The Shelfish Reader

I’m not buying any new books until I reread all the ones in my bookshelves! I’ve got a nice library that’s very eclectic, so it should be a fun little challenge I’ve set for myself. I estimate a new review once a week. I’m a fast reader, but many of these are 500+ pages!

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MARJORIE MORNINGSTAR

By Herman Wouk

©️1955; 565 pgs; Doubleday

I first read this book after experiencing my very first heartbreak. I was 18, and the eponymous heroine in this novel was 17 going on 18, so I felt that I understood her. In the den/family room of my childhood home, one entire wall was bookshelves, floor-to-ceiling, without any room to spare. Sometimes, I would investigate that library if I was bored or had run out of new reading material. Most of it was classics, with a big helping of history, biography, and World War II nonfiction. But this title was so out of place among the Churchill, MacArthur, and Eisenhower biographies, I couldn’t help but investigate further. I’m forever glad I did. I didn’t know who Herman Wouk was at the time, but in the early 1980s I would read both The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, and I would avidly watch the miniseries made from the former. My aunt Ruth was the acquisitions director for the wall of books, since nobody else in the family ever read any books for fun except herself. And me. I’m pretty sure her membership in Book of the Month Club is how she ended up with this one, as it’s a coming of age story and a romance. Aunt Ruth didn’t do either of those.

Marjorie Morgenstern is 17, lives with her parents and brother in a swanky Manhattan upper east side apartment on Park Avenue, and attends Hunter College where she is a sophomore. I was in college at 17, although a year behind Marjorie, who skipped a grade and started school earlier than other children due to her precocity. I was acutely aware, both now and back in 1977, that this book was published in 1955, but somehow, I forgot the fact that it takes place in 1933 through 1939, with the last chapter jumping ahead to 1954. My mother was born eight days after the opening of the story, when Marjorie is innocent, carefree, dating a wide pool of suitors, and becoming interested in the theater. She decides in the first few pages that she is going to be an actress, and she dreams of a name less ordinary and more memorable than “Morgenstern.” She tries “Morningstar,” and she likes it. That, then, is who she will become:

Marjorie is a smash success in Hunter College’s production of The Mikado. She meets and befriends a fellow student whose Bohemian clothes and vivacious manner draw her in instantly. Marsha Zelenko is the costume designer for Hunter College’s drama department, and she and Marjorie become close friends. Marsha tells Marjorie of a summer job opportunity at Camp Tamarack, a camp for kids. Marsha will be a counselor for the summer, and there is an opening for one more. The chief attraction of this job is the fact that opposite Camp Tamarack, on the same lake, is South Wind, an infamous resort for adults only. All kinds of debauchery is reputed to go on at South Wind. The staff of Camp Tamarack isn’t allowed to leave camp grounds upon risk of termination, but Marsha convinces Marjorie to wait until lights out, then accompany her in a rowboat and sneak over to South Wind. Marsha knows everybody there. The resort puts on musical theater shows every night, written and directed by their musical director and shining star, Noel Airman. He’s had two hit songs already, by age 28, that everyone knows. Noel is tall, lean, and blond, very handsome, very talented, and nine years older than Marjorie. He’s singing and playing piano for a group of South Wind staff when Marjorie first lays eyes on him, and she is in love before he’s finished the song.

Marjorie becomes a volunteer at South Wind the next summer, against her parents’ wishes. This is when her relationship with Noel deepens into reciprocated love with a huge dose of passion, but absolutely no sex. She builds sets, sews costumes, dances in the chorus, and “necks” with Noel. This summer ends very dramatically with the death of Marjorie’s beloved uncle. Marjorie’s mother arranged for the Uncle (as he is referred to by everyone in the family) to be hired as a dishwasher in the South Wind kitchens so he can keep an eye on Marjorie’s virtue. The Uncle dies of a heart attack very suddenly, and Marjorie leaves with his hearse. The shine is permanently gone from South Wind afterwards.

There are many different subplots concerning Marjorie’s Jewish extended family and one or two concerning some of her dates. But the book is primarily interested in exploring Marjorie’s and Noel’s commonalities, differences, and attraction to each other. Noel Airman’s real name is Saul Ehrmann, and it turns out that Marjorie’s parents know his parents, which is a connection Marjorie never anticipated. In fact, Marjorie dated Noel’s younger brother Billy, who always seemed clownish and silly to her. But despite Noel being from a good Jewish family, the Morgensterns never totally warm to the prospect of their daughter ending up married to him. He’s a songwriter, which isn’t steady, reliable work. He’s slept with half of New York, or so people say. He’s louche, slippery, untrustworthy. Noel IS all of these things, plus later in the book we learn he is a borderline alcoholic with episodes of mania, never specifically stated as such but definitely what Wouk is describing. Noel is in love with Marjorie, has been since the summer at South Wind, and he tries to mold himself into what he thinks she wants him to be. He takes jobs—high paying jobs, the kind the Morgensterns would respect—does well for about two weeks, then walks out and never returns. He is faithful to Marjorie, even though he knows there is no way she’s giving her virginity to him without marriage. And Noel isn’t the marrying kind.

Eventually Marjorie sleeps with Noel. It was inevitable, given their attraction to and love for each other. What’s glaringly out of place in 2022 are the admonishments Wouk gives the reader for anyone having sex out of wedlock. He describes Marjorie as feeling tarnished afterwards; very much “less-than.” Of course, in the 1930s (and the 1950s for that matter), a woman who chooses to sleep with a man she’s not married to is regarded by polite society as a “roundheels” (slut) and is to be pitied and avoided. He also takes the opportunity to scold us again at the end of the book, which I’ll get to later.

Noel has an image in his head of a certain type of young Jewish girl whose only goal in life is to marry and produce children. He calls this unflattering composite girl “Shirley.” In the beginning of their relationship, he teased Marjorie relentlessly about her inner Shirley, and how, despite all her attempts to behave unconventionally and become a theater actress, he is sure she will eventually return to being a Shirley. Marjorie seethes at the comparison. She is going to BE SOMEBODY, and being that somebody doesn’t include a husband or babies. Noel good-naturedly stops teasing her about it, but he believes she is one, no matter what she may believe to be true about herself.

After a few years of being in a semi-monogamous relationship, circumstances intervene by way of Noel’s fear of commitment and general rootlessness, and he writes Marjorie a 22-page letter breaking up with her for good. In this letter, he tells her that over the years of their romance, she proved herself to be, thoroughly and completely, a Shirley. He tells her he is sailing to Paris and starting over there by gaining inspiration from the beauty of Europe. Maybe he’ll write another hit song, or maybe he’ll write another musical for the stage (he had one produced on Broadway that was excoriated by theater critics and closed within a week, but there is always the chance he can do it again and get it right this time). Marjorie is broken by the letter and the fact of Noel’s leaving, and she tells her father she will take a job at his business doing secretarial work, which is applauded by both of her parents as an excellent practical first step towards independence. But Marjorie saves her wages for something else. She’s calculated that she needs $700 to sail round trip to Paris, and she works very hard and spends no money, and at last, she is on board the Queen Mary to France to find Noel and get him back.

On board, she meets an enigmatic, brilliant stranger named Mike, who actually knows Noel. He had no idea Noel was in Europe, but he pledges to try to help Marjorie find him. Mike and Marjorie have a shipboard romance that’s not serious and involves no sex beyond kissing, but Marjorie is drawn to him in a different way than she’s drawn to Noel. Mike says he’s in chemicals, but the evidence of this lies only in his possession and consumption of many different types of pills. He gives Marjorie pills, too, ostensibly for seasickness. From the description of how Marjorie feels once the pills take effect, it seems like they were tranquilizers. Mike has some type of secret undercover job, which Marjorie eventually learns is pulling Jewish families out of Germany and getting them to France. He is heroic, brave, and possibly a drug addict.

Thanks to Mike’s network of acquaintances, Marjorie finds Noel in Paris, they spend an evening reconnecting, and Noel finally does the thing Marjorie has been praying for since she first met him that long-ago night at South Wind: he proposes marriage. It’s been a long time, and much has happened to Marjorie to allow her to mature and accumulate wisdom about men and women and love and expectations, and so she declines the proposal. That done, the relationship finally ends in Marjorie’s heart. She returns to New York, and in short order meets, falls in love, becomes engaged, and marries a nice Jewish doctor whose name is never mentioned. Here is where Wouk again shows his obsolescence regarding sex without marriage: it’s an ordeal for Marjorie to tell her fiancé that she’s not a virgin. AN ORDEAL. Firstly, I really bristled at the fact that she NEEDED to confess this fact at all, and even more when her fiancé is so shaken by this revelation, he takes days to decide whether or not he will still marry her (!), and when he decides that yes, he loves her regardless and will marry her despite this one glaring flaw, I had to repeatedly remind myself of the 1930s attitudes towards physical affairs. I might’ve thrown this book through the window otherwise.

Still, for all the author’s personal opinions, I love this book. I love the descriptions of Manhattan society, post Prohibition repeal. I loved the world building of South Wind (Marjorie’s mother always referred to it as “Sodom,” and indeed, Part 2 of the book is set in South Wind, and it’s titled “Sodom.”) I loved sailing to Europe on the Queen Mary, and I loved being in Paris in 1939, when Hitler was on the move and darkness was descending on the world. I enjoyed the Jewishness of the family and the explanations of their customs and rituals, particularly the Morgensterns’ Seder. And most of all, I loved Marjorie. I could relate to her romantic highs and lows, and it was immensely gratifying when she was able to stop loving Noel. He brought her so much pain in an otherwise comfortable life. I was going through the same thing, trying to fall out of love with a boy I knew would ruin my life if I let him.

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STATION ELEVEN

By Emily St. John Mandel

©️2014; 334 pgs; Alfred A. Knopf

I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth. — Dr. Eleven, Station Eleven

I’m straying from the physical bookshelf to report on my favorite novel of the 2010’s that was recently adapted into a ten-episode HBOMax miniseries. I LOVED this book when I read it upon publication, and I loved the miniseries too. I had forgotten the particulars of the novel, and so I was able to watch the series without any cognitive dissonance. The overarching plot was the same, the characters were familiar to me, and the basic outline of what happens and to whom remained mostly the same. Now that the series concluded last week, and I have re-read my Kindle copy from eight years ago, I honestly couldn’t choose which one I enjoyed the most. I do know that as I read this time, I pictured the actors from the series as each character in my head, which to me means that the casting was 100% successful.

Everyone who has HBOMax should watch this series. There are so many thought experiments contained in this story: creating your identity from the ashes of a burnt civilization, how we process trauma and grief, whether or not good and evil can coexist more or less peacably. There is a Before, and there is an After. Nobody who is alive at the end of the 99%-fatal flu pandemic that’s the cornerstone of this book is the same person they were before. Nobody but a very few remember the ubiquitous technological aids we used without thinking, or airplanes flying in the sky, or electricity. It’s a medieval world, the After, and survivors repurpose found objects in new and surprising ways.

I’m not going to go into detail about the plot. Many people found the series too difficult to watch, given that we are still in the midst of a global pandemic that has killed 800,000 Americans in just under two years. This is a dystopian post-apocalyptic story, and the apocalyptic event is an extraordinarily lethal form of influenza. NINETY-NINE PERCENT FATAL. What do the survivors do? Where do they go? What horrors do they see?

The opening is set in Chicago, and the main character, Kirsten Raymonde, is eight years old. Kirsten is our avatar in the post-flu world. The people who survive are apparently immune, although some are lucky enough to have found shelter from the outside world of death and chaos, like Jeevan Chaudhury, who holes up with his brother Frank in Frank’s high-rise condo on the lake for a few months. It’s likely the virus burned itself out while he was sheltering, or maybe he was immune all along. Jeevan and Kirsten spend about thirty minutes total together in the book, but in the series, they spend much more time together, get separated, then meet again after 20 years have passed. It’s emotionally satisfying in the best possible way, but the novel is more interested in people’s individual struggles to survive the aftermath of the collapse. Not everyone is connected to everyone else in the novel, and those who are connected don’t even realize it. It’s kind of like real life in that regard.

There is violence, but it’s always defensive. The series went with more visceral violence perpetrated by the villainous antagonist because of a set of beliefs this character adhered to, but it didn’t detract from the love and humanity that are the emotional basis for the story. Found families try to stay together, and they mostly succeed. People do unexpected things out of love and basic decency. The book concentrates on these positive indicators of rebirth and renewal. You may have lost your entire family to the flu, but if you’re lucky, you find other survivors who also share the common goal of creating a new normal in which to be safe and hopefully, to thrive.

Station Eleven is a graphic novel about a physicist, Dr. Eleven, living on a space station called Station Eleven 1000 years in the future. His station has been thrown into chaos, and he is longing for his home while trying to survive the attacks from the Undersea, a collection of hostile people living in a network of fallout shelters beneath Station Eleven’s oceans. How Kirsten comes into possession of one of the only two copies in existence, what it means to her, and how it connects her to other characters she will meet in Year Twenty is a remarkable story. (The world is counting years since the “collapse,” as the flu event is referred to, and this story is mainly set in Year Twenty with flashbacks to the Before.) So Kirsten is 28 in the “now,” but we flash back to her eight-year-old self and to other characters in the Before who didn’t survive the collapse, but whose actions reverberate for the next twenty years.

Read this book. Or watch the series and then read this book. This story is transcendent, beautiful, and unforgettable either way, but this novel is exceptional.

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AMONG THE DEAD

By Michael Tolkin

©️1993; 274 pgs; Wm Morrow & Co

I’m using a photo of the exact cover I used to have on the hardback I just re-read instead of my usual photo of my copy. At some point in the late 90’s or early 00’s, I read that if you had a lot of books, you should remove all their covers because the solid colors and metallic titles on the spines would be an aesthetically pleasing DECORATING CHOICE. A few escaped, but not many. Anyway, my copy is battered, there are actual coffee cup stains on the front, and this photo has the cover I remember so vividly. That cover is a perfect graphic representation of what awaits the reader inside. Jagged, discordant, yelling text on monochromatic bands of sad neutral colors.

