Book Review: THE SPIRITS

Not every family gathering for the holiday meets the happy Norman Rockwell standard. Instead, deeply held differences of opinion can be all it takes to raise loud, angry voices. Add in memories of childhood trauma, plus a holiday outburst remembered from the year before, and you have the nervous tension of the fictional Whitby family anticipating their annual Christmas Eve dinner together.  

The Spirits, Bonnie Jo Campbell’s fourth novel and most recent book (released Oct. 13), is a departure from her previous long fiction. Both literally and metaphorically, the fictional setting is more interior than outdoors this time around. 

The Spirits shares with Campbell’s first novel, Q Road, a compressed timeline, giving us this time a family on Christmas Eve: widow Linda Whitby, her four children, and the older son’s girlfriend around a dinner table for most of the story, the living Linda somehow a less substantial presence—at least in the mind of Sis, to which the author gives us access—than her late husband, Henry, bullying patriarch and father of Sis, Doug, Trevor, and Beth. 

Is Doug’s girlfriend, Mary (the surprise non-family guest at the table), a stand-in for Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens? She does use crutches to get around, having been struck by lightning when young and told she would never walk again, and her general outlook on the world seems bright and happy (Tiny Timish), but when I read the novel I didn’t put too much weight on that as a literary allusion, even if the author intended it. Instead I met Mary and her boyfriend’s family as I would meet any new people here in Michigan, curious to see how they would reveal themselves—to me, the reader, to each other, and to Mary, the newcomer. 

While Mary is a catalyst for the direction taken by the holiday dinner table conversation, it is primarily the thoughts and feelings of Sis Whitby that the author gives us. Sis is tormented by Christmases past, both the Christmas of nine years ago, when her father died, and the one only twelve months past, when she herself was the cause of a blowup the family has yet to put fully behind them. Sis carries a load of guilt for both previous Christmases and longs to confess and be forgiven, but fear of another dinner table explosion chokes back her words. What she doesn’t realize is that other family members have their own confessions to make and that everyone has given a different interpretation to the father’s death nine years earlier.

Along with page-turning suspense, we encounter in The Spirits Campbell's usual signature preoccupations, Sis’s devotion to the world of green growing things and a country family’s growing, harvesting, and preserving of its own food. These authorial preoccupations are never peripheral but are intrinsic to her stories. In this case, it is in caring for trees and other growing plants, if anywhere, that Sis will eventually find redemption and salvation. Like Rachel Crane in Q Road, Margo Crane in Once Upon a River, the Zook women in The Waters, and Campbell herself (at home in rural Kalamazoo County with her donkeys and her husband, “darling Christopher), Sis Whitby is rooted in Michigan soil, and I am one Michigan bookseller grateful to Campbell for putting us on the American literary map.

Bonnie Jo at Dog Ears Books, 2015

Author at home with one of her donkeys

Rambling Post in Need of a Unifying Title

 

Beautiful colors of ash leaves in October

Timely reminder first:

Bonnie Jo Campbell at Dog Ears Books!

Bonnie's suggestion was that we plan to do as we did with her last visit, which is to give her a chance to chat informally with customers who want books signed. If a crowd builds up and clamors for more, she is willing to read an excerpt for us, but you should feel free to drop in any time between 4 and 5 p.m. next Friday and not worry that you'll be late.

A Seth Family Story

Giving a visiting out-of-town friend a little township scenic auto tour on Monday, for the first time when I saw the sign for Seth Road it linked up in my mind with poet and novelist Vikram Seth, as I am currently reading his book titled Two Lives, though the road and the author have nothing to do with each other.

Two Lives begins with Seth's own antecedents and life and then goes on to detail the life of “Shanti Uncle,” his father’s brother, and Shanti’s German wife, Henny. “Vicky,” as his family sometimes called him (with no suggestion of femininity), had traveled from India to England for education and lived with his aunt and uncle off and on in London while in school, the three growing very close. Years later, his Aunt Henny suggested that he interview Shanti Uncle about his (the uncle’s) life, and those eleven long interviews formed the first basis for a book that eventually included the second life, that of Henny, when a trunk of old letters she had written and received turned up in the attic of the house Shanti had bought when he first set up his dental practice, the house where he brought Henny as his bride, and where both lived until their deaths.

