Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation by Linda Villarosa
Under the Skin is the kind of book you dread to read, but once you start, you’re compelled to see it through — not because you like its contents, but because it would be immoral to look away. Indeed, it would be more than a little awkward to say that I liked the things I learned in Villarosa’s documentary of healthcare in America today. It is more accurate to say these were things I needed to know to in order to live in America today.
I read this for a book club at work; I work at a university so some of the messaging of Under The Skin felt like preaching to the choir, but it was, nonetheless, a lesson worth learning again. What lesson is that? Racism is not “over” and it hasn’t “ended” in any kind of definitive way. Anti-blackness especially is a legacy that remains and it’s tentacles are long and far reaching.
Indeed, its toll is not as hidden as it appears. Its toll is a scar and a fresh wound in living flesh.
This is a book worth reading at least once, and I would say, especially for women of color, for whom the tax of racism is higher, more exacting, even sometimes fatal.
I have such mixed feelings about Happiness Falls: On the one hand, it was a brilliant mystery and a dynamic, swift family drama. Equally, its attention to matters of ability and disability struck a profound note for this reader. On the other, the flaws of its characters annoyed the hell out of me. Still, hats off to Kim who wove the story and its characters so seamlessly together that I compulsively — and sometimes against my will — read to the very end.
The noel revolves around a mixed race, Asian and White American family: parents (Hannah and Adam), two young adult children (Mia and John), and an adolescent son (Eugene) who has a mental disability and is non-speaking. One day Adam and Eugene go missing. Eugene returns, injured and unable to articulate what has happened to his father. As the police, authorities, and the family attempt to unravel Adam’s last know whereabouts and uncover the mystery of his disappearance — and hopefully, his safe recovery — family secrets, fears, and flaws come to the surface.
A distinctive appeal of the novel is how Kim embeds a discussion of ability/disability rights and the treatment of persons with disabilities into this tale. What assumptions do normatively abled persons make about those who express themselves differently, about those who are deemed “disabled”, and about the parents and their responsibilities to society and their loved ones with disabilities? It is this element of the novel which makes it so resoundingly relevant and contemporary to our moment.
What then did I find so irritating about the novel? Mia. I found Mia irritating. I found myself annoyed with her youth and rigidity. I have little patience for inflexibility in fictional characters (ironic and hypocritical, I know, but there I am). Still, I could understand her position, and Kim speaks through Mia, as the primary narrator of the novel, with a depth of skill I can only envy as a writer.
The resultant dissonance makes Happiness Falls an engrossing read, one which I could not tear myself from until I reached its end.
Clouds Without Water was a slow burn for me, but it did burn bright — especially in the second half — compelling me to keep reading to discover what happens to Calvary and its more independent-minded denizens.
The novel is a fiction around true events, The Millerite Movement of 1844, in which the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world was predicted for October 22nd 1844, and The Great Disappointment, when the predicted end did not materialize. Delivered in two parts, Clouds Without Water delivers a portrayal of the community and town at the epicenter of these events, Calvary, NY, where the Millerite Movement begins under the direction of its eponymous leader, Reverend William Miller. Part One focuses on the rise of Miller’s influence, Part Two on what happens when the Apocalypse fails to occur, the subsequent social fallout.
The story the novel promises is fascinating. But Harper’s prose… Well, this was the novel’s “great disappointment.” Harper is heavy-handed in Part One, and the voice behind the writing feels biblical in a supercilious sort of way. There is a plodding sensation, an awkwardness in Part One. Harper has a penchant for long or obscure words, wordy words: “concatenation”, “incredulity”, “entropy”, which made the prose dense and feel overly structured. The characters, so vibrant in Part Two, are underdeveloped in Part One. Indeed, I DNFed this book three times before reading it a fourth time, and completing it.
Although the novel is, particularly in Part One, pedantic the strength of Harper’s story and his characters do seed a tension which prevailed on this reader to keep reading. Interestingly, the Reverend Miller himself is almost a supporting figure in this novel; though he is the hinge around which the movement develops and Harper deftly crafts his portrayal of Miller’s fervor and charisma, the reader does not witness events through his eyes. Indeed, we are never treated to an internal view of Miller’s mind or heart. The result is a rather one-dimensional Reverend.
That said, while Miller is somewhat flattened, Harper’s other characters shine and are fleshy representations of people most readers would recognize: the Smith family headed by Henry, his children Abigail, Rosemary, and Benji, the town doctor, Dr Clarke, its newspaperman, Josiah Young, Marigold Chandler, descendent of the town’s founders, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who owns the general store. It is through these characters’ eyes that the reader is treated to a deeply disturbing facet of religious passion. Part Two draws and holds the reader because of them.
I can’t stop thinking about this love affair. It’s been months since I finished reading the book, but Allison and Eyal (and Timor, Aisha, Talia, and so many others) continue to occupy my thoughts, not least because the war in Gaza and the horrors that plague Palestine and Palestinians, Israeli and Israelis, remains on-going.
The Lover is a timely novel, as one which revolves around that very political and cultural conflict. But the novel offers a social perspective on how politics hits the ground, how real lives are shaped by the tragedy. The short of it, as I think most people understand, is that the situation is messy. Israelis and Palestinians, Jewish, Arab, each and every one, is woven into a fabric that cannot be unpicked, their threads too tightly interlaced for any one to be extracted without fraying, snapping, leaving a scar in the cloth. The Lover highlights that messiness, the ethical messiness, the material messiness, the psychological and emotional turmoil of Palestine and Israel.