I was very fond of this one. I probably read it three or four times, I’m guessing. It’s so jarring to realize that since 2009, when I got a Nook (remember those? Are they still a thing?), I haven’t read actual print books nearly as often as digital versions. Age, limited space, and eyesight make digital books much easier for me. I’ve had an iPad since 2010, and in my Kindle app, I’ve got 430-odd books. This blog is basically me revisiting my reading past, and so it happened that the next book in line was this plain black coverless book, so innocuous on my shelves. You’d never suspect what its pages hold. I’m glad it’s over, but I quite enjoyed the ride. It’s an immersive plunge into a very specific kind of personal hell, which will never happen to me, so it’s safe to explore through fiction. It’s why we ride rollercoasters—they’re like rehearsals for death.

Frank Gale is married to Anna. They have a three-year-old daughter, Madeleine. Frank has been having an affair with a woman who works in his business’s insurance office. Her name is Mary Sifka, and she is married as well. Frank has decided to end the affair, confess everything to Anna, beg for forgiveness, and rebuild their marriage. He doesn’t want to do this in L.A., where they live—he has booked a 10-day vacation in Acapulco for himself, Anna, and Madeleine. He won’t confess the affair until they’re in their suite at the resort. This will force Anna to stay with him for another nine days and give him uninterrupted time to manipulate her into forgiving him. He thinks up a brilliant idea: he’ll write her a LETTER of confession, then on their second day in Mexico (he wants to let her have one day of fun, and he considers himself generous to have thought of this), he will give her the letter, take Madeleine for a walk on the beach, and let her have her emotions in private (he hopes the worst will have subsided by the time he returns because he is a coward.)

The night before they leave, he writes the letter and tucks it into his suitcase. It says

“I love you. You asked me a few weeks ago why I was so desperate to take this vacation and I said I needed to get away from the office for a while, and that’s true, but there’s more. For six months you’ve noticed that I’ve been distant, and I have been. You asked me if there was another woman, and I said no, but I was lying. I had an affair with Mary Sifka. It’s over now. I wanted to take this trip so that we could find a way to heal ourselves. I don’t know how you’ll take this, and all I can say is that I beg you to forgive me, but if you don’t want to, I’ll understand. I love you.”

Frank doesn’t go with his family to the airport. He has to meet Mary Sifka for lunch and actually end the affair (he wasn’t technically lying to Anna in the letter—he said it was over and it was; he just hadn’t told Mary yet). Their flight isn’t until 3:00pm, so he has time…except he drinks a little more than he should (for courage), and the lunch lasts longer than he’d planned. Mary took it well, and this pleases Frank. But he’s running late now, his cab is slow, traffic is awful, and he knows he’s going to miss the flight. At least Anna has his luggage so he can just take the next flight out, but he needs to let her know. He has the cab stop at a pay phone (the 90’s!) where he finally reaches Anna on the courtesy phone at the gate. The plane is boarding. Anna is furious. Frank has never heard her this cold with this hard edge in her voice. “I read the letter,” she tells him, having had to pack some of Madeleine’s toys in his suitcase, whereupon she discovered it. Frank is a raw nerve in a suit by now. He gets her to say she won’t do anything—anything at all—until he gets to Mexico so they can deal with the information together.

Frank’s at the gate waiting for the next flight to Acapulco when the news comes in that the plane Anna and Madeleine and nearly 200 other people were on has crashed just south of San Diego, in a residential neighborhood, taking out two blocks. His wife and toddler daughter are dead, and Frank immediately begins to spiral—not from grief. His brother and parents, who also live in L.A., come to the airport. Families of the dead begin congregating, the airline dispatches its crisis workers and P.R. machines, and the news media go into overdrive. Over the next week, he will experience an episode of hysterical deafness, his bowels will evacuate without his permission—only in front of his parents, so it could’ve been worse—and an open, ongoing display of such truly bizarre behavior that everyone chalks up to his deep grief. Only Frank doesn’t feel much of what we commonly recognize as grief. Frank doesn’t FEEL much of anything except the obsessive need to go to the crash site and look around for the bodies of his wife and child. Maybe he’ll find their suitcases. Will they be hanging in a tree? He’s heard the first responders found a bunch of bodies from the plane like that. He wonders what it feels like to fall at 32 feet per second per second from 30,000 feet, or did the plane explode in mid-air and the altitude killed them before they could fall?

Of course, his written confession to Anna is found by rescuers helping survivors on the ground. This wouldn’t have necessarily been a bad thing, but Frank had named his mistress very specifically, and that name, Mary Sifka, was not only uncommon, she had her own listing in the L.A. phone book. At first, her name is redacted as the mayor of San Diego reads Frank’s letter aloud at the official memorial service. It is considered to be a miracle that this letter was found, but it was unsigned and not addressed to anyone specifically, leaving the public to speculate about who wrote it (the poor bastard is dead now, along with whomever he wrote to), and to discuss how to find out the name of the lover. Frank’s letter is printed on the front page of newspapers everywhere, and when reporters uncover Mary Sifka’s name, address, and phone number, Frank’s entire family knows he’s the letter writer.

“How did Frank feel? This is how he felt: tie a man’s wrists to two posts. Nail his feet to the floor. Take a razor blade or a scalpel, and cut the skin in a circle around his neck. Then, from his neck down to his waist, cut a series of strips, an inch apart. Then pull each strip away from the body, and let them fall, making a loose skirt of flesh. Then throw boiling ammonia on this swamp of blood. Wait three minutes for the blisters to rise. Rub them with hard salt. This should overload the myelin sheaths that protect the nerves from agony.”

The whole novel is told from Frank’s point of view, and it includes all his thoughts, ideas, feelings, and perceptions. Frank isn’t an exceptional man. He’s maybe Everyman, full of inadequacy and doubt, just trying to survive this tragic event. But the event he’s working so hard to survive isn’t the loss of his wife and daughter. He’s trying to survive the discovery, dissemination, and publication of the letter, and through it the knowledge of his infidelity. Frank cares what people think. He especially cares what his parents and brother think. He cares what Anna’s parents think of him now that his secret has been exposed. He’s so preoccupied by his imagination supplying him with all the death scenarios he’s imagined for Anna and Madeleine that he acts without thinking. Later he’s so preoccupied by THE LETTER and how long it will take for the media to discover Mary’s name that he makes some Very Bad Decisions. It can be wildly funny, but make no mistake—this is dark. I’d call it a black comedy, except I can’t really use the term “comedy” when a plane crash with no survivors is a key plot point.

Michael Tolkin also wrote “The Player,” which was turned into a movie starring Tim Robbins. I think I’d like to read that one, although I know it would be dated. I enjoyed this unusual, well-written novel of worst-case scenarios, and I recommend it to readers who love exploring the dark side of human nature.

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AMY AND ISABELLE

By Elizabeth Strout

©️1998; 304 pgs; Random House

I have so many feelings about this re-read. Amy and Isabelle are daughter and mother, I’m the mother of a daughter, my daughter is herself the mother of a daughter…So. Many. Feelings. I finished it this morning, but I’m going to think about it for a while before writing up a book report. I first read this in Palm Beach when Miranda and I were there for my sister’s wedding, when Miranda was sixteen. I remember LOVING it, recommending it to Miranda, and I think I even loaned it to her. How I didn’t lose my goddamned mind after reading this then is a mystery because it’s terrifying. Women can be terrifying. Very young women, especially. I guess I considered myself immune somehow to the darkness of this story because I thought of Miranda’s and my relationship as being close, loving, and SO much healthier than the one depicted here. I don’t know. Strout is a beautiful writer, I do remember that, and it was perhaps even more beautiful to me now that I’m a grandmother. Maybe age fosters appreciation? Beautiful prose.

The story is told alternately from either Amy’s or Isabelle’s point of view in the third person, so the reader isn’t always aware of some events told from only one perspective. This time around, I noticed that in the first half of the book, the majority is from Amy’s POV, but this gradually shifts so that in the second half, Isabelle’s POV is featured more and more. She is ultimately the far more interesting character.

Amy Goodrow is fifteen in this book, which unfolds over one unusually hot, dry summer. The fictional town of Shirley Falls, somewhere in New England, is where Amy and her mother, Isabelle Goodrow, have lived for all fifteen years of Amy’s life. Amy never knew her father, as he died when she was a baby. She’s a typical teenager in many respects—her naïveté, her lack of self-esteem, her trouble making friends in her high school. She’s not so typical in others—Amy is beautiful but doesn’t know it. She’s exceptionally smart. She is an avid reader. She’s tall, long-limbed, big-breasted, and she has a glorious head of long, curly, blonde hair that everyone says is her best feature. Amy uses her hair primarily as a shield, ducking her head and letting it fall over her face. She hides behind its thick curtain whenever she feels too exposed, which is frequently. She dutifully attends church with her mother every Sunday. Her one friend, Stacy, who normally hangs out with the popular kids, goes to lunch with Amy every day, and every day, they leave the school grounds and go into the edge of the woods, where they hide, gossip, and smoke cigarettes.

Isabelle Goodrow is Amy’s mother. She’s an executive secretary at the mill, the largest employer in town. She has arranged for Amy to work as a clerk in the mill office for the summer, or at least until Dottie returns from her medical leave. The kind of mill is never specified and hardly matters. It does matter that her coworkers are the only women Isabelle sees regularly, except for the women at her church. Isabelle feels slighted by these church ladies because they are married while Isabelle is not. They live in homes they own while Isabelle rents. They sometimes talk of their trips to Boston to shop. Isabelle can’t even imagine herself having the money or the free time to do this, and anyway, she is never asked. She is extremely aware of these differences between herself and the other women of the town who are roughly her age, and her chronic feelings of inadequacy overwhelm her. She “keeps to herself.” But the women she works with are, in her view, low class. Beneath her. She has worked at the mill for Amy’s entire life.

Amy and Isabelle have always lived together, by themselves. Isabelle hasn’t had a relationship with a man in Amy’s lifetime, and she is a very strict mother who tries to control every aspect of her daughter’s life. I think all mothers do this to an extent, but as the child grows and matures, your need to control lessens. Isabelle either hasn’t reached this point or is unaware it’s coming, but Amy is fifteen. The tensions between mother and teenage daughter have escalated by the start of the summer and are gloriously explored in this book:

“‘Use your napkin, please.’ She couldn’t help it: the sight of Amy licking ketchup from her fingers made her almost insane. Just like that, anger reared its ready head and filled Isabelle’s voice with coldness. Only there might have been more than coldness, to be honest. To be really honest, you might say there had been the edge of hatred in her voice. And now Isabelle hated herself as well.”

I think the everyday “hatred” Isabelle feels at this dinner of hamburger patties and canned beets isn’t so much hatred as it is fear. Isabelle lives in a constant state of fear. Fear of failing Amy, fear of losing Amy, and fear of Amy’s emerging womanhood. This seems related to Isabelle’s aversion to adult women in general: will Amy turn out like the women at the mill—uneducated and ignorant? Will she leave Isabelle without warning, maybe run away? Will she turn out like the women from church: thinking she’s better than Isabelle? Or, worst of all—will she turn out like Isabelle herself? We learn that something awful happened between the two on the first weekend after school let out for the summer, and that is the catalyst for all the current misery.

Amy’s substitute teacher for the winter/spring term in English is Mr. Robertson. He’s short, bearded, young, and interested in Amy. They begin meeting in his classroom after school, reading poetry and talking about literature, but progress to taking drives in Mr. Robertson’s car, long drives which end with parking on an old logging road at the edge of the woods. He’s a little more than twice Amy’s age. They never have actual intercourse, but they do engage in a variety of sexual activities. Amy is in love. She believes Mr. Robertson loves her too. Doesn’t he always say she’s his best and brightest student? Doesn’t he loan her books of poetry with special phrases underlined just for her?

Isabelle discovers the affair when her boss, Avery Clark, happens to notice a flash of steel glinting in the hot sun at the edge of the woods. Thinking it was someone whose car had broken down, he investigates further and sees his secretary’s teenage daughter, naked with a bearded man, in the back seat of a car. Being a man of discretion, he reports what he saw to Isabelle privately. He won’t tell a soul. Isabelle rushes home in panic. She and Amy proceed to have a terrible fight, during which Isabelle alternates between outright interrogation and withering condescension. Amy is vague, refuses to meet her mother’s eyes, and defends Mr. Robertson’s honor the only way she knows how: by insulting Isabelle:

“‘You don’t know what the world is like,’ Isabelle told the girl gently, almost crying herself, leaning forward slightly in the green upholstered chair.

‘No!’

Amy spoke suddenly, loudly, turning her wet face to her mother. ‘YOU don’t know what the world is like! You never go anywhere or talk to anyone! You don’t read anything…’ Here she seemed to weaken momentarily, but moving a hand sideways through the air as though propelling herself forward, she continued. ‘Except for the stupid Reader’s Digest.’

It changed everything, her saying that. For Isabelle, it changed everything. Remembering it weeks later, in the soft darkness of night, it brought to her the exact intensity of silver pain rippling through her chest that it had delivered at the time it was spoken; without moving, she seemed to stagger, her heart racing at a ridiculous pace.”

After the confrontation, Amy and Isabelle don’t speak unless it’s absolutely necessary. Each harbors a vast emptiness inside. For Isabelle, the empty feeling comes whenever she lets herself ruminate on what a bad job she did raising Amy—if the girl would so easily give herself to a man who could never return her affection…! For Amy, it’s self-preservation: she can’t think of it. Mr. Robertson hasn’t contacted her since Isabelle found out, her heart is broken, and she is consumed with thoughts of the love between them, so unbreakable and yet so fragile.

Each is resentful, hostile, and silent, nursing their separate grudges. The silence lasts all weekend. On Sunday, Isabelle erupts and calls information, gets Mr. Robertson’s address, and goes to see him. She tells him she knows about him and Amy, she could call the police and have him arrested for statutory rape, she could call the school superintendent and make sure he never gets another teaching job as long as he lives. He is impassive, polite, and tells her he’ll be gone by tomorrow. School is out, it was a temporary job anyway, and he doesn’t want any trouble. As she drives home from Mr. Robertson’s apartment, her emotions percolate and multiply:

“What she felt, turning into the driveway, was a fury and a pain so deep that she would never have believed a person could feel it and still remain alive. Walking up the porch steps, she wondered seriously, briefly, if in fact she would die, right here, right now, opening the kitchen door. Perhaps dying was like this, those final moments of being rushed along by some powerful wave, so that at the very end one did not actually care, there was no reason to care: it was just over, the end was there.”

