Richard Russo. Empire Falls. 2001; Knopf, 2010.

I picked up Empire Falls because I read somewhere that it had a connection with The Great Gatsby. Well, it does contain the famous quotation about “boats against the current,” from that novel—other than that, no so much.

Having said that, Russo does suggest as Fitzgerald did elsewhere that “the very rich… are different from you and me.” Perhaps they were. If anything, Russo suggests that they are less different now than they used to be.

We see most of the story through the eyes of Miles Roby. Miles is a native of Empire Falls, Maine. Like most industrial towns in New England, it had peaked about a hundred years before. The Empire Textile mills prospered for a long time, and then gradually lost business and eventually closed. The Whiting family, the owners of the business, are still well off and control much of the town’s real estate, including the Empire Grill. Miles has worked in the grill since he dropped out of college to support his family and now manages it.

Now in his forties, Miles’ wife is leaving him for a sexier man who calls himself the Silver Fox. Miles’ teenage daughter Tick struggles to negotiate both the administration and social pecking order at the Empire Falls High School. Sociologists have said that a woman who is living with a man not her husband and who has a daughter has put her daughter in danger. While we never are privy to any details, Tick (given name Christina) most assiduously avoids Walt Comeau, the Silver Fox.

Fitzgerald in his novels implies that the rich are able to get away with things that “you and I” cannot. In Empire Falls, set in the nineties, the amorality has flowed down the social ladder, and it has consequences. We see plenty of irony—some sad, some funny, some simply saying “I told you so.” No one seems to really succeed in this town. It is all anyone can do to stay afloat. (Also because it is set in the nineties, baseball fans here look at the Red Sox as a fatalistically as they view anything else in life.)

To Miles, there is a place of escape and freedom—Martha’s Vineyard. He has successful college friends whom he visits there every year, but the Massachusetts resort island would be too expensive to move to. As the story progresses, we understand that the Vineyard is a refuge but maybe an Eden with its own species of serpent.

Nearly everyone in Empire Falls seems to be unlucky in marriage. Miles’ wife divorces him, but it turns out that Walt Comeau has a lot to hide. Miles, in turn, has carried a crush on Charlene, a waitress at the grill who has been married and divorced four times herself. And, in turn, Cindy Whiting, daughter and heiress to whatever us left of the Whiting fortune, has carried a torch for Miles most of her life. She and Miles were born on the same day—she sees them as kind of soul mates—though now she shaves a few years off her age when she talks to people. Cindy is a paraplegic, having been run over by a car when she was a child.

There is a lot of low-key, real-life drama in the story. It builds. The characters come alive. Having lived in New England most of my adult life, I can vouch at least for the economic struggles in many small towns and cities with abandoned mills. By the time the tale ends, we have become invested in the town ourselves.

Because it is a small town that people move out of but not into, everyone knows everyone else. Even matriarch Mrs. Whiting knows about Miles’s crush on Charlene as well as the details of his parents’ relationship. His father is an alcoholic and a ne’er-do-well who survives by mooching, Social Security, and doing house painting of marginal quality. Miles’ father believes the Robys are a branch of the Robideauxs, a wealthy family from upriver. Mrs. Whiting was a Robideaux. It was not uncommon for French Canadian families in New England to anglicize their names, but to Miles, his father’s assertion is mere wishful thinking and a personal rationalization saying, “I am as good as they are.”

Mrs. Whiting is the eminence grise of the story. As owner of the grill, she keeps Miles under her thumb. When he was a boy Miles’ late mother lost her job at the mill when it closed. She began working as a kind of aide to Mrs. Whiting and Cindy. Mr. Whiting had moved to Mexico where he lived for years with a second wife and family, returning to Empire Falls only to die by suicide shortly after arriving.

The one person of character is Miles’ mother, Grace Roby. Others are often flawed and not really that likeable. The crooked cop Jimmy Minty and Miles have been at odds most of their lives. His son Zach Minty is the on-again off-again boyfriend of Tick. Tick does pretty much see things as they are but sees little hope out of her situation. She becomes friendly with Candace who lives in the poorest part of town. The high school principal, an old friend of her father’s, compels her to attend during a free period to John Voss, a strange, solitary kid who rarely talks.

All these characters, plus a few more like the two priests at the local Catholic Church, come together in Miles’ life to a rising climax. The final image might recall “boats against the current,” but it is really a lot closer to the final frames of Dr. Strangelove.

Mr. Whiting had tried to change the flow of the river that goes through the town so that debris from upriver does not wash onto his property. In doing so, he has business dealings with the Robideaux family, and that is how he met his wife. The river becomes a symbol. There are things in life, like the course of rivers, that people only have so much control over. The rest is left to “time and chance,” which happen to us all (see Ecclesiastes 9:11).

Though never fast-paced until the end, there are many surprises that keep us reading. So much so, the reader might hope for a sequel. There is a note of hope for both Miles and Tick at the end, but can either of them rise above their circumstances?

Victor John and David Coles. Bhojpuri Breakthrough. WIGTake Resources, 2019.

Bhojpuri Breakthrough describes one of the most remarkable and enduring works of God in the last thirty years. This book mainly provides testimony of what the Lord has been doing in northeastern India, first among the Bhojpuri-speaking people. This people group lives mostly in two Indian states and numbers close to ninety million. In 1990 there were virtually no Christians among the Bhojpuri, now there are estimated to be about 25 million.

Mostly through testimony and Bible teaching, the authors tell how this happened. To sum it up simply, the Christians there began following the directions Jesus gave his disciples in Luke 10:1-17. There is no mission agency and little oversight. The person or persons enter a village and find a man or woman of peace (see Luke 10:6) to work with to determine the needs of the community.

The people begin serving specific needs of the place—often education, sometimes agriculture, crafts, small business, or something else. Normally, they may not even talk about God for six months or more. Usually within a year or two, with prayer and signs following (see Mark 16:20 KJV), the Lord has established a church and a community learning center.

The leaders raised up are all local. They might get together with fifty or more leaders from other places annually for teaching and encouragement. The new church is usually what in America we call a house church, rarely is there a building other than the learning center.

