Enchanted Prose

Female doctoring, activism, and mysteries in the desert Southwest (Phoenix, Arizona, present-day): Retired university family physician/poet/novelist Sandra Cavallo Miller is on a mission to show us what it’s really like for a woman to practice family medicine out West, particularly in Arizona. Her brand is writing comforting novels in poetic, atmospheric, easy-flowing prose with real life authenticity that feels cozy even when realities aren’t.

Where No One Should Live presents a harsher, blazing hot landscape than in her earlier trilogy: the Dr. Abby Wilmore medical series, mostly set in a clinic at the Grand Canyon National Park (see https://enchantedprose.com/what-the-river-said/). Her fourth novel is also set in Arizona, this time Phoenix, where the author lives, at Arizona Public Health and a clinic that trains medical residents like Miller did for hundreds of doctors in training.

Despite all the trials and tribulations she puts her characters through and packs into roughly 250-page novels, they sing out to us because we recognize these people: the powerful and the vulnerable. Relationships drive Miller’s novels, good and bad ones.

Her new female family medicine physician and protagonist is, like the former Abby Wilmore, quite likeable. You’ll wish all your doctors were as compassionate and forthcoming. Both are unsure of themselves, though for different reasons. Maya, more than Abby, hides her personal demons, hinted at and then revealed bit by bit. Painfully aware of her traumatic issue every day, she strives to rise above it using what she’s experienced for the betterment of her community.

Happiness is not easy for Maya as she’s not one to sit back, taking on more than she should, including coming to the rescue of others – doctors who suddenly sicken, her old horse and an unbroken one. All the while dealing with the additional challenges of illnesses prevalent out West brought on by the intense heat, severe drought, toxic plants, funguses, parasites, mosquitos, and much more. Miller has a talent for blending the medical into her stories so we won’t turn away from them as she wants us to be aware and informed.

Turning her lens on females practicing family medicine, not typically seen in fiction, although today there are more women than men in medical school, is purposeful. Men still dominate some fields of medicine, and it’s still an uphill battle for women to achieve equity in salaries, leadership positions, and negative attitudes in a traditionally male enterprise.

Cleverly, Miller chooses Maya’s boyfriend, with whom she’s been in a romantic relationship with when the novel opens, in one of those male-dominated specialties, cardiology. Whit Whitaker couldn’t be more handsome to go along with his swelled view of himself. Self-centered and lacking empathy, he’s demanding, jealous, and overprotective of his girlfriend, oppressively so. You’ll be asking why Maya stays with him. He’ll get under your skin, as intended. 

Unless I’m reading too much into it, Miller names some of her characters and animals to make a statement about them or the desert. Summer, most obvious, symbolic of the unrelenting heat that overwhelms throughout. Whit to mean he’s so shallow, who cares a whit about him? Luna, her thirty-year-old female horse from childhood she’s still over the moon about, treating her like an aging goddess? Or, Twinkie, her twenty-five-year-old, giant Desert Tortoise who isn’t soft nor getting smaller like the new creamy vanilla treats are. Twinkie is a stunning reminder that things are different in Arizona. A family can actually adopt a giant tortoise as a pet in Arizona, like her parents did when she was growing up. Take a look at amazing one-hundred-year-old Ralph in this video from an Arizona zoo:

The bond between humans and animals is poignant as Maya knows how uplifting this special relationship can be with a horse for a boy with a heavy heart. Rafael is her undocumented neighbor’s and friend’s son, Rosa. His father, from Guatemala, disappeared three years ago and there’s been no trace of him, reflecting immigration issues on our border states we’ve yet to figure out how to humanely solve. Rafael is too serious for a ten-year-old boy. Maya’s tenderness for him, the family’s situation, and her joy of spending downtime with both of them is an important part of her life. She lets Rafael feed and spend time with Luna, who lives in a barn attached to her parents’ home she lives in, after they decided to move to a retirement home, raising another reality of today’s life for the sandwiched generation. Her parents remind us of Doctors Without Borders volunteers, giving selflessly to provide desperately needed medical care in the poorest of countries.