Isabelle takes her fury and pain out on Amy the only way she can think of: she takes a pair of scissors and chops all of Amy’s beautiful, long, curly hair off—right at ear-level. Amy starts her summer job at the mill the next day, ashamed of her shorn hair, uneven and exposing her face. She doesn’t believe her mother yet that Mr. Robertson has moved away and will never be back. As the long, hot days at the office drag on (there is no air conditioning), mother and daughter, avoiding each other at home, avoid each other at work. They are both watchful; quiet. Amy watches her mother sometimes from across the expanse of the office floor, and despite all that has happened between them, notices things about Isabelle she never could’ve recognized before:

“He might have spoken her mother’s name, because Isabelle stopped in his door; Amy, glancing up again, saw the submissive hopefulness that lit her mother’s pale face, and then saw it disappear. A hole opened in Amy’s stomach: it was terrible what she had just seen, the nakedness of her mother’s face. She loved her. On the black line connecting them a furious ball of love flashed across to her mother, but her mother had returned to her desk now, was rolling a sheet of paper into the typewriter. And immediately Amy felt that loathing at her mother’s awkward, long neck, the wisps of moist hair stuck to it. But this loathing also seemed to increase some desperate love, and the black line trembled with the weight of it.”

Mr. Robertson makes good on his promise to leave town, and when Amy uses a pay phone to call him, his number is disconnected. She goes to the empty school and learns from a friendly janitor that he left permanently, probably for Boston…didn’t he always talk about wanting to teach there? Of course, she is completely shattered by the fact of his absence and the dawning realization that her mother was right about him, about them, and that he hadn’t loved her at all.

Over the summer, the heat is oppressive. The river dries up. Vegetables wither. Isabelle treats Amy as though she, and the whole situation with Mr. Robertson, were an alien event, unconnected to herself, surpassing even her private fears—the worst has happened. Now it’s even hard to look at Amy, much less live in the same two-bedroom house with her. Just watching Amy walking across the yard to the front door now causes intense storms of emotion within Isabelle:

“The anger arrived in one quick thrust. It was the sight of her daughter’s body that angered her. It was not the girl’s unpleasantness, or even the fact that she had been lying to Isabelle for so many months, nor did Isabelle hate Amy for having taken up all the space in Isabelle’s life. She hated Amy because the girl had been enjoying the sexual favors of a man, while she herself had not.”

Mother and daughter finally reach an uneasy kind of peace, but only once the weather turns cooler with the promise of fall. Isabelle finds herself responding to her coworkers’ various crises in ways she never would have dreamed before that summer. She had always thought of herself as far too busy with Amy to cultivate any outside relationships. She becomes caught up in these women’s lives and their need for friendship when one of them reaches out in a moment of crisis. Dottie—who’s had a recent hysterectomy—has suffered a blow. Her husband of 28 years has up and left her for another woman. Isabelle impulsively invites Dottie, plus Dottie’s best friend Bev, to spend the night in her home. She has never even considered doing this before. The three women stay up consoling Dottie and sharing confidences. In particular, Isabelle shares her best-kept secret with these two women, and afterwards, she finds she has undergone a change in how she thinks of not just Dottie and Bev, but also in how she sees herself. She is not better than these women! She is just like they are—doing the best she can in trying circumstances. The camaraderie—the friendship—alters her view about Amy and Mr. Robertson too. It was unfortunate, yes, and he was a predator, no doubt about it. But at least he hadn’t taken her virginity, so there was no possibility of pregnancy—something Isabelle knows about from personal, devastating experience.

The secret Isabelle confides to her two new friends is this: when Isabelle was seventeen, she fell in love with a close friend of her father’s. This man, Jake Cunningham, took advantage of her youth in much the same way Mr. Robertson would take advantage of her daughter’s youth years later. Unlike Amy’s misadventures with her teacher, Isabelle became pregnant by Jake. Isabelle’s own father died when she was twelve, but her mother was a gentle soul who wanted to help, not argue or condemn. So Isabelle had the baby, and her mother took care of baby Amy while Isabelle drove to the teacher’s college a couple of towns over. Her mother died that January of a heart attack in her sleep, so Isabelle dropped out of college. More than anything, she wanted a father for her baby, and there was no eligible husband material in their town, so she sold her mother’s house and moved to Shirley Falls. She never found eligible husband material there, either, but stayed because what choice did she have?

Dottie and Bev don’t react the way Isabelle thinks she herself would if told this story by someone socially superior to her. Isabelle would be shocked to speechlessness, then she would find a reason to excuse herself. But these women—her coworkers—are sympathetic yet not shocked. They don’t judge her, but upon learning that Jake Cunningham had been a father of three, they let her know that they feel Amy has a right to this information. She has siblings! The possibilities! The three of them sit, smoking, for hours, discussing all of this, men and their deficiencies, the world and its complexity, God and His mysterious ways.

The night produces a change in Isabelle’s worldview that manifests itself in how she sees Amy too, and not just Amy, but their relationship. In a gesture of apology, she takes Amy to a hairstylist to shape her hair, grown out a bit from the awful night Isabelle hacked it off, into a pretty style that shows off her face rather than hiding it. At the salon, the stylist asks if she can put a little makeup on Amy, just for fun. Isabelle has always forbidden Amy to wear any makeup at all, even lip gloss. To Amy’s astonishment, Isabelle says yes, go ahead.

“Isabelle smiled and nodded again, then looked out the window once more. Awful to think she was a disapproving mother. Awful to wonder—had she always frightened Amy? Is that why the girl had grown up so fearful, always ducking her head? It was bewildering to Isabelle. Bewildering that you could harm a child without even knowing, thinking all the while that you were being careful, conscientious. But it was a terrible feeling…knowing that her child had grown up frightened. Except it was all cockeyed, backwards, because, thought Isabelle, glancing back at her daughter, I’ve been frightened of you. Oh, it was sad. It wasn’t right. Her own mother had been frightened too. (Isabelle’s foot was bobbing quickly, in tiny little jerks.) All the love in the world couldn’t prevent the awful truth: You passed on who you were.”

Isabelle does tell Amy the entire story, and, at Amy’s request, writes a difficult letter to Jake’s widow, who writes back with forgiveness and regret that Isabelle hadn’t stayed in touch and hadn’t wanted money, when Jake had been ready to take financial responsibility for Amy. The three Cunningham children were eager to meet their sister, especially Catherine, the eldest, and would Isabelle care to bring Amy to the next family gathering in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for the baptism of Catherine’s baby?

The novel concludes as Amy and Isabelle are driving to Stockbridge:

“Yes, Isabelle would remember this drive, the yellow leaves, the autumn goldenness.[…] It marked to her the endless days of Amy’s solitary childhood, and those endless hot days of that terrible summer. All that had once been endless would by then have ended, and Isabelle, at different places and moments in the years to come, would sometimes be surrounded by silence and find in herself only the repeated word ‘Amy.’ ‘Amy, Amy’—for this was it, her heart’s call, her prayer. ‘Amy,’ she would think, ‘Amy,’ remembering this day’s chilly, golden air.”

[the-shelfish-reader]

KING SOLOMON’S CARPET

By Ruth Rendell (writing as Barbara Vine)

©️1991; 356 pg; Harmony Books

Ah, Ruth Rendell makes her first appearance (but not her last) in this blog. She’s famous in her native Great Britain, but I’ve never met anyone else who ever heard of her. She died in 2015, leaving an enormous body of work. All of it was published under her own name and a pseudonym, Barbara Vine. It took me a while to figure out the differences between a Rendell book and a Vine book—I loved ALL the Vine books, but I found fewer Rendell that I enjoyed. I first read Ms. Vine’s work upon the release of A Dark Adapted Eye, a tour-de-force of psychological suspense that was very different from Ms. Rendell’s well-known series of Inspector Wexford detective novels. She wrote other books under her own name that weren’t part of the detective series, some of which are every bit as suspenseful and psychologically complex as her pseudonym’s, and those I have all read.

Vine’s books are interested in the lives of ordinary people surviving, usually in London—either struggling economically, or, more likely, because of mental illness. Or both. She delves into the personalities of these people and she explores why they make the choices they make—and their various quirks, eccentricities, addictions, and delusions—with a thoroughness that’s riveting. I’m a psychologist’s daughter, so this is my jam. I love her careful reveal of how all these disparate lives with their attendant problems come together to form an engrossing story. No matter how I try, I can’t guess what the common thread will be amongst the characters, but they always evolve into a complete tapestry that touches them all with tragic and often profound consequences.

This particular story isn’t one I consider among her best, but it sucked me in all the same. It’s set in l988 London, where AIDS was making its way through the gay community and Communism seemed to be dying out, although it is NOT an AIDS-crisis story. The title refers to this:

It’s the London Transport Underground, familiarly known as the “tube.” A vast, interconnected system of trains, sometimes underground, sometimes not, that Londoners use to go everywhere it does. This book’s characters all use the Tube, some live near its stations and tracks, one is obsessed with it, some work in it, some commit crimes on it, and some die because of it.

“While they waited on the platform Jarvis told them about King Solomon’s carpet. This magic carpet of green silk was large enough for all the people to stand on it. When ready, Solomon told it where he wanted it to go and it rose in the air and landed everyone at the station they wanted. He said the tube reminded him of this carpet and elaborated his theme, but they were not listening.”

Jarvis Stringer has inherited the old Cambridge School building. His parents had run a school for girls after the war, so it was constructed with dozens of rooms and a bell tower, from which his father hung himself when Jarvis was a boy. At the start of this story, Jarvis hasn’t anywhere else to live. He received a small inheritance along with the school, which provides basic sustenance, but Jarvis needs money. Jarvis needs money because his hobby (obsession) is the study of major metropolitan subway systems of the world. Traveling is expensive, even for someone as frugal as Jarvis. He’s already been to New York to ride and inspect the world’s largest, he attended the opening of Atlanta’s MARTA, and has marveled at San Francisco’s BART, which has the deepest track in the world under its bay. He badly wants to visit Omsk and see the rumored many new stations and expansions of its system, and at the beginning of this book, he’s saving his money. He’s a kind man, even if nearly everyone would consider him eccentric. Jarvis doesn’t mind. While saving for his planned trip to Russia, he’s writing a book: a complete history of the London Underground. This takes up most of his time, sitting in his room in the School, typing. He is only vaguely aware of his surroundings, for he lives in his own head much of the time.

Jarvis decides to rent the rooms of the School for extra income. He charges rents so absurdly low as to guarantee a ready supply of tenants. These people, their backgrounds, their chance meetings, their passions and betrayals, their inadequacies and desires, all join together at the School. These connections, both planned and spontaneous, form the plot of this novel.

Occupants of The School:

Tina is Jarvis’s cousin. Her mother Cecelia and Jarvis’s father were siblings. Tina has two children, a 9-year-old boy named Jasper and a younger girl, Benavida. As the novel opens, all three have moved into the school with Jarvis. Tina doesn’t know who the fathers of her children are, as she has slept with every man she has ever met, including cousin Jarvis, long ago when they were teenagers. Tina’s mother, Cecelia, lives within walking distance of the School, but they don’t get along very well due to Tina’s aforementioned propensity for casual sex and lax attitudes towards disciplining her children. Cecelia disapproves of nearly everything about Tina, but she has learned to censor herself so she can continue seeing her grandchildren.

Tom is a talented singer and flutist, a musical prodigy who could play a little piano and trumpet, too. Tom attended the prestigious Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and flourished there. One day, instead of making the complicated train journey from visiting his grandmother’s house in Ealing back to London, he accepts a ride on the back of a motorcycle from his gran’s neighbor. They hadn’t gone a mile when the crash happened. The driver died under a lorry’s wheels, but Tom was thrown clear of the wreckage and hit his head on a tree. He spent six months in hospital with many broken bones and emerged, after several surgeries, with a permanently crooked little finger on his left hand. He has lost his place at school, he’s depressed, he has trouble concentrating, migraines, black thoughts, and rages (it’s obvious Tom has suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury, which wasn’t yet a thing when this novel was written.) He ends up busking in the stations of the Underground, trying to regain his former ability to play the flute.

Alice is 24, a gifted violinist, wife, and mother of a baby girl. Her marriage is loveless, and she felt nothing but guilt at being a mother whose heart wasn’t completely engaged by her baby. She longs to play her violin well enough to join an orchestra that would travel and perform regularly. Motherhood is incompatible with her ambition, so she leaves her family a note that she won’t be returning, and escapes to London with just £100.

Jed is a volunteer Safeguard on the tube. Safeguards are to England what the Guardian Angels are to New York: men who ride the trains, looking for trouble to stop. His passion, however, is his pet hawk, Abelard. Jed always smells of the rancid meat he feeds Abelard, so people generally avoid him, and he takes Abelard with him everywhere he goes, except on his nighttime train rides with the Safeguards.

All of these people, each unknown to the others (except Jasper and Tina), move into the School, and they all live together comfortably enough. Jarvis originally met Tom while walking through a tube station when he stopped to hear Tom’s classical trio busking. Jarvis met Jed on the tube, late at night during one of Jed’s Safeguard patrols. Because neither Tom nor Jed had a permanent place to stay, and because Jarvis was a kind man, he invited them both to move into the School. Alice, the runaway wife and mother, is the next to move in. Just after leaving her husband and daughter, upon arrival in London, she hears Tom’s voice and flute in the tube station. She recognizes the piece, she has her violin, and almost without meaning to, she joins in with the buskers. Tom falls in love with her the minute he sees her, and invites her to come live at the School. Tom and Alice are a couple from that moment on, but while Tom is madly in love, Alice is not—she just felt she had no alternative.

There is almost always an older, judgmental person in Barbara Vine’s books; one who feels superior enough to try to impose their views on other people, who manipulates and lies with equanimity, and we are definitely meant to dislike that character. In this book, it’s Tina’s mother, Cecelia. However, in this case, we are also meant to sympathize with and understand her frustration with her daughter. We are gradually, in small increments, given to understand that Cecelia and her best friend since school days, Daphne (both are in their seventies), are in love. Neither one is aware of it, exactly, and nothing physical ever happens. No words are spoken between them of this kind of love. They’re content to visit each other once a week and talk on the phone at exactly the same time every night. Cecelia is acutely aware of how the world perceives her:

“She might not have been there for all the notice they took of her. However, Cecelia was used to that and did not even mind much. She knew very well that the least noticeable, the most invisible and indifferently regarded of all human beings, is an old woman.”

