Like Mother, Like Daughter:  Cake Wars

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Our Mother’s Cake Wars

“Morituri salutamus te!” my mother muttered in the car on the way to Devil’s Lake. (That’s what the Roman gladiators said when they entered the arena: “We who are about to die salute you!”) She’d studied Latin at the Catholic school across the street from our church before it was converted into an elementary school. However, she sent us to public schools. “The public schools are really better.”

Mom was a good fighter. And, indeed, the barbs, digs, snottiness, and gentle feminine quarrels were about to begin in the aptly-named Devil’s Lake, which was so cold that only devils could survive there, or so they said.  Mom had vowed three years ago that she would never make this terrible trip again.  Dad insisted on bringing us kids, and she would not let us go to those wild parts without a chaperone. 

“Here we are,”  she said as we pulled up in front of a dismal bungalow on a bare treeless street. Mom refreshed her lipstick in the rearview mirror, then smiled a fake smile that told those who knew her, “Beware!”

There was a cake war in Devil’s Lake. The aunts had been getting ready for days. Mom was not a baker. She bought an angel food cake at Hy-Vee for this occasion.  “It will be the best-looking cake there,” she predicted.

She still stung from last time when the aunts patronized her for bringing a Duncan Hines cake.  The aunts had made their cakes from scratch, and though they were lopsided, like something I might make, and the Duncan HInes cake tasted better, they were intense about cake.

But this time the aunts did not thank her for the angel food’s cake. Instead, they offered to teach her to make homemade.

“No, thank you,” she said, and gathered up her purse.

Anyone who didn’t like the Hy-Vee angel food cake ranked very low in her estimation. Anyone who didn’t thank her for it ranked lower. “Mom, can we take the cake with us?” we asked as we got ready to leave.

“Manners,” she hissed.

These women were at war: cake was the weapon.

The Daughter’s Cake Wars

“Morituri salutamus te!” I said as my boyfriend drove at a snail’s pace through a blizzard. This time, my mother’s favorite slogan, “We who are about to die salute you!”, was appropriate. While we looked for signs or a rest stop, I rolled down the window and wiped the snow off the windshield with a mitten.  The snow fell faster than I could wipe. Then the car broke down.

This was a letdown for my macho boyfriend, not to roll into town on his own wheels. His reticent father (in retrospect, my favorite in-law) picked us up and gave us an impromptu tour of the city as we drove through the blizzard in the dark.

However, many surprises lay ahead. I thought my boyfriend was poor, because of his shabby clothes: instead of a winter coat, he wore layers of jackets over a sweater with a hole under the arm. I’d expected to meet his warm, working-class family. But, alas, there was no warm welcome at childhood home of the love of my life. If we’d worn a mood ring, it would have been CRANKY.

The three-story house was enormous. It was in a posh neighborhood! What the…? Who were these people?

His mother barely said hello, and two of his sisters stared balefully. “I hate this,” one said, possibly after I said hello. “I know,” the other equally charming girl said. During the next 10 snowbound days they did not talk to me. I tried to make light conversation, even about books (a desperate topic, but one was an English major) but these snobbish girls just grunted, nor did they chat much to their brother.

“They ignore you because they hate me,” he said.

“I do not accept that explanation,” I said.

Several times a day we walked at a nearby park. At night we went to a hockey game, or the movies, or played Scrabble with the family: someone’s boyfriend had a breakdown because he didn’t have any letters – that is always the luck of the draw.

You get the idea: but I must tell you about the pancake war!

On a cold winter morning, is there anything better than pancakes? The family did not breakfast together; everybody got up at different times, and ate cereal or whatever; but one morning I caught my future ma-in-law making pancakes for my boyfriend.

“How lovely!” I said. “Mrs. _, I love pancakes.”

Too bad, because she shut down the operation and walked away. No pancakes for me!

Welcome to the family!!!

What is it about cakes, or pancakes, and in-laws?

Underemployed in an Alternate Life

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What would have happened if you never left your hometown?  

That’s a haunting question. In memory, the hometown was idyllic:  five bookstores, two libraries, a Jackson Pollock at the art museum, a gorgeous park with woods, and meadows with cows.

It would have been great if the town hadn’t changed, and if we were still 20 years old.  But “my city is gone,” as  Chrissie Hynde sang about Akron.  Our town has doubled in size.

