NOMADLAND: Don't sit down yet, old folks, the table's got no place for you

NOMADLAND: SURVIVING AMERICA IN THE 21ST CENTURY
JESSICA BRUDER
W.W. Norton
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

WINNER, BEST PICTURE ACADEMY AWARD!

TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL PEOPLE'S CHOICE AWARD WINNER! Is an Academy Award next?

SEPTEMBER 2020 UPDATE Read all about the Toronto International Film Festival premiere of the film based on this book! FRANCES MCDORMAND STARS!! There is a link in the CBC article on how to watch the Festival offerings via web from 10 to 20 September.

The Publisher Says: From the beet fields of North Dakota to the wilderness campgrounds of California to an Amazon warehouse in Texas, people who once might have kicked back to enjoy their sunset years are hard at work. Underwater on mortgages or finding that Social Security comes up short, they're hitting the road in astonishing numbers, forming a new community of nomads: RV and van-dwelling migrant laborers, or "workampers." Building on her groundbreaking Harper's cover story, "The End of Retirement," which brought attention to these formerly settled members of the middle class, Jessica Bruder follows one such RVer, Linda, between physically taxing seasonal jobs and reunions of her new van-dweller family, or "vanily." Bruder tells a compelling, eye-opening tale of both the economy's dark underbelly and the extraordinary resilience, creativity, and hope of these hardworking, quintessential Americans—many of them single women—who have traded rootedness for the dream of a better life.

My Review: I'm not sure how this happened: A talented writer with a well-regarded agent sells a book to an established and deeply experienced editor at a very good publishing house; the net result is a series of magazine articles, good ones mind you, strung into chapters with some basic tarting-up transitions stuffed in the cracks.

The subject is the source of my upthrusting the earned three-star rating. I'm amazed and appalled that "the world is such a cruel place for the US middle class" needs shouting about. Yet it does. I read Methland not so long ago; its tale of towns being eaten alive by the desperate need to Make It even if it means going against the law of the land like Lori Arnold (sister of Tom Arnold, ex-husband of loudmouth Roseanne the Racist) did seems almost quaint. Making It isn't a viable option for the unemployed older worker. Keeping up a house has been replaced in the older homeowner's worrywarting with plain old keeping the house they scrimped and saved to buy. Pensions are no more; 401(k) plans are flattened; Social Security is under attack from greedyass politicos and banksters. What in the hell does someone who can't make her (most likely medical) bills going to do?

That medical-bill thing is an underplayed thread constant throughout the narrative Author Bruder spins. Person after person, story after story, has its starting point with the medical issues that beset all of us and are particularly prevalent among us oldsters. Author Bruder never fails to elucidate the nature of the medical issues. She's letting you know without doing the teller and the told the insulting condescension of saying outright, "this is due to the insane US medical system, and yes these are people with genuine conditions and diseases who need treatment not shirkers." The mostly older workampers (a word coined by the owners of Workamper dot com in 1987 for the growing legions of mobile, seasonal workers) do jobs that stress their already taxed and aging bodies; then they go "home" to a space most of y'all would sneer at. But it's their own. And so they remain houseless but not homeless.

The people houseless after the 2008 implosion are, in significant numbers, taking to the road. They've traded real estate for wheel estate. They have no choice. It's a simple truth that women are the major sufferers, since they've historically earned less than men and now, in older years, are in line to receive lower Social Security payouts. And the hiring bias for permanent, professional jobs (that we're told doesn't exist) discriminates against women and then, insult to injury, against older workers. Takin' it to the streets has changed meaning in the forty-plus years since the Doobie Brothers sang it. (That was only partially ironic.)

The unbearable whiteness of the mobile homeless is another sad commentary on how the inequality of the US system plays out. People of Color don't follow the nomadic way. Why? When one is at risk of DEATH in a goddamned traffic stop why do you even ask the fucking question?! So the meager assistance and illusory control offered to whites as they take to the road is denied to darker-skinned citizens.

