Clarissa Iverton’s mother once told her she was named not after Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, but Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa: “I named you after this Clarissa, with the hope that you’d rewrite history.” When that opportunity comes years later, it’s up to Clarissa to decide whether or not to take it, in this third book by Vendela Vida.

At 28 years old, Clarissa earns her living editing subtitles, cleaning up poor translations of foreign language films, and fixing other people’s words so that their meaning is clear. Ironically
though, nothing can fix the discovery of another man’s name where she expects to see her father’s listed on her birth certificate. Even more stunning, Clarissa’s fiancé admits that even he and his mother had known the truth for years. Never having fully come to terms with the disappearance of her mother, Olivia, 14 years earlier, this fresh vanishing of a parent sends Clarissa into an emotional and existential tailspin.

Adrift in grief and betrayal, Clarissa takes off for Finnish Lapland in search of her real father, the Sami man whose name is on her birth certificate. Clarissa’s search within the Sami community, despite her being unable to speak the language, is surprisingly fruitful, but not in the way she anticipates. In a complete reversal, the level of communication between Clarissa and the people she meets in Lapland is light years beyond the depth and breadth of the communication between the people with whom she shares a language, a home — even blood — prompting her to reexamine all she has previously believed about family, community, and identity.

Vendela Vida’s spare and concise prose is more like a series of vignettes than a long, detailed narrative. Yet it makes real to the reader the desolation and isolation of Finnish Lapland’s geography, of the insular Sami people, and of Clarissa’s feelings of aloneness. In spending two weeks among the Sami, Clarissa isn’t known as Olivia and Richard’s daughter, Jeremy’s sister, Pankaj’s fiancé; she’s half a world away from home and stripped of the identity pressed upon her by those around her.

It’s only through reconciling what she’s learned about her family history with what she articulates about her own personal history that she can even consider rewriting anything, balancing what her family — her mother in particular — may owe her and what she owes them. Only by fully realizing the truth of who she is and where she is from, can Clarissa transcend a legacy of secrets, betrayal, and grief.

Amy Brozio-Andrews

Admit it — you see a short bus and you pretty much think you know the kind of kid who is riding in it. Jonathan Mooney is not your average short bus rider though — wait — maybe he is. As a child, Mooney, an Ivy League university graduate, was diagnosed as dyslexic and labeled a severely learning disabled student. As he grew up, he was taunted and teased, made to feel inferior and inadequate by teachers and school administrators, and struggled with his identity and with where he fit in.

Now an adult and still processing the childhood experiences in which he heard, directly or indirectly, again and again, that he wasn’t normal, Mooney decided to take a road trip — on the short bus, of course — to meet fellow children and adults negotiating similar terrain. He has chronicled his experiences in The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal.

In this cross-country jaunt, Mooney’s book goes beyond memoir/travelogue to include brief asides on the history and the current use of various labels. In the process, he explores what it means to be normal, to be different, and to fit in with our culture and our society.

To Mooney, even a label as innocuous-sounding as “learning disabled” is fraught with unspoken meaning and judgment, the impact of which might not be realized by many people: “The label ‘learning disabled’ may seem minor in a world full of labels, but in the context of normalcy and self-acceptance, it matters deeply. A kid who on every other level appears normal and could pass for normal is pulled out of the crowd and told, in essence, that he isn’t right, isn’t like everyone else.” It’s this message — which sets a child up for a pattern of failing to meet the cognitive expectations of the education system — that has long-lasting repercussions.

In Mooney’s opinion, placing the blame for shortcomings in academic achievement squarely on the shoulders of children and their parents deflects attention away from shortcomings in the accepted standard of intelligence and learning. Medicalizing variations in learning styles and abilities shunts parents’ attention to their child’s neurological defect or deficiency instead of allowing them to see the big picture: that perhaps the problem isn’t with their kid, but with the way our culture views intelligence.

Focusing on de facto case studies of a diverse group of people with cognitive differences, Mooney’s day-in-the-life observations are compassionate yet brutally honest — with himself and with his reader. He cuts himself no slack in admitting his own discomfort during his first impressions of Ashley, a deaf and blind child. He wonders at her ability to learn, believing that ability to be one of the primary criteria for defining what it means to be a valuable person, and finds she exceeds his expectations in more ways than one.

From troubled children whose educational needs are not being met by the school system, to adults who’ve never received a formal diagnosis of any kind but who live life according to their own rules, The Short Bus offers readers a close-up of how students and adults labeled as learning disabled assert their own identities beyond established societal expectations. For example, Mooney meets up with his old friend Kent, who was labeled as having attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) but who managed to do a 24-hour comedy routine. This leads Mooney to ask the question: If the guy has no attention span, how could he do anything for 24 straight hours? Wouldn’t that indeed require a great deal of concentration and attention?

