The plan was always to write about books. The plan was to review last year and write about changes hopes and dreams. The plan was....the plan was.... the plan was...
Then Wednesday happened and 2021 no longer looked like the “happily ever after” coda of a fairy tale. The big bad wolf wasn’t dead. We weren’t tripping hand in hand down the lollipop trail. I was thrown into a sense of turmoil. I was not alone in that, but I did not know how to react. Continue with previous plans? Write something new? But the more I thought about what I would write the more I also realized I needed to write about what I had planned to write. Sometimes we can’t go forward without figuring out where we are. And although I was not the only one shocked by the events in Washington last week, the episode did not spring out of the ether without warnings, and its lasting effects will not simply disappear because we wish it so.
And so I find myself back at books. There is no reason to subject you to the tedious list of all the books I read in 2020; that list is available either by looking me up on goodreads or library thing. And I continue to either struggle or question with the idea of “best” lists. How do I compare nonfiction to fiction, and even within those broad categories? Does a really good mystery compare with a literary novel? Writing a book is hard, and although I do believe discernment is a necessary aspect of life, I can also say that everything I read satisfied the requirements or reasoning behind my choice. So once again, who is to judge?
What I am actually interested in this year is the idea of change. What changed me? In a year where so much of my interaction with the outside world was through books, are there books that profoundly affected the way I see myself and the world? To some extent all books do that, everything we read, see, do, affects who we are, how we see the world, and who we become. But in this year that truly challenged the assumptions of many of us, were there books that also rocked my basic understanding of the world and my place in that world?
Yes. Yes there were. They may not be the “best” books, and they may, in fact may not be the books brought about the greatest change, but they were books that opened a door if you will, and forced me to see something I might not have seen otherwise. They laid the foundations.
In order read:
Colson Whitehead’s novel The Nickel Boys shocked me in many ways. It is a beautiful and yet horrifying novel. The story flows, the characterizations are strong, and one is drawn in to a novel that breaks one’s heart, a novel that is simultaneously compelling and sickening. It is a novel that is difficult to write about without giving everything away, but then, as one is horrified and sad, and congratulating oneself on how much better everything is today, Whitehead throws in a surprise ending that works perfectly and hit me like a sucker-punch. In that moment I realized that everything I assumed and thought I knew was perfectly backward, that we think we see character clearly but what we actually see condemns us more than it tells us anything useful.
Then I moved on to The Underground Railroad. Initially, it came as a bit of a relief; even though it was intellectually more challenging and highly metaphoric, the novel felt a bit more distanced and removed from the highly personal and empathetic prose of The Nickel Boys. But then it got hold of me and hit me upside the head. We are often able to intellectualize the past, to protect ourselves from our discomfort. Our need to think of ourselves as “good” allows us to distance ourselves from the past, no matter how shocking and horrifying it may have been. But then the masterful way Whitehead uses allegory hit me. This is a novel that explores all of the ways of slavery, past and present, a novel that belies all the exceptions that we claim for own ancestors, that talks of the work and danger in seeking freedom, and it is a novel that simultaneously, while writing about the past, is writing about today. Every stop on this railroad, every experiences is its own bubble, as much of today as of yesterday. We haven’t changed, the world hasn’t changed. After reading this book I had to close my door for days. After reading this book I could no longer see myself or a world I had taken for granted, in the same way. I, in fact, could no longer be the person I had been a week previously. Who this person would become I didn’t know. I still don’t know, but we never understand change while we are going through it.
Then the world started to shut down. I shut my door, and in fact, although I thought I would read up a storm, I couldn’t. I slunk into the quiet. When I started reading again, I read Tayari Jones’ novel An American Marriage. I expected this novel to be more outraged, to kindle my own outrage, but I found instead was that its heavy, resigned, acceptance served to cement the changes that had begun in my heart. Yes it is a story of a marriage, a truly American marriage even, and it is meaningless to say that this is not “my America” because there can’t be “my” America and someone else’s America. America is not what I believed it to be. Knowing that in my head was one thing. Feeling it in the very core of my being was something else entirely.