Cecelia is old-fashioned, judgmental, and disapproving, yes; she also exhibits personal growth and self-awareness that were previously unknown to us as the story unfolds.

Terrible things have happened, are happening, on the tube.

The book opens with an account of an afternoon in the life of a much-pampered, privileged, wealthy woman who had always been “delicate” and fussed over due to her “heart murmur.” This unnamed woman takes a taxi to Harrod’s to buy a dress for a party that night. It’s a beautiful dress of pure white, heavily embellished and embroidered. On a whim, she decides to do what common people do and take the tube home. But she’s never been on it in her life, gets hopelessly lost, train after train, disembarking and waiting, shivering, on the platform, then getting back on another and being surrounded by rush hour commuters, squashed between them in the car. She spirals, hyperventilating, panicking, feeling suffocated, and her heart stops. The carrier bag she’d been holding, the one containing the white dress, had been trampled upon and nearly left on the train, but it was returned to her family, along with her body.

That opening vividly illustrated how frightening the tube can be, and imparts dread. Who was she? Why was the dress described so thoroughly? So she had a panic attack brought on by the crowd, which brought on a fatal heart attack, which is tragic for sure, but she has no connection to any of the characters. The significance of this event won’t be revealed until the end, and even then, you have to work a little bit for the connection, but when it comes, it’s just ANOTHER thread neatly woven into the tapestry that is this story. And there are many.

Tina’s son Jasper “sledges.” Sledging is riding face down on the top of a subway car itself. It’s illegal, and it’s dangerous. Jasper is nine years old, smokes regularly, has a tattoo of a lion on his back that nobody knows about, and cuts school so much he’s being suspended. Tina loves him in her own distracted way, but she doesn’t know where he is most of the time, doesn’t know (or doesn’t care?) about his truancies, doesn’t worry, and isn’t home herself for days at a time. Tina knows her mum lives just a short walk away, and she takes Cecelia’s proximity and availability for granted. Jasper’s fellow delinquents have been cutting class to hang out on the tube, generally being nuisances, annoying other riders, and smoking. One of them describes sledging and claims to have done it himself from one station to the next. Very quickly, Jasper becomes a veteran sledger who knows the tunnels and clearances of the tube, and he’s very good at it and never gets caught. But one of his mates, simply to avoid being dubbed “chicken,” attempts his first sledge ride while Jasper is sitting in the car below. The train had to slam on its brakes and come to an emergency stop while in a tunnel, on tracks high above the subterranean depths of older, deeper tunnels. The boy was flung from the roof and killed, right before Jasper’s eyes. By the end of the book, it seems likely that Jasper, too, will suffer from PTSD. That’s really unfortunate, as Tina will never notice.

Jarvis literally knows nothing about his tenants or what they do under his roof. He departs London for Russia about halfway through the book, and doesn’t return until after the climactic event occurs. But it’s through his obsession with subway systems and the book he’s writing about the London Underground that we are able to read various facts and trivia about the tube. I found these sections fascinating. Gradually, these sections become smaller, but contain more gruesome details. A huge fire at King’s Cross station destroyed much of it and killed 30 people. A train full of riders crashed head-on into a blocked-off tunnel and killed 50. Air raids during WWII caused massive amounts of people to seek shelter in the stations of the Underground; still, Luftwaffe bombs struck their targets, obliterating them and the people sheltering within. But there had never been a successfully-detonated bomb placed into the Underground by a person or people (this was written long before 7/7/05).

Everything this author does is in gradual increments that can go two ways when they’ve accumulated into a giant reveal: either it’s like a light appears and illuminates the truth of a character or situation, or it’s like all light is extinguished and you might feel a tight ball of dread that lodges behind your ribs because you know disaster is coming. Rendell/Vine is a MASTER at this.

The final character to enter this story, Axel Jonas, a man who apparently torments tube commuters for fun, encounters Jasper rather dramatically in a tube station just as Jasper flings himself off the top of the subway car, narrowly avoiding being decapitated by a steel overhang at the entrance to the tunnel ahead. Axel starts a conversation with the boy about his sledging, then offers to take him for pizza. Jasper is perpetually hungry, and he’s inclined to like this man because he doesn’t chide Jasper for sledging. Axel asks Jasper a litany of questions about the tube itself, specifically whether or not Jasper knows anything about “ghost stations,” or stations long closed and unused that trains never stop for. Some of these stations supposedly have ventilation shafts that go right up through the centers of office buildings. Jasper replies that Jarvis could tell him, Jarvis is his mum’s cousin, he knows everything about the tube, he and his family live with Jarvis at a school, Jarvis has even gone to Russia to see their subways, and then he gives Axel his last name. Jasper tries to memorize the man’s face with its cornflower-blue eyes, short dark beard, and short black hair, so he can tell Bienvida all about their strange lunch.

Axel turns up at the School. Alice, the only one home, answers the door. Axel pretends to know Jarvis, pretends he spoke to Jarvis before he left for Russia and rented a room from him. Alice accepts this (everything in the School is done on impulse without much deep thought), and Axel moves in. Alice is immediately entranced by Axel’s blue, blue eyes, and his mysterious nature, and eventually they begin an secret affair, in the rooms just above the room she shares with Tom.

What is gradually revealed is Axel’s sinister plan. He wants, badly, to destroy the Underground, or at least cripple it so badly that it stops running, hopefully forever. He uses Alice’s infatuation, Tom’s friendship, and Jasper’s youth in his attempt to accomplish this goal. Axel never tells anyone what he’s doing. He hides every part of it from his fellow inhabitants of the School, and selects Tom to be his unwitting accomplice in his mission. None of the characters have any idea of his plan.

Alice, lovesick and yearning, picks a night Axel is out, and goes through his suitcases, drawers, and cupboards. She doesn’t suspect him of anything, but is desperate to learn who he really is, where he’s from, and what he might be hiding from her. She finds, but does not recognize it for what it is, a heavy plastic bag taped shut that’s full of some kind of liquid. She seals it back up and returns it to the closet so that Axel won’t know she’s snooped. The room smells strongly of petrol afterwards. Oddly, she also finds, in an old, stained carrier bag hanging in the closet, a a beautiful dress of pure white, heavily embellished and embroidered, and she wonders: is this a gift for herself? There is a small photograph in his suitcase of a lovely woman with his same dark hair and cornflower-blue eyes, and Alice knows immediately the photo is of his sister.

Reading this was a bit like I imagine heaven to be. My heaven, anyway. I raced through the last parts of the book as the stakes got higher and higher, and the narrative thread got tighter. And as usual with Ruth Rendell, I marveled at the seemingly effortless way she weaves separate storylines together to create a cohesive, propulsive suspense novel. So much suspense! I won’t detail how the story ends, but you can guess, I think. I enjoyed this re-read!

[writerswritecompany]

Quotable – Ruth Rendell

Find out more about the author here

[the-shelfish-reader]

THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY:

Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

By Erik Larson

©️2003; 390 pg; Crown

The 1893 “World’s Columbian Exposition,” better known as the World’s Fair, opened to the public in May on the southern shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago. The nod to Columbus in the official title was ostensibly to celebrate the 400th anniversary of his voyage’s end in the New World, on October 12, 1892, and the word “fair” was deliberately left out. “Fair” conjured images far too pedestrian for what Chicago was building. “Exposition” was much grander, and the world had become accustomed to the shortened “Expo” as a term for marvels, wonders, excitement, food and drink, games, and activities brought together in one place and offered up (for the price of a ticket) for the public’s enjoyment. America was again taking her turn at hosting this extravaganza, and Chicago had beaten New York City and St. Louis for the right to host. Chicago had also officially become America’s second-most populous city according to the 1890 census, beating out Philadelphia, and civic pride was high. The city needed to show that it had recovered from the Great Fire of 1871, in which 18,000 buildings were destroyed and 100,000 people were left homeless. Civic solidarity strengthened as construction started on the site, known as Jackson Park.

At the same time, a young sociopath from New Hampshire named Herman Webster Mudgett made his way to Chicago, lured by the promise of the fair and its attendant spike in tourism and foot traffic. He would change his name to Dr. H. H. Holmes, taking his new surname from the popular novels of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s brilliant detective. “Dr. Holmes” worked as a pharmacist while building his “hotel” on a big lot at the corner of 63rd and Wallace, near the future Midway and main entrance to the fairgrounds. His dark, ugly, infamous hotel would rise just as the beautiful, shining buildings of the World’s Fair were being built by over 20,000 men.

Herman Mudgett, aka H.H. Holmes

This book is a perfect study in contrasts: the most high-minded American ideals of purity, patriotism, pride, and beauty versus the depravity of a serial murderer of men, women, and children. In particular, the commitment to architectural and landscape design beauty possessed by Daniel Burnham, the Chicago architect who became the fair’s Director of Works, is a great counterpoint to the sociopathic charm, insincerity, greed, and chronic dishonesty of Holmes. These are the two men whose stories are told, accompanied by transcripts of correspondence to and from both men, and the reader comes to know Burnham quite well. Holmes, however much we read his own words, remains a mystery. For me at least, all sociopathic true-crime killers’ minds will forever be impenetrable. Their charm is strictly surface-level; their intelligence bent towards manipulation.

I found the parallel narratives of Holmes’s Chicago years and Burnham’s years spent building the fair beautifully described, and I never got bored. But while I suppose the story of Holmes, his “murder castle,” his victims, and how he disposed of the bodies is fascinating, it’s the other half of the story that really glued me to these pages. The planning and construction of the 1893 World’s Fair, with all its complexity: the architects, the engineers, the steel suppliers, the horticulturists, the design and build of each individually-contracted building (that had to match, design-wise, with all the rest in order for the vision of Burnham’s “White City” to be realized)—the fact that this place existed at all was a miracle of American determinism. Burnham’s story is mainly one of a man with great artistic vision and inner strength plus the cooperation of thousands of people, working together to create and execute a World’s Fair that would AT LEAST rival the 1889 fair in Paris. That fair had the singular distinction of having unveiled to the world a tower, 1000 feet tall, the highest in the world at that time. The designer was Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, and newspapers all over the world reported on the wonder of its design and thrilling viewing opportunities.

Daniel Burnham, as Director of Works, hired Frederick Law Olmsted to design the exposition’s landscaping. Olmsted had designed and built Central Park in New York, as well as the lawns and gardens of several millionaires’ estates. Burnham personally oversaw and approved the design and construction of every building and every exhibit. But time was short—he’d only landed the assignment when the city of Chicago had, in 1891. Jackson Park was a neglected wasteland of scrub-filled sand and water, and all of it would be the foundations upon which he would build a place of such beauty that Chicago’s “Black City” would be repudiated by his “White City.” Burnham ordered that all buildings be painted white, except for the gold dome on the Administration Building and the gold atop the Statue of the Republic. Olmsted directed the digging of lagoons, the creation of a Wooded Island to show off the native Illinois foliage, the placement of gravel walkways, and the judicious planting of vines, ferns, and the occasional colorful wildflower. These two men, then, along with hundreds of other talented creators, built an entire World’s Fair out of nothing in something like 20 months. There are not many photos in the book, but this one shows a main attraction, the Peristyle, along the main plaza:

The dedication day was scheduled for October 12, the very first Columbus Day, celebrating 400 years of America. From 2021, this seems ridiculous, but…hindsight. The ceremony included only the top people in Chicago society and/or top administrators of the build. The fair wasn’t ready to open to the public by October 1892—far from it. Opening day was scheduled for May 1, 1893, and Burnham was nervous. Things had repeatedly gone wrong—workers had been killed in accidents and there were several fires. Unpredictable spring storms caused massive sheets of glass and steel ceilings of the largest building, the Manufacturers and Liberal Arts Building, to fall and shatter on the floor of the building, damaging many exhibits. But Burnham believed in repairing and moving on as quickly as possible from one catastrophe to another. Maybe he found encouragement to keep going in his belief that he had found the one crucial element that would forever distinguish his fair from all others, and possibly even surpass the 1889 Eiffel Tower in innovation and entertainment value.

Burnham knew he needed a centerpiece attraction. He contacted every reputable engineer he knew of from all across the country and solicited ideas. Some of the rejected ideas are HILARIOUS:

“…a tower with the height of 8,947 feet (nearly nine times the height of the Eiffel Tower), with a base one thousand feet in diameter sunk two thousand feet into the earth. Elevated rails would lead from the top of the tower (in Chicago), all the way to New York, Boston, Baltimore, and other cities. Visitors ready to conclude their visit to the fair and daring enough to ride elevators to the top would then toboggan all the way back home.”

“…[another] proposal demanded even more courage from visitors. This inventor…envisioned a tower four thousand feet tall from which he proposed to hang a two-thousand-foot cable of ‘best rubber.’ Attached at the bottom end of this cable would be a car seating two hundred people. The car and its passengers would then be shoved off a platform and fall without restraint to the end of the cable, where the car would snap back upward and continue bouncing until it came to a stop. The engineer urged that as a precaution the ground ‘be covered with eight feet of feather bedding.’”

But one young engineer who worked for the steel-inspection company contracted to the fair submitted a proposal for a completely original structure that had haunted him ever since he first heard the fair would be in Chicago. He’d gone so far as to work out much of the design, including the calculations to test its structural integrity, and he was satisfied his “Wheel” could be built, would work, and would be safe. His name was George W. G. Ferris, and his 264-feet-tall wheel would be built as a main attraction on the Midway, giving riders sweeping views of the fairgrounds and the lake. It would require 28,416 bolts and have 32 cars weighing 13 tons each, carrying an additional 200,000 pounds of human beings. Nobody had ever attempted anything like it, and it was enormously popular. From that point forward, every fair and carnival in America would have a version of the Ferris Wheel.