After a year or two, people from the new church go out to a new location, usually a village, where they have some connection and begin the process again. In some instances there have been over twenty “generations” of churches started. Many individual leaders have overseen the start of twenty new fellowships. Some have overseen two hundred.

The Lord has made remarkable changes in the cultural outlook here. Because the caste system is so ingrained into the Indian culture, Christian workers often focus on a single caste. No so here. While higher caste people were more likely to be literate, the learning centers have taught many more people to read—especially to read the Bible. Others listen to audio recordings.

There have been breakthroughs in other ways, too. The churches began to minister to railway children, what in the United States we would call runaways or street kids. There are medical clinics and ministries to orphans, to widows, and to trafficked children. They do not have legal permission to help trafficked people to escape, but they often work with those who have escaped as they require much healing.

Also with few alterations, they have begun similar works in urban areas and among other people groups like Muslims. (The Bhojpuris’ main city is Varanasi, a traditionally Hindu city where Buddhism got its start.) In the cities nowadays, for example, they consider English speakers a separate people group.

There are numerous testimonies in Bhojpuri Breakthrough and much wisdom. The leadership and organization is organic. There are no titles except for a few that are required for legal purposes. They prefer the term “executive director” if someone is buying land or representing a church in some capacity to the government.

While the current Hindu nationalist party governs, the churches have learned to deal with persecution. Readers in the West may find their response wise.

They also are very culturally sensitive. They sing songs using local language, instruments, and music styles. They dress according to local fashions and mores. No one would mistake them for Westerners. Even wedding celebrations are done in the traditional manner except for the prayers and blessings. To paraphrase Bruce Olson’s Bruchko, Jesus has become a Bhojpuri.

Those of us in the West may learn something from this, things like back to basics in Luke 10: what to do when you enter a place, finding the son of peace. “Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons,” and primarily, “Freely you have received, freely give.” (Matthew 10:8 NKJV)

The nameless, faceless workers in India have been giving freely for over twenty-five years. This has meant many others freely giving as well.

Eugenia Lovett West. Firewall. SparkPress, 2019.

Emma Streat’s godmother Caroline Vogt is beginning to show signs of dementia. At the same time, Mrs. Vogt received an anonymous blackmail note. Married four times, she is also trying to get her widowed goddaughter interested in men. The reader soon learns that there is more going on than Emma is letting on to Caroline.

Firewall involves the upper classes, the heirs of the Gilded Age. Mrs. Vogt is old New York money and an art collector. Emma’s onetime boyfriend belongs to the House of Lords and has worked for British Intelligence. She rubs elbows with Cyrus Liden, a Silicon Valley billionaire.

Emma tries to help Mrs. Vogt sort out her options, but Mrs. Vogt insists on paying the blackmailer. Mrs. Vogt is convinced that husband number one, who now lives in France, is out to get her. To France Emma goes and gets in deeper. There is also time in England, and much of the action occurs in Italy. She makes stops in Switzerland, Ireland, and Connecticut.

Every turn gets Mrs. Streat deeper and deeper into trouble. Firewall follows the Edward Stratemeyer method—a cliffhanger every two dozen pages or so. (Stratemeyer was the author of the original Rover Boys, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Bobbsey Twins, etc.). It is fun to read for that reason.

The book does run against type in one way. Usually novels like this involving the upper classes tend to cozies with a wry humor—think Peter Wimsey, Drew Farthering, or Emily Hargreaves. This has the characters from the upper crust with the big bucks, but it is quite serious and deadly.

Even though the mystery begins as a personal problem, the crime becomes international in scope. While the story is not political at all, some scenes are more reminiscent of Tom Clancy than Dorothy Sayers. From this reviewer, that is a compliment.

Mrs. Streat may not be the most sympathetic narrator. She is somewhat calculating, but she loves her two sons (i.e., she “saves the cat”). She also clearly loves her godmother and is not especially interested in her money. And she is very well-connected. She knows people. And if she does not know them, she knows people who do.

Firewall keeps moving. At least half a dozen times it appears that Mrs. Streat or her allies have things wrapped up, but there are too many pages left. That means more complications, more adventures, more surprises, more mystery—and more entertainment for the reader.

Thom Hartmann. The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America. Berrett-Koehler, 2019.

Two of the bitterest people I ever met were a brother and sister whose parents were American Communists. In the fifties when these siblings were young, their parents were blacklisted, and these young adults still carried some kind of animosity over it. The parents were never imprisoned or found guilty of a crime even though they were working with the Soviet Union to help overthrow the United States.

I found it hard to understand their bitterness unless it was simply that the Communist Party in the United States had not succeeded in its goals. After all, this was not like McCarthy vs. the Army. There were no false accusations. Their parents actually were Communists.

The Hidden History of the Supreme Court reminded me of those two aspiring Communists. There may have been some political similarities between Communists in the seventies and the positions taken by the book, but throughout the tone was so bitter I had to read it in small doses.

According to this book, every Republican elected to the presidency from Nixon on “stole” the election—even Reagan’s landslides apparently were stolen. That sets the tone. Basically, Republicans have somehow “betrayed” America, especially by naming justices to the Supreme Court.

I heard someone say recently that calling people of racist is becoming like the boy who cried wolf. The term is being bandied about to label nearly anyone’s political opponents that the word is losing its meaning. Nearly everyone this book disagrees with is accused of racism.

So here, by innuendo, Bush’s close win in Florida was caused by racism. At the time of the election I remember someone reporting that blacks at least in the Panhandle area of the state were supporting Bush in spite of their party affiliation. In other words more blacks in Florida supported Bush than normally would support a Republican candidate for president.

Even though Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood began out of concern that inferior classes and races were procreating too quickly, this book claims that the pro-life movement is racist. Until Hitler and Tojo went too far in World War II, the Progressive movement in the West included eugenics and various neo-Darwinian racial theories.

Even the late Jerry Falwell is accused of racism here. The author clearly knows little about Falwell’s background and how he rose above and beyond the narrow fundamentalism of his origins. Falwell probably received as much criticism from the “separated” fundamentalists loosely characterized by Bob Jones University as he did by liberals.

According to The Hidden History of the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court betrayed America mostly because of two of its decisions: the Citizens United decision which upheld freedom of speech in political campaigns and the Heller decision which said that the Washington D.C. gun law clashed with the right to bear arms.

