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Monday, February 27, 2017

Book Review: THE LAKE AND THE LOST GIRL


The west boundary of the lower peninsula of Michigan is the east shore of Lake Michigan (I mention this for Australian readers), and it is in west Michigan, along the shore, that Jacquelyn Vincenta has set her novel, The Lake and the Lost Girl. Freshwater and the scent of pines mingle, and moody sunsets provide a scenic backdrop. We know where we are.

The story toggles back and forth between the 1930s and 1999, as a husband and wife in the present (1999) search for the truth about a local poet who disappeared in 1939. She has been presumed dead, but did she die, or did she live on, elsewhere, and add to her literary legacy? This is the question that drives the plot.

With that question always in mind, we as readers wonder how much parallelism exists between the marriages, sixty years apart, of poet Mary Stone Walker and her husband Bernard Evans and that of Lydia and Frank Carroll. Both women are writers, both men have anger issues. These are surface similarities, perhaps misleading. But is the present any clearer than the past when it comes to understanding the secrets of the heart? As one character says and another much later agrees, “Marriage is complicated.” Any married person can attest to that, I'm sure!

For years, while Frank Carroll has pursued teaching and academic research on his beloved vanished poet, Lydia Carroll has been the family’s main support, as the writer of popular romance novels. After twenty years of this arrangement, disagreements over finances are only part of a building tension in the household, and their young teenage son is caught between his parents’ increasing unhappiness.

Is Frank’s research meaningful, or has it become an expensive, dead-end obsession? Should Lydia act on her growing dissatisfaction with the writing of genre novels and try something new, or is she deluding herself about her abilities? In the famous words of the midcentury woman’s magazine, “Can this marriage be saved?” Can son Nicholas perhaps be the one to save it? And is it possible for any research to reconstruct the lives and marriage and personalities of Mary and Bernard, after all these years?

Changes from one time period to the other are clearly indicated, as are changes in point of view from one character to another. There are, however, rough spots that more rigorous editing would have smoothed out.

For instance, someone without the terminal degree who teaches part-time in a community college is an instructor, not a professor. While it is plausible that students would fail to make the distinction, colleagues and other adults certainly would note the difference.

In general, the cast of characters could have been pared down. One character introduced early on, Lincoln Babcock, for example, seems marked for an important role but never reappears after his initial scene. Similarly, Lydia’s bookseller friend, proprietor of Charlotte’s Book Web in downtown White Hill, is introduced in the novel’s early pages and brings forward important clues not recognized until later, but Charlotte herself never reappears, nor does her bookstore. Instead, when a book surfaces as the key to the central mystery, it comes by way of Jacob’s Tavern and Books, owned by Brad Kramer, a business and character introduced for the first time very late in the novel. It is disconcerting to have characters we thought important disappear, while others whom we haven’t met at all come suddenly out of nowhere.

Those criticisms aside, I found Jacquelyn Vincenta’s novel compelling and her characters intriguing and believable. Her main characters are complex, because their searches and confusions are so, but we enter into their points of view eagerly, searching along with them for answers to questions that multiply like wire coat hangers in a forgotten closet. Truth and lies ... deception and self-deception, faith and belief ... love, hate, and the passion both inspire ... the struggle to create art and meaning in one’s life – these important themes are skillfully woven into a story whose precise end will surprise even readers who put some of the pieces together along the way.

Don’t take this book to the beach! You’ll forget to re-apply sunblock and come home with a bad burn. Better to begin it in a shaded hammock and finish on the porch of your summer cottage.

The Lake and the Lost Girl
By Jacquelyn Vincenta
Sourcebooks Landmark
Paper, 352pp, $15.99
To be released June 2017



Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Keepin’ ‘em Down in the Swamp


A startling new look at our history that every American should read


Philosopher with Feet of Clay

I thought I knew John Locke. I’ve studied and taught, intensively, the second of his Two Treatises on Government (the first, also, but not with anywhere near the rigor) and felt close to the political John Locke encountered there. The empirical Locke of the Essay on Human Understanding I also found congenial. Though not #1 in my philosophical pantheon (that honor belongs to Henri Bergson), he was one of “my guys.”

Now along comes Nancy Isenberg, who shows me a horrid little man behind the curtain, “a founding member and third-largest stockholder of the Royal African Company, which secured a monopoly over the British slave trade” and the anonymous author of the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, a document granting “ABSOLUTE POWER AND AUTHORITY” of “every Freeman in Carolina ... over his Negro Slaves”! John Locke!