As if Maya hasn’t enough on her plate, Miller adds one more problem lurking. No one knows it exists for a while, revealed to us early on through a mysterious, anonymous, of course, Journal. Periodic entries in-between chapters are brief yet ominous as the writer has it out for someone. Who? We’re not sure. Why? No clue. How? That you’ll surmise when you start seeing a pattern developing. Even when you do, you may still be hard pressed to figure out the evil culprit and motive. I did ten pages before he or she was exposed, which isn’t saying much as the novel ended twenty pages later.

Another male doctor, Alex Reddish, is also in the picture early on. Maya works with him at the residency clinic. Again, his name could signify how flustered, as in how red someone’s face can turn whose socially awkward. In his case, it’s his quirky “mannerisms” Maya picks up. Later, she’ll learn he was a former chess champion, stereotyped as a nerd in contrast to Whit. You’re heart goes out to Alex when he admits to himself he’s attracted to and cares about Maya, but too modest and respectful of her supposedly great catch Whit to interfere, let alone know how to go about letting her know his feelings. He’s another really good person you’ll be rooting for. Maya and Alex’s humility and humanity are just what a fine doctor would order.

Maya doesn’t just treat the holistic health of individual patients, she examines and aims to treat the public health of a community. For example, she’s the unpopular activist for passing a helmet law for all Arizona motorcyclists in a state that only mandates protection if you’re under 18. Like today’s polarized world, she does so at great personal risk as she’s been receiving scary threats. And yet, she persists.

At Arizona Public Health, a few characters stand out. Sheila, a nurse, a “wizard” Maya couldn’t live without. Once again, like the author did in her trilogy, she highlights the vital roles of nurses. Dr. Mel Black, in his sixties like Sheila, has “brooding” looks that come from a personal loss, triggering his joining “the roller coaster of public health.” Both look out for Maya.

 A couple of residents who stand out include Jim, who’s having the most difficulty performing. Sometimes he acts okay, at other times he seems to have checked out, and his diagnoses miss things. What’s wrong with him becomes a medical mystery that’s eventually uncovered. His inability to excel is troubling to the medical team, allowing us to see how hard it is for doctors to speak negatively of another. The other resident is Veronica: extremely capable but inappropriately flirtatious.

To borrow the words of MSNBC anchor, Rachel Maddow: “Watch this space.” Because another novel by Miller is due out in 2022. Prolific, fortunately for us.

Lorraine

Realistic and fantastical individual and ecological interconnectedness (New England, Midwest, Southern, and Western US, a South Pacific island, Australia, Brazil, and the Arctic; contemporary timeframe): Cai Emmons is an extraordinary wordsmith who’s created a two-book series on the magical powers of personal relationships and their interconnected relationships with Nature, and how individuals and groups have the power to change the trajectory of the climate change crisis. Each stands alone; together their strength is multiplied so this review encompasses both.

Weather Woman, the original novel, introduces some of the same well-drawn characters you’ll find in Sinking Islands. Its focus is primarily America; the sequel expands globally.

Book 1 sets forth the fantastical plot: that someone fascinated by weather and cloud formations since childhood is so acutely sensitive to atmospheric conditions they have a supernatural ability to alter the weather. Bronwyn Artair, thirty, getting her doctorate at MIT in atmospheric sciences, is that person. Unlike anyone you’ve known or heard of, her “long, wavy, dark-red hair” makes her physically stand out, but her superhuman power makes her unique.

Bronwyn’s rare gift takes the message of what each of us could do to make any difference in reducing global warming is far-fetched, extreme, but extreme eerie weather is what’s happening around the world. Scientists have told us time is running out; not everyone is listening or feels the urgency to act aggressively like Bronwyn intensely does. Everything about these novels is intense, including Emmons’ gifted prose.

Bronwyn “does not read people as she reads the earth.” She “burns hotter” with her “gutsy, mercurial nature.” Her mother died five years ago, leaving her awfully alone. Except when she’s in Nature, the “perfect solution for soothing a human being,” when she’s not “lost in a cyclone of loneliness.” The author’s literary, poetic prose is gorgeous: sometimes expressed meteorologically.

