I talk about how much I want to read more books, so lately I’ve been trying to put my money where my mouth is. This one was about a small liberal arts college with a dilapidated athletic department and an eccentric student body filled to the brim with self-importance, so I read it because I went to a college like that. At first I thought, honestly, “Ew, baseball.” In truth, baseball is only the backdrop for the other story, which is about friendship and failure and whether or not we’re good people, like all stories, I guess. 

Chad Harbach’s first novel has been batted about as a debut for the ages, and in many ways, I suppose it is. This novel rests on a shared experience for many people, I suppose. It invokes the feeling of the undergraduate life and the struggle to become an adult person by merging the noble and intellectual pursuit for understanding and purpose with the base, the very unrefined and callous pursuit of more tangible desires. In a popular convention, Harbach uses sports as a way of determining whether they can reveal our moral characters, our gifts in our other lives, whether or not we have successful relationships.

 This was, for me, a study in the way our academic lives for a brief, self-absorbed time inform so much of our daily activity. It portrays how an academic pursuit of non-academic activities, whether they are relationships or sports or even character development, inform our quest for perfection. It demonstrates the way that our academic experiences color our entire perception for a period of our lives, the way that clouds our life, and the influence it leaves after we’ve left the place where we grew up.

These characters spend quite a bit of time wondering whether it is ever possible to leave a place you’ve loved. It’s funny how the way a book is written can take you back to a place you’ve been and the people you knew there. The characters were very knowable, for me. It was a community I recognized from my own college experience, so Harbach accomplished that goal. We were a community of otherwise imperfect people, united only in that in some way, we were unlikely. There was something about us that made us unlike the others we knew, there is something slightly off. This novel is a story of those people, too. The author betrays his homage to the campuses of Wisconsin’s Eastern North shore, and at some parts, the campus he describes is so arrestingly like the place I lived four years of my life that I have no doubt he must have been there. At other parts, there are small things, like the quirks one observes after being transplanted to a big-town-small-city, that he misses completely.

I wished he had made this school more like my own in the fact that in many ways, athletes were the most fallible members of the school community. Division III athletes are often a rag-tag group, motivated by odd, unknowable passions. They receive no affirmation for what they do. They are generally regarded as less-than. This team is a team I recognized, but Harbach does not discuss the larger campus community’s attitude toward athletes. In fact, he rarely mentions anyone outside the orbit of the Westish baseball team. It’s in no way a failing, as the book is definitely strong enough without any greater context, but because I felt so at home in the pages, it was something I missed.

I’m not a book reviewer or anything, but I can tell you if I liked it. I did. It’s about 500 pages and I read it in a week.

According to the purchase receipt tucked into the epilogue, I have been reading this book for a little over six months. It’s not a long book, and it’s incredibly readable, but it is rough going. I do not mean to emphasize my own naivete about this time in America, but in a sense that is exactly what I intend - the fact that these things happened while my mother was alive is never not overwhelming to me, which speaks mainly to the deplorable way our country treated half its citizens and the effectiveness with which Danielle McGuire invokes that time.

This is not to say that you should not read this book, because the author’s mere suggestion that black women, at a time when they were the most powerless in society, were able to start turning the tide against injustice, violence and racism they experienced is ground-breaking and undeniably inspiring, and I would love nothing more than to see this perspective incorporated into popular American history. But I couldn’t help but constantly wonder how quickly people would resort to the animalism outlined in the book if they knew that, like in the South of the 1950’s, they could get away with it, and that was terrifying.

In detailing experiences of Southern black women leading up to the Civil Rights movement, Danielle McGuire accounts, often for the first time in great length, the brutal, unimaginable ordeals women endured at the hands of white men on a daily basis. She uses examples of the sexual subjugation of black women by white men, and the consequent abuse black men faced for daring to share space with white women, to illustrate the hidden genesis of the Civil Rights movement. Black women had been working together, organizing to protect themselves, fighting for their civil rights and their bodily autonomy, before Martin Luther King, Jr. was anointed as the leader of the nonviolent movement.

