Shoemaker Book Launch in Northport Next Month

 

Sarah Shoemaker of Northport, Michigan, author of the critically acclaimed Mr. Rochester, has a new novel coming out this fall. Children of the Catastrophe, set in the city of Smyrna in the early 20^th century, is, as the author herself describes it, a story of family, love and loss, crisis and survival. The book’s release date is September 6, the day after Labor Day, and Shoemaker will be at the Leelanau Township Library that evening to meet and greet the public. Dog Ears Books will be on hand, as well, to sell books to those wishing to purchase, which the author will be happy to sign. 

 

In her new work of historical fiction, Shoemaker goes behind the bare facts to imagine two families over the course of years leading up to a tragic real event in history. Early in the novel a marriage is arranged within Smyrna’s Greek community. The bride is one of four sisters, the groom an only child. Parents of the two (especially the mothers) have traditional concerns about qualities they wish to see in a partner for their respective children, but happily for the bride and groom in this case, they are attracted to one another from the start, and soon a new generation of Greeks is growing up in a happy home in Smyrna, little suspecting that their world is about to be utterly destroyed. 

 

There are, Shoemaker said in a recent interview, 27 million refugees in the world today, and every one of those people represents “a family, a community, a way of life that is forever lost to them.” In large world events – every catastrophe, especially – it is easy to lose sight of particular individuals and families. Yet every war, every famine, every horrendous headline event changes the world forever for people who were up until then, most of them, living very ordinary lives. 

 

What must it be like to have almost everything and then suddenly to lose it all? How does this affect families, and what differences are there in the responses of different family members? Different generations? These are questions Shoemaker sought answers for in her novel.  

 

Shoemaker has lived in Greece and also for two years in Izmir, Turkey, the present seaport city on the former site of Smyrna. She knew the history and heard the personal story of one survivor whose entire family was lost in the Great Fire (1922), also known to Greeks as the Catastrophe. So, all in all, she felt this was a story she could write. 

 

“Every time I see pictures from Ukraine,” Shoemaker said to her interviewer, “our most recent world events that impact people’s lives – seriously -- I see those people now, having written this book, differently, because I see them as individuals who’ve had lives.” She observes that it’s easy to lose sight of individual lives when we see masses of refugees in events not happening to us. But – “This could be us sometime. Or this could be somebody I care about sometime.” What tragic events do to real people’s real lives is what Shoemaker wants readers to take away from her novel. And in this aim, she succeeds brilliantly. 

 

As a reader, one comes to live inside the story, to live inside houses inhabited by people one comes to know. One hundred years later in time and far distant in space, while reading we inhabit the world of early 20^th-century Greek Smyrna and feel connected to the characters’ hopes and dreams, sympathetic to their problems, concerned for their lives. In the end, we realize that their tragedy is our tragedy, in that it is a human tragedy, and we are all human beings, despite our differences.

-- Can you tell I am excited about this book? It is going to be an excellent choice for book clubs, too! 

Tuesday, September 6, 7:30 p.m., Leelanau Township Library, Northport, MI: Sarah Shoemaker and Children of the Catastrophe

P.S. You can hear the complete interview with Sarah Shoemaker on the Library Love Fest podcast from Harper Collins, publisher of Children of the Catastrophe. Sarah Nelson, vice president and executive editor of Harper Collins, introduces and interviews Sarah Shoemaker in the podcast.

 

Facts, Truth, Lies, and Fiction: THE ORPHAN MASTER’S SON

The surest evidence that the woman in the photo was Jun Do’s mother was the unrelenting way the Orphan Master singled him out for punishment. It could only mean that in Jun Do’s face, the Orphan Master saw the woman in the picture, a daily reminder of the eternal hurt he felt from losing her. Only a father in that kind of pain could take a boy’s shoes in winter. Only a true father, flesh and bone, could burn a son with the smoking end of a coal shovel. - Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

The Orphan Master’s Son is like no other novel I know. It has been compared to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, but the author has not created a future dystopia: the world of this fictional work is a country that really exists in our own time. 

“How much did you know about North Korea before reading The Orphan Master’s Son?” asks the first question in the “Questions and Topics for Discussion” section following the novel’s end. My answer would be “Very little.” That Communist North Korea lost its battle for reunification with South Korea and that its people live under a repressive regime. Little more, except that recently I saw a photograph of a newly opened, antiseptic-looking North Korean bookstore (check it out in this issue of “Shelf Awareness”), with very little offered for sale on its shelves other than various editions of the Collected Works of Kim Jong Il and a paltry handful of translated foreign titles.