The Lover is a love story, a romance between Allison, a half-Jewish American graduate student who has come to Israel for a semester abroad, and Eyal, a soldier in the Israeli army. To fulfill his military duty, Eyal must conduct missions in Gaza, while Allison frets and waits for his return. But there is another romance here: Allison’s as she becomes enraptured with Israel and the tensions between Jews and Arabs. This is a novel about the ethics of love, what authentic compatibility means, and the difference between passion and compassion between lovers.
What makes The Lover so compelling is that the intertwined romances here force us to confront our own biases in this or other situations. This is a story we cannot turn away from, because even as outsiders watching the news, looking in on the events in Gaza, its messiness forces us to consider what we each might do, might have to do in a similar situation.
The story, as darkly riveting as it is, is not the novels only attraction. The Lover is superbly written. This is literary fiction at its most devastating. Sacks has also clearly done an incredible amount of research, and what might be understood as ethnographic observation; the novel’s environs are so real as to transport the reader to that place, to Israel, to Gaza. The tension Sacks develops through combining research with literature results in a palpable immersion for the reader.
Moreover, Sacks’ characters are fleshy, flawed, and real. Allison is its main protagonist; it is through her voice, her thoughts, that the story is narrated (though she is not its only narrator). Readers cannot help but feel her anxiety, her excitement; as Allison falls deeper in love with Israel, readers may find they are uncomfortably immersed in Allison’s mind. This is a testament to Sacks skill with words.
The Lover is a novel I will likely return to again, perhaps more than once.
Baker Street Irregular: A Novel by Craig W. Fisher
Readers who love a good spy novel, immersive writing with fleshy details, and large casts of characters will find a gem in Baker Street Irregular.
The novel follows a WWII British spy, Bill Hoffman, as he navigates Nazi occupied Europe, attending to the missions he has been tasked with. His primary task is to track a Nazi official in Vichy France, but events lead him to a deeper mystery.
I have mixed thoughts about Baker Street Irregular. On the positive side, Fisher is adept at storytelling, weaving the historical fabric of WWII through an intricate interaction of historical details and dark, noir-ish mood-setting scenes. The story is compelling. And Fisher is a good writer, possessing a unique voice and style. Fisher’s characters too are clearly visible. The novel reads like literary fiction: deeply reflective and full of wartime shadows.
But, some of these same aspects of the novel lost me as a reader. The pace of the novel is slow; long and numerous pages flow without progressing the arc of the story, even as they contribute to making the grey landscape of war tangible for the reader. Pages and pages would pass without a clear direction of where things are headed. At 328 pages — not including Historical Notes and a Glossary of terms at the end — the meanderings within the novel induced torpor, rather than interest. There are also numerous characters; Fisher’s attention to detail suggests each one is one to remember, leading this reader to forget many of them for lack of memory to track them all.
All in all, Baker Street Irregular delivers on its promise. Readers who enjoy historical fiction set in WWII or languid, noir novels are very likely to find it gripping and satisfying.
 Woman of Pleasure is a slim novel whose size belies its powerful contents. For readers who enjoyed Memoirs of a Geisha, a novel by Arthur Golden (1997), Murata’s novel is the more historically accurate complement. Like Golden’s popular (but flawed and orientalist) work, this is a novel about Japanese geishas and their Floating World; however, unlike Golden, Murata draws on real events from Meiji-era Japan, weaving a story which is both fiction and history at their best. In Murata’s novel, geishas are not isolated from the rest of Japanese society, but integral to the larger whole.
The view of the floating world Murata offers us is raw and real, not romanticized; here we see women as they were, as actors with agency and power. We are given a glimpse into the real operations of a hanamachi and geisha houses of varying ranks and size, and the concerns of its most visible denizens. This is a powerful novel, one which removes geishas from the stereotypical niche they are often penned into, and places them in historical and economic context; Murata’s geishas are not dolls, but fleshy, flawed, and powerful individuals. This isn’t a romance, but an honest portrayal of what people do when they are denied their basic needs.
I am considering assigning A Woman of Pleasure in one of my history courses, as it emphasizes the change an individual and collective can invoke.
I utterly love, love, love this book. I never knew about or read any of Ellen Cooney’s fiction before, but I am a fan now. And to think, I only found this novel by mere chance. I happened to visit a branch of my local library system that I used to go to quite a bit, but hadn’t for awhile, and I happened to walk past the new arrivals shelf. The title, so striking, so challenging immediately appealed to me. I picked it up, felt its heft in my hand (slim novel as it is) and decided it was coming home with me.
I read it in a day and half. I couldn’t tear myself away. I felt so connected to this woman, felt her latent simmering dissatisfaction so keenly, I had to keep reading.
The novel revolves around a woman who leads an ordinary life, as most of us do: she works for a local company, a office job, and she’s married with kids. She’s hitting her middle years. She’s good at what she does professionally. She is encouraged to and does apply for a promotion. She doesn’t get it, which would be devastating enough — but the kick in the head is that the job goes to a man who is clearly under-qualified for it. It all comes to a head at the company’s annual banquet, held at a famous, local restaurant.
The woman walks in one way, walks out another.
That’s all I’ll say. You have to read this book.
Cooney’s words are knives and silk ribbons. Perhaps they are silk ribbons with edges as sharp as knives; they slice and soothe all at the same time. Women of this age — or, really, of any age once they’ve had a taste of the patriarchal world in which we all must live — will find this novel tragically relatable. It is so nice to hear a chorus of voices bounce back to us, to know what sounds like an echo is not merely our own voice, but the sound of many others screaming same complaints, announcing the same snubs and hurts and disrespects that have been inflicted on ourselves. The isolation Trisha Donahue, the novel’s protagonist, lives is a dark we all know. Cooney shows us that though we may not see each other, she does.
Dr JoAnn LoSavio 