People now live in the suburbs.  There never used to be suburbs.  God, we all despised the suburbs!  (Was it because of John Updike and Richard Yates?)

But if we had stayed we would not have found a professional job.  There simply were no jobs for liberal arts majors.

Here’s what happened to some of the people who stayed.  The portraits below are VERY loosely based on some of some of the lifers.

Lynn:  unemployed, agorophobic, single, still lives in her late parents’ hourse, and is now a bit like a character in We Always Lived in the Castle.  THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR:  Not a college graduate.

Susan: underemployed, flunky office clerk (slightly reminiscent of Harvey Pekar in his comics), reputed to be a witch and drug addict.  THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR (besides drugs):  Not a college graduate.

Jessie: married, self-employed, underemployed, keen on rock music, critical of the late Tom Petty’s appearance, and knows TV trivia.  I mean all of it.  THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR:  college graduate. 

GWEN:  married, underemployed, book club maven, sociology teacher in a high school.  THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR:  Ph.D. in sociology but no jobs for sociology professors.  

ANNA:  single, employed, former actor, returned to hometown to get M.D., oncologist,  columnist in local paper, and gardener. THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTORS: B.A. , M.D..

LIZZIE: marital status uncertain, former hippie, banks in the Cayman Islands, reinvented herself as a devout Christian.  THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR: no college degree.

So are you nostalgic for your hometown?

Two War Classics:   “”Reporting Vietnam” & “The Leopard and the Cliff”

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TThe first war of my conscious life was the war in Vietnam. We attended the moratorium protests, and there were daily silent vigils downtown. Years later, when I taught a remedial writing class at a college, I xeroxed an article from a Library of America anthology, Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1969-1975. To my astonishment, few students had heard of this war.

 One woman asked what the Vietnam war was about. It was difficult, too complicated to answer.   The government claimed it was a war against communists in North Vietnam. We looked at the article for deeper answers. 

These days I might assign a war novel rather than reportage: it is an excellent way to understand the emotional and psychological aspects. But the best war novel I’ve read is barely known in the U.S.,  Wallace Breem’s The Leopard and the Cliff, published in 1970, set during the Third Afghan War in 1919.

Based on an actual conflict that took place in 26 days, it is brilliantly told from the perspective of a sympathetic flawed hero, Sandeman, a 43-year-old officer who considers himself mediocre, and has been left in charge of a British fort in Waziristan while Chalmers, the political agent, is away.

Sandeman is a Graham Greene-ish character, and Breem’s style is as elegant as Greene’s. While Sandeman drinks lime juice on the verandah, he daydreams about his absent wife, due to give birth to their first child in a distant town. But the message that arrives on the wire is not from his wife; it is addressed to Chalmers, a government order to retreat from the fort because three tribes are waging war on the British. 

Organizing the march is a massive task, complicated by the fact that the majority of the men belong to the tribes. Some desert, others fight among themselves, there is a murder, and a mob threatens Sandeman’s life.  Sandeman, who often meditates on his  “mediocrity,” proves his heroism by controlling the chaos, and then calculates the minimum amount of food, meds, clothing, guns, and ammunition needed on the march.

On their march through difficult terrain, the enemy outnumbers them. Many die. He keeps going grimly, mechanically, out of respect for his position in the British army. And he has been trained for this particular brand of heroism.  Other men, including his friend Wynter, have also been trained with the military attitude that they are part of a whole. 

But then Wynter dies, and that threw me into a state of unconsolable grief. Wynter is one of the likable, ordinary, mediocre men who die in war.

Earlier in the novel, Breem writes: “Francis Wynter was 29 years old.  Tall and fair-haired, with a passion for horses, hawking, and girls – in that order – he was a good officer, unimaginative but reliable.”

That is how Sandeman sees himself:  unimaginative but reliable..  He keeps marching, fatigued, in pain, almost lame, wounded, determined to reach their destination before he dies.  By God, after all the losses he will save the few.

Sandeman and his men are caught between “the leopard and the cliff,” as his friends from the tribes say. This grim, tragic, hyper-realistic novel is beautifully-written, and deserves a wider audience..

How Dickens Exposes the Perils of Legal Entanglements

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If my so-called employee had read Bleak House, would she have gone straight?  (N.B.  Who coined the phrase “gone straight”?  Did Edward G. Robinson say it in a crime movie?)