The book hadn’t been on my agenda or radar, but it was recommended to me by a friend whose opinion on books I trust. Looking at the last few titles on my “Books Read” list, I saw it was also time for a modern novel, so home with me went the book.

Johnson’s tale, enriched by research into the actual country, opens with two pages of imagined propaganda from the North Korean government, arriving by loudspeaker in every home. Various unrelated statements are made and rumors denied. “What are you going to believe, citizens?” the loudspeaker asks. “Rumors and lies, or your very own eyes?” Immediately I wondered what I was going to believe in this story, where rumors and lies play such an important part and the fiction imagined is based on facts. Knowing full well that I was reading a novel, I quickly gave myself over to belief in Johnson's convincing fictional world.

The protagonist, Jun Do, who grew up in the orphanage administered by his father, was not technically an orphan, but like the other boys he was given an orphan’s name, a name that also echoes for American readers the name John Doe, and he is the North Korean Everyman. He does what he must to survive, whether that means sending other orphans to work in fatally toxic environments, enduring combat duty in completely dark tunnels under the DMZ, or participating in kidnapping expeditions to Japanese shores. “Then the kidnappings ended, as suddenly as they’d begin,” and Jun do is sent to school to learn English. Next he is assigned to intercept and translate American radio transmissions from a North Korean fishing vessel.

Out at sea the young man’s life begins to open up for the first time. He has a taste of freedom in the water and sky surrounding him and gradually learns about family from the captain and crew, while in the dark night, he is given glimpses of another world in the person of the Girl Rower and the manned space station whose location eludes him for so long. Jun Do cannot plan his future, nor can he predict a single one of his “long tomorrows.” He can only hope to keep himself and his friends the fishing crew and captain safe, as each astonishing, improbable turn of events tests his ability to lie convincingly and to suffer torture without recanting his false testimony.

Improbable, yes. How likely is it that just this particular motherless not-an-orphan, also a kidnapper, tunnel soldier, and radio operator, would be chosen as the official translator on a mission to Abilene, Texas, for some “talks before the talks,” an informal meeting with an American senator who will later visit North Korea to make a serious exchange? In an interview at the end of the book, the author addresses the question of what is “real” and what is “invented” in his novel.

If literature is a fiction that tells a deeper truth, I feel my book is a very accurate portrayal of how the tenets of totalitarianism eat away at the things that make us human: freedom, art, choice, identity, expression, love. And because few things about North Korea are verifiable ... this seems to be a realm in which the imaginative reach of literary fiction is our best tool to discover the human dimension of such an elusive a society. But I know what you’re asking.... I have a rationale for every artistic decision I made in the book, but suffice it to say that most of the shocking aspects in my book are sourced from the real world.... What’s fiction is that one person might serve in all these capacities, as my character Jun Do does. But in this case I valued the larger portrait of North Korean society over the plausibility that one person would have such a range of positions.

Stop now and take a deep breath before you read what he says next.

I felt I actually had to tone down much of the real darkness of North Korea, as in the kwan li so gulags, the reports of which were so harrowing—forced abortions, amputations, communal executions—that I invented the blood harvesting as a less savage stand-in, one that was simple and visceral, for the ways that the Kim regime stole every drop of life from citizens it had sentenced to an eternity of slave labor.

To give any kind of adequate review of this book, I would have to discuss Jun Do’s transformation into General Ga and his love affair with the film actress Sun Moon (General Ga’s wife), and I would have to mention her children, too, and his relationship with them. I would also have to discuss the nameless figure of the interrogator, a man who works only at night, whose own parents fear him, who takes pride in his team being different from, more “scientific” than, the Pubyok torturers. What will become of them all? The author says in his interview, “The people there are just as human as we are, driven by the same needs and motivations.” Some of Johnson’s characters become harder as the story unfolds, while in others their humanity cannot help reaching for the light.

But all I really want to do is urge you to read this heartbreaking, horrifying, mesmerizing, and beautifully written, book. Deserving recipient of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize, The Orphan Master's Son has prompted different people to ask: Is it magical realism? A political thriller? Love story and/or a tragedy? Coming-of-age tale? I say that the best of novels, whatever labels critics attach to them, transcend genre boundaries, and Johnson has gone transcendence one better: his novel blends and unites genre categories, and transcends them all.

Reading the first few pages, I wondered if I would be able to “get into” this book; now I think that no one could read very far into it without becoming obsessed by the characters and compelled to continue the voyage. If I were to put together a “Top 100 Novels of My Lifetime,” this would surely be on the list.