I'm seriously irked by the disjointed nature of the book. Many things are excellent. Author Bruder is a quality storyteller. I'm a smidge uncomfortable about the smacks-of-disaster-tourism nature of a three-year research project into a subject that has no real relevance to the life of a Boerum Hill-dwelling Columbia University professor. I'm willing to skip past that for the light her work shines on those of us thrown away by our sacred US system...absent timely and generous help from friends, this story could be my very own...but then I smack into the disorganization problem.

I don't doubt that there is an organizing principle at work here. The author's a journalist. The editor's an experienced pro. But I can't follow it in any kind of satisfying, narrative-building way. My failing? Permaybehaps...but from the first chapter I got the idea that a narrative would unfold that included two people as my focus. That didn't happen because one person, Linda, whose story really is the backbone of the tale, disappears and reappears at different times doing different things at various stages of her life, while Silvianne vanishes for the length of a Bible before sprouting back into view near the end, and what I assumed was a close friendship kinda wasn't but there's another closer friend who doesn't appear that much in Linda's narrative. I'm left wondering if the reason might not be that LaVonne (the aforementioned friend) called out Author Bruder's motives early on (which we're not told early on, another chronological lapse).

Whatever my quibbles about structure, the information in the piece is grounded in solid reporting. You'll have to look at the endnotes to know this. There are a few footnotes, but these are parenthetical asides. The absence of inline citations is, in my view, not a good decision. Howsomever I can at least see the point of it: Inline citations in a popular social history will scare off the punters, and the slenderness of the proffered analysis of a section of the homelessness epidemic will cause derisory snortings and contemptuous pooh-poohings from Academia.

I hope this book achieves a wide readership among those most in need of its blend of qualities: The comfortable and clueless six-figurers who infest our gentrifying coastal cities. It can happen to you, kids, and it becomes a very great deal more likely to the less likely you are to vote in November 2018.

TEMPER, sophomore effort from Nicky Drayden, builds success on talent topped by native brilliance

TEMPER
NICKY DRAYDEN
Harper Voyager
$15.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Two brothers.
Seven vices.
One demonic possession.
Can this relationship survive?

Auben Mutze has more vices than he can deal with—six to be exact—each branded down his arm for all the world to see. They mark him as a lesser twin in society, as inferior, but there’s no way he’ll let that define him. Intelligent and outgoing, Auben’s spirited antics make him popular among the other students at his underprivileged high school. So what if he’s envious of his twin Kasim, whose single vice brand is a ticket to a better life, one that likely won’t involve Auben.

The twins’ strained relationship threatens to snap when Auben starts hearing voices that speak to his dangerous side—encouraging him to perform evil deeds that go beyond innocent mischief. Lechery, deceit, and vanity run rampant. And then there are the inexplicable blood cravings. . . .

On the southern tip of an African continent that could have been, demons get up to no good during the time of year when temperatures dip and temptations rise. Auben needs to rid himself of these maddening voices before they cause him to lose track of time. To lose his mind. And to lose his . . .

TEMPER

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME AN ARC OF THIS TITLE, THANK YOU. ALSO, I KNOW THE AUTHOR. NO FURTHER DISCLAIMERS.

My Review: Okay, let's get this out of the way up front. Yes, I knew the author in Austin; we met during NaNoWriMo, we were in a writer's group together, we hung out despite the fact that she's young enough to be my *much* younger sister (and that's quite far enough, thank you). I still have fun chatting with her. She is a delightful person.

And if she'd written a mediocre book, that's all I'd be saying.

But since she didn't write me a gushing acknowledgment in this book *chinwobble* I can actually review it without squicking myself out.

I'm an old white man with a white Gandalf-y beard. Young persons of color snicker at me as I stump along the boardwalk behind my house attired in what can charitably be described as old-guy clothes, floppy hat preventing my unmelaninated skin from turning lobsterish. It isn't visible that I have a radicalized leftist's heart and soul. That's what I wonder about, really, how to make it plain that I'd FAR rather see one of those young people in Congress, City Hall, the Chancellorship of the university system than yet another old guy who looks like me. It's time we move on to the dustheap of history. Go and get it, y'all, it's time to burn the damn thing down and get busy rebuilding it!