Emmons writes about the human condition of loneliness and how the devastation of climate change has caused profound loneliness. In Sinking Islands, we’re taken to more places around the globe where climate destruction has either transformed or threatens to erase their beauty. The mood in both novels isn’t just gloom and doom, though; it’s also wonderment and awe of Nature’s therapeutic powers and why we must find therapies to save and heal our aching planet. 

If you think the premise is too wacky, too science-fiction-y, consider a proven scientific concept cited called the Butterfly Effect. The phenomenon captures Bronwyn’s moral dilemma when she finally accepts she can change weather (Book 1). The video below explains the theory as: “Small things in a complex system may have no effect or a massive one, and it is virtually impossible to know which will turn out to be the case”:

In both novels, but more seriously in Sinking Islands, Bronwyn thinks not only of the potential benefits of her power but of unintended, harmful consequences. Described as a “thinker,” we get to see how she thinks and how her thinking evolves starting with the first time she’s done something unbelievable with a storm atop Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, famous for its extreme weather.

Initially, she thinks whatever she’d done is an aberration; we think it’s a weird coincidence. When she influences weather again, she thinks something’s wrong in her brain. When it happens again, she’s tormented by thinking she’s “coming unhinged,” having a nervous breakdown, or experiencing early onset dementia. When a witness sees how she stopped rain at a wedding, it spreads virally. Add a couple more witnesses to other weather conditions and she’s disgusted that she’s lost her privacy. Until she starts wondering could she do it again? Then tests herself in Kansas and Oklahoma’s Tornado Alley, later California’s wildfire country. Weather Woman tracks her evolution.

Sinking Islands raises the stakes from what one individual can do to experimenting with teaching others since she alone cannot possibly change the weather around the world. In Book 1 she’s “in love with the world like never before”; in Book 2 she spreads that love to a select group ripe for her interventions as they’re from beautiful places that global warming has despoiled. Their coming together isn’t just a statement about making a difference ecologically, but how doing so affects our relationships and humanity.

Weather Woman opens with Bronwyn’s doctoral studies under the mentorship of Professor Diane Fenwick, whom she’s known since she was eighteen; Diane convinced her to pursue academic science. They became very close friends; Diane loves her like the daughter and child she never had. (Happily married to Joe, a novelist who spends time in their cozy cottage in Maine to write). Mentor and mentee have two different personalities: Diane, the “extrovert” confident and commanding; “painfully shy” Bronwyn unsure of herself.

Hard sciences at an elite institution is a tough place for a woman. Bronwyn is constantly mocked by male students to such a degree that she questions and then decides she’s not cut out for academia and leaves the program to Diane’s great dismay, which continues into the sequel. Moving to southern New Hampshire to work as a meteorologist on TV, Bronwyn rents a secluded cabin in the woods overlooking a peaceful river. One day a reporter from Florida, Matt, shows up at the station and is immediately attracted to her. Their story is intense. How could it not be given Bronwyn’s intensity? Unlike Diane, a doubter of anything unless backed up by scientific data, he’s heard about Bronwyn’s otherworldly power, doesn’t believe it either but willing to turn his life upside down to be with her. Joe, whose career relies on imagination, is open-minded too, along with a few other believers appearing in one or both novels.

It’s Diane’s belief in Bronwyn that matters most. But her reaction is that this isn’t “thinking outside the-box – this is thinking outside the range of known human capability.” The reader will see whether Diane comes around or not in Sinking Islands.

Emmons, who taught creative writing and screenwriting at the University of Oregon, describes herself as a “word-lover” and “people lover” – both on full display. Sinking Islands has an even more ambitious reach than Weather Woman, but both are remarkable and thought-provoking.