Shanti Seth served in the British Army as a dentist until he lost his right arm below the elbow in bombing hear Monte Cassino. The story of how he was able to retrain himself and return to dentistry is itself a testament to courage and perseverance. He had met Henny and her family in Berlin while in dental school and was one of a social circle of the daughters’ friends, both Jewish and Christian Germans, in the 1930s. You can see where this is going. Henny eventually was able to emigrate and go to London, where she and Shanti were once again in the same social circle and eventually married, but her mother and sister were trapped in place, a brother overseas having squandered money that was to help the family emigrate, and they were eventually “transported” and died, Henny’s mother in Theresienstadt and sister Lola in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Author Seth only learned of this history after the trunk of letters was discovered, motivating him to do further research. Henny had never spoken of this part of her family history to him.

A 1948 letter to Henny from her best friend back in Berlin closes with these words: 

"I am reading Seneca, and it makes me think of how old Herr Mahnert once left his rucksack on the train, and then declared as a distinguishing feature that it contained Seneca’s The Happy Life. Reading is still the best thing. I always read in bed till I drop off to sleep…."

Two years earlier, Henny herself had written to that same “old Herr Mahnert” that she could find “no solace or peace” in the case of her mother’s and sister’s deaths. 

"You can understand [she wrote] that I hate each and every German who has been connected with the Nazi Ideology. This naturally does not hold good for the people like you who, I know, have always been against the beastly Nazi Regime from the very first day. I know, that some of my old friends changed with the time as the tide changes with the moon and you cannot blame me if I despise such people. I know ’to err is human, to forgive divine,’ but the way the Nazis have erred is inhuman and can never be forgiven and, I hope, never be forgotten."

In recounting the life stories of his uncle and aunt, the author generally lets them speak for themselves. In one of the later sections of his book, however, he allows himself to speculate on the past and the future of our world. He asks why Germany was such a lightning rod for so much of what happened in the 20th century (“Berlin shaped the first half of the twentieth century, and epitomized the second”) and comes up with the following reasons: communism played a “crucial role,” both theoretical and actual; Germany made “singular contributions” in “science, quasi-science, and pseudo-science”; German pseudo-science led to and supported a German belief in their own superiority as well as the inferiority of other peoples; finally, there was Germany’s geographical location between East and West, fueling its determination not to be overtaken in either direction but to expand its own territory, having taken a path toward imperialism when the German states unified in 1871.

Seth speculates that the “terrible tragedies both caused by and inflicted on Germany” could serve as a lesson for the future, the way that the postwar Marshall Plan avoided the punishing repercussions that followed the “Great War” and laid the groundwork for a more lasting peace in Europe. But will we learn from the 20th century? Is there any sign that the world has learned the terrible price of war? Seth raises the possibility without full confidence and says of his own hope:

This may well smack of wishful thinking; all too often one finds among the very people to whom wrong has been done a blindness to the suffering of those whom they are wronging.

- Vikram Seth, Two Lives (HarperCollins, 2005)

Each leaf lives but a season.

What lessons can we draw from the past, and how?

Looking around at conflicts today in so many places, it is difficult to be optimistic about the world’s future. It is also difficult to imagine forgiving, in the future, those who at present are changing with the time “as the tide changes with the moon,” going along with brutality on the part of our own government—or at least shrugging and turning away as if it doesn’t concern them. I can forgive a wrong done to me—but wrongs done to others in my name? That is entirely different.

Which reminds me (lightening the tone for a moment) about the time a friend tried to convince me that the Universe was setting “lessons” for each of us as individuals. I didn’t buy it. (I can’t see the “Universe” having me under a microscope!) “But I do try to learn from my experiences,” I told her, “so pragmatically there’s no difference between your belief and mine.” 