There’s so much interesting detail about the inventions and wonders on display at the fair, and so many surprising and unexpected guests. Dignitaries from all over the world sailed to America to attend, as did celebrities and aristocrats. Shredded Wheat was introduced to the public here. Visitors could listen to an orchestra playing live in New York via long-distance telephone. The first-ever zipper was exhibited to much enthusiasm. Intrepid visitors could visit the first all-electric kitchen, sample an oddly flavored chewing gum called Juicy Fruit, and munch on a new snack called Cracker Jack. Innovations in science were proven as Nikolai Tesla shot lightning from his fingertips while Edison displayed moving pictures on his “kinetoscope.” Francis Bellamy, an editor of Youth’s Companion, composed a pledge that he thought would be a fine thing for schoolchildren all across the country to recite in their classrooms on Dedication Day. The Bureau of Education agreed, and mailed a copy to virtually every school. It began, “I pledge allegiance to the flag…” And the magnificent Ferris Wheel drew ticket-buyers in exponentially greater numbers each month. Its popularity only grew as it was accepted as being a safe yet exhilarating ride.

The White City as seen from Lake Michigan

Meanwhile, Holmes occupied himself with completion of his monstrous “hotel” that became known as “the castle” in the neighborhood. It was an ugly building, particularly when compared to the brilliant and inviting facades of other buildings in the area, so close to the fair that it seems to have inspired individual owners to spruce up their properties as much as possible. Holmes used no architects or engineers to help build his hotel. He drew the plans himself and never allowed anyone, contractor or supplier, to remain on the job for very long. Later, it was surmised that this unusual practice of hiring and firing workers ensured that no one apart from Holmes had any idea of the scope of the building or what was inside. Corridors veered off at strange angles. Narrow hallways contained too many doors for there to be spacious guest rooms behind them. He also contracted a manufacturer to produce a box to his exact specifications: fireproof brick, eight feet long by three feet wide, “encased in a second box of the same material, with the space between them heated by flames from an oil burner.” His excuse for needing a coffin-sized kiln was to produce and bend plate glass for his fictitious Warner Glass Bending Company. At this point, Holmes had married twice (without divorcing) had at least one child, and had successfully pulled a number of small-to-medium con jobs in several states prior to his arrival in Chicago. He had undoubtedly also committed murder, but now he was poised to offer lodging to unmarried women or groups of women, some with children, who were visiting the fair. Many would never be heard from again, and their fates would be unknown until long after the fair had closed forever.

There is no doubt the 1893 World’s Fair left an indelible impression on America. When you consider that the population of the U.S. was 65 million, and the fair counted 27.5 million visits by tickets sold, it’s absolutely remarkable. On “Chicago Day” in early October of 1893, attendance was 751,026—“more people than had attended any single day of any peaceable event in history.” After it closed on October 30, 1893, Burnham and the rest of the planners and builders fell into a depression. Two days earlier, the wildly popular mayor of Chicago, Carter Harrison, was shot and killed by a young, floridly psychotic Irish immigrant (whose brief story is the book’s subplot.) The city itself succumbed to the sadness and loss a political assassination and the close of the shining, otherworldly White City brought to its residents. The buildings and grounds of the fair began their long slide into disrepair, and newspapers cried that it should all be burnt rather than the city’s residents see the iconic buildings blacken and collapse. This sentiment came true:

“On July 5, 1894, arsonists set fire to the seven greatest palaces of the exposition—Post’s immense Manufacturers and Liberal Arts Building, Hunt’s dome, Sullivan’s Golden Door—all of them. In the Loop men and women gathered on rooftops and in the highest offices of The Rookery, the Masonic Temple, the Temperance Building, and every other high place to watch the distant conflagration. Flames rose a hundred feet into the night sky and cast their gleam far out onto the lake.”

Holmes, too, left an indelible impression. In 1894, evading telegrams and letters from families of young women and their children who’d never returned from the fair or his hotel became unbearable. He was being sued by many of the creditors he still owed for their work on his strange, ugly building. Holmes decided it was time to leave Chicago, first setting fire to the top floor of his building in an attempt to erase it and its secrets, but the fire failed to progress beyond that floor. He tried to file a fire damage claim with his insurance company, but they refused payment and opened an arson investigation for which he was arrested and jailed in Philadelphia in 1895. But it was thanks to the obsessive work of one detective, Frank Geyer, that a murder charge was added and many more human remains would be found on Holmes’ properties. The alleged murder for which he would be convicted wasn’t of any of the young women he’d lured into a romantic relationship, but of Benjamin Pitezel, his assistant and employee at the hotel. Pitezel’s two small daughters were also missing and hadn’t been seen or heard from in months. He was murdered by Holmes after leaving Chicago for Indianapolis. His remains, and, cruelly, the remains of Pitezel’s two small daughters, were found by Det. Geyer in a rented house in Irvington, Indiana. Holmes was in jail in Philadelphia for insurance fraud, indicted for murder in Indiana, and he was wanted in Toronto, again for murder.

Eventually Holmes stood trial for the murder of Benjamin Pitezel, was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. His execution was carried out in May 1896. After his conviction, he confessed to 27 murders, 9 of which were confirmed prior to his death. Authorities estimated his count at 200 victims, but this was never proven. Was he America’s first serial killer? Certainly many other true crime writers believe so.

This book was just as fascinating to read now as it was the first time. It’s much more difficult to report on nonfiction than fiction. Names, dates, and places need to be accurate, and I’m always aware that I’m trying to summarize real events. That matters to me. I take far more notes/reference the text when I’m writing a book report that’s also a true story, but still, errors can happen. Any mistakes in this book report are my own. Erik Larson is a brilliant writer, and I own several of his books, so this won’t be the last time I write a report on one of his extraordinary true stories.

[the-shelfish-reader]

ALIAS GRACE

By Margaret Atwood

©️1996; 465 pg; Nan A. Talese/Doubleday

I didn’t really want to re-read this one because of the 2017 Netflix miniseries adaptation. I’ve only read this book one time, when I bought it new, but my memory of it was pleasant. When the miniseries debuted on Netflix, I tried to watch it, but it was terrible, which made me question my memory. That was my opinion in 2017. Maybe I’ll give it another shot now that I’ve finished the book, because I enjoyed it so much this time around.

This is fiction, yes, but it can be considered historical fiction. Grace Marks, her alleged crimes, and nearly all the characters who appear in these pages actually existed, and the events described actually occurred. In 1845, in Toronto, a 15-year-old household servant was arrested and tried for murder and being an accessory to another. The victims were Thomas Kinnear, an unmarried man of some wealth, and his housekeeper/lover Nancy Montgomery. They were killed with an axe (Kinnear) and by strangulation (Montgomery.) Grace was just a servant who did cleaning, sewing, laundry, gardening, and feeding the animals. Nancy was Grace’s superior, so she gave orders that Grace carried out. Kinnear’s farmhouse was in Richmond Hill, a suburb north of Toronto now, but in the mid-nineteenth century, it was so far from that city that it took eight or more hours to reach by carriage.

We meet Grace in the present of this book, which is in 1861. She is the narrator of her own life, and so the reader comes to know and understand Grace quite well, as first-person accounts are generally rife with the character’s thoughts, feelings, and perspectives. She is a convicted murderess who had her death sentence commuted to life in prison, mainly due to the efforts of a group of upper class professionals who found her story tragic and did not believe Grace could have committed one murder, much less two. Grace’s main defense at her trial was her near-total amnesia surrounding the night of the murders. She can’t remember what she said or did—only the terror:

“When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”

Grace and her family emigrated from Belfast to Canada. Her father was a talented and experienced stonemason. Tragically, her mother became ill (possibly with cholera), and died during the long journey by ship. She was buried at sea, a fact that weighed heavily on young Grace’s mind for the duration of this story. Upon reaching Canada, she, her father, and her nine siblings lived in two rooms in a boarding house much too small for them, wholly dependent on income their father managed to bring home.

Very unfortunately for his children, Mr. Marks seemed unable to move past his bad luck at having a wife who died just as the family was moving to improve their lives. A recurring theme of this novel is women’s suffering, always at the hands of men, and it begins here, with Mr. Marks’ belief that HIS troubles were to be blamed on his dead wife. He never really sought much work after arriving in Canada and spent most of his time in the local tavern. When Grace was fifteen, he told her it was time for her to get out and make her own way, just as he had done with her two elder siblings when they turned that age. And so Grace embarked upon her life in domestic service, offering her sewing skills and other qualifications in exchange for room and board, which is how things worked in 1845.

She meets the woman who became her best friend in the world at her first job. This was at the sprawling, very grand home of city Alderman Parkinson. We never learn this gentleman’s first name, as he is only referred to as Alderman Parkinson, so I guess that was a Very Big Deal at the time. Mary Whitney, the housekeeper (essentially her supervisor) was sweet-tempered, generous, and treated Grace like a sister. They shared a bed (again, it was 1845, so nothing sexual about it), confidences, and dreams, and Mary protected Grace and educated her in the ways of polite society and the dangers of impolite acquaintances. Like men. Some men were great men, like aldermen and doctors and judges—to be respected and maybe a little feared, but certainly trusted. Others were cads and blackguards who would try to take liberties, more often drunk than not, and they should never be trusted.

These lessons proved devastatingly ironic when Mary becomes pregnant by one of Alderman Parkinson’s adult sons. She refused to tell Grace the father’s name, only that she had told him and been given five dollars, then ordered away. So Mary and Grace began to plan a cover story for Mary’s abortion. They find a “doctor,” the procedure is performed, and Mary dies of blood loss in her and Grace’s bed.

Grace, grieving and in shock, is immediately dismissed. Mrs. Alderman Parkinson was furious that Grace hadn’t come to her and divulged all she knew about Mary’s pregnancy OR that she planned to terminate it, and therefore she couldn’t be trusted any longer. The woman is also frightened about the father’s identity, as it’s clear she suspects her sons. This loss is as painful as the loss of her mother, and Mary’s spirit stays with Grace from this point forward in her life, and is a significant factor in what happens later.

This is not the only unplanned pregnancy between an employer and a servant in this book.

Grace then accepts a position in the home of an upper-class gentleman named Thomas Kinnear, out in the country, where the total staff is only Nancy Montgomery and the handyman, James McDermott. He has a thing for Grace from the start, but she ignores him, then evades him as he begins to try to take all kinds of of sexual liberties with her. Mr. Kinnear is often gone for long stretches of time, and when he’s gone, Nancy asks Grace to sleep with her—in Mr. Kinnear’s bed. It slowly dawns on Grace that her master and his housekeeper are sleeping together, which was very scandalous at the time and seemed evil to Grace. So when Nancy starts gaining weight, then throwing up every morning, Grace knows exactly what’s wrong with her, since she observed Mary Whitney experiencing the same things early in her pregnancy.

One hot July night, McDermott approaches Grace and tells her he’s thinking of killing Mr. Kinnear so he can rob the house of its silver and other valuables. Grace doesn’t believe he’s serious. But of course, McDermott does it anyway, and since Nancy was a witness, he kills her, too. He then carried both bodies down to the cellar, methodically went through every cupboard and drawer in the house and took everything he could sell. He makes Grace come with him by making her believe that if she doesn’t, she will undoubtedly hang for the double murder, and so she complies. They are arrested in America, having managed to board a ferry to Maine.

The novel isn’t built like a linear story. There are alternating chapters from Grace’s first-person account of her life, which is introduced by way of a Dr. Simon Jordan, a psychologist, or alienist, who has traveled to the Toronto women’s prison to interview Grace and try to restore her memory of that night. The story of his interest in Grace’s case and their many sessions spent in therapy is the main focus of other third-person chapters. We learn Simon has a sharp mind and good heart. Grace never fully recovers her memories of the murders, but she knows she had nothing to do with any kind of violence. That evidently wasn’t enough to convince a judge and jury, but we the readers know she is innocent. There are many lengthy letters to and from Simon from various other doctors, prison wardens, and his family regarding his patient and her murder conviction. Some of this correspondence can be difficult to get through, but all of it fleshes out this strange period in American history and the prevailing attitudes towards mental health, “hysteria” in women, the servant class, and the appalling prison conditions of the time. The practice of psychiatry was in its infancy, and the observations made by various medical practitioners with regard to Grace’s mental status were influenced by the prevailing attitudes towards women and poorly-understood mental health issues, like trauma and amnesia. The age of ignorance is displayed in a snippet of correspondence from a doctor who oversaw Grace’s “treatment” immediately after her arrest to Simon:

“Continuous observation of her, and of her contrived antics, led me to deduce that she was not in fact insane, as she pretended, but was attempting to pull the wool over my eyes in a studied and flagrant manner. To speak plainly, her madness was a fraud and an imposture, adopted by her in order that she might indulge herself and be indulged…she is an accomplished actress and a most practiced liar.”

We and Simon never do learn, exactly, what Grace went through at the hands of McDermott, who testified both murders were Grace’s idea and that she helped him drag the bodies to the cellar (frankly unbelievable from what we know about Grace). His testimony was the main reason she was convicted, and he was also convicted and was executed by hanging shortly after her trial. But we do understand Grace’s temperament, her nature, her most private thoughts and desires, and we know she only cooperated with McDermott in order to survive. Her story has an happy ending (or as happy an ending as was posssible) when her conviction is overturned, she is set free, emigrates to America, marries and, by the conclusion, is three months into a miracle pregnancy herself. She is 45 and has spent 29 years in prison, so it’s a bittersweet ending, but doubtless far happier than she could have expected.

The novel is beautifully written, like all Atwood’s novels, and the everyday lives of people in the mid-19th century are finely drawn. It’s impossible to come away from this book and not be grateful the world has moved on. It’s no picnic in 2021 for either women or the poor, but we/they have more choices now than poor Grace Marks could ever have dreamed of.

[the-shelfish-reader]

THE BOOK OF ACCIDENTS

By Chuck Wendig

©️2021; 529 pg; Del Rey New York

I love Chuck Wendig’s writing. I also love his subject matter. I’ve been a HUGE Stephen King fan since I was 16, and Wendig has a similar style. This is the second book of his I’ve read, and both were excellent. It’s horror done perfectly.

I decided to take a break from my shelves and read an e-book via Kindle. I loved Wendig’s last novel, WANDERERS, and I knew I’d probably love this one, too. Spoiler alert: I did. Very much.

The titular “Book of Accidents” is a magic spellbook in the now, when we meet our main characters. But back in the beginning of last century, it was exactly what it said: a record of any and all violent accidents, resulting in serious injury or death, that miners met in the coal mines of “Pennsyltucky.” The story takes place in a region of Pennsylvania, upper Bucks County, that in this story (and maybe real life—I’m not sure, since Bucks County only means Amish country to me) had a productive coal mine a hundred years ago.

