We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

You can’t write a review of this book without spoiling it for others. The reason is that Karen Fowler ingeniously hides a key plot point for the first fourth of the novel; namely, the heroine’s sister is a chimpanzee. The heroine of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is Rosemary, a girl who grows up with a chimpanzee. The novel is about Rosemary’s growth in personal and moral awareness. Gradually—in a non-linear manner that is also the author’s style—Rosemary comes to terms with her curious family, including her desolate mother, drunk-yet-brilliant father, animal-rights-activist brother, and loved-but-abandoned simian sister. More importantly, Rosemary realizes her identity and moral responsibility as a member of this family.

What I liked about this book is that it avoided becoming an ode to animal rights and equality. Although Fowler prominently features simian studies and animal aptitude tests, she nonetheless shows a healthy agnosticism as to whether animals are truly equal to humans. She acknowledges the complexity of the moral questions surrounding animal research. Most importantly, Fowler remains focused on her heroine. Perhaps Fowler intended this book as a portrayal of a brutal world in which humans cannot acknowledge that they differ from simians not in essence but only in their degree of capability. But I didn’t take it that way. I took it as an enjoyable, though sad, tale of a girl who grew up with a chimpanzee for a sister.

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

Imagine this book as the spiritual autobiography of secular, skeptical modernity. The protagonist is a thirty-something dentist in New York City, fairly well off. He spends his days bustling around his office thinking sardonic thoughts. He spends his nights eating takeout and watching the Boston Red Sox. Then suddenly, his identity is stolen, and he is caught up in the religion of Ulm; a religion of doubt.

This book is ostensibly about religion. But I would say that it's about alienated men who have a yearning to belong. They yearn to belong to a family, a religion, something that will give their lives meaning. The male characters, in particular our protagonist, go about attaching themselves to women of various faiths. The relationships always end badly, because the men seek not love, but rather the family and religion the women can provide. And what's left at the end? The religion of Ulm; a religion of doubt. No resolution, no catharsis. The book ends where it begins. I felt rather empty when I finished it.

But at least Joshua Ferris is a damn good writer! His prose sparkles with a mordant wit that tickles you into laughter and admiration. While the novel ultimately doesn't work, it leaves you with gems like this (the protagonist's thoughts on baseball): "Baseball is the slow creation of something beautiful. It is the almost boringly paced accumulation of what seems slight or incidental into an opera of bracing suspense. The game will threaten never to end, until suddenly it forces you to marvel at how it came to be where it is and to wonder at how far it might go. It's the drowsy metamorphosis of the dull into something indescribable."

The Grapes of Wrath

A novel is a world of landscapes, characters, and emotions. A great novel immerses you in this world; you feel that you have walked the landscapes, commiserated with the characters, and shared their emotions. The world of The Grapes of Wrath is 1930s America, a time of economic depression and desolation. By the time I had finished this book, I felt I had lived in that era.

The Grapes of Wrath impresses on you the terrible power of poverty. This is a poverty that came close to crushing the Joad Family, our protagonists, in their journey from Oklahoma to California. John Steinbeck describes every detail of the Joad Family's experience: the intricacies of their car, their daily meals, and their nightly sleeping conditions. The detail is so evocative that you eventually feel the family's hunger, homelessness, and even hopelessness.

This novel edged close to despair, but fortunately ends on a note of hope. I'm not entirely sure of Steinbeck's philosophy. The novel is an indictment of capitalism. The novel also favorably portrays citizen-run communities in which egalitarianism and cooperation reign supreme. These communities are in line with the novel's odd pantheism (as expressed by the preacher character) in which holiness is found in all things, and not in a distinct deity. Fortunately, these philosophies are not fully worked out, as they would have transformed the book into a polemical work. What is left is a great novel and an impoverished world that will remain in your imagination.

Drooping Man

The man is drooping. His legs and torso sit properly in a metallic seat. But his upper body leans over to the side. His close-cut hair and dusty jacket suggest a straight-forward fellow, probably heading home to enjoy an evening of TV. His trousers are wrinkled and shabby. And he is drooping. Passersby at the train-station thought he was asleep. Perhaps he was drunk. But he is drooping.

A clean-shaven monk notices the man. The monk pauses and then comes closer. He gently lays his hand on the man’s cheek. The drooping man is dead. The monk smoothes out his tan-colored robe and then abruptly pumps out his arms to the side, as if preparing for a magic trick. But the monk has religion, not magic, in mind. He leans over and takes the drooping man’s right hand into his own. The monk’s left hand straightens so as to give the blessing.