Returning the Dear Leader’s gaze, Ga felt no fear looking into the eyes of the man who would get the last word. In fact, Ga was oddly carefree. I’d have felt this my whole life, Ga thought, if you had never existed.

Tragic, yes, but not a tragedy. The central character is not a great man brought low by a tragic flaw but an Everyman who discovers his purpose and finds strength and resolution to fulfill it.

A Fog of Causes

Into the fog we go again.

While David was in surgery on Thursday morning, a good friend of ours kept me company in the waiting room. This friend is a cardiac nurse and gave me some advice about back problems I’ve been having lately: apply ice, take anti-inflammatory medication, wear a good brace to support the back, and, yes, think about investing in a good mattress. I told him I’d tried the ice a couple evenings, to no effect whatsoever, and he replied that when he tells someone to take aspirin, get bed rest, and drink a lot of fluids, the person is quite likely to report a few days later that he followed the advice about fluids but ignored the rest. “You can’t just do one thing,” he said. “You have to do it all. It all works together.”

When we human beings think about cause and effect, it’s all too easy for us to envision oversimplified schematics, such as a pool cue hitting a cue ball that hits another ball that goes into a pocket. Even the physical world of pure material causes is seldom that simple! And as for that pool cue—wasn’t someone guiding it?  And so, looking beyond the pool table at the larger realm of human behavior, a complex and confusing welter of dreams, fears, resentments, desires, hopes, and intentions, is it any wonder we want to simplify the picture? But simplification distorts and falsifies reality.

The cue ball had no choice. It offered nothing other than insufficient material resistance to the cue that struck it and no resentment whatsoever against the ball it struck. A purely causal explanation tells the story. Human beings are different. We are intentional beings, partly but not fully conscious of our own desires and aims, and there it is. If we had no intentions, material causes would explain us, and there would be no “behavior” at all. If we were fully conscious, completely aware of all our intentions and emotions, we would behave very differently from the way we do. But that’s not who or where we are. We move through a fog that obscures our own motives as well as those of others, and often, searching for simple explanations, we tell stories that serve only to generate more fog.

Much is hidden, and we see little.

Whenever there is a tragedy such as the recent school shooting in Connecticut, the same sadly predictable, two-sided debate questions are hurried onstage. Is our violent film industry to blame? (Sides form up in yes or no lines.) Is America’s love of guns the culprit? (Debaters say yes or no.) Easy access to deadly weapons? Or maybe it’s violent video games or untreated mental illness or drug addiction or divorce or one-parent families or parental neglect or parental abuse or bullying from others or social isolation or post-traumatic stress?

How can we think only one identifiable “thing” is to blame? We all know individuals, maybe even ourselves, who have suffered from or participated in any of the possible “causes” listed above but have not gone on a rampage of violence. So we say, no, bullying doesn’t explain it, because I was bullied as a child, too. Or we say, no, guns cannot be at fault, because everyone in my family hunts, and none of us would ever kill another human being. Or, no, we can't blame violent movies, because I’ve seen plenty of them, or no, it can’t be divorce, because my parents were divorced—and on and on and on. Everyone is ready to point to a cause, and there’s always someone else ready to argue that what is identified as the cause is insufficient.

Human status: "It's complicated."

I would feel more hopeful about a solution if there were more indications of awareness that the reasons and explanations for these horrible tragedies come from many directions, from time to time converging (to schematize) on a vulnerable point, a desperate individual. Can we not imagine that while every contributing cause is insufficient it itself, together they gain strength? And so, every contributing cause may be significant, even though insufficient in itself?

It isn’t enough to try only to stop bullying in schools or only to put tougher restrictions on purchase and ownership of weapons or only to intervene in troubled families or to take any single line of remediation, ignoring other sources of harm. On the other side of the coin, it is naive and unhelpful for anyone to say, “No, it isn’t my bullying or cruel teasing or gun manufacture or violent film production or violent video game creation or sales of weapons or sales of violent films or games or music or my not bothering to know my neighbor or my avoiding eye contact with people I meet or my rush-to-judgment of others’ motives and overly confident faith in the purity of my own-------.” On and on and on.

As long as I live, I will probably be enough a child of the Sixties to believe that “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” We children of the Sixties, like the children of every other decade, surely made our own contributions to this problem. The question is, can we stop pointing fingers and come together to explore possible solutions? Can we find our way into the light together?

Seeking clarity....

I have been thinking and thinking about how to say this, and here is what I think I want to say: If the last straw had been the first, it alone would not have broken the camel’s back, but each and every straw the camel was asked to carry would have contributed its weight to the final result. 

