century writer Jane Austen on its 10-pound note.

Regardless of which woman winds up on our money, the discussion about it is useful.

Thinking and talking about it is a way to review history and learn it.

I was entertained by the names that popped into my mind when I pondered candidates.

What about Louisa May Alcott?

She was a feminist, abolitionist and the author of Little Women, a book that has inspired generations of plucky girls. I wouldn’t mind carrying her around in my wallet.

How about Jane Addams?

That woman did everything. She was a writer and philosopher. She campaigned for women’s right to vote. As the co-founder of Hull House in Chicago, she helped immigrants and the poor. She won the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize.

Handing Jane Addams to a cashier would make me stand up taller.

Rosa Parks, who bravely rode that segregated bus in Alabama? She’s high on my list too.

But when the argument is over, I hope the winner is the apparent frontrunner, Harriet Tubman.

I hadn’t thought of Tubman in years, frankly, but reminded of her life — an abolitionist born to slaves — I can’t imagine anyone better to represent who we’ve been and who we hope to be.

Whoever it is, it’s good to be reminded that the cash we carry represents the stories we tell ourselves.

(Mary Schmich is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Contact her at mschmich@tribune.com. You can follow her on twitter.com/maryschmich or contact her on facebook.com/maryschmich)

Photo: Elii Christman via Flickr

‘Death And Mr. Pickwick’ — A Novel Rich Enough For Dickens To Steal

‘Death And Mr. Pickwick’ — A Novel Rich Enough For Dickens To Steal

By Mike Fischer, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (TNS)

Death and Mr. Pickwick by Stephen Jarvis; Farrar, Straus and Giroux (816 pages, $30)
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How can I convince you to lose yourself in first-time novelist Stephen Jarvis’ magnificent, 816-page Death and Mr. Pickwick?

Perhaps by reminding you that The Pickwick Papers — the greatest phenomenon in literary history and, during its first century, the world’s best known book after the Bible — was an equally big book by another rookie novelist named Charles Dickens?

If, that is, Dickens really deserves being remembered as the creator of the legendary Samuel Pickwick, whose famous image — round and bespectacled head, big belly, black gaiters — is even recognized by those who have never read the book describing his picaresque travels around England.

Calling Dickens’ authorial claim “the greatest literary hoax in history,” Jarvis weaves a staggering amount of research into a gripping, fictionalized presentation of his emphatically non-fictional argument: Dickens stole both the concept as well as various scenes and characters in Pickwick — including the fat man himself and his three companions — from Robert Seymour, the caricaturist who illustrated this serialized novel’s first two issues.

When the young and relatively unknown Dickens was approached about providing text to accompany Seymour’s illustrations, Seymour was a famous caricaturist — we’d say cartoonist — drawing every third political caricature in Britain, along with hundreds of illustrations satirizing everything from Shakespeare to sporting life.

Three days after the only known meeting of Seymour and Dickens — between publication of the first and second parts of Pickwick in April 1836 — Seymour shot and killed himself.

Examining Seymour’s surviving artwork and life while poking holes in the shifting and contradictory accounts by Dickens and his allies of how Pickwick began, Jarvis leaves little doubt in my mind that for all Dickens’ undeniable genius — and I’m on record calling him the “greatest English novelist” — Seymour had much more to do with Pickwick than Dickens ever admitted.

Watching Jarvis make his compelling case is reason enough to read Death and Mr. Pickwick. But that account doesn’t begin to describe this novel’s breathtaking shape and scope.

Much like Mr. Pickwick and his book, that shape is round, full and apt to wander off on long tangents; if you’re looking for a tight story, this novel isn’t for you.

Many of those tangents involve the real-life sources for the interpolated tales in The Pickwick Papers itself. One illustrative example: The jarring story of a pantomime who drinks himself to death is reborn in Jarvis’ novel as the slightly fictionalized story of Joseph Grimaldi and his alcoholic son, both famous clowns in the early nineteenth century.

That story is in turn entwined with Seymour and Dickens’ immersion in the same period’s vibrant culture, featuring a huge cast of colorful characters — from bootblacks to philandering prime ministers — worthy of any Dickens novel.

Jarvis devotes particular attention to the publishing business, packing his account with real-life cameos involving printers, woodcutters and engravers as well as publishers, editors, writers and illustrators, at a time when London teemed with stores selling books and magazines — and when people eagerly queued up for the latest installment of Pickwick as it was released each month.

In a novel that often mirrors The Pickwick Papers while expressly invoking Borges’ Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, all of this comes our way through discussions between two contemporary men: an older one who has spent his life amassing a trove of Pickwickian material and a narrator, “employed to produce the work which I lay before you now.”

Unlike Dickens’ treatment of the ill-fated Seymour, this younger writer pays continual homage to his companion. And like The Pickwick Papers, they both pay homage to a vanished age of eccentrics — extending back through the Age of Johnson to Cervantes — when neither the novel nor life were as moralistic, rule-bound or plot-driven as they would become.

“It is the lie of novels,” our narrator tells us toward the end of this wild ride, “to pretend that life has plot. The truth of life is like ‘Pickwick’: that one thing just follows another.” In this exhilarating novel — so boldly backward that it’s actually forward — Jarvis stakes a winning claim that we need more novels like it.