 Dickens’s masterpiece Bleak House is a satire of the  legal system. At the center is Jarndyce v Jarndyce, an inheritance suit which has gone on for decades, driving some family members mad and one to suicide.  Middle-aged John Jarndyce has withdrawn from the suit: he has seen too much collateral damage.  And he is devastated when his charming young ward, Richard Carstone, decides to quit his job because he believes there will a verdict soon and he will be rich. 

Nevertheless,  Bleak House did not teach me everything.  Here’s what I wish I’d learned: Do NOT hire a former hippie to do legal work when she asks for the job.  At the commune she doubtless baked whole wheat bread, played the lute, and made enough homemade tomato sauce to open an Italian restaurant.  But, no, even if she’s the spawn of a friend or relative – it will be a hassle to deal with her! 

It was, of course, an unwise decision to hire her. After a year, very little progress had been made. We scheduled phone conferences. We offered to assist her, and  gave her tips for finishing the job.

And then one day she telephoned Mr. Nemo at his office and wasted an hour of his time telling him I was a bad person.

“But what on earth did she say?”

“She’s a hysterical bitch,”  he said. 

I was crushed, because I had tried to help this woman.  No good deed goes unpunished, as they say.  I should have emulated Esther Summerson in Bleak House,  the sensible, charming, beloved diarist who befriends everyone and helps the rich as well as the poor, but understands that some people, like the charming parasite Mr. Skimpole, are not worth your time, and indeed cannot be helped..

A Book and a Rant: Doris Lessing’s “The Good Terrorist” & the “Nouveau-ization” of the Neighborhood

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We used to await the Nobel Prize announcement with bated breath, wondering if the committee would finally recognize Philip Roth (no), Grace Paley (no), or Joyce Carol Oates (no, but there’s still time). 

Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize at the age of 89 in 2007. She did not seem especially pleased or respectful when a reporter helped her out of a taxi and informed her she’d won it. Her reaction was, “Oh, Christ!”  (I’d remembered it as “Oh, fuck,” but I rewatched the video, and either I misheard it the first time, or it has been edited.)

Some of Lessing’s books are masterpieces; others are not quite classics. Her bleak 1985 novel, The Good Terrorist, is a compelling read, with a flat, slightly distant style, reminiscent of great journalism, albeit with dialogue. In this engrossing novel, she explores the dynamics of a group of radical squatters.

The protagonist, Alice, is an intelligent, highly-organized radical woman in her thirties who has lived in squats on and off for years.  For four years, Alice and her best friend Jasper, a gay man, have lived with her mother. When she kicks them out, Alice and Jasper move into a squat in an abandoned, once-beautiful house in London.  It is already inhabited by a group of radical squatters who dream of joining the IRA. Alice puts home improvement before politics.

What is fascinating is Alice’s understanding of how to use the bureaucratic system.  She persuades a sympathetic woman at a city agency to take the house off the “condemned” list, explains to the utility companies why they must legally turn on the electricity and water, and finds an out-of-work carpenter who makes all the home repairs, from plumbing to electricity to roofing, with the help of Alice. Alice is much more stable than most of the group – but, alas, she loses control when the the  group plans a violent action in her absence. 

A stunning book. Alice is not a likable heroine, but we at least understand how she got that way through her reminiscences of family history.

WHY WE WON’T LIVE IN A SQUAT: WE’RE SETTLERS!

 Over the years the neighborhood has changed. Whether it has gone up or down is a matter of opinion. Let me describe the problem: It has been nouveaued!  On one side, we have nouveau riche Republicans.   They fly the flag and entertain a lot:  once they blocked the street for a surreal birthday shindig. But who doesn’t love a food truck? I just didn’t feel like Chinese, Mexican, French, salmon, ice cream, or champagne cake…

And then there are the Nouveau Nouveau, an even more annoying breed. They’re a hybrid group – a cross between Millennials and Generation Z –  and their backyard is a Disneyland playground for their spoiled brats.  Thank God there’s a hedge between us!   We pray to the Soccer gods that they’ll be at soccer practice all summer!

But even worse, I’ve got to admit, are hillbillies, Moms for Liberty, gangsters, drug addicts, and scam artists…

WILL THEY MOVE TO THE SUBURBS FOR THE POOLS AND SCHOOLS?