Rosa Park’s entrée into the civil rights movement actually occurred years earlier, as a young NAACP investigator rallying around black victims of sexual violence while publicizing sexual assault and rape cases committed by white men against black women that often went unreported or ended in acquittal. McGuire reveals how Parks, weary as a result of fighting for justice for black women, and not as a result of her “tired feet,” was protesting the systematic rape, assault, and lack of autonomy that black women experienced in the south when she refused to relinquish her seat on a Montgomery bus. As a result, she and fellow activist Jo Ann Robinson organized a bus boycott that was led predominantly by the black women who relied on the Montgomery bus system to transport them to their jobs as domestic workers in white neighborhoods. Therefore, the seminal moment in the Civil Rights movement was not only incited and led by women, but was an indirect result of the crippling oppression and violence black women experienced at the hands of white men and their refusal to remain powerless against it. Instead of being remembered as the radical leader of a movement she helped start, Rosa Parks became a passive symbol of virtuous black womanhood as Martin Luther King rose to become the public face of a struggle already being quietly and fiercely fought by women.

McGuire goes on to demonstrate the many ways in which white supremacy in the Jim Crow South was ultimately about sex, and who would retain control over women’s bodies. One of my favorite statements from the book, “By policing white women and black men’s sexual and marital choices while retaining power over black women’s bodies, white men retained their position at the top of the racial and sexual hierarchy,” suggests that at its basest, segregation, and the vehement, violent, ignorant refusal to integrate schools and other public places and act out with violence against those who threatened the power structure, was ultimately about a fear of the loss of control - mainly the loss of power and control over women. In sequential chapters, she relates the way the country’s response to cases of sexual violence and rape of black women mirrored the gradual end of de jure segregation and racism. It is a fascinating account of a history not often told and serves as an inspiring, if at times demoralizing, account of the trials black women in America have overcome and organized against. The women McGuire profiles were brave enough to tell their stories; we have to be brave enough to read them.

I took Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil from the spot on my grandparents’ bookshelf where it has been sitting since 1994, from where the book’s cover has haunted me every time I passed it. I’ve picked it up on and off and flirted with the first chapter, but it sucked me in two weeks ago, as I began searching for the next city to call my home and applying for jobs that list “extensive travel,” as a requirement. This book is generally classified as part true crime story, part travelogue. It’s a story that is as much about the scene of the crime as the crime itself - Savannah is as important a character as the murder suspect and the black magic he relies on to change his luck.

Although the trial sequences are entertaining in their own right, John Berendt is at his best when he’s painstakingly describing the unique beauty of Savannah and the eccentricities of her people. As a narrator, Berendt’s attention to detail coupled with his genuine curiosity and humility as an outsider make the sense of wonder with which he approaches his subjects a fascinating account of a city whose residents have thoroughly charmed him. 

The story speculates a great deal about human nature, from the way we form routines to the way that our societal allegiances create our definition of normal. The behavior that is accepted in a city built primarily around its outrageous characters and their idiosyncratic actions, juxtaposed with a murder trial shrouded in murmurs of behavior that the conservative residents are not yet willing to accept, is an interesting commentary on how we create normalcy in our communities.

If nothing else, this book convinced me that I want to grow very old and very drunk in Savannah.

I read Super Sad Super True Love Story in the last days of summer, in a frantic week before I started my new AmeriCorps placement and before my brother left for Russia. I have had some trouble with reading in these winter months simply because every book I read cannot be this book. After every book I’ve read since this end of summer respite, I’ve finished it only to realize how much I wish to read Super Sad Super True Love Story over and over and over and have the experience be new each time.

 If I may state an opinion that is of course necessarily humble, there’s a gap in the satires being written about the farce that has become our daily life. Gary Shteyngart is a relief. He writes with the tenderness and sentimentality of Russian authors before him, but he combines these gifts with the piercing perception, witty observation, and nostalgia for a lost era of Evelyn Waugh. Shteyngart positions the melancholy, mismatched relationship doomed to fail in the center of a pre-apocalyptic society on the brink of collapse. Through the frenetic pace of an impersonal, paperless, emotionless society, Shteyngart displays the urgency the lovers exercise as they fumble through their relationship. He expertly captures many of my fears about the future, mainly my acute fear of the desperation of living in a society that no longer relies on the salvation of the written world without a companion to share my longing. In short, why isn’t every book this book? Why can’t every book make you feel so confusingly bad and good and relieved and scared, all at the same time?

Please don’t confuse this with a book review; it’s not a book review by any means. It’s more like a love letter.

kelsium:

One of my favorite more recent YA novels.

At the risk of sounding like Kanye, this is one of my favorite books OF ALL TIME. I used to pretend to be the protagonist of this book. She was sort of like the Nicki Minaj of 1998, for me.

I was also so unreasonably obsessed with the name “Belen” after reading this book, like I named all the girls I wrote into my pre-teen short sob stories “Belen” and decided I wanted to have a zillion kids all named “Belen” kind of obsessed.