Yes, I knew that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, but John Locke was a philosopher. Not just any philosopher, either, but one who imagined the State of Nature as a state of perfect freedom, “wherein all the Power and Jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another.” Natural equality! A State of Nature “not a State of Licence,” but governed by natural law, every human being equal before God. Even mothers and fathers, as Locke imagined the State of Nature, would have had equal authority over their children. Nothing else made sense.

“Much better,” wrote John Locke in the Second Treatise, for human beings to remain in the state of nature than “to submit to the unjust will of another.” What democrat could resist that John Locke?

But how are two so different Lockes to yield to a single key?

Peter Laslett, Fellow of Trinity College and Locke scholar, feels that efforts to make Locke consistent through the body of his writings are doomed. Locke, Laslett believes, wrote differently when speaking for himself and when speaking for his patron, Lord Shaftesbury, another adventurer in the North American colonial enterprise.

Does chronology help at all? Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina saw daylight in 1669. Laslett believes the Two Treatises were written a decade later, in the period 1679-80 (but not as late as “established dogma” would have it, i.e., in 1688). Could Locke’s political thinking have mellowed sufficiently in ten years for him to have renounced slavery? Well, he never did so publicly, and Laslett himself says Locke is hardly the spokesperson for a rising middle class, let alone an egalitarian who would do away with all distinctions. He remained “the determined enemy of beggars and the idle poor,” and at the same time “profoundly mistrusted commerce and commercial men.”

That “unjust will of another” to which it would be so unreasonable to submit – that would have been the will of an absolute monarch. The will of a household head, a property owner, even the owner of slaves had “justice” on their side, it seems. For John Locke was, first and last, an English gentleman, with all the prejudices of his class and his era.

War Between What and Whom?

Only other philosophers and maybe a handful of political historians will be as shaken as I was by the toppling of my formerly revered John Locke, or even care about his views, but the Civil War, or War Between the States, remains relevant in American politics today, a century and a half beyond the official end of armed hostilities. And so Isenberg’s seventh chapter in White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America bears very careful reading (though it would be a serious mistake to skip to Chapter Seven, “Cowards, Poltroons, and Mudsills: Civil War as Class Warfare” without first reading six preceding chapters, which lay a groundwork back to colonial days).

“Mudsills” was a Southern epithet used by James Henry Hammond of South Carolina to denigrate Northern democracy and a Union army made up of “a foul collection of urban roughs, prairie dirt farmers, greasy mechanics, unwashed immigrants, and ... insolent free blacks.” Menial laborers, stuck in the mud from which they would never emerge, were the base of all civilizations, in Hammond’s view of the world, but Southern slavery kept only slaves of African descent in this lowly condition, while the North “debased its own kind,” i.e., white men.

Isenberg reframes the Civil War conflict (though there is no reason to think she has distorted or misrepresented what anyone of the times thought, said, or write) as one of class rather than race or geography. As much as the South rebelled against the North, it was also those who saw themselves as aristocrats rebelling against others they saw as beneath them -- Davis “born to command,” Lincoln a “rude bumpkin,” whose very honesty was grounds for class suspicion. As Isenberg puts the Southern case against Lincoln,
His Kentucky home made him white trash, and his chosen residence in Illinois made him a prairie mudsill.

But Northerners took up the “mudsill” epithet as a badge of honor, a sobriquet of independence and stark contrast to the tired, dead, Old World aristocratic ideals of the South. Many Union officers felt the war would liberate not only black slaves but the South’s poor whites, as well. “They too needed emancipation,” declared Ulysses S. Grant. Secession, after all, except in Texas, had never been subject to a popular referendum, and the sons of large landowners (planters with 20 or more slaves) easily gained exemption from service, while the suffering of poor recruits and of their families left at home fueled discontent and led frequently to desertion. In the South, the wealthy held all the good land, slave labor made poor white farm workers redundant, and terrible poverty often resulted. The North was the land of economic and political opportunity and must prevail in the end.

Southern leaders, for their part, saw inequality as a natural condition. Large plantation owners of good bloodlines and the benefit of education were clearly born to rule. To the Southern mind, a Northern economy had poor white men working like slaves, and the Northern political system that allowed those same poor whites to vote like gentlemen was an outrage against natural law. Such a debased system could only devolve into squalor and anarchy. The South, therefore, with its culture firmly rooted in established classical principles, must in the end prevail.