Nate and Maggie Graves and their 15-year-old son Oliver have moved to Bucks County from Philadelphia. Nate’s father finally died of cancer, and all he owned in the world was this house in the country and the land it sat on, which Nate inherits. He hated his abusive, alcoholic father, so it’s not sentimentality that prompts him to accept the house, but economics. Nate is a refreshing male horror story protagonist in that he isn’t an abusive father, isn’t an alcoholic, isn’t a drug addict—he’s a good husband and father, an ex-cop. His and Maggie’s marriage isn’t failing, and their son Oliver is well-adjusted and has great relationships with both his parents. Oliver has the unique ability to actually see emotional and physical pain and fear in people, just by looking at them. He sees their hurt as a black, coiling, shifting cloud, with tinges of red for their anger. Abusers beget abusers. Oliver quickly sees that the two boys in his new school who bully him the most are LIT UP with pain and rage inside, and he instinctively understands that their pain is borne of abuse and hatred. Later, he discovers how to reach into their psyches and remove their pain. Whether or not this is a good thing is up for debate.

An infamous local serial killer (or his ghost) haunts the parks and forests outside of town, particularly the “Murder Tunnel,” where he picked his victims. Nate is haunted by the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father. Olly is haunted by other people’s pain. Maggie is haunted by the wood carvings she makes of owls, which then fly away. Ramble Rocks, an area consisting of fields interrupted by giant boulders, is said to be haunted by the spirits of the girls murdered there.

There is a monstrous supernatural entity living in the Murder Tunnel that can (and does) choose to inhabit a human being. All the legends of various reported hauntings aren’t what they seem. We learn of the existence of alternate worlds and timelines, and that they’re being extinguished and eliminated, each falling into another as they die. The consequence of this catastrophic world-dying is that the line between “living” and “dead” becomes very, very thin. Dead people (or people thought to be long dead) return, and they can inflict actual physical harm on this world’s inhabitants. But there are also alternate versions of the characters in our world, and they too can appear and disappear like ghosts. Our world—the world we and the characters live in—is the final world left, and all of these alternate universe people, “travelers,” are hellbent on destroying it, too. There are other versions of Nate, Nate’s father, and Olly, and they interact with their “originals” in terrifying, life-altering ways. All of these supernatural phenomena, combined with Olly’s special sight and Maggie’s art-that-comes-to-life make for a delightfully tense, scary, and satisfying read.

I loved this one, and I couldn’t wait to read more every day. If you like long, dense horror novels with characters you can love, understand, and respect, then this one’s for you.

[the-shelfish-reader]

EDIE: An American Biography

By Jean Stein and George Plimpton

©️1982; 452 pg; Knopf

Edith Minturn Sedgwick, known as Edie, lived a brief, tempestuous life. She made her mark in popular culture in the sixties in New York City as an “It Girl,” spending her time associating with the burgeoning counterculture and its most famous and influential members. Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, Joel Schumacher, Nureyev, Jasper Johns, poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, Truman Capote, and the Velvet Underground (and Nico) were some of the people she spent time with in those days of Warhol’s “Factory,” setting fashion trends, breaking rules, making art, and doing drugs. Every kind of drug, in every form.

Edie, circa 1965

I’ve owned the same copy of this book for forty years, and it shows. But I’ve never given it up, and back in the day, I read and re-read it several times. While some of the themes of familial mental illness, addiction, and family trauma have stayed with me (I can relate), the horror of what happened to her and her family of origin is just as upsetting to me now as it ever was, and maybe it’s even more impactful now that I know and understand how such events shape a person’s entire life.

I’ll try to explain just how aristocratic Edie Sedgwick’s family was. Her great, great, great grandfather was an ally to Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, and was the Speaker of the House of Representatives. One of her great uncles founded Groton, the elite prep school in Massachusetts, and another was the editor of Atlantic Monthly. Every male member of her paternal side graduated from Harvard. It’s mind-boggling, how wealthy and influential the Sedgwicks (and the de Forests, her mother’s side) were. And I think that’s why Edie’s life and death made such an impact on American culture—you couldn’t believe this ball of beauty and energy and daring who was a member of one of the wealthiest and most prominent families in America could end up dead at 28.

Edie was the seventh of eight children born to Francis “Fuzzy” Sedgwick and Alice Delano deForest. She was raised on a 6000-acre ranch near San Francisco, where she and all her siblings learned to ride horses at a very young age. The ranch had its own private primary school staffed by tutors, so the children didn’t leave the ranch except for medical or dental appointments. The effect of being a kind of prisoner in their father’s bell jar was that the kids had no socialization with other kids their ages—just each other. Fuzzy was an odd duck, to put it mildly, who had already suffered two nervous breakdowns and subsequent psychiatric hospital stays before he even married Alice. His diagnosis was “manic depressive psychosis,” and the facts given by the people who talked for this book support the theory that mental illness can be passed from parent to child.

Fuzzy was, in the years after his children’s births, a tyrannical narcissist and alcoholic, and the things Edie and her siblings experienced at his hand were pretty horrific. They are all detailed by various family members in this book. All of them are included in the story at this link:

Edie Sedgwick

Edie Sedgwick was a socialite and model who became a muse to Andy Warhol in the 1960s.

Edie’s older brother Francis Minturn Sedgwick “Minty” suffered a mental breakdown in 1963 and was committed to Bellevue, in New York. He was transferred to a private psych facility in Connecticut, Silver Hill (the Sedgwicks should have received a frequent flyer discount here.) Reportedly, Minty communicated to his father that he thought he was gay, Fuzzy disowned him, and Minty hung himself with a tie in his hospital room.

Her eldest brother Bobby attended Harvard in between his stays at various mental hospitals and actually managed to graduate. He died while riding his beloved Harley, crashing it into the side of a bus on New Year’s Eve, 1964. Edie and her surviving siblings considered the accident to be suicide.

Tragedy after tragedy upon tragedy would be an appropriate motto for the Sedgwicks. At this point in the book, one feels the gathering clouds of dread that await our subject. Edie was bulimic, starting before her teens. She was committed to Silver Hill in 1962 at age 19, but its policies were found to be too relaxed—she wasn’t recovering at all—so she was transferred to New York Hospital’s Bloomingdale facility. She was erratic, suffered from extreme mood swings, and the bulimia had made her so thin, people mistook her for a boy. She was released, and soon after, she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, ostensibly to study sculpture with Lilian Saarinen, but probably mostly just to hang with the Harvard/Radcliffe students. She was noticed, she was popular, and developed a social circle consisting mainly of very rich, very attractive young gay men. She quickly became a star in the Cambridge art society circle.

During the Christmas holidays of 1964, Fuzzy demanded she return to California. She was on the other side of the country when Bobby had his fatal accident, but she soon had her own: she was shopping in Santa Barbara when she totaled her car and broke her knee. She was put in a hip-to-toe cast, but that didn’t stop her from returning to New York to live in her grandmother’s enormous upper east side apartment. Edie made an immediate impact among the artistic circles of the city. She soon moved into her own apartment, where the only art was a big pencil drawing on the wall behind the sofa that she had done of a white horse. She furnished it with odd pieces: heavy crystal lighters that never worked because she never filled them with lighter fluid, cushions covered with handmade textiles in bright colors, a big leather rhinoceros, and maribou feathers. VOGUE magazine dispatched a photographer to her apartment, and Edie posed in her ever-present black tights, Rudi Gernreich miniskirts, and huge, dangly earrings. The famous photo of Edie in an arabesque on top of her leather rhino, is below. They called her a “Youthquaker.” A young Patti Smith saw that photo spread, became obsessed, took the train into Manhattan and waited outside Edie’s apartment building just to get a glimpse of her exiting or entering, always from or into a limousine.

Edie in Vogue Magazine, summer 1965

It was inevitable that Edie would meet Andy Warhol, and it was probably equally inevitable that Andy would be fascinated with her. She dyed her hair silver so that she and Andy could be twins. Both were small, slight people—Andy with his trademark white hair and Edie with her short silver hairstyle—and they attracted much attention from the New York underground art scene. She became a regular at Andy’s “Factory” art studio/pleasure palace, mingling with the rest of his eccentric collection of artists, junkies, musicians, and devotees, many of whom would star in Warhol’s films, Edie included.

The number of truly astounding people who dropped in on the Factory—and the mix of personalities—and the drug use—is staggering. I can’t begin to list them all. Nobody who visited ever intended to actually live there, and although Edie had her own place, she came close. Andy certainly lived there, plus a smattering of boys he liked and who worked with him to produce his art and his films. Nonstop, 24/7 party people, all believing they were creating ART, and some of them were. But there were a lot of shady hangers-on whose reasons for crashing at the Factory weren’t about art. These people were shooting up speed, and the Factory was all about the drugs. Andy managed The Velvet Underground, who had their band gear set up in the Factory, and Andy designed that iconic banana on the cover of their album. Bob Dylan wandered in and out for a time, and it is said that his songs “Leopard Print Pill Box Hat,” “Just Like A Woman,” and “Like A Rolling Stone” were about his brief affair with her.

I can imagine the bright lights/big city atmosphere her wealth and status afforded Andy. He was already a rising star, but Edie and he arguably publicized themselves as The Power Couple of the underground art world AND A-listers invited to grand society events. Edie was a superb acquisition for Andy. She had a family background to die for, she was beautiful and rich, and she was seemingly up for anything. He cast her in his films. He attended glittery Manhattan parties with Edie on his arm. They frequented a club called The Scene where everyone danced, and Andy, as was typical, would watch. Sometimes Edie and Andy would dress identically. They went to museum openings, film openings, the works, but theirs was no romance. Andy was gay, and Edie loved being among the gay men of New York. They worshiped her.

Andy said that in the future, everybody will be famous for 15 minutes. In 2021, that statement seems very prescient indeed. It’s nearly true now, and it probably will be true in the not-so-distant future. Andy was a star maker, and he let his “superstars” have their 15 minutes, then tossed them aside. Edie split with Andy and the Factory crowd when she signed Albert Grossman as her manager. He was Bob Dylan’s manager, and Edie “ran off” with Bob Neuwirth, a friend of Dylan’s and former Factory habituè. Grossman had told her she would star in a movie with Dylan, which never materialized. Her exit from the Factory was the end of the Edie/Andy relationship.

Edie decided to try modeling, and VOGUE did a photoshoot with her again in 1966. Shortly after, Edie nodded off with a lit cigarette, and her apartment caught fire. Back to a hospital, this time Lenox Hill. After her release, she moved to the Chelsea Hotel, where another fire happened AGAIN in the exact same way. She went home to California for Christmas in 1966, tried to fill a prescription from a NYC doctor for speed, and her parents were notified. They committed her to the local county hospital.

This fragile person, on massive amounts of drugs, both prescription and illegal, was in and out of psychiatric hospitals for the rest of her life. None of her admissions were voluntary. Some of them lasted four to five months. Bellevue, Gracie Square, Manhattan State, and Lenox Hill in New York; Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara. It’s absolutely staggering to read how someone with so much promise was so hell-bent on destroying her body with all the shooting up, snorting, and smoking of acid, barbiturates, speed and heroin. One reads the last part of this book with a heavy heart, as if reading about someone you love.

Her father died in 1967 of pancreatic cancer. His brother Minturn told the biographers:

“I went to stay with Francis and Alice at the end of Francis’ life. I heard him say, ‘You know, my children all believe that their difficulties stem from me. And I agree. I think they do.’ He stated it; he felt it; he knew it.”

In 1970, the producers of Ciao, Manhattan! wanted to finish the movie they had begun in 1967. Edie had been the star, and they needed her to complete her scenes, so they brought the production to Los Angeles. They had an empty swimming pool that they used as Edie’s apartment, all painted with furniture installed, and Edie did, in fact, finish that movie. She had changed so much physically that actors had to say new lines that were written as exposition to explain why. She had gotten breast implants where before she had no breasts at all. Her hair wasn’t silver. She wore a fall—a long sweep of hair—but it was just brown. She had a year to live.

In July of 1971, Edie married Michael Post, another drug casualty, whom she had met while they were both inpatients at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara. They had been engaged for a very short time. It seems that she intended to try to make the marriage work, although she told a few people that she knew it wouldn’t work out long-term. On November 15, after attending a fashion show that was being filmed for the new, buzzworthy PBS reality drama, An American Family, and after drinking a lot at the afterparty, Edie died in her sleep. Her husband woke up to find her already past saving. The official cause of death was acute barbiturate intoxication, with acute ethanol intoxication as the secondary cause.

She was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Ballard, California. It’s a very out-of-the-way place, which I think she would have hated, being so eager for publicity and fame her whole life. Her gravestone reads “Edie Sedgwick Post, wife of Michael Brett Post, 1943-1971.”

I could link to any of the number of songs written about her. Edie Brickell’s 1988 “Little Miss S,” The Cult’s 1989 “Edie (Ciao Baby),” or the Dylan ones. I could list the movies that have been made about her life, like “Factory Girl” with Sienna Miller. I could transcribe the beautiful poem Patti Smith sat down and wrote immediately after hearing of her death. I could quote what people who loved her, or who were dazzled by her, said upon learning the awful news. I could write hundreds more words about her life and struggles, her overdoses, her self-destructive impulses and urges, all the fires she accidentally set. But I don’t need to. Her enduring impact and influence on pop culture makes her immortal.

[the-shelfish-reader]

THE HOUR I FIRST BELIEVED

By Wally Lamb

©️2008, 723 pg, HarperCollins

“Why is it that these damaged people who can’t take the pain anymore have to pick up firearms and go out in a blaze of glory? Destroy other people’s lives along with their own?”

Caelum Quirk and his school-nurse wife, Maureen, have moved to Colorado after experiencing a major disruption in their lives at home in Three Rivers, Connecticut. Maureen had an affair and Caelum found out. Though they stayed together, the residual anger and bitterness Caelum felt towards Maureen left him emotionally stuck to memories of her betrayal, so they decide to move west in an effort to leave hurtful memories behind. They move to a suburb of Denver—Littleton—where the main event of this story happens.