Since the nineteen-thirties most of the most radical and heavy-handed policies of the U. S. Government have been initiated by the Supreme Court: the 1963 ban on school prayer and Bible reading, unregulated sale of birth control devices, the legalization of abortion, decriminalization of sodomy, homosexual marriage, eminent domain for non-governmental “public” purposes. One would think that it was a political conservative that would be claiming the Supreme Court has betrayed America! One would think a “progressive” like the author would feel elated instead of betrayed!

He rightly notes that the Supreme Court began changing its view of the Constitution when President Franklin Roosevelt threatened to “pack” the court with six new members. Pundits today have speculated that Chief Justice Roberts may have used the Social Security as a tax precedent to cast the deciding vote supporting most of the Affordable Healthcare Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) to avoid such a thing happening during his term of office.

One tired cliché repeated several times is “human rights, not property rights.” The Kelo case is not even mentioned, even though it clearly gave Mrs. Kelo’s property rights over to the City of New London, Connecticut. One would think the author would have been delighted at that outcome.

That overused line about property rights is a straw man to begin with. Take, for example, the Soviet Union. Its Marxist principles included the idea that the state would own the means of production. In other words, the government owned all the property. There were no property rights. This means that the government owned all printing presses, copiers, computers, fax machines, parks, meeting halls, church buildings, auditoriums, etc.

The Constitution of the U.S.S.R. did say the people had freedom of the press and freedom of speech, but since the government owned all the property, people could only publish or say publicly what the government would allow. Because the government controlled all the means of producing publications and speech, it rendered its claim to a free press and free speech meaningless. Property rights are necessary for freedom of speech, press, and religion—things the American founding documents recognize as human rights.

By the way, the 1963 decision banning prayer and Bible reading in schools picked up the term “separation of church and state” from various Soviet Constitutions. That would permit the government to regulate and restrict religious beliefs and behavior. The American Constitution has no such wording. “Establishment of religion” refers to a state religion, not religious expression by people employed the government.

The Hidden History of the Supreme Court is mistaken about Roe vs. Wade in a few salient details. Justice Rehnquist was one of two (not three) justices who opposed the decision; the book said he supported it, but he did not. Indeed, Rehnquist’s dissent expressed concern that this would create a public problem that would be far more difficult to settle, and referred to the decision as “raw judicial power.” Yes, it was a topic that Congress is supposed to deal with, but why bother if there is an activist court? (Ms. “Roe” would later tell her story and admit that she lied under oath.)

By the way, this reviewer has read “racist” innuendo concerning Roe. The justices hypothesized that legalizing abortion would reduce the number of “the poor.” One source I read said that in Washington D.C., the poor were nearly all minority races, so the Roe decision was racist. I doubt if that were really much of an issue, but it is no different from the multiple charges of racism in this book.

The book claims that “the people” support abortion. Yet even today many states are passing laws to limit the number of abortions expectant mothers have. We are told “the people” support so-called gay marriage, but even the constitution of California contained a provision that marriage was between a man and woman. And that constitutional amendment was approved by a state-wide referendum in spite of harassment from the gay lobby on groups and individuals who supported the amendment. This is California, part of the Left Coast, not some “deplorable” fly-over state.

In a truly irrelevant rant, as the author seems to find racism behind every political figure he disagrees with, he even notes that somewhere between fifty and a hundred million Native Americans may have been killed in North America. While there were some Indian Wars, most of the deaths were caused by diseases Europeans brought with them that the Native Americans had no immunity to. In that past history, the Supreme Court often took the side of the Indians. When President Jackson overruled the Supreme Court on Indian removal, for example, he simply stated that the court had no army.

I am sorry that The Hidden History of the Supreme Court does not find the sixty-five million American babies that have been aborted since Roe vs. Wade equally appalling.

I kept asking myself, why is this book so bitter? The so-called progressives have gotten virtually everything they have wanted over the years, mostly thanks to the Supreme Court. I recall once my former Congressman, who had been a campus radical in the sixties, was disappointed when a certain bill he supported failed to pass. He simply said that we will try to get it done in the courts.

Currently there is a case winding its way through the courts where a climate scientist sued some writers who disagreed with him. I recall the 1992 vice-presidential debate where then-Senator Gore predicted some disaster within ten years. He similarly predicted disasters within about a dozen years after he came out with his film. Those things have not happened, but still the progressives complain about “climate change.” They do not even talk of “global warming” any more.

Not only is this reviewer old enough to remember when people were worried about global cooling in the seventies, but also after the fall of European Communism he recalls academics saying that they could not use economics as an argument for socialism or communism, but they could use the environmental movement for their ends.

It seems that this book would like the Supreme Court to take on this issue because Congress is unwilling to act. We saw under Hitler what “established science” could do in its theories of superior races. We saw under Stalin what “established science” could to with the theories of Lysenko. Where is the humility? Where is the compromise? At least an honest scientist will admit, “This is how we understand it now.”

A democratic republic that we have in the United States depends on compromise. They so-called progressives have nearly everything that they have lobbied for because of the courts, so why complain? It appears that some people are never satisfied.

The Hidden History of the Supreme Court seems to engage in some rewriting or at least re-slanting of history. Its cure for what minor “betrayals” it has found? “…diminish the power of the court, work around it, or pack it as FDR proposed.” That is the bottom line: We must pack the Court!

During both the first Barack Obama presidential campaign and the campaign of Hillary Clinton for president, people would sometimes recommend the book Rules for Radicals, not because they thought it was a good book, but because those two candidates thought it was a good book. It might help us understand what they believed and how they would implement those beliefs.

While the history and the bitterness of The Hidden History of the Supreme Court may leave the reader looking for something more balanced and positive, this book may give some insight into certain progressives who want to pack the court and to use compulsion rather than persuasion squeeze the American people into their mold. -The truth shall set you free! Lord, open the author’s eyes.

Henry Lee Poe. Edgar Allan Poe: An Illustrated Companion to His Tell-Tale Stories. Metro Books, 2008.

Edgar Allan Poe: An Illustrated Companion is a well-done overview of the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe, one of America’s best-known writers. This book not only reminds us that Poe wrote the first detective story but also shares that Jules Verne credits Poe for writing the first science fiction story.