And so both sides, North and South, saw the other as “an alien culture doomed to extinction.” And yet, Isenberg notes --
Little separated northern mudsills from southern trash. Neither class gained much when reduced to cannon fodder.

Over and over, it is the different groups on the bottom of the heap – be they mudsills, squatters, crackers, “white trash,” black African slaves or displaced Native Americans – who have the most in common. Over and over these groups without franchise must be kept apart, made to see each other as enemies, so that the wealthy and powerful of North and South, old East and new West, can claim their allegiance to ensure an open road ahead for their own continued self-enrichment.

Who Dwells in the Swamp?

Along the boundary between Virginia and Carolina was a large and forbidding wetland known as the Dismal Swamp. ... 
 Virginians viewed the twenty-two-hundred-square-mile wetland as a danger-filled transition zone. The seemingly endless quagmire literally overlapped the two colonies. There were no obvious routes through its mosquito-ridden cypress forests. In many places, travelers sank knee-deep in the soggy, peaty soil, and had to wade through coal-colored, slimy water dotted with gnarled roots. 
 ...  
...The Great Dismal Swamp divided civilized Virginia planters from the rascally barbarians of Carolina.
The story of the Carolinas and the reality and potent image of the “swamp” comes chronologically long before the Civil War. So now let us return to colonial times.

William Byrd II, a wealthy Virginian, had an idea: Drain the swamp! Ditch it and create farmland!  Such a wild, uncivilized country was not, however, easily tamed and became the natural refuge of poor whites crowded out of the good land. With little farming experience or knowledge, many lived in rags and starved. They certainly had no wherewithal to pay the rents demanded by landowners, who held large tracts, in absentia, by royal charter. In pockets of desperation, rebellions formed.

Enter Lord Shaftesbury! Yes, the patron of John Locke. The disorder of “Culpepeper’s Rebellion,” Shaftesbury argued, was no “rebellion” at all, since Albemarle County had no government worthy of the name and, so, remained in – yes! -- a State of Nature, and as such its inhabitants could expect no protection from civil law!

In 16th-century colonial America, the “swamp” was basically North Carolina, a buffer between prosperous Virginia plantations and the South Carolina seacoast, gradually undergoing civilization. It was inhabited by the poor, the uneducated, the hopeless and landless. Could the “swamp” have been sufficiently “drained” in colonial days, the newly homeless poor whites of its wilderness would have been forced elsewhere, along with Native American tribes, instead of remaining in their remote Appalachian communities. So much for historical precedent.

Our recent U.S. election went to a candidate who promised once again to “drain the swamp,” but with important differences in the phrase as it was used in 1728 and then in 2016. This time around, last year, the reference was to Washington, D.C. and the promises seemingly given to “forgotten” poor whites. It would not be they swept down the drain this time, but the “elites.” Did that mean the rich and powerful? Doesn’t look like that so far. Instead, career government workers and appointees with education and background in their fields are being run out of town, their places taken by a wealthy business and industry elite.

So how about the big swamp-draining promises? Will those who have been at the bottom of the heap for 400 years finally catch a break? Or will the most rich and most powerful smash to pieces the flimsy ladder of worker protection, educational opportunity, health care, and hope for cleaner air, soil, and water so painfully constructed for all Americans in the decades since 1929? Will the “forgotten” finally prosper, or will they be pushed yet deeper into the mud?

What do you hope for? What do you fear? What do you expect?

You can probably tell how it looks to me, but then, Americans have never been of a single mind on anything, have we?

References

Locke’s Two Treatises on Government: A Critical Edition with Introduction and Notes, by Peter Laslett, 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press, 1967

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg. NY: Viking, 2016






Friday, February 10, 2017

Book Review: IF THE CREEK DON'T RISE


Everybody, it seems, is reading Hillbilly Elegy, the recent memoir by J. D. Vance. I read it myself and thought he did a good job of conveying his background story. I’m very curious to see where his life will go next – and I’m not alone in that. Right after reading the Vance memoir, I turned to Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America and am making my way slowly and carefully through this excellent, eye-opening, carefully documented piece of work that will surely be a classic of American history for as long as the United States of America lasts. I’ll have much more to say about this book in the near future.