The sinking island earns the title of Book 2 because it’s more momentous than a “discrete thing” as “all oceans are connected.” Located in the South Pacific, it could be any of the “islands of plastic” in which “apocalyptic” floods have washed plastics onto the shore, overwhelming sewage systems spreading “industrial chemicals, and human waste, and algae bloom, and deadly bacteria.” Two characters stand out in the island storyline: eleven-year-old Penina who has “limitless energy” like Bronwyn, and her lonely father Analu. He and Nahani, his wife, have already grieved the loss of their other two children who drowned from the high waters, so they decided to leave the island despite a dying grandmother’s wish not to. For Analu, the island has become a “winking hologram of beauty and sadness.”

A different type of “water crisis” is happening in São Paulo, Brazil. Severe drought is “squeezing the verve from everyone.” Felipe, a dancer in the theatre with the body of “Adonis,” is the central character. At forty, he’s single as dance has been his life. “Hydric collapse” means audiences are so on the edge they’re not coming to performances. This once lively city is rioting over water, diseases are spreading from standing water collected in buckets, and reservoirs are alarmingly low for a city that once owned “twelve percent of the world’s fresh water.” “Where does the soul of a city reside?”

Emmons whisks us to the Arctic Circle to draw our attention to magnitudes: survival under the most extreme weather conditions in Greenland, where the melting glaciers remind us of the butterfly effect warming Earth, affecting all of us. Except these hardy, resourceful Greenlanders still feel the “delicious joy of being alive.” Why don’t we, given all we have, the novel asks.

Although these two novels can’t provide answers, the message is we can still do something, individually and as a group. We’ll never have Bronwyn’s mythical ability to “coral” enormous concentration to release enormous energy through the body into the atmosphere, but we can make an effort that can have ripple effects.

Lorraine

Inside the creative genius of a kinetic sculpture artist who lived life to the fullest (Indiana and other Midwestern states, New York, California, Scotland, England, France, Germany, the Netherlands; 1913-2002): How can an artist live nearly a century and leave his public mark throughout the US and Europe and no one has written about his life?

“Behind every public sculpture is a story the public never hears” says Belinda Rathbone opening her outstanding book about an American artist whose work can be seen everywhere if you know where to look. George Rickey evolved from a painter who loved history to become the most prominent moving sculpture artist outside of Alexander Calder. Initially inspired by Calder’s famous mobiles, he pioneered a technically more complicated “movement movement.”

“His sculpture, always an expression of balance and tension, uneven structures and counterweights at play with one another, also expressed, though he never said so, the dual forces of his personality and personal relationships in abstract form.”

To compare the work of two kinetic sculpture artists, here’s two looks at Alexander Calder’s crayon-colored mobiles hanging in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC:

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Then watch the sophisticated engineering in the movements of George Rickey’s stainless steel sculptures in these two short videos:

You can see four of Rickey’s outdoor sculptures (left-to-right) in Indiana, New York, California, and Germany, including a painted one (photos by Wikimedia Commons user IH Havens [CC BY-SA 4.0], Flick user Sébastien Barré [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0], Flickr user rocor [CC BY-NC 2.0], Wikimedia Commons user Rufus46 [CC BY-SA 3.0]):

George Rickey: A Life in Balance is the first biography of his fascinating creations and life, from his early childhood to the end at ninety-five. What stands out above all is how he used his technical, mechanical know-how, great intellect and knowledge, and a slew of personal connections to keep pushing himself to new frontiers, becoming a prolific moving sculpture artist (3,000 pieces). To understand his groundings and influences, Belinda Rathbone offers a take-a-village perspective.

This is not Rathbone’s only biography of an artist, nor the first time she’s been the first to write one about an artist: on the Depression-era photographer in Walker Evans. She’s also the author of another biography about her father (when he was the head of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts) and the controversy surrounding a famous painting: The Boston Raphael: A Mysterious Painting, an Embattled Museum in an Era of Change, & A Daughter’s Search for the Truth.

On first impression, the art historian’s newest biography is handsome: dust jacket, page design with a ball hanging down to organize its thirty-five chapters, and nearly thirty illustrations in black-and-white and color. Along with its captivating literary and accessible scholarly prose, it’s the right impression as everything about this book is high quality.