The photographs and illustrations that accompany this book are chosen well. In addition, each of its eight chapters contains a plastic envelope with facsimiles of pictures and documents related to Poe. Among these are copies of letters Poe wrote and received, pages from the first printing of some of his works, and even his marriage contract.

The author summarizes the main idea or themes of Poe’s best-known poems and stories without producing spoilers. We get an idea of his upbringing and financial struggles. We get insight into his own career plans—in his day he may have been best known for his impartial literary criticism at a time when most reviews were puff pieces.

And we certainly get an appreciation of Poe’s work.

The author stresses that Poe is not a character in any of his stories. Even very few poems are autobiographical in nature. For example, “The Raven” was written well before his wife died. Like others who have written about Poe, the author deems it necessary to debunk some of the rumors and even slanders that have persisted about Poe.

He notes that Poe was somewhere between the Age of Reason and the Romantic Era. While his work was vivid and emotional like the best Romantics, Poe was also interested in science, nature, and medicine, and applied the scientific method to his writing.

Edgar Allan Poe: An Illustrated Companion keeps E. A. Poe (his usual byline) in a realistic perspective. At the same time even readers who have researched Poe will probably discover things that they did not know about Poe or his acquaintances.

The author, a professor at Union University (Tennessee), is related to Edgar. We learn about Poe’s relations with his brother, sister, aunt, and cousins. A few family documents come to light for the general reader for the first time. For example, his affiliation with the Sons of Temperance (the nineteenth century precursor to Alcoholics Anonymous) towards the end of his life reveals quite a bit.

I was reading this book just as one of my classes is beginning a unit on Poe and Hawthorne (an author Poe admired). It is a pleasant read and will no doubt help me teach these authors with a little more depth this year.

Thomas Wolfe. Of Time and the River. Thomas Wolfe: The Complete Works. 1935. Pandora’s Box, 2018.

The biography of Eugene Gant, protagonist of Look Homeward, Angel, continues with Of Time and the River. Yes, the story rambles. Yes, by modern standards it has too much description. Still, the saying that Wolfe had plenty of bad sentences but no dull sentences holds true.

North Carolina native Gant becomes “a stranger among strange people,” and the people get progressively stranger, especially by his hometown standards.

First stop around 1920, a couple of years in Massachusetts in a master’s program at Harvard. On his way, he stops in Baltimore to visit his father, a long-term patient at the Johns Hopkins Medical Center where he is dying of prostate cancer. Wolfe’s description of older men with prostate problems (cancer or not) is spot on.

As in the first novel, there are over a hundred people described in some detail. One of the striking characters early in the book is a shrill, swarthy man who insists that things will just get better and better. We learned from World War I, he claims, and now the world is headed to Utopia.

But then we also hear from people who are “tired of Woodrow’s flowery speeches, an’ we’re tired of hearin’ about wars an’ ideals and democracy.” The return to normalcy, indeed.

Campus legend at Harvard tells us that when Thomas Wolfe was a student there, one night he started howling in front of its Widener Library. There were too many books there for anyone to read in a lifetime. Young Gant does not howl in this novel, but he is moved and pained because he realizes that it will be impossible to gain all the knowledge contained in those books.

A friend compares him to Faust—especially Marlow’s version. Faust makes his deal with the devil so that he can gain knowledge. At first he becomes famous for his medical savvy which saves many lives during the plague. It is only later in the tale that Faust reveals his wickedness.

Though Gant does not howl, he does prowl.

Now he would prowl the stacks of the library at night, pulling books out of a thousand shelves and reading in them like a madman. The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know—he greater the number of books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read seem to be.[See Ecclesiastes 12:12]

He simply wanted to know about everything on earth; he wanted to devour the earth, and it drove him mad when he saw he could not do this.

In some ways this is a sign of growing maturity. Gant is realizing that there are just so many people in the world that a single life becomes insignificant.

Gant is a poet-writer. His masters’ program teaches play writing. As a poet, Gant “at seventeen, as a sophomore, triumphantly denied God, but he was unable now to deny Robert Browning.” (“What’s a heaven for?”)

There are a number of chapters that could stand alone as stories. Indeed, at least one chapter on his uncle who moved to Boston many years before was published as a short story. His general chapter on what it was like to be a student at Harvard is still basically true. Let’s just say Wolfe would have used the term snark if it existed today in its present post-Carroll meaning.

He notes that at Harvard, one has to learn “to be beautiful, ‘distinguished,’ ‘smart,’ ‘chic,’ ‘forceful,’ and ‘sophisticated’—finally, how to have ‘a brilliant personality’ and ‘achieve success.'”

His professor drops names, e.g., “I have a letter from Gene O’Neill on this very point.” In the real world, O’Neill had taken the same master’s program about a decade before Wolfe.

The second half of chapter 36 about Miss Potter’s soiree, “that crowning horror of modern life, the art party…the meagre little spirits of no talent and great pretensions.” This describes in detail the same kind of party that J. Alfred Prufrock attends in his love song. One of the guests is a “Miss Shanksworth, the militant propagandist for free love, sterilization of the unfit, birth control by every one, especially the lower classes.” Margaret Sanger maybe?

A few chapters are devoted to Uncle Bascom Pentland, a brother of his mother, who settled in Boston after two decades as a theology student and preacher. He symbolizes the changes that the elites went through in the nineteenth century. He at one time was an Adventist, a Methodist, a Presbyterian, and then a Unitarian. Finally he even quit the Unitarian Church after he announced his agnosticism in a poem he read one Sunday. Now he does title searches for a real estate company.

Still, Uncle Bascom can quote the Bible, and we understand his sense of loss, not unlike that of Matthew Arnold. He cries out:

“‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end’—the mightiest line, my dear boy, the most magnificent poetry, that was ever written.” [cf. Revelation 1:8]

And he cries for pity:

“It brought back—memories…”

Not only does Gene Gant observe the Harvard and Bostonian way of doing things, but his uncle sets him up with a nice girl whose company he enjoys but to whom he is not that attracted. Gant also enjoys her mother’s cooking. Indeed, throughout the novel Gant describes in some detail the physicality of the food and the women he is attracted to. He is aged from twenty to twenty-five here, so there are many fantasies about women.