Too Much for Humans:  The Pressure of AI

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Articles about the wonders of AI chatbots tend to end with a wedding or a funeral. A year or two ago, before I grasped what a chatbot was, I read about a man who married his chatbot. This confused me: did it have a corporeal form? And then I read a melancholy piece about a competent, successful woman who committed suicide after discussing her depression with a chatbot. Her mournful family said they had seen no signs of depression.

And then they blamed the chatbot.

I was befuddled. I barely knew what a chatbot was, so I wanted to blame it, too. But the level of hysteria in the U.S. has been over-the-top this century, and the American impulse for drama and melodrama is insatiable. The bot had advised the woman to see a therapist. Nonetheless, the family sued the AI company, claiming that the bot SHOULD HAVE REPORTED HER DEPRESSION TO THE AUTHORITIES.

This seems unhinged to me: It’s like asking the Chatty Cathy doll to say something more complicated than, “May I have a cookie?”  As the commercial said,  “Pull the string, and she’ll say a lot of different things!”  

Dysfunctional family vs. AI: there are days when I’d love to have a chat-thingy-bot, but I have too many electronic devices already to take things to the next level. In offices, like it or not, people are urged to use chatbots. According to a PEW Research Center survey, “half of U.S. adults say the increased use of AI in daily life makes them feel more concerned than excited… Just 10% say they are more excited than concerned. Another 38% say they are equally concerned and excited.”

 AI seems particularly harmful at the college level, where students are turning in AI-generated papers without conscience. They do not experience the thrill of doing their own research and organizing a cogent thesis. And today I was disturbed to read that The Commonwealth Short Story Prize in the UK was awarded to a short story that turned out to be AI-generated. The judges, the readers, and the editors of Granta, who published the story, are devastated.

In an ad on TV, a chatbot on a phone tells a young person that he/she can tell it anything.  “Anything?” the person says.  And since that’s how it’s advertised, as a confidante and friend, it’s not surprising that the results can be devastating. 

The Charm of Mass Market Paperbacks & Old-Fashioned Library Check-out

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One of Grant Wood’s illustrations for Main Street in the Limited Book Club edition (1937)

I am a great fan of Sinclair Lewis. “I am Carol Kennicott,” I said in a class during a discussion of Main Street.  No longer, but when I was young I shuddered over the description of Gopher Prairie. Carol Kennicott, a librarian in Minneapolis, follows her handsome doctor husband to his hometown, Gopher Prairie, where he practices medicine.  She despairs over the ugliness of the town, and the mediocrity of its residents. She tries to bring culture to Gopher Prairie. The name of the town tells how that works out.

The old Signet edition

And I am Babbitt, the middle-aged businessman (in my case, it would be “businesswoman”) who lives in Zenith City, a tedious midwestern city which is Gopher Prairie on a larger scale.  In these archetypal midwestern towns and cities, the natives love their hometown, but it is an adjustment for the outsiders.  Even Babbitt, an enthusiastic denizen of Zenith City, rebels for a short time.

Right now I am frantic, because I cannot find my copy of Lewis’s Arrowsmith, which won the Pulitzer in 1926:  the politically-minded Lewis rejected the prize. Anyway, a few months ago I bought a new Signet edition as a homage to mass market paperbacks

Mass-market paperbacks may not be around for long. Reader Link, one of the largest distributors of paperbacks, has decided to discontinue publishing mass-market books, because they claim they don’t sell. It’s a shame. The mass market paperbacks have been around since the 1930s, and are less expensive than trade paperbacks. They are also more portable: you can sling them in a handbag or the pocket of your winter coat.

At the universities, professors often assigned inexpensive mass market editions of classics published by Signet, Bantam, and other companies.  In an American Studies class, we read the Signet edition of Main Street, which, by the way, had an excellent introduction. And most pop fiction is, or used to be, published in mass market paperbacks.  What will happen to the cozy mysteries with cats on the cover?  Not to mention the mass market editions of Dune and George R. R. Martin?

SINCLAIR LEWIS & AN OLD-FASHIONED LIBRARY CHECK-OUT CARD

In my search for Arrowsmith, I found a canceled library book edition of another book by Sinclair Lewis.  And inside the front cover, there is the old-fashioned check-out apparatus. I was excited.

The times were so simple then:  no electronics, no electronic security gates, just paper and card catalogues. It was all based on trust and paper.

Here are some evocative photos of the card system on the endpage of this old library book. Now that there are so many library cuts, and the self-checkout breaks down so often, it might be a good time to go back to paper!