The fulcrum upon which this novel rests happened, in real life, on April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. In this novel, Caelum has taken a job as a teacher at Columbine; Maureen is the school nurse. On the day Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris massacred ten students and one teacher, then killed themselves, Caelum had flown back “home” to Connecticut to attend to the recent death of his great-aunt Lolly. Maureen, however, was at work that day. She was in the library, scene of the murders of those ten students, and hid in a cupboard in the faculty break room until the shooting was over. Maureen heard the shots, the screams, the things Harris and Klebold said, and she believed they would find her and shoot her, too.

This story was a little tedious on this second read, I have to admit. Caelum, who narrates the book, isn’t very likeable. He’s got a temper, engages in much self-pity, and says/thinks/does many, many things that are incomprehensible to me. Maureen has a severe, severe case of PTSD from that day, and begins taking more and more tranquilizers to cope. But she isn’t coping. At all. And Caelum is, despite his “understanding” of his wife’s problem, impatient with her slow recovery. He’s also perplexingly blind to Maureen’s changed self and how to best help her with recovery.

They decide to return to Three Rivers, Connecticut, Caelum’s birthplace and the location of his family’s farm. His family also founded, and operated, a correctional facility for women. The great-aunt who acted as a second mother to Caelum and whose death called him away from Colorado, Lolly, was the warden of the prison until her retirement. So there is a LOT of Quirk family history that remains in the old place, but still, Caelum and Maureen are so exhausted from living in Littleton with the constant reminders of the school shooting that a return to small-town life back home sounds like it might be their rescue. But it isn’t.

Maureen doesn’t get better back in Connecticut. She begins to doctor shop to get extra prescriptions for tranquilizers and sleeping pills. She finds a job at a hospital, working the night shift, but she begins stealing any liquid tranquilizer leftover from her shift and injecting it. Soon enough, she drives home from work one pre-dawn morning, high on downers, and falls asleep briefly behind the wheel. Unfortunately, at that same moment, an overachieving high school senior boy runs across the highway and is hit and killed by Maureen. She is sentenced to five years, and is incarcerated at Quirk Correctional Institute—the same prison founded and run by Caelum’s family in years past. Now it’s just a women’s prison, with all the attendant problems found in 21st century American prisons.

This is a long book, and I think much could have been edited out without hurting the story, but I’ll summarize: Caelum’s mother was not who he thought she was, and he discovers the identity of his birth mother after Maureen begins serving her sentence. Caelum and his family’s old handyman dig up a steel chest whose contents are two mummified, dead babies. None of this has anything to do with the Columbine massacre, Maureen’s deterioration, her vehicular homicide charge, or her prison term, which were the core points of the book. All of it concerns Caelum directly, and he is far from the most interesting character in the book, so it seemed like a lot of unnecessary detail. I didn’t feel sorry for him before these events occurred, and I didn’t feel sorry for him after they were discovered, so I can’t say the additional 300 or so pages that concerned all his family history were interesting or important to the overall story.

In the end, Maureen literally drops dead from a cerebral hemorrhage, still incarcerated. I’m not sure why Mr Lamb decided to kill off half of his protagonist couple just before the end of the book. I have the feeling it was to both add to Caelum’s guilt/pain and remove a loose end, and neither worked for me. In the end, I still think this character was unsympathetic, being maddeningly blind to obvious signs of trouble with Maureen post-massacre, and I couldn’t quite overcome that feeling of dislike.

Throughout the book, Caelum professes his atheism, or at the very least, agnosticism. By the final page, however, he becomes a believer in a higher power, not necessarily God, and that’s where the title comes from. I’ve read and re-read that last page, trying to fathom the why of his conversion, and I still don’t get it. But this book was a wonderful meditation on guns, mentally ill teenagers, PTSD sufferers, prison inmates and prison administration, and teachers’ responsibilities to their students.

[the-shelfish-reader]

SHOT IN THE HEART

By Mikal Gilmore

© 1994; 403 pg; Doubleday

(Back row: Frank Sr. and Bessie Gilmore, Front row: Frank Jr., Gary, and Gaylen)

In 1977, a career criminal with a long record, who had been sentenced to death in Utah for two counts of capital murder, made international headlines. His name was Gary Gilmore. He was 36 years old. There hadn’t been an execution in America for nearly ten years. Utah was and is, of course, the nearest thing to a theocratic state in the U.S., heavily influenced by the LDS church in all matters relating to crime and punishment. It was the territory whose Mormon-dominated legislature, in 1857, drafted a criminal code that provided for death by hanging or firing squad in the cases of convicted first-degree murderers. The latter method also satisfied the early Mormon covenant, conceived by Joseph Smith himself, of “Blood Atonement.” Simply put, if one took a life, one must shed one’s own blood into the earth as an apology to God in order to have any chance at salvation. Early LDS history is rife with bloody, violent murders for crimes ranging from apostasy to rape to horse-theft. There are accounts of men murdered simply because they were perceived as an enemy to the LDS Church.

Gary became a celebrity due to his rejection of all appeals and reviews of his sentence. He demanded the State of Utah proceed with his death, by firing squad, as swiftly as possible. In the sociopolitical climate in America at the time, which hadn’t seen an execution in ten years, Gary’s demands were unthinkable. He was convicted in early October and was executed in January, and his last words, according to Mikal, were, “There will always be a father.” According to other sources, his last words were, “Let’s do this.” I think he probably said both. In any event, his execution-style murder of a Salt Lake City motel manager, followed by a similar shooting of an unarmed gas station attendant, were most definitely done in cold blood. At the time of the murders, he was out of prison on parole.

This is Gary Gilmore’s story. More broadly, it is the entire Gilmore family’s story, told by his youngest brother, nearly 20 years after Gary’s famous death. It’s even more interesting to me personally, as a true-crime enthusiast, because I knew Mikal Gilmore’s writing very well through Rolling Stone magazine. He was a staff writer there for a long time; I had a subscription for the same long time. His pieces were always really great reads, no matter the subject. I never associated his last name with that of Gary Gilmore, celebrated dead murderer, whom I had read about when I was a teenager. When this book was published, I was shocked the two vastly different Gilmores were, in fact, BROTHERS, and I ABSOLUTELY had to know how this was possible.

I should note that the famous author Norman Mailer wrote his own book about Gary Gilmore, which provided Mikal with information about his family—a family whose background was shrouded in secrets. THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG was published in 1979, and a few years later, it was turned into a TV movie of the same name. Gary was played by Tommy Lee Jones. Mikal says he saw no trace of the Gary he knew in Jones’s performance; then again, Mikal states multiple times that he didn’t really know Gary at all. More importantly, in an effort to avoid the family “curse,” Mikal had maintained a detachment from the story of his family that didn’t resolve until Mailer’s book was published. He was unaware of much (maybe even most) of his family history beyond the fact that he had a mother and a father. I think maybe Mikal didn’t want to know. But Larry Schiller (a producer on the movie) and Mailer made the tapes of all their interviews with Bessie Gilmore, Mikal’s mother, available to Mikal, and that’s when he learned the details of the family’s exploits in the years before his birth in 1951.

Gary on death row, 1976

Mikal (born Michael, changed in high school) Gilmore is an hugely talented writer who tells Gary’s story with sensitivity, love, and a massive, undeserved amount of guilt. The depth of sadness, shame, and abuse this family of “black sheep” had always suffered is almost unbearable to read. I felt Mikal’s grief and empathy for all his subjects, no matter how much they terrified or confused him. It’s unsurprising he had to struggle to make sense of all the turbulence within that group of damaged people he knew as his family in order to overcome their awful destiny. In writing this meticulously researched book, he attempts specifically to pinpoint the exact moment it all started to go so horribly wrong for his parents and his brothers. An impossible task, as it turned out.

More than just a personal story, this book is about a certain subset of Americans who have always existed: their economic prospects grim, their interpersonal relationships bleak, plagued by alcohol abuse and physical abuse, always known to the law, shunned by “polite” society and even elder generations of their own families. The Gilmores’ family history is a tale of two such societal outcasts who had the misfortune of meeting and marrying and procreating, inflicting grave emotional, spiritual, and physical damage on each other, and, most painfully, on their children.

Frank and Bessie Gilmore had four children: Frank, Jr., Gary, Gaylen, and, nearly ten years later, Mikal. Frank was a drifter and small-time criminal; Bessie a young Mormon woman dissatisfied with her life as one of nine children on a small farm in Provo. Frank was in his forties, and, unbeknownst to his new bride, had been married six or seven times and had a child or two whom he then abandoned; Bessie was barely out of her teens. He was an ad salesman for Utah Magazine, and he traveled through the southwestern United States as the result. Together they logged hundreds of miles traveling the back roads of Utah, Arizona, California, Nevada…and once the children began arriving, they too were packed in the back of the station wagons Frank preferred and taken along. These weren’t pleasant trips. Frank and Bessie fought, screamed, threatened, and hit each other for the majority of time spent on the road, while the children cowered in the back.

By that time, Frank was pulling a con on advertisers. He’d secure payment in advance for an ad to be run in the magazine, then abscond with the money. It was the family’s main income in those early years, but it also came with fear of the ever-present law enforcement threat. Sometimes, the perceived threat was directly from the person robbed. In those days of lynchings and mob mentality, one can understand the fear this family felt, which permeated right down into the children’s lives. It was no way to live. For anybody.

In 1941, when Bessie was pregnant with Gary, they were in Selma, Alabama, on an unknown “job” Frank had to do. She was over eight months along, and the plan had been for them to make their way back to Sacramento, where Frank’s mother lived, to have the baby. Frank’s Alabama activities dragged on so long that, as they were driving west through Texas, Bessie went into labor. They stopped in the next town with a hospital, McCamey, Texas—an oil boom town in the western part of the state. There Gary was born. However, Frank gave assumed names at check-in, and he named the baby before Bessie had recovered from the anesthesia given out routinely in those days. Hence, Gary Mark Gilmore was born Faye Robert Coffman. Once they had left the state, Frank took Gary’s birth certificate, tore it into little pieces, and said it was over and they could name him whatever they wanted. (That is the story Bessie told Mailer, but she kept a copy, which Gary found twenty years later. He accused her of having an affair with someone named Coffman—a frequent alias used by his father, but Bessie never explained, and Gary never spoke of it again).

The theme of destroying “official” things like marriage licenses and birth certificates, then making up events, names, and occurrences to suit their own needs in the moment recurs so often in this story, it becomes the Gilmore ethos. I suppose these small acts of destroying records were a rebellion against authority. Sudden departures, without warning, and without any promise of return, happened again and again. Once, memorably, Frank, Bessie, toddler Frank, and infant Gary were driving through northern Missouri when Bessie talked Frank into stopping at a gas station. She needed to change Frankie’s diaper and stretch her legs. When she and Frankie emerged from the bathroom, Frank Sr., baby Gary, and the station wagon were gone. She waited until nightfall, but Frank didn’t return. The gas station attendant locked up for the night and asked Bessie if he could take her to a nearby town that had a hotel and a bus station. Bessie wired her parents in Provo for the bus fare to come back to Utah. This had to be an extra-humiliating experience for her, because she knew her parents disliked Frank and didn’t approve of her marriage to a Gentile so much older than she, not to mention the rootlessness and unforeseen disappearances of this man they distrusted. Several days after arriving in Provo, she got a telephone call from an orphanage in Des Moines—they had Gary. They informed her Gary’s father had been arrested and jailed on a charge of passing a bad check; hence baby Gary was brought to them. Bessie again borrowed money from her parents, took Frankie, and went to Iowa. There she reunited with Gary, found a job as a housekeeper in return for room and board, and waited for Frank to get out of jail. This was the sort of everyday chaos the Gilmores lived in throughout the forties.

Eventually, Frank Sr. went legit, creating his own Building Codes Digest for Portland, Oregon. He compiled all the city building codes in an easy-to-reference handbook, with advertising space for interested buyers. It was a success, they bought a house in Portland, and by 1951, when Mikal was born, they were living comfortably. However, Frank and Bessie’s violence continued to erupt, as dependable as the sunrise. Frank beat his wife regularly. She bore the marks—black eyes, lumps on her face, bruises on her arms and neck. As soon as any of the children grew old enough to defy Frank, they too became recipients of regular beatings. Nobody provoked Frank as much as Gary did, and consequently, he bore more than his share of the daily household violence. Gary was beaten repeatedly by his father. No one intervened, and Bessie never tried to take the children away, never tried to leave this man of secret sorrows and rage, for the same reasons women stay in abusive relationships to this day.

Their last son before Mikal was Gaylen. His fate would be to live a life of petty crime, much like brother Gary. Gaylen would die at 27, in 1971, home in Portland, Oregon from a lengthy stay in Chicago. Portland was where the family finally settled permanently, with Frank making trips to Seattle for the new handbook he’d created of that city’s building codes. Mikal was a student at Portland State, living in an apartment downtown. He only knew what his mother told him: that Gaylen had returned, that he wasn’t well, he’d had a stomach problem and undergone surgery in Chicago, but he was “not himself.” Mikal didn’t know the truth of the circumstances of Gaylen’s death until after Gary’s execution and Mailer’s book, and to this day, he still doesn’tknow the details because Bessie would never tell him. He states, “This much I do know: Gaylen got stabbed in Chicago. Horribly, viciously and repeatedly.” His wounds never healed, and he died of what was apparently sepsis, in the hospital, after another surgery. The why of his stabbing will never be known, and isn’t important. I think it’s notable that in this family, two of its sons would meet violent death by different means. Can this be attributed to the history of violent crime, both hidden and known, that ran through both the father and the mother that somehow combined in the sons to predispose them to terrible deaths?

Mikal believes this to be true. A cursed family legacy. You can feel the pain in his words. When I originally bought and read this book upon its release in 1994, I had no way of learning whether or not Mikal ever came to terms with his family’s past. It was clear that by the time he’d finished this book, he had not. But time does heal, and I have always wished him the best possible emotional reconciliation with the causes of his nightmares (invariably, terrifying dreams starring one or more family members). I’ve researched him now, in 2021, and I’m delighted to see that he’s married to an accomplished woman, and they have at least one child, a beautiful boy. Mikal battled throat cancer caused by HPV recently, and he seems extremely grateful he survived not just the cancer, but the attendant therapies that follow such a diagnosis. I’m grateful he survived his family of origin, and I’m immensely cheered that he seems to be leading a happy life.