Later in the story Gant seems to use one scene to justify his own irreligion and attraction to prostitutes. He witnesses and describes in some detail two prostitutes who successfully tempt a couple of Catholic priests.

There is also a recurring theme that America is so “immense” that Americans “are driven on forever and have no home.”

“What’s wrong with people?…Why do we never get to know one another?…Why is it that we get born and live and die in this world without finding out what any one else is like?…[ellipses in original]

To Gant, his travels are like those of the Argonauts. Chapter 14, his meditation on Washington D.C. and America is another great stand-alone chapter. So is one describing a baseball game with Christy Mathewson pitching.

After getting his master’s degree, Gant gets a job teaching freshman writing at New York University. Some things never change: he has to deal with students’ questions about relevancy, “Why do we have to do this?” Chapter 66 is a great one to read for anyone who teaches a writing class, especially freshman composition.

NYU is largely Jewish then, and at first, Gant brings some of his Southern prejudices and fears about Jews with him. However, he becomes friends with the student who had intimidated him the most, and learns to respect their culture and the many trials his family and other Jews have had to overcome.

While in New York, he connects with a buddy from Harvard who comes from a very wealthy family that has an estate on the Hudson River north of the city. A few chapters describe his time there. We might be reminded at little of The Great Gatsby, but not Gatsby himself, rather perhaps the Buchanans or Jordan Baker. In other words, people to the manor born. In some ways the name-dropping here is humorous. We really do understand that when they say “It’s too bad about Franklin,” they are speaking of their neighbor Franklin Roosevelt who has come down with polio.

Throughout the book there are meditations on literature. Gant goes first to England, partly to join friends at Oxford, but also to perhaps understand better some of its great literature. He says:

Samuel Taylor Coleridge. To me, he is not one of the great English poets. He is The Poet…he is there by Shakespeare and Milton and Spenser.

His meditations on literature include many of the popular writers of his day such as Joyce (whom he says is the best), Sherwood Anderson, Belloc, and a variety of others. And like many of the American writers of that time, he has to spend time in France.

The last thirty or forty percent of the novel is set in France. He leaves Oxford with the sense that none of the Americans there will ever fit in. He is attracted to France because he believes that France likes writers, that even mediocre writers get good reputations in France.

While he does some writing while there, he spends most of his time in France with three friends from Boston and New York, Starwick, his girlfriend Elinor, and her friend Ann. They travel from place to place, eating and drinking. Eugene often seeks out prostitutes. Elinor has left her husband to travel with the younger Starwick. Ann is tagging along, as is Eugene. Most evenings they go out drinking and spend the next morning asleep or hung over.

They stay in Paris for a long while seeing the sights. Eugene seems to have a love-hate attitude about the art he sees at the Louvre. They then travel south to numerous other cities including Lyons, Marseilles, Dijon, and Nice. While distinctive, Of Time and the River does have echoes of some of the other “Lost Generation” novels telling of epicurean wanderings around postwar Europe searching for something, e.g., The Sun Also Rises or Tender is the Night.

Jack Kerouac called Wolfe, “the best writer, except for me, of course.” Reading Wolfe’s intense, rambling account of Eugene Gant’s adventures in search of love and fame in France are similar to On the Road. Of Time and the River must have inspired Kerouac.

One thing to note for the reader: In On the Road Sal and Moriarty travel through Southern California and Mexico. It helps the reader to know a little Spanish for those scenes. Similarly, it helps the reader to know a little French for the chapters on Eugene’s French argosy. (He compares himself and his companions to the Argonauts.)

There really is a lot of humor in this book. Eugene or Wolfe sees and describes many people, and people are funny. Like a lot of Hemingway’s work, there is an appeal to the adolescent in all of us.

There is one glaring and ironic inconsistency in the overall effect of the story. Like Look Homeward, Angel, Of Time and the River describes at least a hundred people—their physical features, maybe their background, their speech, their behavior. Eugene notes random people on the street or sitting near him in a restaurant or outside a train window. Yet, when our “Faust,” Eugene, meets his “Helen,” the book is remarkably vague. All we get is that he has fallen in love, whatever that means. We do not know what she looks like, what she says, what she does.

It is like Frank Zappa’s parody of pop love songs:

Wowie zowie, baby, you can’t be beat
Wowie zowie, baby, you’re so neat

or maybe “Wild Thing”:

Wild thing, you make my heart sing,
You make everything groovy

or maybe even (gasp!) the Archies!

A critic might be disappointed at fuzziness, but as a reader, one just has to laugh one last time. As Eugene tags along with Starwick, so we tag along with Eugene, taking our time and, yes, following the course of many rivers.

Spencer Quinn. Heart of Barkness. Macmillan, 2019.
___. Scents and Sensibility. Simon, 2015.
___. The Dog Who Knew Too Much. Simon, 2011.

We have a growing fondness for the Chet and Bernie mysteries. Heart of Barkness does not disappoint. As in all the stories, the reader gets the narrative from the dog’s perspective.

I recall reading once that the dogs have the mental capacity of a human two-year-old, except, of course, for speech. That is really what reading Heart of Barkness and the other Chet and Bernie mysteries is like: a story from a literate two-year-old child—easily distracted, excited about almost anything, loyal to their authority figure.

And in this case, very funny.

Lotty Pilgrim is an over-the-hill singer-songwriter. She had one really big hit in the seventies, but now she is playing in smaller venues. Private Detective Bernie Little has liked her stuff, so he goes to a local club to hear her when she comes to town. He gives her a big tip in her tip jar. Chet tells us it is a C-note. Almost immediately someone steals the tip and runs outside.

The young thief opens a car door, but Chet is on the chase, so the young man ends up running away, but not before Bernie gets the money back. Bernie tells the club’s big bouncer what happened. The bouncer removes the car’s steering wheel to make it difficult for the thief, when he does return, to drive away without announcing himself.

A day later, Bernie’s friend Nixon who owns a car repair and detailing shop tells him that he is fixing the car. The bill is being paid for by—of all people—Lotty Pilgrim.

That is weird to say the least. Bernie tracks down Lotty, and it gets weirder and weirder. Of all the Chet and Bernie stories we have read so far, this is most mysterious. Nothing seems to make sense.