Horace’s Odes:  Politics, Patriotism, and Observations from the Sabine Farm

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Horace’s odes are polished and provocative, celebrated not only for his charming Epicurean philosophy (Carpe diem!, or “Seize the day!”) but for political and patriotic themes.   Even if you have not read Horace’s odes, you may be familiar with some of his oft-quoted phrases, like dulce et decorum est/ pro patria mori  (“It is sweet and decorous to die for one’s country”), in Wilfrid Owen’s poem of  the same name. 

One of Horace’s most startling achievements was his adaptation of the meters of Greek lyric poetry to fit the different rhythms of the Latin language. The son of an ex-slave- turned-wealthy auctioneer, Horace was educated with other wealthy and often upper-class men in Greek rhetoric and literature.  And obviously his odes are more various than those of his peers because of his facility with meter. Horace especially admired the Greek poets Sappho and Alcaeus, and the majority of his odes are written in Sapphic and Alcaic strophe.

But Horace’s odes are different, almost alien, in his shunning of personal details. It’s not that he does not celebrate love, dinner parties, and wine and women, but he seldom contributes a personal anecdote. Unlike Catullus and Ovid, who write hot-headed traditional elegies about unfaithful mistresses, a dirge for a girlfriend’s dead pet, and poems about a mistress’s abortion,  Horace presents himself as a middle-aged single man who is content to drink wine under the trees on his Sabine farm.  When love is mentioned, it is usually to give advice to the lovesick or to destructive femmes fatales.  These are rather artificial in tone, but often comical, and even sweet.  Love is never too serious in Horace’s lyric poems.

Horace is famous for his use of apostrophe in the odes. He addresses each poem to a specific person, place. or even a ship or tree. The nature of the addressee shapes and defines the theme and tone. And this focus on the other allows him to distance himself from personal revelations. 

Many people don’t get beyond his Carpe diem poems, but he is also a nature lover, a patriot who praises the emperor Augustus, talks about poetry with his patron Maecenas, and even addresses a ship: he prays it will carry his friend the poet Virgil safely across the sea.

And then there’s Ode XV in Book II. It caught my eye because there is no apostrophe. Indeed, it reads a bit like an impassioned op/ed piece written in Alcaic strophe. And I wonder, is this as close to Horace’s personal voice as we get?  Horace lives on a Sabine farm, not mentioned in this ode, but here he describes the problems caused by an influx of rich newcomers who buy enormous stretches of land and ruin it by building mansions (more like palaces), uprooting the native plants, and planting plane trees and exotic flowers that don’t belong there and may not thrive on their own..

I have attempted a literal prose translation of this ode. I cannot, of course, copy any of the figures of speech or unique turns of phrase. This is the bare bones. It will give you a hint of what’s happening, but, alas, I am not a poet.

Ode XV, Book II (Horace)

Now the rich estates will leave only a few acres for the plow,

on all sides the ponds will be seen to stretch from the Lucrine lake,

And the Oriental plane tree will supplant the elm.

Then the banks of violets and myrtle and every kind of sweet-smelling flower will sprinkle perfume in the olive grove that was fertile for the former owner.

Then the laurel with thick branches will shut out the hot rays of the sun. 

Not thus was it prescribed by Romulus and bearded Cato, either by the auspices or the rule of the ancients.

There was little private property then, and great public wealth.

No portico for private individuals was measured by ten-foot rods to look out over the shady north side.

The laws did not allow them to spurn the native turf, but at public expense they decorated the towns and temples with new marble.

The Substack Trend:  Whom Does It Benefit?

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 I know little about Substack, and am oblivious of Patreon, too. 

I had no idea that such newsletters were controversial until I received an excerpt from a Substack newsletter in my email.   A  book columnist had responded to the writer Lauren Groff’s scathing criticism of  Substack.  The whole thing was a bit confusing, but then I don’t subscribe to Substack.

I loved Groff’s first novel, The Monsters of Templeton, though I have not kept up with her work. And I admit I’m puzzled by her animosity to Substack, though her remarks seem to have been taken out of context. In the quotes below, she is, I think, talking about Substack’s effect on new literary writers and on the closure of literary magazines. 

Groff writes, “Substack is an inherently pro-individual, anti-community, anti-new-writer technology and is responsible for the death of so many excellent small literary venues.”