Which explains why a blog that has never reviewed a biography wanted to share this book with you. If you’re of a mindset (like I typically am) that biographies are dry (whereas memoirs aren’t), you’ll be captivated by Rathbone’s exceptional prose and impeccable research. It was on display in her memoir The Guynd: Love & Other Repairs in Rural Scotland (see https://enchantedprose.com/the-guynd-love-other-repairs-in-rural-scotland), the impetus for appreciating the author and ignoring the genre, knowing it would read like historical art fiction and memoir. It’s even better, providing insight into how a great artist became a real one.

Starting with Rickey’s childhood, when he lived in Indiana until he was five. His family (the only boy among five sisters) moved to Glasgow, Scotland so his MIT engineer father could manage the huge Singer Sewing Machine Factory in Clydebank nearby, not like the smaller plant he oversaw in South Bend. Before they left, Rickey spent time with his grandfather, a clockmaker, a formative experience that gave him an “appreciation for mechanical structures and the intricate handwork” and the concept of a pendulum, which played out years later in the precision and intricacy of his moving sculptures. Rickey gained a different kind of appreciation for how things work and the skills needed when he observed the making of the world’s most popular sewing machine. Sent to boarding schools as a teenager, first in Scotland where he met his life-long mentor, George Lyward, who inspired him to do the same when he returned to the Midwest and taught history and studio art at colleges. Lyward understood that Rickey was no longer as passionate about math and science as history; he transferred to one of Oxford’s colleges (Balliol built in the 1200s), where as luck would have it he stumbled on the Ruskin School for Drawing. John Ruskin, 19^th century British writer/painter/more, is just one of the names cited in this book dense with so many who in some way influenced George Rickey.

Special people and fortunate events in Rickey’s life by eighteen show a pattern that continued for much of his life, opening a door that led to another, another and another, until he became the one sought after by museums and art galleries in the US and Europe. Eventually, he reached the point that he had to hire assistants or he couldn’t possibly keep up, despite his boundless energy, work ethic, and desire for simplicity. The studio where most of this happened started out as a barn on acreage in East Chatham, New York, with a dilapidated countryside farmhouse he bought with his first wife, Susan. As the money came in, the house and studio were renovated repeatedly to make room for his expanding collection; when still there wasn’t enough space he acquired other properties. His second wife, Edie, managed them. More about her below.

So many people, known and unknown to us, made a difference in Rickey’s artistic and personal life. Amazingly so. A legendary name, Andrew Carnegie, gave him his real start as the recipient of the first Carnegie grant for an artist-in-residence program at colleges, pioneering this type of grant and program. Initially, Rickey taught history and art, then combined the two teaching art history. As jobs, responsibilities, and his reputation grew, he’s seen hopping around the country taking on bigger and more challenging positions. Then in the late 1920s he spent time in Paris, that famous era of the Lost Generation. Those years and later when he lived in New York City with Susan, he felt freer to experiment with abstract art. After the Depression, he pushed himself more and never stopped. His is a stunning story of an artist constantly moving and changing in sync with historical times when art was changing too. It wasn’t until after the Vietnam War and dream-destroying political assassinations that he turns to Europe, especially in West Berlin and Rotterdam, becoming hugely popular internationally in the 1970s.

As a story of two marriages, his life becomes more relatable and not all highs. Mild-mannered and steady, Rickey’s unstable wife Susan became an obstacle to his work and peace of mind, but it wasn’t easy to divorce her. His second marriage to Edie, much younger and taller, represented decades of highs until alcoholism took its toll. For much of the book though she’s his “flamboyant,” “theatrical” opposite partner devoted to promoting his work and managing it like a “boardroom” meeting, she the Chairman. As a father, he comes across as not having enough quality time with his two sons, Philip and Stuart. Yet his influence on them is seen by their both becoming artists and Philip heading up the Foundation that carries on his father’s legacy.

The Edie years when she was at the center of Rickey’s art make this both an engrossing story of a great artist and a “couple’s life in art.”

Lorraine

How personal and world history made the man – the life of Thomas Mann (1891 to 1950; Germany, Switzerland, US): I love the sound of Colm Tóibín’s prose. It makes this ambitious biographical novel about a major literary figure of the first half of the 20^th century even more special.