She didn’t buy that! “One of us has to be right and the other wrong,” she protested. 

I held to my position and still do, because if one of us were right and the other wrong, (1) how would we ever know which was which, and (2) (as I said to her then) what difference would it make, as long as both of us tried to learn what we could?

Fall color of shasta viburnum

"Why do human beings never learn from history?” another friend asked. 

Who knows? I think a large part of it is that our own lives are so short—history so long!—and we have a hard time learning from something we have not been through ourselves. Knowing is nothing like experiencing. And even then, two people never experience the “same” event the same way.

Don’t we all know people who have grown wiser with age and others who have grown more foolish? What can we conclude from that?

But I seem to have painted myself into a corner here, so it’s probably time to stop talking about lessons.

From My Little Corner

Coming into the village

It is peaceful in my little corner of the world. In Northport I read and sell books and buy and order more. At home I wage war only on invasive species, usually autumn olive (and a single nasty buckthorn so far; I hope there won't be more). I read at home, too, tend outdoor plants and engage in agility work and tennis ball play with Naughty Barker, take walks with her and Tree Guy. 

An unusually grim mood invaded our usually placid domestic space when Tree Guy belatedly learned of the slaughter of over 400 trees in our nation's capitol. The trees were cut down in violation of a court order, the devastation getting underway just before 5 p.m. of the recent holiday weekend--timing impossible to see as coincidental. 

I realize that my preceding paragraph provides no relief from “the violence of the political internet,” as one person commenting referred to my blog last week. While neither engaging in violent rhetoric nor inciting violence, I have definitely referred to it. Why? Because it's there, and I can't pretend it isn't, and while these recent dead are trees and not human beings, it is yet another example of wanton destruction, occurring daily, not visited on us by nature but by human beings, and haven't we seen enough for the entire rest of this century (barely underway)? 

The old Bob Dylan song keeps going through my head, as I ask myself, “How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see?” People I know! Fundamentally—I truly believe it—decent people, somehow at present blind (willfully?), who will, surely, one day wake to ask themselves how they ever—? But what point is there in going over this again and again? They won't see until they let themselves see, and then their hearts will break as ours break, day after day, now. Or do they see and not care? And how can that be?

For relief from the violent present, I turn to living green things, to stories set in other times and places, and to my canine and human life partners. We are so, so lucky. We are here now!

And I have the best job in the world! 

What's so great about being an indie bookseller? I spend my days with books! I don't have a boss, and I don't boss anyone else. 

Book by a retired conservation officer

I meet interesting people all the time, each day presenting delightful surprises I could not have predicted the day before, fascinating people from all over, some of them writers, all of them readers, with backgrounds varied far beyond the confines of libraries and academic classrooms. 

There are parts of the world in which the life I lead would not have been possible for someone like me--a woman running a business (albeit a tiny one!) in books, with full control over the titles I stock. No one tells me what to wear or what hours my shop must be open or what books I must sell or any that I am forbidden to handle. I do not take these freedoms for granted, any more than I take for granted other ways my life has been and continues to be fortunate.

Sounded important to me

Mine is a human life. Conflicts arise from time to time, and, as does everyone, I have my worries and struggles along the way. In time, death will come, as it comes to all. That, as Tree Guy says, is “part of the deal.” We did not make the deal. We were born into it, given the gift of life, and accepting that is accepting all of it, including death. Okay! I gratefully accept.

What's New Around Here?

Besides Bonnie Jo's new book and upcoming visit, I have a few other new titles to share, one special one a little book on the stars.

I don't recognize many constellations. Half a dozen at most. I can't tell you when it occurred to me that learning names of the stars given to them by ancient Greeks who never set foot on North America soil was a little strange for us here in Michigan. and Next I began to wonder what names Native Americans gave to our familiar northern constellations, a question that led me to this book: 

Whether at home in Michigan, where Orion appears over my barn, or out in southeast Arizona those five winters past, where I saw the same stars in the high desert sky, the familiar constellation gave me a feeling of home. That feeling is enhanced now by learning the Ojibwe name, Wintermaker, or Biboonikeonini. Yes, that fall constellation tells us what is soon to come. Familiar. Part of home. As familiar and homelike as the yipping of coyotes in the dark.