Mooney, also the coauthor of Learning Outside the Lines (Fireside, 2000), loses his narrative focus a bit about three-quarters of the way through the book, when he arrives in the Nevada desert for the annual Burning Man Festival: “Here, I thought, I would let go of these old selves. But first, I had to experience being someone new, living without regard to the norms, for the next five days.”

But even in a place like Burning Man, there are norms; even in a society without rules, the community still self-organizes into a place with cliques and “cool kids,” much to Mooney’s surprise. “I felt increasingly desperate to fit in at Burning Man and it showed.” Mooney gets a Mohawk haircut and finds out what millions of women already know: A new haircut really amounts to no more than a new haircut; no matter how good it looks (or doesn’t look), you’re still the same person walking out of the salon that you were walking in.

“I had traveled all this way, only to find myself at the end of the tunnel, no different.” This one statement risks undoing all Mooney has done in his book up to that point — his rejection of the standard of normalcy, his advocacy that our culture increase its tolerance and understanding of cognitive differences and abilities. Here, Mooney is showing that he’s just as preoccupied with being normal as anyone else is — which is, ironically, totally normal.

The final stops on his short bus journey bring Mooney back full circle, helping him learn to expand his definition of normal, as his Uncle Bill put it, and leading him to affirm his identity as a short bus rider, on his own terms, once and for all. In the process, he leads readers to re-examine how they think of people with diverse abilities and the way we, as a society, treat them and allow them to be treated.

Mooney’s writing style is affable and easy, and pulls no punches, even when events paint him in a not-so-flattering light. His persuasive arguments prompt self-examination in the reader, and support new ways of thinking beyond the traditional education/intelligence standard. While I found the ending to be a bit flat, overall, The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal is a powerful book that offers readers a road map for exploring our culture’s preconceived notions about abilities and labels.

Amy Brozio-Andrews

Andrea Levy’s warm and loving literary postcard from Jamaica presents a long, diverse, and dynamic family history — a vivid blend of personalities, nationalities, and even prejudices, without being judgmental. The challenges of straddling two cultures can be readily found in modern fiction, but in Levy’s capable and empathetic hands (Levy herself is the daughter of Jamaican immigrants), the insulated story of the Jackson family — as told in Levy’s novel Fruit of the Lemon — has a timeless quality that makes this 1999 novel worthy of its new Picador reissue, and a recommended read of the Essence magazine book club.
 
All parents dream of a life for their child that’s better than their own. Jamaican immigrants Mildred and Wade Jackson are no different, wishing only the best for their daughter, Faith. So after moving to London, Faith’s parents remained tight-lipped about their hometown, leaving their daughter to wonder about being teased at school: “Faith’s a darkie and her mum and dad came on a banana boat.”
 
“It was a proper boat with cabins and everything,” says her mother. “Even had a dance every evening and we took turns to sit at the captain’s table. What, you think we sit among the bananas?” But Faith’s notions of her family’s past remain sketchy — stitched-together bits and pieces she gleans from offhand comments over the years. It isn’t until she begins her professional career in television, moves out of the cocoon of her parents’ home, and her mother and father begin to speak of going “home” to Jamaica, that Faith’s identity and self-awareness are shaken to the very core.

At the same time, experiences arise that open Faith’s eyes to the existence of racism: Despite getting a promotion at work, she’s still effectively held back; a white woman she and her brother go to see about a used car behaves as if they’re about to rob her; a terrible incident of urban violence highlights the differences between her and her white friends. These events begin to unmoor Faith from all she had grown to believe about herself and her identity.

Desperate to rescue their daughter from an emotional tailspin, Faith’s parents decide to send her to Jamaica for a visit with her maternal aunt Coral. Thus, Faith begins her journey completely unaware of her Jamaican heritage, blinded by her own assumptions and stereotypes about life on the Caribbean island. Once there, through the storytelling of her relatives, she learns of her parents’ rich social, cultural, and economic heritage, and of her extensive family tree æ men and women who loved in the face of racial and class prejudice, lived under the shadow of harsh economic conditions, and yet still prized family above all. She begins to develop, for the first time, her own ethnic and cultural identity.

Elements of Faith’s sudden revelations feel a bit unbelievable. Though in England she carries on a longtime friendship with a woman whose father is blatantly racist, she maintains an implausible lack of awareness about prejudice until her arrival in Jamaica. But Levy, whose novel Small Island won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the Orange Prize, shows obvious skill in building a moving narrative that is sentimental without being saccharine. Throughout the novel, she deftly captures the speech patterns and styles of her British and Jamaican characters, and wisely avoids caricature and stereotype, imbuing Faith’s family and friends with staunch individuality in thought, word, and deed.
 
