‘He put a familiar face on schizophrenia, a name that still sounded like an ancient curse in modern ears….’ The Best Minds, by Jonathan Rosen
Growing up in New Rochelle, New York, a stone’s throw from Manhattan, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor were best friends. Both of their families inhabited a tightly knit Jewish community; both boys were passionate readers and aspiring writers as well. When it came time to go to college, they both chose Yale. Michael breezed through his undergraduate studies in three years and then went to work for Bain Capital.
It was during this period that troubling symptoms began to emerge: wild mood swings, delusions that overpowered his perception of the real world. Ultimately, Michael was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He sought and received medical help for his condition.
Meanwhile, Michael had applied to a number of law schools. He turned down all but one: Yale. The question was, could he make it through this rigorous course of study while coping with a serious mental illness? He persevered valiantly, all the while being helped by family, friends and professors who believed in him.
In the midst of all of this, he fell in love with Caroline Costello. Called Carrie by those who knew and loved her, she was aware of Michael’s illness but nonetheless loved him and wanted to see him succeed. Eventually they became engaged and moved in together.
The subtitle of this book is A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions. I actually knew how events unfolded before I started reading The Best Minds. An excerpt had been published in a magazine; I believe it was The Atlantic. I wasn’t sure I wanted to read the whole book. For one thing, it was longer than I thought it would be. The early section on Michael and Jonathan’s boyhood in New Rochelle was, in my view, somewhat protracted. But I might have felt that way because I knew of the coming catastrophe and wanted to get to it, and get it over with.
Jonathan Rosen has spoken about this book in public settings and recounted his experience writing it and reliving the story he faithfully, and with considerable anguish, narrates. What follows is an interview that I particularly liked. (It might contain spoilers, so be warned.)
In addition to being a fine writer, Rosen comes across as an empathetic, compassionate, deeply intelligent, and loyal human being – in other words, a real mensch, as both his antecedents and mine would say.
‘For more than a century now, the province of Alberta has seen its future writ in oil….’ Fire Weather by John Vaillant
Having read this book several months ago, I remember few of the particulars. And there were plenty of particulars! So rather than cudgel my poor brain on the subject, I’ve decided to let others do the explaining for me. Click here for the New York Times review.
Let me say first that I found Fire Weather riveting, astonishing, and just plain brilliant. Oh, and harrowing in the extreme. It’s the story of the fire that ravaged Fort McMurray in the province of Alberta, in Canada, in 2016.
‘Since the dawn of the Petrocene Age just a century and a half ago, we have given fire exponentially more opportunities to engage in all those behaviors we seem to emulate and excel at. But like Ariel to our Prospero, fire is a begrudging servant. Selfish and willful, it yearns, above all, for freedom, which it will take at any opportunity and at any cost.’
(Love the Ariel to Prospero analogy. See Shakespeare’s The Tempest.)
This video will give you an idea of what the people of Fort McMurray were dealing with. And they did deal with it – with incredible courage and resourcefulness:
Vaillant’s description of this fire’s unstoppable power were stunning:
‘Combustive energy had drawn people to Fort McMurray in steadily increasing numbers over the course of a century, and combustive energy was driving them out again, en masse, in a single afternoon. As the people of Fort McMurray made their escape, it was through apocalyptic conditions that recalled the seventh plague in the Bible’s Book of Exodus: “So there was hail, and fire mingled with the hail, very grievous, such as there was none like it in all the land since Egypt became a nation.” There was none like it since Canada became a nation, either: the exodus of May 3 was the largest, most rapid displacement of people due to fire in North American history. It took the form of an unbroken ribbon of vehicles crawling in ranks, like army ants, northward and southward out of the city while fire raged along the highway, in some cases right up to the breakdown lanes. Visible in every rearview mirror was a monstrous plume where their city should have been, as if the city itself had erupted. Many who saw this sight speculated that the entire city was lost. The fire plume, which was growing steadily larger, was actively changing the region’s meteorology. No longer simply a ground-level interface fire, it had become a force of Nature. As temperatures rose past 1,000°F, the air at the smoke column’s center rose ever more rapidly, driving upward, like smoke up a hot chimney. As this superheated air rose higher and faster, it created a vacuum into which cooler air was drawn from all sides at greater and greater velocity. Operating like a recirculating fountain, storm systems this large also generate powerful downdrafts along their outer edges, which, in the case of a wildfire, can cause it to burn even more intensely, like an atmospheric turbocharger.’