Moon before dark...

Color is a developing story. So is my bookshop.

Sunny in the morning sun 

We have been having a spate of lovely mornings so far this October. Spate. That’s an interesting word. A large number of anything, definitions of the word say, although a few add that it usually refers to bad things. No, no! Lovely mornings are good! They are beautiful gifts, and we can never have too many of them! 

Barbara clouds at sunrise

Wild aster festival

A bend in the road

(For a very early morning sight, look here.)

Sometimes I make notes or lists ahead of time for a new blog post; other times the writing becomes a seat-of-the-pants improvisation. (Fiction writers are sometimes said to be “plotters” or “pantsers,” the former planning and charting a novel’s action, the latter just seeing where the action takes the story.) One reason I omitted from my last post the visit from a dear friend of 60 years (!!!) and her husband is that somehow, unbelievably, she and I completely forgot to have the guys take a picture of us together, and I was writing my post largely from photographs (except for the book stuff), so there you are. Terrible me! Sixty years! Jeanie, how could we???

If I work from photographs today, this will be another pantsed (seat-of-the-pants) post, and it looks like that’s what it’s going to be.

Always ready for fun

The World Around Us

Again, because I was unable to photograph it, I keep forgetting to record my sighting of a red-bodied dragonfly along our daily two-track road a few weeks back. Entrancing! Was it a common darter? A meadow skimmer? I confess I prefer the name meadow skimmer, so that's what I want to think it was. 

Red is not as common in nature, it seems to me, as green or white or yellow. Cardinal flower stands out for that reason alone. In this season, it is the leaves of the pin cherries that enchant me. 

What could be lovelier?

Virginia creeper?

Garden and Orchard Notes

Wanting to introduce Tree Guy to my favorite area nurseries, I drove us to one on the way home from errands in Traverse City, not intending to buy anything but simply to luxuriate in the arboretum atmosphere--until I saw something that had to come home with me, a little native shrub with the most beautiful fall color imaginable.

American hazelnut planted Monday

I was a goner! It fit in the car, and before sunset it was in the ground near my boardwalk perennial border.

Although shrubs involve more initial cost than most perennials, I am coming to think they might be a better bargain. How many so-called perennials have I planted, only to have them disappear after two or three seasons? Also, like a tree, a shrub it its beautiful self for at least half the year. Long ago I fell in love with a viburnum (var. 'Chenault') for its fall color, having no idea what it would look like when it flowered in summer. That shrub I planted in Northport in the late 1990s is still strong and healthy and beautiful, so I have high hopes for the shasta viburnum a friend brought me from a garden being bulldozed, another new member of my garden family.

Shasta viburnum planted Tuesday

I disassembled my strawberry tower to bring it to the bookstore for the winter. Maybe the plants will die, unhappy without a dormancy period. The whole tower was an experiment, anyway, wild plants not fruiting that I dug up along the back of my house, so there was nothing to lose.

Its earlier incarnation

Moving for the winter

More and more of the plant world is shutting down as the days grow shorter. The time for rest will soon be here. 

A late statement of color

The big harvest and preserving push at present involves apples. Peeling, slicing, saucing and drying. So far, I have two batches of sauce in canning jars and a second batch of slices in the dehydrator.

Adventures in Reading

Sounds like a schoolbook, doesn't it? As a lifelong reader, however, and bookseller of over three decades, I have to admit that many of my life's adventures are vicarious, found in the pages of books. One that held me spellbound was Venture to the Interior, by Laurens Van Der Post, although when I read about his life after reading the book, I wondered if I had been completely taken in. Were his facts really facts? Were the emotions he recounts what he truly felt? The morning those doubts assailed me, I began reading a memoir by Vikram Seth, Two Lives, and then watched a video of an interview with Seth, interested to note that he considers himself primarily a poet, although the world knows him chiefly as a novelist--much like Jim Harrison, I couldn't help thinking, the market (and how crass that word sounds in this context!) for poetry being so much smaller than that for long fiction.