The structure of the book is particularly effective: Family legends and stories are threaded throughout Faith’s narrative, with each new tale accompanied by an ever-expanding family tree diagram that incorporates the previous story. The initial tale of Mildred and Wade is thin and spare, but as Faith learns more about her family history, the tales become more dramatic and lively, visually and thematically infusing the family with life.

As her visit to Jamaica comes to an end, Faith is finally open to incorporating her Jamaican culture into her English identity. “Let them say what they like. Because I am the bastard child of Empire and I will have my day.” In the end, neither her Jamaican heritage nor her Englishness is completely subsumed by the other. Proud to draw upon the strength of her Jamaican roots, Faith returns to England triumphant, the roots of the lemon tree holding firmly while the new branches reach ever upward, distant blooms bearing fruit.

Amy Brozio-Andrews

Mention monster trucks, cheap beer, trailer parks, and NASCAR races, and the term “white trash” inevitably comes to mind. Some people, including those who would not dream of describing a racial minority with an epithet, might even say the classist phrase aloud. While some self-caricaturists have reclaimed and defanged the slur, in many circles, people still use it to suggest their separation from a so-called lower class.

In Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (2006: Duke University Press), Matt Wray traces the history of the term “white trash” from its origination in the colonial-era South. Inspired by his own impoverished upbringing, Wray — who is white — explores the concept of “white trash” and the reason the epithet remains powerful more than a century after its first recorded use.

Wray, a sociology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, argues that the status of middle-class whites at the turn of the 20th century relied in part on their categorizations of lower-class whites as “white trash,” derived from its inception as a derisive term among blacks in the pre-Civil War South.

Class scapegoating is not the only reason the epithet outlasted its predecessors. According to Wray, the unusually compelling term derives its power from the tension created by juxtaposing “white” — with all its connotations of racial superiority — and “trash,” which is valueless and disgusting.

“But why white trash? Split the phrase in two and read the meanings against each other: white and trash,” Wray writes in the introduction. “Slowly, the term reveals itself as an expression of fundamental tensions and deep structural antimonies: between the sacred and the profane, purity and impurity, morality and immorality, cleanliness and dirt. In conjoining such primal opposites into a single category, white trash names a kind of disturbing liminality: a monstrous, transgressive identity of mutually violating boundary terms, a dangerous threshold state of being neither one nor the other … This is no ordinary slur.”

In fact, argues Wray, the term “white trash” evolved out of two other colonial-era slurs — “lubber” and “cracker.” One of the earliest descriptions of the poor rural whites known as lubbers occurs in the writings of William Byrd, a legislator in colonial Virginia who went on a surveying trip to settle a boundary dispute with North Carolina. According to Byrd, lubbers affronted respectable whites not only by being destitute, but also by disregarding conventional morality, social boundaries, and gender roles. In the diary of his journey, which Wray quotes, Byrd depicted lubbers as idle men content to leave strenuous labor to their industrious wives. In Byrd’s account, lubber men interacted openly and closely with blacks and American Indians, a habit rare among elite whites at the time. Lubber women, to Byrd, were notable for their sexual availability to high-status white men. Byrd went on to describe these poor whites as sick-looking and lazy, characteristics that would be associated with “white trash” for centuries to come.

Crackers shared with lubbers a tendency to laziness, but were construed as bragging, nomadic, mean-spirited outlaws who stole from American Indians and wealthy whites. When charged with theft, crackers blatantly defied agents of both law enforcement and government.

For a while, “cracker” and “lubber” were used prevalently to describe poor Caucasians, but “white trash” eclipsed them before the Civil War, says Wray, who attributes the first recorded use to an English actress and abolitionist who included it in an 1835 account of her tour of the United States. “… the greater proportion of domestics being slaves, all species of servitude whatever is looked upon as a degradation; and the slaves themselves entertain the very highest contempt for white servants, whom they designate as ‘poor white trash,’” wrote Fanny Kemble in her journal.

“White trash” both reflected and created class- and race-based contempt. After white domestic workers gained the right to vote when the franchise was extended to non-landholders in the 1820s, enslaved Africans used the term to express their disdain for their fellow servants.
 
“This historical situation suggests the likelihood that blacks, in labeling white servants poor white trash, were reacting with resentment and hostility to white domestics’ claims to superiority. They were, after all, doing similar if not identical kinds of work, but the shifting political landscape meant that white servants, despite their immigrant status, could demand and reasonably expect to be granted limited privileges over blacks,” Wray writes.