That I received the other day an advance reader copy (ARC) of a novel set in Appalachia, among “the forgotten folks” of Baines Creek, North Carolina, in 1970 – that was purely coincidental, but like so many coincidences in a reader’s life, it was serendipitous, given what I’d already been reading. The characters in this novel by Leah Weiss are unschooled and hardscrabble poor. They live high on a windy ridge, where the air is thin, and so is the soil. As if the Civil War ended only last week, they still despise Yankees. The very people Vance in his memoir and Isenberg in her history described, Weiss brings to life in her fiction.

She’s not an opportunist riding a hillbilly bandwagon, either. Her mother grew up with fourteen siblings in an unpainted house without electricity or plumbing, and the first chapter of If the Creek Don’t Rise began as a short story entered in a writing contest in 2011. Weiss worked on the novel through 2014 and put it in the hands of an editor in 2015. The interview at the end of the book made me happy: here is a writer who not only understands but loves the hard work of revising and rewriting, which she calls “polishing the silver.”

But, how about the story?

Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge inspired the novel’s structure and enriches it in ways that are impossible to exaggerate. The book opens with pregnant teenage bride Sadie Blue, beat up again by her husband of fifteen days, moonshiner Roy Tupkin. Roy himself has a turn at narrating, but not before we’ve heard from Sadie’s grandmother, an aunt by marriage, the community preacher, the preacher’s sister, the new teacher enticed to the mountain by the preacher’s entreaty (teachers come and go fast in Baines Creek, and no one expects this one to last any longer than the others), and a boy who lives in the woods by hunting and fishing. Kate Shaw, outsider and new teacher, also has a guardian angel in the person of an herbalist midwife neighbor some might call a witch, and Birdie gets to tell her story, too.

Character names beg the reader to pronounce them aloud. Along with Sadie Blue and Roy Tupkin are Gladys Hicks, Marris Jones (proud to be named for the famous Mary Harris “Mother” Jones), Eli and Prudence Perkins (brother and sister), Tattler Swann, Billy Barnhill, and Birdie Rocas. Pharrell Moody looms large in the preacher’s story of his calling. Weeza Dillard is one of Kate Shaw’s little pupils. The store proprietor is Mooney – and only “Mister” if he’s in trouble with the law.

An important gain in having multiple narrators is that we see all of them not only as they see themselves or even as an author might wish to portray them, out of sympathy or lack of it, but as other characters see them. For example, Birdie Rocas at first looks like an urban homeless woman to Kate Shaw, but when Birdie has a chance to tell her story we learn why she wears so many wool skirts at once. Eli Perkins hints at his sister’s excessive martyrdom, her bitter devotion to living poor than she needs to live, but only when we look through Kate Shaw’s eyes do we see Prudence’s dirty neck and fingernails, clothes like rags, and shoes tied together to keep the soles on. The most unlovable characters in the book, we learn, have their own secret heartaches and pain.

Kate Shaw is far from perfect herself. “Book smart and mountain dumb,” is the way Sadie Blue puts it. But what I really appreciate about this book is that Kate Shaw does not come into the community as Sadie’s savior, nor is she shown up as an incompetent fool with all her book learning. Kate recognizes that “the mountain” has a lot to teach her and that the mountain people are not the only ones with needs. She needs a purpose and a place to belong as much as the Dillards need food, Eli needs intellectual companionship, and Sadie needs to find her way to a better life.

If the Creek Don’t Rise country is rich with homemade quilts and watermelon pickles, herbal remedies and colorful stories. It is also home to wife-beating, near-starvation, falling-down houses, and mine accidents that can take breadwinners out quick as snuffing a candle. Leah Weiss captures the rhythm and wit of Appalachian speech without resorting to incomprehensible spellings and a blizzard of apostrophes, and the reader is drawn eagerly and easily into a world that is, for most of us, as remote in experience as the mountain where its characters live is far from the rest of the country.

You’ve probably heard something about studies showing that reading fiction increases empathy. Well, a lot of Americans these days are having a hard time feeling empathy for one another, aren’t we? Feeling bruised ourselves, we rush to judge each other rather than trying to see the world from another’s point of view. If the Creek Don’t Rise just might be the novel to provide a breakthrough perspective to many. Already I can hear lively book club discussions as members exchange opinions on different characters, why they are the way they are, and if they can or should try to be different!

The book is not scheduled for release until late summer, but put it on your list now, or let me know if you want to pre-order a copy.