Shortly afterward, Lotty’s manager, another big man, is found stabbed to death in Lotty’s house. She confesses to the murder but admits she remembers nothing because she had blacked out from drinking. Although the local sheriff is excited to arrest a famous person, Bernie and at least one other person realize that a woman of Lotty’s size and build could not have done it.

Meanwhile, someone attempts to break into Bernie’s house. The same unnamed but muscular, well-dressed individual seems to show up in a few other places that Bernie is checking out. Let us say that the encounters are not only mysterious but also unpleasant.

Heart of Barkness takes a lot of digging—both figuratively and literally—to get to the bottom of things. And Chet, thanks to his superior nose, actually saves the day. While the title is essentially a simple literary joke, there are a few serious matters of the heart revealed in this mystery.

Scents and Sensibility turns into a wild story. Bernie’s neighbors the Parsons have a son who just got out of prison after serving fifteen years for kidnapping. He bought them a big saguaro cactus for their yard—this is Arizona.

It turns out that the cactus was obtained illegally. It is an endangered species, and many wild saguaros including this one have a microchip implanted in them. The Arizona Department of Agriculture was able to track it. A DOA agent shows up at the Parsons’ house and says that she will press charges on the elderly Mr. Parsons. (Mrs. Parsons has been in the hospital.)

The next day, workmen from the state come to remove the cactus and return it to the place where it came from. Bernie thinks the DOA agent has been too rough on Mr. Parsons and goes out to the spot in the desert where the cactus came from to find her. He finds her—but she has been murdered.

Murdered over a cactus? Obviously, there is more going on…

Oh yeah, around the same time as the cactus shows up next door, someone steals a safe from Bernie’s house. No sign of forced entry, and Chet smells hints of Iggy, the Parsons’ dog. Remember, these stories are told from the dog’s point of view.

Billy Parsons and another young man named Travis Baca were convicted of kidnapping a young woman about their age. Her wealthy father paid the ransom, and the two young men (both around twenty at the time) were caught a few days later. The half a million dollar ransom was never recovered, and its seems pretty clear that neither young man was the brains behind the operation.

There is a lot of action in this one: car chases, explosions, fist fights, gun fights. The kidnapping plot turns out to be far more elaborate than the official version. The story involves a gang, drug dealers, a mysterious prison death, a wino, a ranch that raises miniature horses, a dog that suspiciously resembles Chet, and even a Burning Man type desert festival called Cactus Man.

As always, told from Chet’s engaging and funny canine perspective, Scents and Sensibility is a well-told tale.

The Dog Who Knew Too Much was actually the fourth in the Chet and Bernie series. We had missed this one earlier.

An attractive divorcee hires Bernie, accompanied by Chet of course, to accompany her as she picks up her son at a summer camp in the mountains of the neighboring state. So what is the big deal? Parents all over North America do that weekly during the summer without hiring a private detective…

Anya says she wants to do it so her ex-husband, who is supposed to be there as well, will leave her alone. She says it is because he wants to get back together, but we learn there are other more significant reasons as well.

When they arrive at the camp, son Devin is missing. Turk, the counselor who took the boys on the hike when Devin disappeared, takes Chet and Bernie on the trail to the place where the boys camped and then to an abandoned mine they explored.

(This is vaguely in the American Southwest. Bernie lives in Arizona not too far from Mexico. Since Chet remembers surfing, the neighboring state is most likely California.)

Hardly a trace of the boy is found except for a scrap of cloth apparently torn from his shirt that has his name on it. Chet loses his scent when he comes to a stream.

Bernie and Chet return later to explore the mine themselves and come across a crusty miner everyone calls Moondog. Moondog is not happy to see anyone in his mine, but Chet discovers the body of Turk the camp counselor with a bullet in his head.

Oh, and when Bernie does not return when he said he would, his girlfriend Suzie drives up to the camp to look for him. She happens to arrive when Bernie is trying to comfort Devin’s mother. She drives off without even saying hello. So, yes, it gets complicated.

It gets even more complicated as Bernie is arrested for the murder of Turk and Chet is dognapped by someone Chet (and Bernie) had trusted. Did I mention that when he was a boy, Devin’s father had gone to the same camp?

This is a mystery and a very suspenseful one.

All the Chet and Bernie books are fun to read, but Heart of Barkness is the deepest mystery of these three, Scents and Sensibility has the most action, and The Dog Who Knew Too Much is the most suspenseful. As Chet would say, it’s all good.

One note on the titles: All the Chet and Bernie books have titles that are word plays on other works. Here we note Heart of Darkness, Sense and Sensibility, and The Man Who Knew Too Much. The titles only vaguely relate to the actual stories, but they do indicate the writer’s cleverness which stands out in the dog’s-nose-view in the narration.

Julianna Deering. Death by the Book. Bethany, 2014.

This is a cozy mystery—provided that you define a cozy to include tales that have four murders in them. It is low key and pretty much nonviolent. We meet a number of interesting people. At one point in the novel, a character mentions author Dorothy Sayers and Lord Peter Wimsey, her famous detective creation. Death by the Book is a kind of hommage to Sayers. Like Lord Peter, Lord Drew Farthering, has turned into an amateur sleuth. Each murder gets closer to home, so others wonder if Drew is not the ultimate target.

As Peter Winsey tries to woo Harriet Vane, so Drew Farthering is trying to win the love of a expatriate American Madeleine Parker. Like some of Sayers’ stories, too, this is set in the early 1930s. It gets complicated because Madeleine’s Aunt Ruth, who prefers American gentlemen, is certain that Mr. Farthering has dishonorable intentions.

The mystery begins on nearly the very first page. Drew has an appointment with his lawyer to change his will (apparently some relatives of his had died in the first novel in this series). He finds the lawyer murdered with an unusual message written on a piece of paper attached to the man’s body by a hatpin.

Three other people in the area become murder victims, too. Each with a cryptic note stuck onto the body by a hatpin.

Why Death by the Book? Because each pinned message turns out to be a literary allusion. I am happy to say I recognized the second one (another reader had given away the first one before I read the book myself). However, even recognizing them does not necessarily have them make sense. That in itself is part of the mystery.