The term then entered the mainstream through the printed word, and was perpetuated by higher, literate classes as a means to oppress the lower class. Expanding printing operations in the 1850s meant more books for those in the middle class or above, including volumes reflecting on the social landscape of the young country. Authors discussing class disparities in the South explained the condition of poor whites differently, depending on the writers’ views of slavery. For abolitionists, those who fell into the “poor white trash” category were victims of an immoral system: Not only did slavery oppress those enslaved, but it also forced poor whites, who had to compete against a captive population forced to work for free, to live in poverty. By contrast, authors who supported slavery argued that poor whites’ biological predisposition to laziness and immorality made their penury inevitable. Proslavery writers noted that “white trash” lived in northern states as well, so the forced labor system could not be to blame.
 
The written debate over why whites were not living up to commonly held expectations for their race brought the phrase and concept of “white trash” to a wider audience, and cast it as a national issue, Wray explains. Out of the initial divisions over whether poor whites’ existence had become degraded due to biology or circumstance evolved an even more sinister debate over how to deal with their problem.
 
“White trash” became targets of eugenics researchers advocating involuntary sterilization and hookworm crusaders seeking to rid them of the “germ of laziness.” Eugenics research led to a chilling 1926 Supreme Court ruling that upheld a law that allowed Virginia to involuntarily sterilize an 18-year-old, “feebleminded,” unwed mother to prevent the birth of generations of destitute criminals. “The strength of the sterilization movement in the United States was such that by the early 1930s, eugenics reformers routinely performed involuntary sterilization (ovariotomies for women and vasectomies or castration for men), believing it to be the only sure way to stop the propagation and proliferation of the ‘unfit,’” writes Wray.

Another group of researchers opposed the prevailing wisdom that poor whites’ biology made them destined for degeneracy. These “anti-hookworm” advocates argued that the unhealthy complexions and sluggish habits associated with “white trash” stemmed not from genetic inferiority, but from a parasitic illness acquired by walking barefoot in areas where human feces containing worm eggs frequently mixed with the soil. These “advocates” presented shoes and outhouses as solutions to what they argued was an environmental, not a hereditary, problem.

Unfortunately, Wray concludes his history of “white trash” here. Although he skillfully traces the term “white trash” into the early 20th century, he fails to explore the more recent history that could illuminate how the term helps create and perpetuate class divisions today. Also missing are first-person accounts, such as the memoir of trailer park life that opened White Trash: Race and Class in America (1996: Routledge), a collection of essays coedited by Wray. In spite of its limited historic and narrative scope, Not Quite White offers valuable insight into a term that is still disturbingly common in American English. Understanding the genesis of the slur might be the first step toward making it as taboo as other racist epithets we’ve come to despise.

Sharlee Joy DiMenichi

Less than one year after Gavrilo Princip assassinated Franz Ferdinand, archduke of the moribund Austro-Hungarian Empire, the American journalist and future Red army fighter, John Reed, set off for the Balkans with likeminded, and sometimes controversial, political cartoonist Boardman Robinson to cover the war Princip had sparked: World War I.

Since Reed and Robinson published their illustrated history, The War in Eastern Europe, a historical consensus seems to have emerged that of all the soldiers who fought in all the world’s wars, those who fought in World War I were the most confused about what, if anything, they were fighting for. While Princip himself may not have known why he had been instructed to shoot the archduke, aside from the pressing matter of removing the term “archduke” from the Austrian lexicon, his superiors certainly did. The leaders of the Black Hand — Bosnian Serbs tired of Catholic Austria-Hungary’s vicious rule, and envious of neighboring Serbia’s independence — agreed that Ferdinand’s death would expedite the creation of Yugoslavia, a national home for the South Slavs.

Nearly a century later, the Black Hand’s accomplishment undone and the republics that briefly comprised Yugoslavia again plunged into war, Harvey Pekar, Ed Piskor, and Heather Roberson take up where Reed and Robinson left off in their graphic novel, Macedonia: What does it take to stop a war? — written by Roberson, illustrated by Piskor, and orchestrated by Pekar.

While Reed covered the Balkans after people “had settled down to war as a business, had begun to adjust themselves to this new way of life,” Roberson wants Macedonia to give people “a firm idea about what peace is.” Pekar similarly describes the book as having an opposing agenda. “There isn’t any fighting going on. There are disagreements, but people aren’t shooting at each other.”

A motivated, Gandhi-admiring student in University of California, Berkeley’s Peace and Conflict Studies Program, Roberson met Pekar by chance in 2003, when her sister invited him to speak at a showing of American Splendor, a movie based on Pekar’s successful comic book series, in their hometown of Columbus, Missouri. The timing was fortuitous. Roberson happened to be stopping through Missouri en route to Macedonia where, she told Pekar, she planned to spend a month researching why that country did not descend into civil war in the 1990s while the other former Yugoslav Republics — Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia — did. Intrigued, Pekar asked Roberson to send him some notes that he could use as the basis for a story. “I was expecting to do at most a long short story, maybe 25 to 50 pages,” says Pekar. “But she sent me almost 150 pages of material, and I thought ‘Wow, we could make a book out of it.’”