Tóibín’s character study takes in the full measure of an extremely complex man considered one of the greatest German writers, and yet he was hardly known. Thomas Mann’s classical novels drew from his extremely complicated family relationships and hidden gay sexuality, so to understand the man you need to understand the autobiographical aspects of his life that inspired his works.

From the opening line, you’ll feel like settling into the novel’s 500 pages: “His mother waited upstairs while the servants took coats and scarves and hats from the guests.” The prose is dignified like Thomas Mann was.

In 2004, Tóibín, an English professor at Columbia University, wrote his first biographical novel about another literary master – Henry James, his “favorite novelist”. The Master is a fitting title for the writer considered one of the greatest novelists of all time. Tóibín could just as easily titled this novel the same. Naming it The Magician, which comes from a piece of Mann’s family life, implies an exceedingly more playful man than he was. Serious, somber, and deeply reflective, Tóibín’s clear and insightful prose not only illuminates the man, but how history made him into the man he became. History takes on new meaning through the lens of how it affected him.

At an early age, Thomas Mann knew he wanted to be a writer. At 25, in 1901, his first novel Buddenbrooks was published, which, in 1929, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature mostly for. It, like others, was inspired by something in his life. Tóibín brilliantly tracks his life alongside the book Mann was writing at the time, so we see where the writer’s inspiration came from.

For example, Julia Mann, Thomas’ mother and the setting of Lübeck in northern Germany where he grew up, with its “atmosphere of mercantile confidence,” inspired Buddenbrooks. The Magic Mountain (1924) was inspired by his wife Katia’s treatment at a sanitorium in Switzerland; and Death in Venice (1912) was drawn from a trip Thomas and Katia took to Italy, where his “left-wing,” “internationalist” older brother Heinrich, also a writer, was living. Venetian waters and the gracefulness of a little boy mesmerized Thomas in this novel about a writer who had “no defenses against the vision of overpowering beauty.”

Just as Henry James hid his sexual preferences to protect his literary reputation, Mann did too. Three of his six children were openly gay and lesbian: Erika, Klaus, and Golo. So is the Irish author. Erika and Klaus’s relationship suggests incestuous feelings, as does Thomas’ for Klaus, and Katia for her twin brother, also named Klaus. One of the complexities explored, then, is the “sly persistence of the erotic.”

Thomas’ mother is an exotic character. Brazilian-born, Julia Mann was “dreamy,” artsy, bohemian, the complete opposite of his serious father. A Senator with a “century of civic excellence” and a prosperous grain merchant, Julia’s elegance did match his “sense of style.” After he died, Julia moved the family to southern Germany, to Munich, a livelier place that suited her better. Rather likeable, she “treated the most ordinary people as though they belonged to some exotic world.”

Katia was well-aware of where Thomas’ eyes roamed, yet let him be himself around her since he suppressed his desires. She, like Julia, had a “mystique of excellence” deserving of a full length book. Thomas eyed her in an opera box, as she reminded him of his mother’s good looks. Her father was a mathematician, a “fanatical Wagnerian” and friends with the composer Gustave Mahler; her parents cultivated a love of music, art, and literature, as did Thomas’. Their youngest child Michael became a composer and later a writer. (Three of their other children were writers too.)

Katia’s family was Jewish, the Manns’ were not. They didn’t practice their religion, so Katia’s Jewishness is presented in that light. Erika and Klaus were the most outspoken about Fascism, along with Heinrich who had a great distaste for “German manners” and desire for “dominance.” In a standout scene in Venice, Heinrich expresses these sentiments about Germany while Thomas argued (they didn’t get along at all) that Venice was “all surface ease . . . there is no depth, no tradition of serious thought, no homage to darkness.” He felt people “hate Germany because it means something,” that life must be viewed in “all its complexity.” Tóibín doesn’t shy away from all the complexities.

It’s Mann’s complete turnaround about Germany’s place in the world that Tóibín brilliantly shows us. In doing so, we also see what happens to a country that lost a war and was suffering, ripe for someone to come along telling grotesque lies destroying everything that came in the way.