If the Creek Don’t Rise
by Leah Weiss
Sourcebook Landmark
Paper, $15.95
Available August 2017


Monday, February 6, 2017

Book Review: GALES OF NOVEMBER


Aaron Stander’s latest northern Michigan mystery, once again featuring Sheriff Ray Elkins of Cedar County (a fictional county on the shore of Lake Michigan), may be his best so far. I stopped reading halfway through in order to get a night’s sleep but woke early to pick up where I’d left off and didn’t put the book down again until the last page.

The story unrolls in two sections. In the first quarter of the book we read journal entries, written by a female freshman student, covering a one-week high school camping trip gone bad, a winter wilderness experience in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It is Thanksgiving week, but these students are not going home to family, for various reasons. We then skip ahead twenty-five years, arriving on a Friday before Thanksgiving, when former campers from the ill-fated trip come together again on the grounds of their old private school for a posh reunion arranged by the wealthiest member of the group.

Both the camping trip and the reunion a quarter-century later are marked by severe blizzards. The faculty member leading the group in the wilderness went for help and never returned; the sheriff and detective have to hike in the last couple of miles after going off the road in their SUV. 

The U.P. campsite was far from roads, the private school below the Bridge located outside even a small town, and both scenes are further isolated by the severe winter storms indicated in the book’s title. 

It is a classic setup, reminiscent of Agatha Christie – a limited cast of characters, trapped together for a period of time, isolated from the outside world. But Stander brings to this classic his own gift for evoking the physical and social landscape of northern Michigan, and he is especially good capturing winter.
Even in the blizzard conditions, they could make out his jagged trail. His path ran down the steep slope toward the lake. ... Their thighs burned as they struggled to move forward through the deep drifts. In places where the wind had blown the snow cover away, they encountered steep walls of sheer ice. The hardened steel rims of their shoes cut into the surface, providing some traction, but not preventing an occasional fall....
Gales of November is the ninth Ray Elkins book from Aaron Stander. “Do you have to read them in order?” people often ask of books in a mystery series. No, of course not. The sheriff’s life and relationships develop over time, as is true of most characters that recur in a series, but each book works fine as a stand-alone reading experience, too.

Starting your Aaron Stander reading with Gales of November is no crime and will not put you in jeopardy. Another of my favorites is Shelf Ice. As I say, Stander does Up North winter very well. But start with any of his books, in any season, and you will not be disappointed -- just hungry for more!


Saturday, February 4, 2017

Thoughts on Escape



Escape?

In December I was on a headlong, high-speed, emotional retreat from the world. I read three Lee Child “Jack Reacher” novels practically in a nonstop row, beginning the second immediately upon finishing the first and then, after a short interval with other material, returning for a third. But running (away) that fast can be exhausting, and it doesn’t really work, anyway. Never mind. It was a phase it seems I just had to go through.

Depression, Nightmares, Insomnia, and Facts

The very phrases ‘post-truth’ and ‘alternative facts’ are depressing, not to mention the way nightmares involving the U.S. Congress have invaded and interrupted my sleep. Me, not the world’s most politically engaged person for most of my life!

As for truth and facts, though, I’ve long realized (I remember a few insights when I was a young child) that we all have different perspectives on the world around us. It’s winter now, so take the fact of snow:

To a puppy, blowing snow might be frightening or wildly exciting. A human toddler might greet snow as does the braver puppy, but if snow keeps blowing in the baby’s face, he’ll probably start to cry. Athletic types cheer up at the prospect of good skiing, while old people worry about slippery sidewalks and roads. Even the plow driver and UPS driver don’t have identical perspectives on snowy weather. But no one denies the fact. No one says, “That isn’t snow, it’s confetti! It’s little bits of paper people threw to celebrate my victory! Whaddya mean, dangerous? Nah! Don' worry about it!"

No, we recognize snow, and we understand that we have to deal with it for what it is, like it or not.

Anyway, I am hardly alone in depression and insomnia. Numerous friends share the same experiences, and we try to buck up for one another’s sakes.

Day of Ups and Downs

On Thursday I walked out of the house to drifted snow and an unplowed shared drive. Don’t ask. As crises go, this one was not so much as a blip on the radar. Merely a challenge. The low right front tire was another, more serious matter.

Rocking the truck back and forth and shouting curses (new studies show cursing can help), I finally broke free and slithered and slewed up the hill. I would air the tire up in town before starting back home in the afternoon. Maybe it would be warmer then.