While Pekar’s earlier work rarely comes across as political, he says he cares “much more about history and politics than people realize.” Indeed, he lectured me authoritatively for 20 minutes, succinctly summarizing Yugoslavia’s history since the archduke’s assassination. When World War I ended four years and many deaths after that fateful event, Yugoslavia was created, he explains. If millions of people had fought and died for naught, at least Princip’s superiors could take solace in the fact that the Yugoslavian nationalists had not.

“When the Second World War started,” explains Pekar, “Germany invaded Yugoslavia and there was all this guerrilla warfare. The most effective guerrillas were led by [Josip Broz] Tito. Tito managed to pull Yugoslavia together, to pull all these ethnic groups together who had a lot in common with each other, but who, nevertheless, had been fighting each other for God knows how long.”

Tito’s Yugoslavia was communist but unaligned, undemocratic but relatively free, and — despite ethnic and religious variety — united. But after Tito died in 1980, the common identity he had managed to instill in, or force on, the Yugoslavian people began to fade away. When the new leader, Slobodan Milosevic, tried to reimpose that identity (albeit with less popular support and less skill than his predecessor), local nationalisms were awakened and civil wars broke out. Macedonia, with its large Albanian minority and weak central government, was a prime candidate for violence. Surprisingly, some might say, war never broke out.

Roberson is a firm believer in peace, but it does seem remarkable, given the unwavering pessimism with which journalists, scholars, and Macedonians alike prophesied Macedonia’s demise after its secession in 1991, that war never came. In Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts, the editor in chief of Macedonia’s largest daily newspaper is quoted as saying, “This is the most volatile area of the Balkans. We are a weak, new nation surrounded by old enemies. Several nations could come to war here as they did at the beginning of the century … And don’t forget that we are a quiet Kossovo: twenty three percent of Macedonia’s population is actually Albanian … We face the same fate as the Serbs in their historical homeland.”

Perhaps it is this fear that makes Macedonians so nostalgic. As one woman tells Roberson, Yugoslavia “was wonderful. Just traveling was so different then. We could go wherever we wanted. We used to go to the beach in Croatia … I was very young, but yes, I cried at his [Tito’s] funeral. Everyone was devastated.” Surprising or not, the avoidance of war in Macedonia proves Roberson’s point: What is needed to prevent a civil war is that “people within the country and in the international community make a commitment to peace and diplomacy as a strategy.”

For Roberson, peace does not necessarily mean harmony. It may actually entail conflict, which she sees as a good thing. “Conflict is how we learn,” she says, “it’s how we uncover problems in our own way of thinking.” Despite being a tiny country of barely 2 million people, Roberson insists, Macedonia’s case is applicable elsewhere, even to larger countries with valuable natural resources. Pekar adds, “Macedonia shows that if you can ever get international cooperation, a lot of things could be accomplished. Right now, there’s very little cooperation.”

A graphic novel whose illustrations are both immensely comical and brutally honest, especially in their depiction of prejudice, Macedonia is much more than a lesson in political optimism. Perhaps Pekar’s disillusionment with the standard superhero comic — which he had grown sick of by age 11 — and his desire to break away from the arbitrary limits imposed on the graphic novel as a medium, make him underestimate the humor inherent in this book. “Some parts of Macedonia are funny,” he admits, “but basically, I saw this as a serious project and I didn’t have any problem with that. Just because it’s never been done doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”

But scarcely a page lacks an image or anecdote worthy of a hearty chuckle. The existence of a Bill Clinton Street in Kosovo, for example, is very funny, as is the anecdote about a policeman who pulls over an international worker because he mistakenly believes a dog is driving his car.

Amusing, informative, and often compelling, Macedonia fits into no preexisting genre; its format serves its purpose effectively. Roberson explains, “A graphic novel is a great way to tell a story that has so much to do with geography, so much to do with where a place is and who lives there.” Even more so when the story concerns Yugoslavia, a historical labyrinth that not even Borges could have concocted. Boasting “the most frightful mix-up of races ever imagined,” as John Reed put it, Yugoslavia’s constantly changing names and boundaries, regular population transfers, and wealth of religions and alphabets render the Macedonian situation entirely inseparable from Yugoslavia’s sprawling history. This book serves as “a primer, something that is as accessible as possible, but that has the history people need to know in order to understand Macedonia and why it was so exceptional for dealing with its conflicts peacefully,” says Roberson.