Then there is nonfiction, which can be as fascinating as any novel written and as beautiful or heart-wrenching as any poem. Three nonfiction books in my recent reading, if they must be given a category (because nonfiction is not really a category, is it?), would have to be called anthropology. Two are called that, another subtitled “oral history.”

Chinese Lives: An Oral History of Contemporary China, by Zhang Xinxin & Sang Ye, with a preface by Studs Terkel, is a collection of stories made in China, inspired by Terkel's collections of Americans' stories. The man and woman who put these stories together were themselves Chinese, born in 1953 and 1955, respectively, Zhang having worked as a nurse and a factory worker before establishing herself in journalism, Sang trained as an electrician who also turned to journalism and modern Chinese history.

John Langston Gwaltney, who received part of his training in anthropology under the late Margaret Mead, collected in Drylongso (that word means “ordinary” in the Gullah language of coastal Georgia and South Carolina) the stories of black Americans of all ages from many different walks of life as his 1970s field study, which he called a “portrait of core black culture,” because as a Black man he felt his people had not been accurately represented in standard social science. Rather than concentrating on poverty or dysfunction, he looked for the ordinary, the drylongso, of Black American culture, and those who spoke with him (many of whom had known him all their lives) did so trusting him with their stories.

Ōkubo Diary: Portrait of a Japanese Valley, by Brian Moeran, was also an account by an anthropologist, but it was very different from Chinese Lives and Drylongso, in that Moeran, the author, (1) was an outsider, a Westerner, and (2) gave his own observations of the life of the Japanese village from a subjective, first-person standpoint. His Japanese wife came from an urban rather than a rural background and so was almost as much an outsider as he was (both spoke Japanese but not the local dialect); however, they bought a house in the valley, hoping to settle there permanently and that they would eventually be seen as “belonging.” Two years later, those hopes were dashed. 

Zhang and Sang, like Gwaltney, allow their subjects (for want of a better word) to speak for themselves, and as readers we feel we are meeting these individuals directly. Fascinating as Moeran's book is, we never have that same feeling. We are given only his stories of the people among whom he lived, and so, like him, we are held at a distance from their lives. Like him, we remain an outsider.

I'll be getting back to Vikram Seth soon. But Tree Guy and I will also be having more company this month, and there is still a lot of fall work to be done, too, around the home place. 

We are still learning, Sunny and I.

One of my favorite portraits of her

Last Monday may have been our last agility session for the season, or we may have one more, depending on the weather. Be that as it may, I asked Coach Mike to take a couple pictures of Sunny and me on the course, and this is what I have:

Sunny and I do pretty well at everything except the weave poles, so I am determined that we will focus on those next summer. Practice, practice, practice! It is the key to success in so many endeavors.

Endings can be beautiful, too.

Besides lovely October dawns, we have also had some spectacular fall sunsets. Those are the Manitou Islands out there on the horizon. 

October's Quiet Entrance

Monday: Quiet aftermath

The Lull After the ???

Do we want to call the 12th annual Leelanau UnCaged street fair a storm? Probably not, even though, once again, it brought thousands of festival-goers to our little village. Despite the numbers, though, somehow the crowd is not overwhelming, as everyone is intent on enjoying the scene: music, arts and crafts, fair food, activities for children, people- and dog-watching extraordinaire, and general good vibes all around. I think I may also say, without fear of contradiction, that the weather was perfect. Last year's weather was close to perfect. (A few people actually thought it was “a little too warm”! Really!) This year could not have been any better.

Saturday morning: All set up and ready to go!