Ultimately, though, the notes will be clues to the killer’s identity. Fans of Jessica Fellowes, Downton Abbey, or Dorothy Sayers may get a kick out of this tale. Shakespeare aficionados might take it as a challenge.

Neal Stephenson. Fall. Morrow, 2019.

Subtitled Or, Dodge in Hell, the overall impression that Fall comes across as a cyberpunk Lord of the Rings. Stephenson, as always, imagines some things that are plausible, if not quite yet possible. With Fall, he seems to be trying to create or continue a Stephenson mythos, but in the Pacific Northwest rather than, say, Yoknapatawpha County.

Stephenson said in an interview after Cryptonomicon came out that he was thinking of sequels. Possibly, Reamde or Fall: Or, Dodge in Hell are some of those. (One character, Enoch Root, is from Cryptonomicon; he must over a hundred years old at the end of Fall.)

Dodge is the nickname of Richard Forthrast, the main character in Reamde. The young hacker in that novel has become a tech billionaire thanks to online gaming. He has even bigger plans.

There is a great line in the American film Fever Pitch when a Red Sox fan exclaims, “Ted Williams must be rolling over in his freezer!”

So Forthrast’s will states that his remains are to be frozen with the bodies of eleven others that have been cryogenically preserved in Eastern Washington State. There such elaborate freezers can run inexpensively for the foreseeable future on hydroelectric power. Some time after Dodge made his will, another wealthy techie from Silicon Valley, Elmo “El” Shepherd, had taken over the cryogenic firm and makes plans to preserve the twelve clients’ connectomes digitally.

Just as the genome is a map of a creature’s genes or chromosomes down to each part of the DNA, so a connectome is the map of how an individual’s brain cells connect with each other and the rest of the nervous system. The idea—and this is the willing suspension of disbelief required by the reader—is that reorganizing neural networks in exactly the same pattern in a virtual computer setting would duplicate a person’s thoughts and personality and possibly even his or her memories. Now, we have seen how brain surgeon Eben Alexander or psychologist Caroline Leaf have demonstrated that the mind and the brain are not exactly the same thing, but for the sake of argument, Fall assumes they are.

Some time after Dodge’s sudden and untimely passing, Shepherd scans his connectome along with those of the eleven other frozen bodies. Almost two decades later, the Miasma (the common name now for the Internet and the Cloud) has been developed enough that the scanned information is uploaded and Dodge’s neural bits begin creating a virtual world. The brains of the other eleven are similarly uploaded to join Dodge in this new virtual reality. As people see the brain scanning as viable way of somehow living past death, the preservation of one’s connectome becomes popular for those who can afford it.

About one quarter of the novel takes place in the real world, a.k.a. Meatspace, and covers about fifty years. When most of the living people in the story die, their connectomes are uploaded so that they live on. It is giving little away by saying that by the end of the story, the virtual world, a.k.a. Bitworld, can be sustained by a network of solar-powered satellites. This means that Bitworld will keep on functioning on its own without needing any more hands-on attention from Meatspace. It has become a world, albeit one of complex computer data, on its own.

As the book points out, and many programmers including this reviewer know from experience, nowadays most computer code is made up of previously written code. (662) After all, who does machine language any more? So couldn’t computerized characters reproduce and sustain themselves? They would just have had the right code to do so.

As is typical of Stevenson, there are many clever observations and philosophical musings. It helps a little to be familiar with the Bible and, even more so, Paradise Lost. Stephenson cleverly applies some of Milton’s cosmos including Chaos to Bitworld, and there are numerous other allusions as well. The serpent first appears to Eve in a dream in Milton’s epic. The last we see of the devil, he is a small worm. Expect something similar in Fall.

Without going into great detail, by the time Dodge Forthrast’s connectome is uploaded, the Miasma is a true mess. People believe whatever they want to believe. Much of what passes as news is total fabrication. (Like Bitworld?) One of technology’s super-rich stars creates an elaborate hoax that, even years later, many believe was an historical event.

A lawyer in the story declares:

The mass of people are so stupid, so gullible, because they want to be misled. There’s no way to make them not want it. You have to work with the human race as it exists, with all of its flaws. Getting them to see reason is a fool’s errand. (174 emphasis in original)

A good example of unreason is spoken by the villain of the tale (I am trying to avoid spoilers) who says, speaking of religion “…prophets and theologians didn’t have factual information to work with” (400) What about history? Fulfilled prophecy? The Exodus? The Resurrection of Jesus? The speaker here becomes the fool.

Whether it is pride or prejudice that keeps us from “factual information,” we are told that some people “deliberately” overlook facts (2 Peter 3:5)—they do not want to know. Even Jesus before his death noted that some people would not believe even if they saw someone rise from the dead (Luke 16:31).

A subplot which demonstrates this introduces us to a new popular religion called the Leviticans. It sounds like an extreme Jehovah’s Witness offshoot. They burn crosses to show they don’t believe that Jesus was crucified or that he rose from the dead. As the Yiddish saying goes, “He didn’t climb the tree, and he didn’t fly.”

Not only are we inclined to disbelieve what is true, but because of “the human race as it exists, with all of its flaws,” Utopia cannot exist, either in this world or Bitworld. The “life after death” in Bitworld still involves the human mind. Perhaps that is why the book is subtitled Dodge in Hell. It is an afterlife, but no paradise. Because Bitworld is code-based, techies have more power there, but they are no smarter than anyone else when it comes to making everyone live harmoniously.

As with other Stephenson novels, there are many ideas and numerous subplots. In fact, Fall does not really have a single plot. We are reminded that Aristotle said it was okay for epics to have more than one plot because they are longer. Fall is epic in proportion, certainly. We should note that besides being familiar with the epic Paradise Lost, it might help the reader to know Greek mythology (at the very least, D’Aulaire or Hamilton). Such mythical allusions carry on through the story.

The key myth is the overthrow of the titans. In Fall, Dodge is overthrown by El, just as the gods overthrew the titans in the ancient mythology. El is short for Elmo, but it is also the Semitic root meaning god or God. In fact, Stephenson has fun with names generally. So Dodge becomes Egdod in Bitworld. Verna becomes Spring. Like a videogame, those who “die” in Bitworld may get a new life. And that usually means a new name.