Thomas is first seen as soulfully passionate about German exceptionalism. Eventually he can’t ignore Hitler’s evil, gradually speaking out when his family frees itself from Germany; when they immigrate to America he’s the most outspoken. Preferring the quietude of his study, Mann’s about-face as a political figure is spectacular.

Mann’s life also shows that you didn’t have to be Jewish to become an enemy of Nazi Germany:

“The very culture he had represented since the war – bourgeois, cosmopolitan, balanced, unpassionate – was the very one that they [Nazis] were most determined to destroy.”

The richness of Tóibín’s prose and imagination was inspired by access to Mann’s diaries from 1918 to 1921 and 1933 to 1950. The rest were destroyed, so the author fills in missing years using a long list of other resources he acknowledges – but all is penned through the magic of his prose.

When Mann received the Nobel Prize, 6 ½ million Germans voted for Hitler. Five years earlier, only a fringe element (3%) did. Mann went from “complacency to shock.” You’ll then first find the family in Lugano, Switzerland and southern France, until they fully appreciate that Thomas was “one of the most powerful Germans alive” and America is their safest option.

A vivid scene takes place at a 6,000 person event held on Harvard’s campus when Mann and Albert Einstein were invited speakers; both men arrived at Princeton University’s Institute of Advanced Study around the same time. Einstein, who by then had discovered his theory of relativity, remarked to Mann about how more roaring the crowd was for the writer over the scientist: “That is as it should be . . . If it were otherwise, there would be chaos.” Mann wasn’t sure what he meant, but it seems he was saying the writer organizes the world, the scientist confuses it. 

In America, Mann also gets the attention of a woman who’s a force to be reckoned with: Agnes Meyer married to the owner of the Washington Post. She connects Mann to FDR; the two saw him as politically valuable for encouraging Americans to get into WWII. Despite disbelieving what they believed, that he was “a man of principle” and “clarity,” Mann picks up the mantel. 

The message is clear: America needs more people of principle to protect our fragile democracy. Listen to the writer.

Lorraine

Seeking therapy for a hurting world (Madison, Wisconsin; set over one year before the 2021 Presidential election, light years on other planets): Like a space rocket, Bewilderment soars and plunges.

Orbiting between a world that sees only black or white to one bursting in color, at a critical time when our children and planet Earth are in crisis, when political millions distrust science, and space travel is no longer the exclusive right of NASA, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Overstory Richard Powers has written an achingly beautiful novel in a poet’s voice.

Among the many questions asked, one that moves us like never before is: “Wouldn’t you like to see an epidemic of infectious well-being?”

After feeling so “exhausted” from writing The Overstory, Powers – he read 1,200 books to write it – he wasn’t sure he’d write anymore. Thankfully, Powers has carried trees into his impassioned thirteenth novel, along with his knowledge of threatened and endangered species, emerging approaches in brain therapy, astronomy and the stuff of science-fiction.

The novel is a literary “empathy machine” similar to the experimental therapy he describes in the super-advanced MRI/AI brain machinery – Decoded Neurofeedback – depicted in the novel. His purpose is a call-to-arms for thinking creatively and innovatively on reconnecting our increasingly socially and emotionally broken youth who, ironically, are the ones who’ve become world advocates for urgently caring for the environment. If you’re thinking of Greta Thunberg, she does make an appearance in fictionalized Inga Alder.

Bewilderment centers on a nuclear family of three, all in different ways are environmental advocates. The child – who says the least (highlighted in italics) but affects us the most – is Robin. His father Theo describes him as “my sad, singular, newly turning nine-year-old, in trouble with this world”; the novel ends when Robbie is ten.

Named after his mother Aly’s “favorite bird,” an avid birdwatcher, she and Theo went birdwatching on their first date in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, where the author moved to having spent so much time researching there to write The Overstory. Father and son are both grieving Aly’s death. You may want to know how long ago she died when the story begins; when you find out on page 97 you’ll realize it doesn’t matter when it comes to grief. (How she died, you’ll learn too.) Theo didn’t just love and “admire” her, he “revered her.” Her life force lives within father and son.