Every year I enjoy strolling through the village in the morning as booths are being set up for the day, and though I spend the day indoors in my bookshop, I was able to have the door open all day this year, and everyone is so happy at UnCaged that I feel very much part of the scene. From the very first year, it has felt like a homecoming for the village and the whole township. 

And then comes a quiet week, the lull after the festivities, everyone still floating on top of a cloud (in the sunshine!), happy that grey, rainy weather held off and did not dampen our celebration on Saturday.

Thursday: Rain

Where does fall color start?

Virginia creeper first, closely followed by staghorn sumac, but never fear, autumn is barely underway, and weeks of beauty lie ahead. The few trees already losing green are mostly urban specimens, surrounded by cement or other hard paving. Trees in the rural landscape are still green.

Green trees, red sumac

Village scene with falling leaves

Grimace of Recognition

Warm, tender, funny, cozy. These words have been used to describe Receipts From the Bookshop: A Bookseller’s Year in an English Seaside Town, by Katie Clapham, one year of a independent bookseller’s diary about bookshop life in her English seaside town. From my own Michigan lakeside village shop, also fiercely independent, I can’t help having a somewhat different take from that of the casual, uninvolved reader. Mine, the response of a committed insider, cannot help responding with (not a shock, but) a wry grimace, whether over bits of conversation that the English bookseller hears from people passing her open shop door without entering or mental notes of the bookseller herself when she sees that July sales in the year she is reporting were less than July sales the year before.

Let me say quickly that my grimace of recognition is not over a business account balance in the red! Frankly, I don’t understand that at all. If your business is losing money, how is it that you are still in business? How do you pay your bills? How do you buy groceries? Unless you have income from another source or are independently wealthy, and then yours is more a hobby than a business. 

Come on in!

“What a cute hobby!” a woman exclaimed once in my shop. Whether or not my shop is “cute” is not for me to say, but it is definitely not a hobby. If it could not support itself and also provide for me, the door would have closed long ago!

But yes, those overheard bits of conversation (e.g., “It’s just books in there,” as I heard someone say once outside my door, dragging her companion past) ... and the inquiries for a specific book that, when put in the customer’s hand, she for some reason decides against purchasing ... and then observations like this:

If you’re wondering whether just one paperback is really such a significant sale, consider the obstacles we’ve overcome to secure it: the dark night of the soul that is winter, not to mention the insidious shift of retail from the high street to the internet and the gentle surrender of attention spans everywhere as the commitment to reading becomes too costly in the attention economy. Buying a book from a bookshop really is an act of resistance; a retro act of resilience and determination to maintain or regain some screen-free time, and a defiant stand against the big corps that assume people value an extra couple of quid over keeping retail afloat in their own home towns. Yes, even if you only picked one up on the way to get your venti mocha, a single paperback is enough to make a difference to us, every damn day. 

- Katie Clapham, Receipts From the Bookshop: A Bookseller’s Year in an English Seaside Town

And yes, my bookshop is unique!

I would not call my bookshop “most unique,” because—well—I wouldn’t call anything “most unique,” unique meaning “the only one of its kind,” and so anything either is unique or it isn’t, and nothing is more or less, let alone least or most unique. But is my bookshop unique? Yes, it is. 

Mine is an independent shop, i.e., not part of a chain, not owned by a corporation, and it’s the only bookstore I own, and I am unique, so there you are. Or, here I am. No two indie bookstores are identical, even if one person or family owns and operates more than a single storefront. Mine is also the only bookshop in Northport, Michigan, and no other bookshop, in Northport or anywhere else, has a collection identical to mine. Each indie bookshop—as is true of a village or an individual human being—wherever it is, has its own unique personality. 

New offerings appear weekly (sometimes oftener).

Answer to the Question You Didn't Ask:

How do you grow an avocado from seed? Keep throwing avocado pits in the compost pile. Sooner or later (maybe much, much later, as happened for me) one or two will produce baby trees that you can dig up and pot for indoor life. Over the decades I have tried every other recommended method, over and over, and none worked for me. This one did. Twice! In one summer!

My window garden will expand over the winter.