So, put together Nicky's age and state of melanination and her well-honed talent-sword and her absence of desire to tell more white patriarchal stories as a woman and person of color, and you'd think from looking at me that I'd be hollering at her to get off my literary lawn.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I *battened* on this meditation on the nature of good and evil, the inextricability of love and hate, the dangers of ideological purity, the dark heart and bright sheen of understanding. Nicky's done a lot of thinking over the years...go to Amazon and get some of her short stories if you want evidence...and it's been deep thought indeed. A theme that she demands her readers think about is fairness. Every word the woman writes is about fairness, almost always in its absence instead of presence. Her mind grapples with the notion of fairness being achievable. It seems to me that she comes down on the side of "not so much" since all of her stories have, well, ambiguous endings. No one ever gets off scot-free and no one ever suffers endlessly. But no one ever faces ennui, either.

So my take on the story here is that, in true Nicky fashion, she's going to take the reader where they need to go and tell them what the characters need the reader to know: It wasn't easy, this life I am leading, it's not a lot easier now than it started off being, but you know what? I'm still here, I'm stronger than I was before I broke this time, and I can't imagine I'd ever want to stop being the me that I've learned how to be. Piss on ya if you don't like it, or me, or the me I'm still learning to be.

Doesn't that sound ever so coming-of-age-ish? Like it's a teenager's dream read? Like hell it is. I attempted suicide for the first time in my life when I was 54. The world broke me. I spent months in a locked ward getting medicated for depression I'd never known I had. After all, when there's no memory of being happy, that's just the world, right? And I share that fault of vision with Auben, and with Kasim, the main characters in this story. They make different choices than I made but they choose between the same things: Accepting the way the world views you and sinking into its molten vats of hate and fear, or finding the updraft from the heat and following it to a less destructive place.

"My people, we have work to do."

So let's get our hands dirty and make the good better and the bad good again.

BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS, a damning indictment of class privilege

BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
KATHERINE BOO
Random House
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: four horrfied, repulsed, politically appalled stars of five

The Publisher Says: From Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo, a landmark work of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century’s great, unequal cities.

In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human.

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting“ in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter — Annawadi's "most-everything girl" — will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call “the full enjoy.”

But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi.

With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects human beings to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget.

My Review: I'll keep this short since the synopsis above is so long. Boo set out to tell the story of the cost that average Indians are paying for the rapid rise through the capitalist ranks that their country has embarked on. She chose as her lens the small tragedy (in the cosmic scheme of things) of a death (and subsequent court case) in Mumbai's slum called Annawadi.

Really and truly, this is all one needs to know; names, places, details aren't going to make this any easier to pre-process. One is best advised to enter into this book with little information about the events chronicled. It simply cannot be fathomed by those of us with thirty dollars to spend on a book, with access to a free public library, with an education sufficient to read the text, with lives so easy that we possess time to pass, as opposed to needs to meet, what this story will reveal. I will not steal Boo's thunder with a fuller report.

I hate this woman's writing. It feels so chilly and so removed from the subject that I can't believe how much praise this aspect of the text has received. It's the kind of gawdawful New Journalism crapola...get in the middle of the story, get all the juice and dirt, and then spew it back at a faux-objective remove...that I associate with Norman Mailer's terrible Executioner's Song, of unlamented memory.

The story is this generation's 12 Million Black Voices. It deserves so much more than it got from its author. It is, quite simply, necessary reading for free marketeers and libertarians and their misguided, often foolishly optimistic, ilk.

THIS IS WHAT REALLY HAPPENS IN YOUR TERRIBLE, UNFORGIVING, “COMMUNITY STANDARDS” WORLD. Read it. Recognize yourselves in the unseen overclass. Your tax-o-phobic refusal to recognize your duty to your fellow human beings leads directly to this world, its injustices and cruelties, its inhumane and indifferent treatment of the innocent-of-any-crime hoi polloi.

If you don't feel deep and humiliating PERSONAL shame after reading Boo's awful story, I fear you are a sociopath.