The huge cross that sits atop a hill overlooking Skopje and reminding Muslim Albanians that they are not in charge; the segregation between ethnic Albanians and Macedonians; the rumors of Macedonian doctors who poison Albanian children — these are not exactly signs of a harmonious society. But in the same country, citizens plaster billboards with antigun posters; graffiti declares “war is bad for your health”; NATO troops peacefully disarm militias; nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) listen to Albanian grievances and pressure the Macedonian government to consider them; and young people set up a multiethnic university. Only segregation has found its way into history books, but it’s been the antiviolence campaigns and the cooperation that have ultimately triumphed; it is these symbols that should be recorded as phenomena of historical significance.

Macedonia is a valiant attempt to set history straight. Roberson, Pekar, and Piskor have created a moving and memorable book that has revolutionized the art of the comic and has the potential to alter the long-dominant discourse on war.

Visit jeremygillick.blogspot.com for the full interviews.

Jeremy Gillick

Growing up amidst the horrors of civil war in Sudan in the 1980s, Valentino Achak Deng witnessed acts that could stamp out the faith of even the staunchest believers in humanity. Hordes of armed men from the north torched his village and massacred his relatives and neighbors when he was just seven years old. Later, Deng saw hundreds of boys his age die as they walked across the desert to seek shelter in Ethiopia. The army that supposedly was fighting for his freedom — the Sudan People’s Liberation Army — drove many other boys to their deaths. But the book that tells the story of Deng’s brutal and courageous life is as much a commentary on its readers as it is on Deng’s experiences and his native country. What is the What, the creative retelling of Deng’s life by journalist and author Dave Eggers, seems to convey that Deng has been victimized by the citizens of his adopted society in America perhaps even more cruelly than he had been during the bleakest days of the war.

Deng’s story involves a 13-year journey from his ravaged village in southern Sudan to refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya until, at long last, he is granted asylum in the United States and flown to Atlanta. What Is the What, a fictionalized version of Deng’s life with Deng as the narrator, focuses on a two-day period in Atlanta, opening with him being assaulted and robbed in his own home. In the book, Deng imagines addressing his attackers when they leave him tied-up and bloodied on the floor, then the God-fearing neighbors oblivious to his calls for help, the cop indifferent to the glaring clues at the crime scene, the emergency room receptionist who makes him wait 14 hours for an MRI, and lastly, the harried clients at the fitness center where he works as a receptionist.

A theme running throughout Deng’s narrative is his recurring doubt as to whether he actually exists to the Americans he encounters. All the characters he meets within the two-day span of the novel behave as though Deng were either not alive or not a human being. “This boy thinks I am not of his species, that I am some other kind of creature, one that can be crushed under the weight of a phone book,” Deng surmises when the child of his attackers drops a phone book on his head to shut him up. When Deng calls his own stolen cell phone after he is freed and the child answers, he expresses defeat that the police never bothered to trace his phone number. “This is the moment, above any other, when I wonder if I actually exist. If one of the parties involved, the police or the criminals, believed that I had worth or a voice, then this phone would have been disposed of. But it seems clear that there has been no acknowledgment of my existence on either side of this crime.”

Deng expresses more outrage here than he does when describing the events of his horrific past. Brutal injustices can be wrought by governments and men during times of war; perhaps they are expected. It is these lesser abuses æ such as being ignored æ that truly offend Deng. “In a furious burst, I kick and kick again, flailing my body like a fish run aground,” Deng says, describing his attempts to free himself after the perpetrators leave him bound and gagged on the floor of his apartment. “Hear me, Christian neighbors!  Hear your brother just above!” He waits. “Nothing again. No one is listening. No one is waiting to hear the kicking of a man above. It is unexpected. You have no ears for someone like me.”

A reader will likely feel frustrated for Deng. How could anyone assault someone who has endured so much? How could the police not intervene? How could the neighbors be deaf to his pleas? But in fact, we too are his neighbors. How many times have we been deaf to the kicking of a man above? How many of us consider ourselves sensitive and empathetic, only to act as if some around us don’t exist?
 
“Does this interest you, Julian?” Deng asks the receptionist who sits ignoring him as he waits hours in an empty emergency room for treatment for his bloodied head. “You seem to be well-informed and of empathetic nature, though your compassion surely has a limit. You hear my story of being attacked in my own home, and you shake my hand and look into my eyes and promise treatment to me, but then I wait. … You wear a uniform and have worked at a hospital for some time; I would accept treatment from you, even if you were unsure. But you sit and think you can do nothing.”

Julian does not hear this, of course; Deng is not speaking aloud. But Deng’s words ring in the minds of the readers. It is us he is addressing, and his acknowledgement of our existence despite our ignorance serves as an accusation. “I will tell stories to people who will listen and to people who don’t want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who run,” Deng states in the book’s final paragraph. “All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist.”