A large portion of the second half of Fire Weather is devoted to the subject of climate change. and what it portends for our future on this planet. I think that Vaillant believed that he had to write about this subject, given how closely it is tied to the Fort McMurray disaster.
I’m glad that I read this book. It was an immensely powerful retelling of an event I knew nothing about it. I recommend it highly. As for myself, though, I think I shall not be reading about any other fire-related cataclysms on the near future. This one has stayed with me for a long time.
‘He now wants only to leave, he wants never again to enter the closed chamber of his marriage….’ Leaving, by Roxana Robinson
As the novel opens, Sarah, a divorced woman of sixty years or thereabouts, is leaving an opera house. At the foot of the stairs, she sees a frail elderly woman standing still, completely immobilized by fear. She offers her arm to assist, and together they slowly ascend the staircase. (As I’m reading this I’m saying to myself, She’s writing a novel about my mother!)
On this same occasion, Sarah runs into Warren, an old flame now married, from her youth. He has become, in the intervening years, a fanatical opera lover. What happens next is both inevitable and predictable. I was thinking, Oh no, this tired trope again. But then I remembered the lines from Ecclesiastes:
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
What makes a situation new is the individuals who are at its center: what they feel, what they do, how they act and react. (And I, like many, should know this, from personal experience.) As the novel progressed, Sarah and Warren became increasingly vivid in my eyes. Their fates became a matter of urgency.
The cover, by the way, is a reference to Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, a painting by John Singer Sargent:
This most poetical work plays a small but crucial role in the drama.
( As you may have surmised, the characters in this novel occupy a rather elevated cultural stratum. As an aid to decompression after an extremely stressful experience, two of them launch into a discussion of the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro.)
This novel is certainly about leaving, but questions tantalize: Who is leaving whom? or what? And finally, why? (The title of this post is only a partial answer, and a misleading one at that.) I don’t want to give away any more.
Finally I have to say, that Leaving is the most discussible novel I’ve read in ages. When I finished it, i found myself wanting rather urgently talk to someone about it. The unexpected developments in the plot, the actions of the various dramatis personae, the workings of an unknowable fate….If you read it – and obviously I recommend strongly that you should – please leave a comment in this space. As soon as possible!
So Long, See You Tomorrow
This was actually a re-read, having been recommended to me by a colleague at the library shortly after I went to work there in 1982. It was published in 1980 and was William Maxwell’s final work of fiction, . A retrospective of this author’s work recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal, prompting me to revisit this book.
If recollection serves, I like it the first time. I liked it this time too, but with a few reservations. These had mainly to do with the novel’s unremittingly dreary tone. The plot concerns two families, the Smiths and the Wilsons, who are eking out a living as tenant farmers in Illinois in the early 1920s. The story is told by the son of the Wilsons who, at the time of the novel’s opening, is a close friend of Cletus Smith, son of the other family. As the Wilson boy watches – I’m not sure but I thinking his name is William – the relationship between the two families becomes increasingly toxic. Consequences of a shocking and inevitable nature ensue.
Maxwell’s sentences are terse and relatively free of ornament. I guess I could have used a bit more in the way of elaboration – more adjectives! Modifiers of any sort!. Still, the story held me. I stayed with the novel, something I can’t say of a great many others I’ve tried to read lately.
‘Sometimes Cletus jabbers in his sleep. Mostly they lie curled together in what is not a very large bed sleeping the sleep of stones. The north wind howling around the corner of the house only serves to deepen this unknowing.’
This is the only novel I’ve read by William Maxwell. He is highly esteemed, especially by his fellow writers.
(Yesterday I visited the local Barnes & Noble. This is a really big one, not far from our residence here in Barrington. As I wandered the stacks and aisles, I kept seeing title after title that I’d tried to read and given up on part way through. A rather discouraging experience!)
Books to the Ceiling