The Corner Store

For those of us who live in major cities in the US, the corner store is a neighborhood fixture. For some of us, it may be the source of life’s daily necessities; for others it may be a quick snack or a newspaper while waiting for the next bus. Such a store is the setting of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu. In truth, the store is almost a character in its own right.

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Ethiopia in the late ‘70s and immigrated to the US at the age of 2. He graduated from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. So it is not surprising that the central character of this novel, Sepha Stephanos, emigrated from Ethiopia (albeit at the age of 16) and, now in his mid 30s, is settled in Washington DC and the owner of a failing corner store in a poor area of that city.

Stephanos, Joseph (from the Congo) and Kenneth (from Kenya) became friends when they all were new immigrants working as valets in a Washington hotel. Joseph is now an engineer and Kenneth a waiter in an upscale DC restaurant frequented by the politicians. The three friends meet at the store after hours to drink, converse and support each other in their efforts to forge their identities in their new country. Mengestu received a fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a 5 under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation – and deservedly so to judge by his writing in this book. (This book itself was a NY Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year.) He fills us in on the events in Ethiopia which drove Stephanos to leave his mother and brother behind in that country. The descriptions of Stephanos and his relationship with his father are extremely touching. If you have ever spent any time in Washington DC you will recognize how accurately Mengetsu captures the detail and feel of that city. As gentrification comes to the neighborhood so, too, does racial tension.

A frequent visitor to the store is Naomi, age 11. Despite the difference in their ages and across a significant cultural divide, a friendship develops between Stephanos and Naomi born of their mutual love of books and reading. Watching them spend the slow hours in the store reading The Brothers Karamazov together confirms again where the true treasures in life are to be found.

This book may not have the endurance of The Brothers K but it also portrays a struggle – in this case of the immigrant experience at a particular time and place in our history. The next time that I am in that corner store, it will be a different experience for me, too.

Living and Dying

Philip Roth is arguably one of our best contemporary writers. He has written twenty seven books. Some of his latest books, “American Pastoral” and “The Plot Against America” are wonderful novels for which Mr. Roth has won numerous awards. So it was with great anticipation that I began reading “Everyman”, which was published in 2006. It is a short book, only 182 pages. As I read it I kept thinking, it will get better, something surprising or redeeming will happen. But it didn’t.

“Everyman” is the story of “everyman” and our protagonist is never named. Our “hero” grows up in Elizabeth, New Jersey the son of a successful and very reliable jeweler. He grows up and leads a very ordinary life. But extraordinary in that he has numerous health problems that plague him from the time he is nine years old until the day he dies. He is a successful commercial advertising artist, he marries young and has two sons. Not satisfied with this life he leaves his wife and sons for the love of his life and has a daughter. When he strays with a model he meets on an advertising shoot, he loses wife number two and ends up in sad marriage with a beautiful but self involved ninny. Our everyman learns that all this effort has led him to a life of isolation.

Along this path to loneliness and isolation our hero encounters health problems and intricate operations. The reader is treated to play by play descriptions of the numerous procedures as we watch our hero slowly disintegrate. After the 9/11 attacks he escapes to a “retirement village” at the Jersey Shore. He begins to paint in earnest and to give painting lessons to other seniors, but alas his health problems siege him : “The year after the insertion of the renal stent, he had surgery in his left carotid artery…….” Philip Roth portrays old age as a “total massacre”.

There are redeeming moments in this story when our hero expresses his love for his daughter by his second wife and laments the terrible relationship he has with his sons from his first marriage. He also helps a elderly woman in his painting class who is suffering from debilitating pain. The reader can almost like our hero as he visits the graveyard of his parents contemplating his own death with pathos. But the author pulls us back to reality as our hero undergoes yet another surgery that chronicles the end. Mr. Roth seems to be telling us the real meaning of life is that is has to end, and it may not be pleasant along the way.

We do know that Philip Roth knows how to write, but I’m not sure his philosophy of life and death constitute great reading material.