Though Deng’s closing tone is a hopeless one — for of course, we can and do act as if he doesn’t exist — his exhortation is clear. To rekindle belief in humanity, we needn’t put an end to all its wars. We must simply assume the responsibility of hearing those we deafly ignore. 

Jennifer Fishbein

To write what you know, as the old maxim says, is good. But to write successfully about something you cannot possibly know is brilliant. And that’s exactly what Wally Lamb has done in his first novel, the New York Times bestseller, She’s Come Undone.

Lamb’s stunning 1992 entry into the literary spotlight deals with a broad range of issues with depth and without judgment, exposing the corners of the human soul as it deals with abandonment, rape, guilt, rites of passage, obesity, death, forgiveness, and finally, hope through the delicate perspective of a female character.

She’s Come Undone, which also made it to Oprah’s Book Club list, follows the life of Dolores Price, from her early childhood memories of her family’s first television to her mid-30s’ desperation for children, weaving you down, up, over, around, and through the tragedies and triumphs of her life. Dolores’ life contains one trial after another, sometimes leaving the reader struggling to see a way out for the imperfect heroine. It is only as we journey deeper into the novel that we begin to realize the full weight of Dolores’ initial warning, “Mine is a story of craving: an unreliable account of lusts and troubles that began, somehow, in 1956 on the day our free television was delivered.”

Beginning with her parents’ separation and being raped at 13, Dolores embarks on a downward spiral through her teenage years, eating away her guilt and entering adulthood at 257 pounds. At the end of high school, horrifically overweight and already withdrawn from society, Dolores is then confronted with her mother’s death in a freak accident.

This is just the beginning of Dolores’ troubles, their effects unraveling throughout the remainder of the story. Indeed, this novel is not for the faint-hearted or weak-minded. At times, it’s difficult not to flick forward pages in search of a glimmer of hope for the main character. Nevertheless, Lamb manages to weave some semblance of strength into Dolores’ character, saving us from feeling completely distraught over the poor girl’s fate.

Lamb’s close connection with his characters is evident in the voice he gives each one. In an interview with The Book Report’s Judy Handschuh, Lamb admitted that he doesn’t control his characters — in fact, quite the opposite. “People always say, ‘But you’re in control of what happens.’ That’s not true,” he explained. “I start with a character’s voice, and that voice leads me into the story. I never know where I’m going, and getting into the character leads me into realizing the story. Sometimes I try to put them on safer paths or have them make better choices. But whenever I do that, my writing becomes hollow. So I’ve learned to let them go their own way, and just wait to see what happens.”

Lamb has an uncanny knack for accurately depicting the tumultuous experience of obesity, which lends a genuine depth to his novel. Dolores’ early depression and attempts to eat her way out of sorrow result in a vicious cycle of gluttony and despair lasting well into her 20s. The ridicule she suffers, particularly once she enters a university, serves as sharp criticism of people’s insensitivity to overweight people. Dolores endures constant taunts and blatant mockery from her peers, and even her so-called “friends.”

Even though Lamb’s novel is 15 years old, the issue of the social ridicule and alienation of the overweight still resonates strongly today. According to a 2003-2004 survey by the United States Department of Health and Human Services, 32.9 percent of North Americans were classified as suffering from obesity — more than double the 1980 record of 15 percent. She’s Come Undone deals with the extreme nature of obesity from a personal perspective, allowing the reader a glimpse at the often forgotten and overlooked psychological difficulties involved.

Katherine Roff

A few years ago, author Jonathan Lethem found himself well on his way to becoming the Philip Roth of Brooklyn with his two most well-acclaimed novels, Motherless Brooklyn (1999) and The Fortress of Solitude (2003) — both colorful and incisive accounts of his hometown borough — quickly propelling him into the somewhat reluctant role of a Brooklynite mouthpiece.

It was for this very reason that Lethem felt compelled to set his new novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet, in the complex maelstrom that is Los Angeles. It’s a bold move, not only because of the notorious competition between New York and Los Angeles, but because Los Angeles is a difficult place to penetrate — even for those who live there.

“There’s that famous Joyce quote about ‘artists need silence, exile, and cunning,’” Lethem told me over the phone in late March, “and I guess I’d just been looking for that ‘exile’ part of things; working from the margins, doing preposterous things, disavowing one’s credentials.”

The novel — Lethem’s seventh — stars Lucinda Hoekke, a bass player stumbling into her thirties while living in Echo Park, an up-and-coming, yuppie-hipster Los Angeles neighborhood. Like many of the city’s residents, Lucinda works odd jobs as she tries to make it with her wannabe rock band. Her latest career move is answering phones at the Complaint Line, an anonymous help line conceived by her conceptual artist friend. Eight hours a day she fields complaints from callers responding to randomly placed stickers that read, “Complaints? Call 213-291-7778.” (The number really works: Try it.)