I reread Milkman by Anna Burns for book club. Once again it rocked me. Burns has created a unique voice which allows the reader to experience a particular time and place and to feel both the physical and emotional constraints of that space in a very personal way. She allows the reader to do this without judgement. The first time I read this novel, I understood one thing in a way I had never understood it before. Reading it the second time I realized that this unique time and space is not unique at all, in its very specificity and distinction, it is simultaneously universal. This story is not so separate from my own life, from any story. The details change, but we are all shaped by understandings, by what is done and what is not done, what is said and what is not said, by who we can be, and who we cannot be.
This lead perfectly into Yoko Ogawa’s beautifully poetic novel The Memory Police. An island somewhere. Sometime in the future I suppose. Things disappear — words, objects, memory — one day they are there, the next they are gone, forgotten. The story begins when our protagonist is a small child. She worries that the disappearances will be frightening, but they are not. People accept. Eventually we learn they are complicit. But what happens when you give up the past, memory, self? What you agree to forget also takes away from yourself. What you accept, what you let go of, shapes who you become. We accept too easily, give in too readily. What do we lose?
These, these were my sucker-punch books. They shaped the foundation for three other books that have also profoundly affected me, my final triad. I list them as such not because they are not worthy, or because they do not stand alone, they do. But my reaction to them was indelibly shaped by my reaction to those previous books. Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste because it made me think about systemic racism differently, although Michelle Alexander had also talked about the American culture of racism as a caste system in The New Jim Crow, which I read in 2018, and picked up again at the end of December. I will read Caste again, probably later this year, and I suspect its impact will be more profound on the second reading, which was the case with Alexander’s book.
And then there is is Ta-Nehisi Coates novel The Water Dancer. I don’t know where to put it. I read and hear contrasts and comparisons to The Underground Railroad, but I think that is unfair. The only thing they have in common is that they are both allegorical, and that in an age that doesn’t really understand allegory. The Water Dancer is a profoundly human novel, and it is about what it means to be human. Yes it is also about slavery, and perhaps that confuses the issue. It also employs a lot of magical realism. But humanity itself is not so easily pinned down. Our essence is very metaphysical; we do not have the words to explore our metaphysical natures directly. Coates explores the way slavery shapes humanity on a very personal and humane level. Rather than discussing the horrors of racism as differentiated from the self, he shows us the way racism shapes and perverts the self. In doing this he writes a novel about a specific culture of slavery, about its broad ramifications on the essence of what it means to be human, and, through that, about the many many ways we are all enslaved. I say this not to make less of this book, or to make less of systematic racism or slavery, but because the simple truth that we are all harmed. We are all enslaved.
Where am I going with all of this? How should I know? Where is the US going? I don’t think we know that either. Last week while I, like many others, found myself watching something I never imagined could happen in my own country, a quote from The New Jim Crow kept running through my mind. Although Michelle Alexander is writing specifically about mass incarceration, the idea she expresses here relates to so much that is facing us today:
The question of how we do reform work is even more important than the specific reforms we seek. If the way we pursue reforms does not contribute to the building of a movement to dismantle the system of mass incarceration, and if our advocacy doe snot upset the prevailing public on senses that supports the new caste system, none of the reforms, even if won, will successfully disrupt the nation’s racial equilibrium. Challenges to the system will be easily ignored or deflected.
I do know what the world post 2020 will be. None of us knows. I do know that I do not want to return to the equilibrium of my former life. I don’t know the specific of my role, and yet I accept that I have a role to play. That is true of each of us. Each and every gift, each and every action is significant in shaping who we are and in shaping the world around us. I can easily sacrifice some of my comfort to bring more comfort to someone else, for what is my comfort if its price is someone else’s discomfort?