Theo is an astrobiologist and professor at the University of Madison-Wisconsin studying whether there’s any evidence of life forms on other planets. He uses his vast knowledge and wild imagination about the universe to tell fantastical stories to calm Robbie down because, when we meet the third-grader, he’s having meltdowns, altercations at school and was suspended. Robbie is neurodiverse: his brain is wired differently, lacking constructive ways to self-control, while being acutely sensitive to the world around him. His mother instilled some of that in him as an animal rights lawyer and fierce activist for all living creatures. Her mantra: “MAY ALL BEINGS BE FREE FROM SUFFERING.”

The term neurodiversity first appeared on this blog in a review of A Room Called Earth. Far less stigmatizing, it refers to children (and adults) diagnosed on the “spectrum” like Robbie. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is the current diagnostic term for a number of disorders such as Asperger’s Syndrome, Autism, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Robbie has been diagnosed with all three. When his second pediatrician wants to medicate him, Theo’s response is:

“I wanted to tell the man that everyone alive on this fluke little planet was on the spectrum. That’s what a spectrum is. I wanted to tell the man that life is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow. Then I wanted to punch him. I suppose there’s a name for that, too.” 

In a “Note from the Author” that appears in the advanced reader copy, Powers asks and proposes if a different kind of “emotional therapy” would make “a difference” in helping people whose brains function divergently. Decoded Neurofeedback has roots that go back at least to 2011 when researchers at Boston University and in Japan conducted sophisticated biofeedback using MRIs and AI. Theo, Robbie, and Aly earlier all consented to the tracking of their brain activities in an entertaining way at Dr. Currier’s lab, located at Theo’s university campus a few miles from their home. Robbie is deemed an excellent candidate; Theo is open-minded so he lets his son go further by using this high-tech, very expensive approach to retrain his social brain – promising, exciting, and controversial. Robbie takes to it far greater than even Theo could have imagined.

Robbie also loves to draw, giving “him a little peace.” He’s also a big reader, so the library “shelves were a total candy shop.” Early on in the novel, Theo pulls Robbie out of school, a bold decision considering how poorly he’s doing, but in light of how his teachers, administrators, classmates and their parents humiliate, bully, and punish him and grades that don’t reflect his high intelligence, we approve. Theo tells us he’s frightened of parenting Robbie not knowing what might put him over the edge, yet he’s acutely aware of how calming Nature came be for his son “attuned to life.” He takes Robbie on a one-week camping trip to the Great Smokies, with its “six different kinds of forest” – “more tree species than in all of Europe.” When Robbie declares, “I feel I belong here,” Theo knows he’s made the right choice.

Among Robbie’s “six going on sixty” comments, he says:

“The great horned owl’s conservation rating is ‘Least Concern.’ How stupid is that? Like: unless they’re all dead, we shouldn’t be concerned?”

You’ll also meet a slew of threatened or endangered species. Here’s three – the Karner blue butterfly, Dusty gopher frog, and giant anole lizard (credits: Stockvault/Pixabay [CC0], Flickr/USFWS Headquarters [CC BY 2.0], Flickr/Martin de Lusenet [CC BY 2.0]):

“While finishing my previous novel, The Overstory,” Powers wrote in his note to readers, “I kept reading accounts of the toll our growing environmental catastrophe is taking on the young. A new word, solastalgia, seemed to take hold overnight. I began to see how we are raising a generation of troubled kids born homesick for a place they never knew. And we adults are relying more and more on a single response for treating the epidemic ravaging our children’s mental health: medication.”

Theo’s first-person voice is visionary when it’s about life on other planets. If the astronomy prose goes over your head like it did mine, you’ll get a gist of it because of how it affects Robbie, a wondrous boy you’ll want to hug and cheer.

Sixteen years ago, Robert Louv called for a back-to-nature movement in his pioneering book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. It seems the Richards are onto something.

Prepare for a ride into “inner space” and outer space. Remember it comes with risks.

Lorraine