It’s hard to describe the level of Gary Gilmore’s fame (or infamy) at the time of his fight to die. He was on the cover of every American newsmagazine at least once. European newspapers covered the story with breathless anticipation. In America, I saw his face on the nightly news so often, I still remembered it in 1994 when I first read this book. There is even a punk rock song by a band from the U.K., The Adverts, who released a song about him, or more accurately, about how it would feel to see the world through his eyes:

Frank Sr. died in 1962 at age 72 when Mikal was 11. It’s maybe not so remarkable that the son born later, after the family’s nomadic days were over, would be the one son who would escape the family dynamic and find success in his chosen field. And for Mikal, that field was rock and roll music. His brothers had grown up on Elvis and Johnny Cash, but Mikal fell in love with The Beatles and Bob Dylan. Reading and music became his outlets, and he’d wait out the various, constant arguments and fights going on around him at home, hiding in a corner, reading his books and waiting out the storm.

I find it remarkable that the first child born to the Gilmores, Frank Jr., didn’t live a life of crime and its inevitable punishment. Frank Jr. was soft-spoken, even-tempered, and shy. He was prone to bouts of depression—not a great surprise. And he became an observant Jehovah’s Witness in his young adulthood. He had been drafted into the Army during Vietnam, but his application for conscientious objector status was denied. He was discharged, having spent two years in Fort Leavenworth for refusing to handle a weapon, and without ever having left the country. After Gary’s execution, Bessie’s death, and Gaylen’s horrible, protracted death, Mikal and Frank became closer than ever before. There was a 12-year age gap between them, and the lives their parents had forced them to live didn’t allow for much brotherly intimacy. They took trips to Utah together, visiting their mother’s family and even the scenes of both murders Gary had committed. Frank’s crystal-clear memory was as informative as Mailer’s books and interview tapes, and the clouds that had surrounded many defining events of their shared history cleared for Mikal.

I found the following quote to be an informed perspective on the way all devout Mormons think of generational sins. No doubt Bessie was made to study this text as a standard part of growing up Mormon in early 20th century America:

“The single strongest instance of blasphemy in the Book of Mormon occurs when a charismatic atheist and Antichrist named Korihor stands before one of God’s judges and kings and proclaims: ‘Ye say that this people is a guilty and fallen people, because of a transgression of a parent. Behold, I say that a child is not guilty because of its parents.’ For proclaiming such outrageous words, God strikes Korihor mute…[he] is left to wander among the people of the nation…and the people take him and stamp upon him, until he lies dead under their feet.”

The Bible is a mass of contradictions about this subject. One can find verses supporting the idea of generational sins, and others that echo the words of Korihor in the Book of Mormon.

It’s a sad story. Very sad. I believe that the best gift Mikal could have given his father, mother, and brothers was to succeed in whatever he chose to do. He was the family’s first member to attend college (on a scholarship), and certainly its first to make a name for himself. That he did so in journalism strikes me as miraculous. Bessie would have been so relieved that, in his case, the sins of the father would not be counted against the child.

[the-shelfish-reader]

LIVE FROM NEW YORK

AN UNCENSORED HISTORY OF SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE AS TOLD BY ITS STARS, WRITERS, & GUESTS

by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller

©2002; 596 pg; Little, Brown

It’s a uniquely difficult task to write a review of a book that’s an oral history told by many disparate voices about a TV show that, when this book was published, was 26 years old. Also, it’s a monster of a book, coming in at nearly 600 pages (!). But it’s such a pleasure to read what luminaries of the comedy world remember about their time on a show that, as Dan Aykroyd put it, was like “the Master’s Program in comedy.” Every single person interviewed for this book, without exception, REVERES the show. And they look back with so much love and gratitude for having had the opportunity to be a part of it, while also recalling hurt feelings, power struggles, experiences of misogyny and racism, 18-hour days (some cocaine-fueled, others not), but still, a time they all remember as the greatest days of their lives.

But it’s also hard because this book contains interview snippets with, like, 150 different people involved in the show who shared their memories. That’s a lot of different, contradictory, FUNNY viewpoints.

When SNL premiered on October 11, 1975, I was 16. I saw that first show live. There wasn’t much else to do at that age, television had always been my friend/teacher, and there were only three channels available back then (and sometimes, if you were lucky, a PBS station). I had no idea WHAT this weird new show was about, but I will never forget seeing the very first cold open: John Belushi and Michael O’Donoghue (head writer) do a sketch titled simply, “Wolverines.” If you haven’t seen it, you should, because none of us, nobody, had ever seen anything like it on TV or anywhere else:

Delightful, strange, and HILARIOUS. The show has changed in many ways since those days, but the premise and the format have basically stayed the same, and well past the publication of this book, up to and including last Saturday’s 47th season opener. This show has been on the air, performed the same way as the first show, for FORTY-SEVEN YEARS straight. Just think about that. How is it possible? This particular oral history strongly suggests that the main reason for its longevity is one man: Lorne Michaels.

Lorne is the rock of SNL. He liked to hire unknowns—potential comedic geniuses who were crushing it in the comedy clubs of Chicago, L.A., and New York, then throw them together in a high-pressure environment and see what resulted. The performers, writers, and writer-performers (almost all performers had to write for themselves and castmates, too) are LEGENDARY. I’m going to give you a PARTIAL list of the comedians who passed through SNL in some capacity at some point in their careers:

John Belushi

Gilda Radner

Dan Aykroyd

Garrett Morris

Chevy Chase

Jane Curtin

Bill Murray

Al Franken

Eddie Murphy

Joe Piscopo

Julia Louis-Dreyfus

Billy Crystal

Martin Short

Christopher Guest

Robert Downey, Jr. (True! For one forgettable season in 1980.)

Anthony Michael Hall

Damon Wayans

Jon Lovitz

Dana Carvey

Dennis Miller

Kevin Nealon

Conan O’Brien

Larry David

Bob Odenkirk

Phil Hartman

Chris Farley

Mike Myers

Adam Sandler

David Spade

Chris Rock

Rob Schneider

Norm Macdonald

Will Ferrell

Jimmy Fallon

Colin Quinn

Tina Fey

Tracy Morgan

Molly Shannon

Maya Rudolph

Chris Kattan

Rachel Dratch

Every person on this list still living at the time gave extensive interviews for this book. There are segments from guest hosts like Steve Martin, Alec Baldwin, John Goodman, Lily Tomlin, and Robin Williams. Executives behind the curtain, producers, casting agents, and actual titans of the entertainment industry also contributed excellent background on the “suits” and the power they had (or didn’t!) over the show’s content, personnel, and format.

I mean, that is a mindblowing list, and again, this is only up to roughly 2001! None of these people are still there now, but their influence is everywhere. I feel it every time I watch. I’m a comedy person. I LOVE to laugh. I’m definitely the target audience, so I bought this book when it was first published in hardback, and have hung onto it through several major book downsizes I’ve done over the years. I remember my first read as just an immensely enjoyable experience—an epic dive into all this fascinating background minutiae. And just exactly how do they write and perform these 90 minutes, every Saturday night from 30 Rock, at 11:30pm, live without a net, year after year? The answer to that is in these pages, and it’s a process of extraordinarily hard work done by all these talented people, week after week.

Nobody remembers the name Charles Rocket, but he was a main cast member in the 1980-81 season. He said “fuck” on air, the censors didn’t catch it in time, and the then-executive producer, Jean Doumanian, was fired as a result. She took over from Lorne after the first five, magical, original-cast years. She lasted 10 whole months, and was replaced by the network suit who’d gotten SNL on the air, together with Lorne, in the beginning. His name was Dick Ebersol, and he lasted four years. The show was in a grave decline in the early eighties. Everyone left when Lorne did—all the brilliant, iconoclastic, talented writers who were tuned into the specific tone SNL had maintained for its first five years were gone. Lorne returned in 1985, did the work, and turned the course of the show around. In later years, they kind of had a revolving door policy: you might have quit, you might have been fired, but if you bided your time and did good work somewhere else, you could always ask to come back (even if only for one show).

This is a recurring cycle in this show’s history—there’s an upward trend of “oh, everybody watches this show and it’s funny and relevant and irreverent simultaneously” followed by years when the quality declined so much the media started referring to the show as “Saturday Night Dead.” Then the evolution begins anew as changes are made/happen. Cast members and writers come and go (in many cases, fired outright), and so the phoenix rises. Again.

The huge tragedies the show has survived are detailed extensively, and the quotes and interview segments used are very emotional. The death of John Belushi from an overdose at age 33, in 1982, devastated everyone who knew him. His death left an enduring legacy on the 17th floor at 30 Rock, the show’s home since day one—no more drug use at work. At least not openly. And if that seems really weird from a 2021 perspective, I’m telling you—the seventies were different. People quoted in this book who were there for those first five seasons tell of a pervasive smell of weed emanating from the offices. Coke was ubiquitous. Nobody knew Belushi used heroin, and generally, people simply didn’t know such a new and “innocuous” drug like cocaine could, in fact, kill you. And after John died, drugs vanished from the offices, studios, and sets. Gilda Radner’s death of ovarian cancer in 1989 was a similar shock. But it was the accidental overdose of Chris Farley in 1997, from the same drug combination that killed his idol, Belushi, and at the same age of 33, that was maybe more personally devastating to the cast. Farley, Adam Sandler, David Spade, and Chris Rock were an extremely close-knit group who had all come onto the show together and subsequently had become lifelong friends, and they’d also done some of their best work of their careers together. Chris died mid-season, and the heartbreak wouldn’t end there, because five months later, in May of 1998, the world learned that former cast member Phil Hartman, considered the “glue” of the show during his years in the cast, had been shot and killed by his wife, who then shot and killed herself.

The book doesn’t linger on the worst times, however, and there are plenty of wonderful stories and funny anecdotes. The majority of people who worked on the show describe it as exhilarating. It’s a purely joyful thing when a group of highly motivated people produce a finished product that is also a quality product. The barometer of quality with this group is simple: to KILL. To leave the audience laughing. In the earliest days, the prevailing attitude was, “WE think this is funny, and if you don’t, you’re WRONG!” I got the impression that while they loved to make themselves laugh, they were acutely aware that their humor needed to translate to an audience. Everyone ever involved has been so, so good at that, and Lorne, with his incomparable instinct, has always had the final cut.

Notable Quotes:

On Belushi:

Lorne Michaels: “In the beginning, there were two things John didn’t do: he wouldn’t do drag, because it didn’t fit his description of what he should be doing. And he didn’t do pieces that Anne [Beatty, a writer) or Rosie [Shuster, Lorne’s wife and writer] wrote. So somebody would have to say a guy had written it. Yet he was very attached to Gilda and Laraine [Newman, original cast member.]”

On the show’s youthful appeal:

Steve Martin: “When you’re young, you have way fewer taboo topics, and then as you go through life and you have experiences with people getting cancer and dying and all the things you would have made fun of, then you don’t make fun of them anymore. So rebelliousness really is the province of young people—that kind of iconoclasm.”

On writing with drugs:

Tim Kazurinsky (writer, cast): “Having grown up in the sixties, I was kind of done with my drugs by the seventies. And so here it was the eighties, and I particularly hated cocaine. And whenever a new shipment arrived on the floor, I would come in and see everybody grinding their teeth. I came in one day, and pretty much the whole floor was just craving it heavily, and I went, ‘Oh, this is not good. I’m going to write at home.’ Because everybody was running into my office with giant pupils and grinding teeth saying, ‘I’ve got an idea!’ And you know, I’ve always found that cocaine causes constipation of the brain and diarrhea of the mouth. In the time it would take to sit and listen to people’s ideas while they were coked up to the tits, I could get more work done at home.”

On the long hours in enclosed spaces:

Lorne Michaels: “I used to say that you only get so many hours that you can be with someone for a lifetime, and you can kind of use it all up in a very intense four or five years, or you can spread it over a lifetime. Friendship really needs distance and space. Not that we’re overcrowding like rats. But the schedule is built so that after three shows in a row, when people are really getting on each other’s nerves, there’s a hiatus and you get some distance from it, and you appreciate what a good place it is to work.”

On Lorne:

Tracy Morgan: “It’s like Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Whenever Luke was in trouble, Obi-Wan would come out of nowhere. That’s who Lorne Michaels is; he’s Obi-Wan. That’s what I call him. Everybody has their little nicknames for him. Chris Farley used to call him the Chief. Some people just call him boss. And some people call him Daddy. I call him Obi-Wan.”

2021 gave me new perspectives on events discussed in these pages, and it was both more fun and more time-consuming. This time, I could find and watch important moments as they occurred, via YouTube. Wikipedia helped me with individuals’ background details that weren’t familiar to me. I had many laughs and a lot of fun doing extra research. Just before I started reading, Norm Macdonald died of leukemia he’d been fighting for nine years. Nobody knew. Even Conan, arguably the closest to Norm, didn’t know he was sick. Norm got to do the popular “Weekend Update” segment after Kevin Nealon left, and he was able to snag a writer “held in awe” at the show, Jim Downey, to co-write and produce his weekly segment.

Jim and Norm decided to do “Update” with Norm giving a deadpan delivery of fake “news” one-liners as savage as they were funny. Sometimes, the audiences didn’t seem to get it. Other times, the jokes would kill. Hilariously, they started writing O.J. Simpson fake news pieces, containing jokes whose punchline invariably outright called him a murderer. O.J. had been acquitted, but that didn’t make any difference to them. Unfortunately, Don Ohlmeyer, at that time head of NBC west coast programming, was a longtime friend of O.J.’s, and he didn’t think any of it was funny. He waged an all-out assault against Jim and Norm, which eventually resulted in Norm being fired from the show. To paraphrase Norm, Ohlmeyer thought every single joke in “Update” should elicit a strong response, like laughter, cheers, and applause. Jim and Norm didn’t care if a joke didn’t get a laugh. They only cared that the jokes were good, even if most of them flew over the audience’s heads.

Re-reading this book was an immersive and highly enjoyable experience for me. I would recommend it to comedy fans, SNL fans, and fans of the talented comedians who have been a part of this extraordinary TV show. I do wish there was another book, done in the same oral-history style, covering the last 20 years. Still, I loved the experience, and it was good to spend some time with people whose work I love and admire.

[the-shelfish-reader]

A preview of what to expect from this re-reader. I’ve started at the top and I’ll work my way down, no exceptions. Kinda dreading INFINITE JEST, but I’ll get through it, and hopefully I’ll enjoy it more the second time around.