And Niko Stratis says, ‘We are rapidly losing the outlets where new writers can learn to shape a voice, where they can cultivate skills beyond quick news hits and PR with the guidance and mentorship of strong editors and the benefit of a trusted name, and it’s such a loss for writers and readers alike.”

Groff says, “I blame Substack. The single worst development for the literary world in the last few decades.”

Strong language, I say.  But I gently differ. Much more damaging than Substack (many of the newsletters are fascinating and well-written) has been the rise of Facebook (Meta), where people blithely learned to give their identities away.  Even worse is Twitter ( X), which originally limited communications (tweets) to 114 characters, and finally raised the limit to 280 characters in 2017.  This kind of dumbing down is the short road to illiteracy. But I did read that with a premium subscription you can now write long posts at X.

There used to be a greater sense of community online. What I miss are the book groups. There were book discussion boards at AOL, Yahoo groups, and various now defunct book websites. Many academics as well as common readers were involved in discussions of Proust, Edith Wharton, Jane Austen, and Virginia Woolf.  At these venues, people wrote in full sentences, paragraphs, sometimes even essays. I love Goodreads, but its book group discussions are in the form of super short sentences.  But I highly recommend the reader book reviews at Goodreads, which are often thoughtful and brilliantly-written.

Of course I am a blogger, and my blog is free. In the early 2010s journalists and editors complained that bloggers were the Devil. OK, they didn’t use those words. But they did claim we were putting book reviewers out of business.  Since I was writing a book blog, not book reviews, it seemed a big laugh to me.

There are many, many factors in the death of book review pages and newspapers.  People began to read news at Facebook and at other venues on the internet.  (I’m  not on Facebook, but so I’ve been told.)  In addition to blogs, the internet has sites like Politico.  And so  Pulitzer Prize winning-newspapers folded, or the remaining reporters devote more time to the State Fair than the war in Ukraine. 

I imagine the worst effect on new writers on Substack would be lack of subscribers, unless they have friends, or “friends” online who are willing to support them. Still, from my point of view, Substack is an excellent venue for established writers to reach their audience and make a little money.

Now if only we readers could find what we’re looking for…  unless it’s a Jane Austen book club, I haven’t the faintest idea what that might be.

But one of these days I’ll subscribe to a newsletter.

Elizabeth Strout’s “The Things We Never Say”

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Elizabeth Strout’s elegantly-written new novel, The Things We Never Say, centers on the modest, likable 57-year-old character, Artie Dam, an award-winning history teacher respected and well-liked in the community. His approach to teaching is creative and, though he tells himself he is not very smart, he uses the Socratic method brilliantly, and he also teaches from  primary sources:  the students learn about the Civil War by reading  letters written by soldiers and nurses during the war. 

But he also creates a mini-society in the classroom: he emphasizes the need to respect others, and he does not tolerate casual cruelties.  He kicks a boy out of class for using the word “faggoty” to describe the pillow case where Artie stores students’ phones. (No phones are allowed in his classroom.)

As usual, Strout’s prose is lyrical and exquisite. She is always thoughtful, but this time around she has also written a dark political novel. It begins in 2024, right before the election, and the small town in Massachusetts is so divided between Trump and Harris that a fight breaks out at a school sporting event..

But this isn’t “Mr. Chips in Massachusetts”: it is a novel about politics, and Artie’s increasing depression mirrors the political scene.  No one understands he is depressed, not only by politics but the  tragedies in his family’s past.  Somehow the two threads become intertwined, and he begins to plan his suicide. He believes it would be easiest to stage a sailing accident, but instead nearly drowns in an unintentional boating accident.  And so he is relieved and happy to be alive, for a while at least,  and befriends the Trump supporter who rescued him. 

The theme of suicide is never abandoned, though.  Artie observes at one point that society is “committing mass suicide.”  Later, a minor character commits suicide, in part because the changes in education make it impossible to do his job.  And a rich neighbor’s mother attempts suicide in Florida.

Strout’s gruesome account and analysis of the political changes in the last two years are as thorough as anything in a newspaper, and it is so well-written that I would not be surprised if it were nominated for the Booker Prize.  But for me, it makes for grim reading, and I much prefer the Lucy Barton books, which are dark in a more personal way.  I prefer the personal to the political, even when they are all mixed up. The Things We Never Say may be the grimmest novel I read this year unless I elect to read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a fictional account of the meat-packing industry.