Fiction and Judgment

Lately I’ve read some very compelling novels, no one of them like the others. The Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, by Guo Xiaolu , was a glimpse into a world of experience completely different from my own, the narrator a young Chinese woman come to London to study English for a year. Quickly, impulsively, and through an initial misunderstanding (she thought his suggestion of a visit to his flat was an invitation to move in), she falls into a highly sexual relationship with a much older Englishman. They share passion and curiosity but cannot really understand one another, either culturally or as individuals. One of the most unusual and fascinating aspects of the novel is the focus on language, both English and Chinese--different parts of speech, tenses, large concepts and idiomatic expressions, as well as the difference between an alphabetic writing system and one based on characters that evolved from pictographic representations. At my suggestion, David has been reading the novel and, as I was, particularly enjoyed the young narrator’s assessment of how verbs live within the two languages:

Chinese, we not having grammar. We saying things simple way. No verb-change usage, no tense differences, no gender changes. We bosses of our language. But English language is boss of English user.

To see ourselves as others see us!

A friend loaned me an Icelandic novel, Under the Glacier, saying he couldn’t make head nor tails of it, and, frankly, neither could I. Tempting as it was to throw it aside halfway through, I finished it—and then wondered why I’d bothered. What on earth had possessed Haldor, Laxness, whose Independent People, written in 1946, won the Nobel Prize for Literature? Susan Sontag wrote a generous and thoughtful introduction to the Vintage paperback edition of Under the Glacier, tracing its myriad antecedents and influences in the following genres (I kid you not): science fiction; tale, fable, allegory; philosophical novel; dream novel; visionary novel; literature of fantasy; wisdom literature; spoof, sexual turn-on. She also called the work “wildly original, morose, uproarious,” but doesn’t the list rather suggest a jumbled hodge-podge?

Then came The Tiger’s Wife, by Téa Obreht. And yes, yes, I admit it: I am one of those snobbish readers skeptical of best-sellers. That’s probably why I took the path through the forest of used books, to begin with—for the sweet, secret pleasure of discovery. But fortunately another member of one of the reading groups I’m part of (the smallest one, the one hardest to schedule, the one of which we always wonder, Will it ever meet again?) chose The Tiger’s Wife for our fall discussion, because I’m so glad I didn’t miss this story! It begins with two young women, doctors, crossing an armed border to take medical supplies to what was recently part of their own country. The story probably takes place in “the former Yugoslavia,” although the country is never named, and that nonspecificity adds to the book’s power. The narrator has had a phone call from her grandmother, saying that her grandfather has died, and thinking of him brings forth all kinds of memories from her earlier life, as well as memories of the stories he told her from his own life, as far back as childhood. Some of the stories merge into primeval rural legends. Fact and fantasy entwine, along with dream and reality. Reality itself often makes little sense. Usually, I would be put off by fiction with these elements and impatient, during the tall tales sections, to return to realism, but not with this novel. It carried me along seamlessly, compellingly.

What, then, is the difference between Under the Glacier and The Tiger’s Wife? Why is one (in my opinion) a mess and the other a success? I don’t know if Obreht plotted her entire novel in advance or let the story lead her where it wanted to go, but my sense was of a writer who knew what she was doing, an author who could be trusted. With Under the Glacier I never had that sense at all. I felt like the butt of a long, pointless bad joke.

And this, finally, brings me to my main topic of the day: judgment. In what ways is it appropriate to judge fiction? Writers of fiction? And should an author judge his or her characters? To put it all together, should a novel and its characters and its author be judged on moral grounds?

The other day I had a conversation with a friend who was very upset about a novel she had just read. My friend did not like the choices that the main character made in her life. She, my friend, thought the writer was advocating the character’s way of life, since, after all, “she was the one in control of the character.” My friend took a Kantian view of the protagonist and felt that society could not function if everyone made the choices that character had made. I couldn’t help asking, “So you’re saying the author should have written a different book?” Mostly, though, I tried to listen without arguing. After all, my friend felt strongly, and there is no arguing with feelings. (This is a lesson I’m trying hard to learn.)

There was so much going on in her judgment. Is an author “in control” of fictional characters? Are they like marionettes, with the writer pulling the strings? My own limited experience with writing fiction suggests otherwise, but really, this question detours away from the main road I want to travel and explore today....

The plain truth is that my friend and I are both very judgmental individuals. For instance, when I drive into Northport and the driver in front of me fails to signal turns, you can bet I’m passing judgment!a minor example to show how leaping to judgment is second nature to me, as it is with my friend.