(c)2015 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Milan Kundera’s ‘Festival Of Insignificance’ On Being And Smallness

Milan Kundera’s ‘Festival Of Insignificance’ On Being And Smallness

By David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

The Festival of Insignificance: A Novel by Milan Kundera, translated from the French by Linda Asher; Harper (128 pages, $23.99)
___

There’s not much to Milan Kundera’s 10th novel, The Festival of Insignificance — his first work of fiction since 2000’s Ignorance — but then that’s part of the point. Revolving around five middle-aged friends living in Paris, it offers not a narrative so much as a collection of vignettes, or reflections: the novel as a set of asides.

“Time moves on,” one of Kundera’s characters tells us. “Because of time, first we’re alive — which is to say: indicted and convicted. Then we die, and for a few more years we live on in the people who knew us, but very soon there’s another change; the dead become the old dead, no one remembers them any longer and they vanish into the void; only a few of them, very, very rare ones, leave their names behind in people’s memories, but, lacking any authentic witnesses now, any actual recollection, they become marionettes.”

This, of course — the issue of meaning in the face of human vanity — has long been at the center of Kundera’s work. His first novel, The Joke, published in Czechoslovakia in 1967, describes in part the fallout from a satirical postcard (“OPTIMISM IS THE OPIUM OF THE PEOPLE!” it declares. “THE HEALTHY ATMOSPHERE STINKS! LONG LIVE TROTSKY!”) sent by a Czech student to a young woman he wishes to seduce: humor that cannot be read as humor, in other words.

A similar theme motivates The Festival of Insignificance, which also traffics in jokes, or more accurately, in our inability to respond to jokes anymore. “We’ve known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world nor reshape it, nor hold off its dangerous headlong rush,” a character named Ramon explains at a Paris cocktail party. “There’s only one possible resistance: to not take it seriously. But I think our jokes have lost their power.”

Ramon is talking to a friend named Caliban, after the Shakespeare character; Caliban likes to pretend he is Pakistani, speaking an invented language of nonsense syllables. And yet this only makes Kundera’s case, for what once might have been a surrealist put-on, a bit of personal performance art, now comes loaded with risk.

“If some servant to truth should discover that you’re French!” Ramon continues. “Then of course you’ll be suspect! He’ll think you must have some shady reason to be hiding your identity! He’ll alert the police! You’ll be interrogated! You’ll explain that your Pakistani character was a joke. They’ll laugh at you: What a stupid alibi! You must certainly have been up to no good! They’ll put you in handcuffs!” Joking, he concludes, “has become dangerous. … It really was the start of a new era. The twilight of joking! The post-joke age!”

That Kundera has his tongue half in his cheek is part of the charm: Look at all those breathless exclamation marks. At the same time, he is completely serious, as he has always been, about the folly of our machinations, political or otherwise.

It’s tempting to regard Kundera as apolitical, despite his long Parisian exile. (He abandoned Czechoslovakia for France in 1975.) But that’s an oversimplification, for in works such as The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he pioneered a sensibility framed around larger notions of liberation and freedom, using sexual politics as a metaphor for affairs of state.

“What seemed to be political fanaticism,” he writes in the former novel, “was only an excuse, a parable, a manifesto of fidelity, a coded plaint of unrequited love.” It’s a brilliant move, not only for its sheer subversive power — critiquing a government in terms it does not recognize — but also for its understanding of desire as essential, equally, to politics and ardor.

In The Festival of Insignificance, Kundera extrapolates such a sensibility to our terror-besotted world. This is not to say the new book offers commentary, exactly; that would be far too great a weight for this thin and intentionally inconsequential novel to bear. “Only from the heights of an infinite good mood,” the author writes in these pages, quoting Hegel, “can you observe below you the eternal stupidity of me, and laugh over it.” That has been his purpose, or one of them, all along.

In that sense, The Festival of Insignificance offers both a continuation of Kundera’s signature investigations and a reaction to the toxicity of the present day. It’s not a brilliant book; Kundera, 86, hasn’t written a brilliant book since 1986’s The Art of the Novel, which traces an alternative tradition of fiction, what we might call the anti-novel, with roots in the work of Laurence Sterne and Denis Diderot.

“I often hear it said that the novel has exhausted all its possibilities,” Kundera asserted in 1985. “I have the opposite impression: during its 400-year history, the novel has missed many of its possibilities; it has left many great opportunities unexplored, many paths forgotten, calls unheard.”

This is the territory from which The Festival of Insignificance operates, which means the most useful way to read it may be as an epilogue. It is slight, incidental, a book in which little happens: a cocktail party, some unrequited longing, a bit of humor. Still, it is compelling in its small way.

Among the novel’s running motifs is a story Joseph Stalin used to tell about his prowess as a hunter, recast here as (yes) a joke. The joke, however, is on Stalin, since he is now among “the old dead,” a point Kundera makes explicit by imagining him transplanted to contemporary Paris, where he goes unrecognized. Marionettes again, another motif of the novel, a reminder of how little everything counts. Or, as Ramon suggests in the closing pages: “Insignificance, my friend, is the essence of existence.”

(c)2015 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.