Transplants

The title of Jhumpa Lahiri's latest story collection, Unaccustomed Earth, is taken from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Custom House. In describing how human nature needs to be transplanted in order to flourish Hawthorne says: “My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth”. The Indian characters in all eight of these stories have been transplanted. But do they always flourish?

In the title story, unaccustomed earth refers not only to transplanted lives, but quite literally to the earth itself, as Ruma, newly settled in Seattle, is visited by her father. He plants a garden for her, and establishes a loving connection with his grandson, but father and daughter are never quite able to share their secrets. In the exquisite “Hell-Heaven”, a daughter's view of her mother changes as she moves from childhood to adulthood. The last three stories, grouped under the title “Hema and Kaishuk”, trace the lives of these two transplants from the Cambridge of their childhood to their chance encounter in Rome as adults.

In one sense the characters are quite specific – first and second generation Bengalis transplanted to the United States. But Lahiri is so talented at describing the bonds that both connect and constrain her characters – husbands and wives, parents and children, friends and lovers – that their appeal is universal. Not all the stories are equally successful. I thought that “Going Ashore”, the final story in the “Hema and Kaishuk” section, was somewhat contrived. But the first and second stories in that section more than make up for that, especially “Year's End”, where Kaishuk, then a college student, struggles to deal with the loss of his mother and the new life his father has built. Lahiri's prose seems effortless. I never see her pulling the strings but I am drawn into her stories, wanting to follow her characters. Her stories are often sad, sometimes even heartbreaking, but always compelling.

A Running Writer

On occasion I have read a book review that was so thoroughly negative that I wondered “What is the point of publishing such a negative review?” Why, when there are so many books from which to choose and so many good ones, waste paper, ink, space and time with a negative one? I’m reading reviews to find books that I want to read, not books that I don’t want to read. So now I find myself on the other side of the table. I have read a book about which I was planning to write for this blog. But I have been so disappointed in the book. Should I still write the blog? Do readers want a negative opinion? Years from now, will it be a candidate for my own “Oops!” list? (See NY Times 10.06.1996 for a sampling of reviews that history has judged differently.) But I did read it and I do have an opinion - so here goes.

I am a runner. I have run two marathons and hope to do a third next month. With luck, a good physical therapist and some discipline, I look forward to running for a long time. So What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, a memoir by Haruki Murakami, was an irresistible choice. Murakami describes himself as a running writer. He has completed many marathons, triathlons and an ultra-marathon, many of which he describes in this book. He has published more than ten novels (including The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), many short stories and a non-fiction account of the Tokyo gas attack in 1995. From the book jacket one learns that he has won many prizes for his writing.

It’s not that his life is not interesting. He describes owning and running a bar. He runs the original marathon course in Greece – in reverse! The unifying thread of the book is his preparation for running the New York City marathon in 2005. Much of the preparation takes place in Hawaii and Japan and Murakami includes some informative descriptions of the various locales. He has the best description of a sixteen-year-old that I ever expect to read: “Sixteen is an intensely troublesome age. You worry about little things, can’t pinpoint where you are in any objective way, become really proficient at strange, pointless skills, and are held in thrall by inexplicable complexes.” (I’m reading this five years too late.)

But overall I was sorely disappointed in the writing itself. I want to ask: could it be the translation? The very best writing (I thought) was a reprint that he includes in the middle of the book of a previously published article describing the Athens-Marathon run. Having spent time in Cambridge, MA, I felt an emotional connection with his description of running along the Charles River – but would it have been the same if I hadn’t been there?

If nothing else, I took away a valuable mantra, not just for running but for life: “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” With that in the book’s Foreward, it is then surprising that Murakami spends a lot of time and ink bemoaning his advancing age and the natural physical deterioration that comes with it. While he describes this as a memoir, it is really his training journal filled in with some reminiscences. It felt to me as if he were writing to exorcise his own demons and to recapture his previous love of running.

If you’re not a runner, this book is not likely to inspire you to want to become one. And if you are a reader, this book is not likely to inspire you to want to read more by this author except possibly to find out if there is a different quality to his fiction writing.

So what do you think about negative reviews: do they have a place here or elsewhere?