A crowd has gathered. Their eyes gaze with a look of confusion, excitement, and sorrow. A young lady with a pudgy face leans over from behind the seats to catch a glance of the drooping man. She wants to know. A fellow, sitting a few seats down from the tragedy, watches the monk. The fellow has seen this before. He fingers the bottle in his black-wool coat, but considers that a swig wouldn’t be appropriate at this time.

The monk prays in a tone too quiet to hear. The crowd knows that the monk is commending the man’s soul to the afterlife, wherever that might be. There is a moment of silence. A deeper meaning can almost be caught. But then the train station shakes. Another train arrives. The medics take away the drooping man’s body. The monk is left alone. And he is drooping.

American Anti-Hero

The Western anti-hero is an icon of American literature. He—and it’s always a he—is a solitary man, rather gruff, with a mordant sense of humor. He knows how to use a gun. His moral sense is skewed, but in his heart, he’s willing to sacrifice himself for the greater good. He’s often the answer when the government just ain't up to snuff. Roland of Gilead, Rooster Cogburn, and the Man with No Name have brought the American anti-hero to life. Escape from New York’s Snake Plissken, played with growling panache by Kurt Russell, is a memorable variation on this theme.

Snake Plissken wears a black eye-patch and tight-fitting clothes. His long unwashed hair and grizzled face bespeak his nonchalance about the world. He does crime, and because of that, he’s being sent to New York, a city that now serves as America’s maximum security prison. But his country first needs him for a mission that only a man of his caliber can perform. He needs to save the President of the United States, who has ironically been trapped in the imprisoned city of his own making.

Escape from New York is arguably a bad movie. The plot is improbable. The sets are so dark that you strain to see the action. And the action scenes are paltry, involving a few punches and bursts of gunfire. Nevertheless, Escape from New York creates a world and characters that are deeply memorable. This is a New York permeated by darkness and crime. In this world, crazed prisoners crawl out of sewers at night and men perform bawdy musicals in dilapidated theaters. A loose hierarchy of criminals, crowned by a villainous Duke, triumphs over the city’s population.

Snake Plissken enters this world and fulfills his mission, albeit for his own selfish and cynical reasons. Ultimately, though, he does what is right because the President just ain’t a good man. That’s an American anti-hero.

Team of Rivals

The Civil War is a captivating affair. The injustice of slavery, the thrill of rebellion, the bloodied battlefields of war—all creating the most tragic and memorable piece of American history. Standing prominent in this history is, of course, Abraham Lincoln, the lanky lawyer from Illinois. Doris Goodwin’s Team of Rivals reverently recreates Lincoln’s life, as well as the lives of his Cabinet officers. In this book, Lincoln’s cabinet officers serve as a prism through which Lincoln’s virtues profusely shine. The officers’ lives are also interesting in their own right, making for a book that draws you closer not only to Lincoln but also his world.

This is a book very much about men, not women. In addition to Lincoln, William Seward, Salmon Chase, Edward Bates, and Edwin Stanton occupy many pages of text. The wives and daughters of these men, in particular Mary Lincoln and Kate Chase, do occasionally grace us with their presence. But they serve as merely a unique perspective on the men to whom they are attached. These men were politicians and lawyers, great statesmen of their age. They were brilliant and admirable, but too often pathetic in their vanity and yearnings for power. Three of the men campaigned to become the Republican candidate for President in 1860, only to be surreptitiously defeated by Lincoln. The men were rivals of Lincoln, who nonetheless brought them together as a team.

Lincoln’s greatness shines brightly in contrast to these men. He was not a man to hold a grudge. He recognized his rivals’ talents and used them to his advantage. Even when Salmon Chase publicly derided Lincoln in an attempt to obtain the presidency in 1864, Lincoln forgave. He even awarded Chase with a seat on the Supreme Court. Above all, Lincoln was a consummate leader. For example, rather than rushing to emancipate the slaves as the abolitionists wanted, Lincoln carefully calculated the timing and rationale of his Emancipation Proclamation so as to make it palatable to the public.

This book is not a complete history of the civil war. Certain battles are ignored and the Southern point of view is conspicuously absent. But as a biography of Lincoln and his Cabinet, this book amply succeeds. I found myself loving Lincoln with his deep reservoir of jokes and hare-brained stories—a characteristic that often infuriated his oh-so-serious colleagues. I also appreciated the other men who, despite their foibles, came to love Lincoln as well. Kudos to Goodwin, who writes all this with elegance and wisdom.