It’s there that Lucinda falls for a regular caller named Carlton Vogelsong — affectionately nicknamed “the Complainer” — who confides to Lucinda at length about his sexual escapades, but also about his feelings of emptiness and dissatisfaction with life. The Complainer also happens to be a professional slogan writer and, indeed, his utterances beguile the wayward Lucinda, who makes note of them and passes them on to her band’s lead singer and songwriter. The Complainer’s words soon become the lyrics for some of the band’s best songs, calling the material’s ownership into question as the band starts to grow more popular. As the songs take on a life of their own, no one is quite sure just where they originated.

The plotline recalls Lethem’s essay “The Ecstasy of Influence,” which was published in the February 2007 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The essay explores the phenomenon of cultural borrowing and appropriation, and the effects of intellectual property rights. “The demarcation between various possible uses is beautifully graded and hard to define,” wrote Lethem in that essay, “the more so as artifacts distill into and repercuss through the realm of culture into which they’ve been entered, the more so as they engage the receptive minds for whom they were presumably intended.”

Appropriation is essential to creative vitality, Lethem reminds his readers, and strict copyright laws are consequently detrimental to artistic innovation. The essay urges consideration of the world of art and culture as a sort of public commons, impervious to possession by a singular person. “Copyright is a ‘right’ in no absolute sense; it is a government-granted monopoly on the use of creative results,” writes Lethem. “Whether the monopolizing beneficiary is a living artist or some artist's heirs or some corporation’s shareholders, the loser is the community, including living artists who might make splendid use of a healthy public domain.”

In that spirit, Lethem has initiated a project through his website called Promiscuous Materials that offers up his stories and lyrics at no cost for other artists to use, rework, and reinterpret at will. Already, artists such as One Ring Zero and John Linnell from They Might Be Giants have recorded songs to Lethem’s lyrics, and some short films are in the works.

Lethem has also recently announced that he will option out the film rights to You Don’t Love Me Yet to a filmmaker of his choice in exchange for just 2 percent of the profits once that film is made. In addition, both he and the filmmaker will give up ancillary rights to their respective creations five years after the film’s debut. By offering this nontraditional option, Lethem hopes to spark a reexamination of the typical ways in which art is commodified. “I also realized that sometimes giving things away — things that are usually seen to have an important and intrinsic ‘value,’ like a film option æ already felt like a meaningful part of what I do,” he writes on his website. “I wanted to do more of it.”

Lethem is not the originator of the battle against the increasingly tight grip of copyright laws; he points to Open Source theory and the Free Culture Movement as influences, as well as longtime collage artists like the American experimental band Negativland. But as a successful mainstream author, Lethem is a uniquely compelling advocate. “Almost everyone you find clamoring for strengthening the public domain or for reexamining the regime of intellectual property control that’s so typical right now is not so much like me,” Lethem told me. “I think there’s a really kind of sad abdication of this conversation by more established artists. That’s why I felt that I had a role to play in this talk.”

Projects such as Promiscuous Materials and the You Don’t Love Me Yet film rights option are potent responses to the rampant propagation of intellectual property rights — more effective, probably, than the latent messages encoded in the plot of Lethem’s new novel. It would be easy to create parallels. For instance, in the book, when the Complainer learns that the band’s hit songs contain his lyrics, he burrows his way into becoming a member — “Do you want to destroy the band?” the drummer asks the Complainer when he claims credit for the songs. “How could I want to do that?” he responds. “I basically am the band.” But this unpopular addition results in the band’s demise. Thus, the Complainer’s aggressive move to assert creative ownership ultimately destroys the artistic product.

Yet Lethem is quick to downplay the connection. “Of course, it comes out of a similar instinct, but it’s not like the book was written as a heavy way of bearing down on any idea. It sort of glances off those thoughts. But the book is, I hope, a little too frisky to seem like it’s got a big and ponderous agenda like that.”

As advised, it’s best to read You Don’t Love Me Yet as a light and playful “sex and rock ‘n’ roll” novel rather than overestimate its relation to Lethem’s crusade against what he calls “usemonopoly.” Though some reviewers are dismayed by the novel’s slightness as compared to the wondrous complexities of Lethem’s more major works such as Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, it is not definitively disastrous for an author to maintain some equilibrium of tone and substance. As the Complainer says in the novel, “You can’t be deep without a surface.” Jonathan Lethem has sufficiently proved his depth as a writer; let us allow him his surface.

In The Fray Contributor