One very popular view in American culture today holds that it’s wrong to be judgmental, and young people who hold this view (I got strong doses of the view in the community college philosophy classes I taught) take it as inseparable from freedom. But the opposite view was held historically: Because we are free, we must judge ourselves and others. Any time I choose, whenever I take action, I have judged—whether after considered reflection or spontaneously (i.e., from my character as it has been formed through life). To judge another to have acted wrongly is to say, in effect, “I would not think it right to do that” or “I would be wrong were I to do that” or (more generously) “I hope I would not behave in such a way in that situation.” To judge that a person made a morally correct decision is (or should be) to think, "That's what I would do" or "I hope I would be able to act in such a way myself." In Kantian ethics, the standard I apply to others I also apply to myself. 

Kantian or utilitarian, or whatever religion or no religion, altruistic or totally ego-driven, because we are creatures who must make choices, we are also creatures who must judge. It is a necessary aspect of our nature.

Still, do we overdo it? Do we leap to judgment unnecessarily, after the fact, when nothing hangs any longer in the balance and when condemnation adds nothing of value? These are rhetorical questions, not real questions, because I believe the answer is Yes, and I hope my explorations into Buddhism will help me accept and understand more often than I condemn.

But my question of the day has to do with fiction, so let’s come back to our sheep, as the old French proverb has it.

Should an author judge her characters and present only characters making "moral" choices, and should we as readers judge an author by his or her characters’ choices and actions? Do we apply the Kantian moral imperative to fictional characters and, by extension, to their author? I told my friend that the main character in one of my short stories is a bigamist, but that hardly means I am advocating bigamy! It’s fiction, not a political platform. In each of my ten Burger Shack stories, there is a character either at an important moral crossroads or one who has gone through a crossroads without seeing it. Another way I think of characters in fiction is that there are people who might sit next to you on a long bus trip, and you’d find their company a nightmare, but if you read about that person as a character in a novel, given the author’s insights into how that character came to be the way he is now, your understanding might lead you to feel at least some sympathy, if not liking. That is part of the power of fiction.

In The Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, for example, the narrator is well aware that most people she meets don’t like her. She is one of the least popular students in her English class, known for what others see as her insufferable rudeness. When we read her story in the novel, we see her differently, from the inside. We see her in her complexity, her depth. In that way, fiction can teach us—if we let it—how to be more understanding of people in our everyday lives.

Many writers and critics insist that writers should not judge their own characters--that doing so turns fiction to melodrama and/or propaganda. Realism, science fiction, murder mysteries, fantasy—all are richer if the characters are more like us, multifaceted, flawed, struggling. Sometimes I do judge a writer because of characters presented, though, because a novel with nothing but thoroughly reprehensible characters engaged in criminal, violent, or otherwise heinous activities is not a novel I want to read. I have to feel some sympathy and understanding. I have to care about at least one character, or I won’t go far with the story. So yes, to that extent I do judge an author’s choices.

The subject came up because my friend was so troubled by violence in a novel she had just read, one that I loved but knew would be a problem for her. I asked her what she thought about what I call “supermarket” novels—those popular, best-selling paperback action stories people consume like potato chips. Does she not find their popularity appalling? And if not, why is it all right for those books to wallow in violence? "Oh, that’s different," my friend said. “That’s not the real world.” But any novel we find compelling is “real” during the time we’re reading it, and although one of my friend’s objections was that the novel she was troubled by did not depict “the real world” (it isn’t the world of Northport), clearly she accepted the character as “real” when she objected to the her choices. So is it okay for male writers to write about male characters being violent but different if a woman writes about a woman? Why? How can we apply a double standard to literature? Are fictional women allowed only interior adventures, nothing that involves action in their fictional worlds? That bothers me a lot. If women cannot be fully human in fiction, how on earth can they be fully human in life?

But I go back and forth on this myself, and viewing fiction moralistically is a difficult call. I remember reading the Greek tragedy “Antigone” in high school and having no trouble whatsoever judging Antigone as completely in the right and Creon as completely in the wrong. When I learned that the play was about the dilemmas of conflicting rights, I was aghast. Creon’s responsibility for the state and Antigone’s refusal to consider the political repercussions of her actions had flown right under my adolescent radar. I’d judged the characters simplistically, not seeing that both were right and both were wrong, and therein lay the tragedy. Seeing the complexity in that story was an important part of my growing up.

Tonight is the first discussion session of our group reading Moby-Dick together. What will we all make of Ahab? And what will we think of Melville for having created Ahab?