First village stop was at the corner store for gas and a newspaper. The very young) woman at the cash register noticed a Tiffany's ad on the front page and expressed skepticism that anyone would ever be offering her a ring from Tiffany's. When I said I'd never wanted diamonds, she admitted she'd be just fine if some guy offered her a HORSE as an engagement token! I'd been pretty low-key up until then but shouted, "Yes! Me, too!" To which she said, "Or even a goat. I'd take a goat," to which I said, "Not me, but I'd take a cow," and she agreed she'd take a cow, too, but we agreed that a horse would be best. I left with a big smile on my face! What a wonderful interlude on an otherwise cold, bleak day! I loved it!

Six people came in during the day to sign my letter to our new U.S. Representative, and that was gratifying. No one came to look at books, which was discouraging, and my UPS delivery came too late in the day to get word to people to pick up their orders. Oh, and then there was the call to AT&T about my phone bill, up in two years from under $70 to over $100 with no new services added, which made me think again of the price of facial tissue and paper towels, up an even greater percentage, and the cost of having my teeth cleaned, which went from $95 in the spring to $160 this winter....

But the real challenge of the end of my business day was the low tire. Twenty pounds, my gauge said when I went to the air hose, checking the pressure first. Next I put two quarters in, cursing the cold, but couldn't get the hose to work. Tried another two quarters. Fingers freezing! Finally gave up and drove north of town to the garage, where I threw myself on their mercy! Told Mark's wife I was desperately in need of help! Told her my pathetic story. She said someone else had had the same problem and that they had concluded the hose
must be frozen. "You mean it isn't just me?" She smiled and shook her head. Thank god! I was feeling so incompetent! She had me pull around to one of the bays, and Mark came out and checked all four tires and brought them up to 35 pounds. I was so relieved I wanted to cry. Before that I'd been so frustrated and felt so stupid I wanted to cry!

Turning to Fiction

After dinner and a movie, I picked up The Assault, by Harry Mulisch. I figured it was time for another novel after so much nonfiction, but this novel offered no escape, other than from the specifics of 2017, because the same questions recur in the troubled history of human civilization:

What apparently insignificant remark or desire sets chains and webs of events in motion? Why, when every single one of us has such a short tenure on this earth, do we muck it up so badly for ourselves and each other? How can mankind be so cruel? And how can one oppose inhumanity without taking on some of its traits?

Does anyone have ‘clean hands’? Is it possible to remember? Is it possible to forget? If we cannot forget, and if we remember only dimly and confusedly, can we forgive and move on? How?

The central character in The Assault is a boy in the first section of the book. The year is 1945. A cruel Fascist policeman is assassinated on the street by anti-Fascists, and neighbors drag the body from in front of their house to in front of Anton’s family home. German occupiers soon arrive and, in retaliation for the killing, set Anton’s house on fire. After a confusing and frightening series of events, in which the boy is taken into custody by authorities who have no idea what to do with him, he is given over to his uncle and aunt. 

Subsequent events take place in 1952, 1956, 1966, and 1981, and gradually the truth of what happened in 1945 comes to light for Anton, piece by piece, and each time Anton has to recalibrate his memory.

Big issues and stunning writing.
And there were not only negative reasons for his choice of anesthesiology. He was fascinated by the delicate equilibrium that must be maintained whenever the butchers planted their knives in someone—this balancing on the edge between life and death, and his responsibility for the poor human being, helpless in unconsciousness. He had, besides, the more or less mystical notion that the narcotics did not make the patient insensitive to pain so much as unable to express that pain, and that although drugs erased the memory of pain, the patient was nevertheless changed by it. When patients woke up, it always seemed evident that they had been suffering. But when he spoke of this theory once to his colleagues, who were talking about yachting, the way they looked at him suggested that he had better keep his thoughts to himself if he wanted to remain in the club.

Final Thought to Ponder

If, under anesthetic, our bodies feel pain – and if bodies continue to feel after-effects, although we have no conscious memory of surgery’s pain – and if learning can take place during sleep – and if, as countless studies have shown, much more takes place in our brains than ever reaches the level of consciousness – why would we ever think we could escape the real world, deny it though we will?

You may be wondering -- was I sorry to have chosen such a serious, non-escapist novel to read? Not at all. It was worth the time spent and left me calm and thoughtful.