Because Fall has nearly nine hundred pages with numerous subplots and characters with various names, it has the effect of a Russian novel or Mexican telenovela. Many editions of tomes like War and Peace or August 1914 contain a list of characters. Perhaps Stephenson should do the same to help his readers here.

By the way, even though Dodge is the creator of Bitworld and is named in the book’s subtitle, he only figures in about ten percent of the story—and that may be a generous estimate. Is he in hell? His niece asks that question (600). When El takes over, he kicks out Dodge anyhow and sends him to Chaos (readers of Snow Crash may recognize it as snow). So most of the story is not about him.

Approximately the last third of the book tells of a quest reminiscent of The Lord of the Rings—or the Grail quest or The Argonautica or The Guns of Navarone or The Voyage of the Dawn Treader or The Diamond Age or…

The quest takes place in cyberspace. Meatspace is becoming depopulated. People figure that they can live on in Bitworld, so why procreate? A group of eight or ten travel by foot, boat, and horse over much of the new world to confront…well, no spoilers, but it is fun for the same reason that those other stories are. Characters are working together and there is lots of solid conflict.

There is a final showdown. The key to Hercules’ victory over Antaeus decides the outcome. Only here it is not just physically losing touch, but psychically losing touch as well.

One episode takes place in what the viewers from the real world call Escherville. Dodge designed a part of Bitworld to unfold like an M. C. Escher print, so people there cannot tell up from down. As the episode was unfolding before me, I said to myself, “I’ve read something like this before.” Back in the sixties (yes, I am that old) I read and thoroughly enjoyed Heinlein’s Glory Road. One world in that space odyssey (lower case) was like a Kelin bottle and the traveler had to figure out how to navigate around that.

And it goes on.

One interesting question Fall raises is this: If there is an afterlife, how much of our previous life will we remember? Most of the “souls” in Bitworld have their brain forms, their neural networks, but not their memories. It is as if most of them were dunked in the River Lethe before being reincarnated. And yet, there are clever discussions among them about whether or not there is another world and what exactly their relationship to that world is. In that sense, their world is no different from ours.

Cosmic and comic, Fall, like Paradise Lost, gets all of us thinking about the big picture.

N.B. For more of our reviews of works by Stephenson and similar stories, search for Stephenson in the search bar above.

K. J. Soze. The Message for the Last Days. K. J. Soze, 2019.

While The Message for the Last Days is subtitled Biblical and Historical Understanding of End Times, do not read this if you want to read a book like The Late Great Planet Earth or Earth’s Last Empire, the latter a book we recently reviewed here. This is not a book on end times prophecy. It does touch a little on different interpretations and reminds us that perhaps too many people have made such a subject more complicated than it is meant to be.

For one thing, this book demonstrates that in most places in the Bible when the end of the age is described that three events are “clustered.” Everywhere they appear together the passages suggest that there is little or no time between them. The three events? The second coming of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and judgment.

For what it is worth, this has been the teaching and belief of most Christians through most of history. It was only in the nineteenth century that different alternate theories began to emerge through such movements as the Adventists, Dispensationalists, and the Irvingites.

The author runs through a number of biblical proof texts to at least challenge, if not dismiss outright, such ideas. But most of the book is not on this subject.

Many years ago Corrie ten Boom wrote a book called Marching Orders for the End Battle. That book, like this one, was not an interpretation of biblical prophecy or end times. In neither book is there any speculation about the antichrist, the Temple, Israel, or anything that such works usually contain. Corrie ten Boom gives instructions on how to live the Christian life in difficult times—a voice of experience, to say the least.

Similarly, at least two thirds of The Message for the Last Days is not about biblical prophecy at all. It mainly attempts to challenge the reader to consider whether or not he would be prepared should the Lord return.

The main theme of most of the book can be summed up by the title of a book by a nineteenth century leader of Lutherans in America: The Proper Distinction between Law and Gospel. This book focuses on that.

There is one slight overlap with Earth’s Last Empire, namely that Soze also emphasizes that the Abrahamic Covenant is unconditional. While Hagee writes that the land of Israel will unconditionally belong to the Jews, Soze really emphasizes what the prophets and the New Testament focus on—faith.

Abraham received God’s promise in the covenant by faith. His faith in God’s promise justified him, made him righteous in God’s eyes (see Genesis 15:6). That truth is everlasting and unconditional as well as any promise about the land. And in terms of mankind’s ultimate destiny, it is much more significant.

Soze notes that this has always been the case. The Bible emphasizes that God does not change (e.g., see Malachi 3:6 or Hebrews 13:8). So Noah acted in faith. Adam and Eve’s sin was that they did not trust God’s word to them. The Message for the Last Days tries to get this across in many different ways. At times it may seem repetitive, but the reader can understand that the author wanted to be thorough.

The author’s approach to the issue of what constitutes saving faith reminded this reviewer of Martin Luther’s most enduring theological work, The Bondage of the Will. Soze states explicitly that free will does not exist. Salvation is rooted in faith, not in works or actions. As both testaments note, “The righteous shall live by faith.” (Habakkuk 2:4; Romans 1:17) Man contributes nothing to his salvation, though the book does remind us that Abraham’s justifying faith in God was such that he would obediently sacrifice Isaac because he believed God could resurrect him (see Genesis 22:15-18, cf. Hebrews 11:17-19).

Philosophers and theologians of all stripes have discussed the idea of free will. Is The Message for the Last Days, then, deterministic or fatalistic? It is hard to say. Perhaps the author will clarify things, if it is even possible, in a promised volume two. Meanwhile Samuel Johnson’s observation still stands for most of us: “All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.” Or as Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote: “We must believe in free will. We have no choice.”

One curious idea which the author repeats is that the soul does not outlive the body. Although a little vague on the issue—perhaps volume two will clarify this as well—it sounds as if the author believes in a “soul sleep” or a cessation of life and revivifying at the Judgment. The book considers the idea of the soul living on an unbiblical Hellenization. (Whew! In the last month I have read three books blaming Hellenization for a number of things…)

It seems there are a number of Scriptures in both testaments that could at least raise questions about that idea, but before launching out on a possible rabbit trail, let us wait for volume two.