Centuries

I’m far behind on writing about books that I’ve read this year, and I’ve read a lot of books, and it’s the last day of the year. It’s time to get cracking. Or not, because it’s not like I’m on deadline or anything. It’s not like failing to write about the books that I read undoes the reading. But this is something that I do and I’m going to do it. So here we are. Here are three books that I read. 

A few months ago, I read Anxious People, a novel. Then I read Maid, Stephanie Land’s memoir of her time cleaning houses for a living; and then Great Circle, which is definitely my book of the year this year. It’s pretty extraordinary. 

Anxious People is about a desperate single mother in Sweden. Maid is about a desperate single mother in Washington State, who eventually moves to Missoula, Montana. And much of the early action of Great Circle takes place in Missoula, Montana. All of this was unintended by me. I didn’t finish Anxious People and then think, “hmm; let me read another story about a struggling single mother living on the edge.” And I didn’t finish Maid and then think, “hmm; let me read more about Missoula, Montana.” 

And with that, I’ve just told you practically nothing about any of these books. Yeah, I know. I’ll get to it. 

*****

First book first. Anxious People, which I read in an English translation (from the original Swedish), is over 70 chapters long but they are very short chapters. As we have already established, it’s about a desperate single mother. It’s also about a bank robbery and a hostage-taking and the economies of Western nations and the world financial system. I can’t describe it in any more detail without spoiling the story. 

Each of the very short chapters tells us a little bit about the characters and their connections to one another going back decades to a single incident. The plotting and the gradual revelations of these connections and their bearing on the story are ingenious. As a reader, you can read it as a mystery. You can try to figure out all of the connections and then try to predict what will happen, but it’s probably better not to. I think it’s more fun to just let Backman tell you the story; see how it all shakes out and allow yourself to be surprised. You’ll feel a little stupid when the plot twist is revealed; you’ll wonder how you didn’t see it coming from a mile away, but then you’ll realize that you don’t care. Even though the book is a little too cinematic in spots, I still believed the characters and the story. 

In addition to a good story and well-drawn characters, this book also contains quite a bit of wisdom. "People need bureaucracy, to give them time to think before they do something stupid." This is Zara, the wealthy banker, explaining why the financial system needs to be complex and difficult for ordinary people to understand. Zara has come to understand that the Western economic system has become a monster, too big to fail and too big to control. Again, no spoilers, but this is as good a reason for bureaucracy as I have come across. An effective bureaucracy will make it just difficult enough to get things done that one person won’t be able to subvert the system and implement an illegal policy or process, but not so difficult that nothing can ever happen. Without bureaucracy, government and quasi-government organizations, such as large banks, can do a lot of damage. 

Of course, as the state of the world right now makes quite clear, banks can do plenty of damage even when restrained by bureaucracy. So can the government. So can large multinational corporations. So maybe Zara doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. 

*****

After I finished Anxious People, I read Maid, Stephanie Land's memoir about her time working as a housekeeper, cleaning other people's houses for subsistence wages. I heard about this book on (where else) Twitter. It's quite good, though the writing is uneven in spots. The whole book reminds me of something that Miss Manners wrote, something about how poorly we treat people who do actual useful work. Housekeepers and nannies and errand runners and Instacart shoppers do the work that makes it possible,or at least easier, for professional and managerial class people to do their work, and we treat them like dirt. “We” meaning society, not “we'' meaning me because I clean my own house. But you know what I mean. Our economic system is rotten at the core; and much like the banking system and the housing market that Backman writes about in Anxious People, it’s not sustainable. 

Like one of the main characters in Anxious People, Stephanie Land was a single mother living in poverty and struggling to keep her family afloat. Stephanie Land eventually realized her dream of a new life in Missoula, Montana. A happy ending. Then one of the two main characters in Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle finally realizes her dream of getting the heck out of early 20th century Missoula, Montana, only to find that getting what you want isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be. 

*****

I don’t like the phrase “strong women.” At best, it’s just Cosmopolitan magazine “you go girl” feminist-lite nonsense. At worst, it’s meaningless. Any woman–any person–can be either strong or weak at any time. Any person can be strong when she needs to be. There’s no such thing as an always-strong or always-weak person. Strength is a product of circumstances as well as character. 

So I won’t say that these three books are stories not about strong women. They are, however, about female strength, summoned in difficult and sometimes desperate circumstances. All three books are about women forced to fight for themselves. We don’t have to approve of their choices but we understand them; we wonder what we would do in similar circumstances. Would we fight back? Would we run away? Would we just endure as best we could? Would we be strong? 

*****

Anxious People and Maid are both very good books, but Great Circle is a great book. The former two are about something, and Great Circle is about everything, about the whole amazing, revolutionary, murderous, 20th century. The story alternates between present-day Los Angeles, where movie star Hadley Baxter is filming a movie about the life of vanished aviator Marian Graves; and everywhere else in the world from World War 1 to the early 1980s, where Marian lives a picaresque, daring, improbable life. Before her fateful north-south round-the-world flight, Marian survives two world wars, the Depression, plane crashes, shipwrecks, fires, and an abusive husband, and we read very little about her feelings. She is action personified, like 20th century America. 

Marian’s story is told in the third person, because she is far too busy living her life to write about it for us. Hadley, on the other hand, narrates her own story. She tells us about how she drifts through her privileged life, flitting from one movie set or red carpet or exclusive club to another. Hadley is almost passive; she seems to wonder why she does the things that she does, as if an external force were controlling her and making her decisions. She occupies her own life as though it’s a movie set. She seems to be waiting for direction, waiting to see how her audience will react to her performance. 

*****

I don’t know what this says about the 20th century and the 21st century. People like Marian would not recognize people like Hadley (or Stephanie Land for that matter, or the desperate abandoned mother in Anxious People). They would simply not comprehend the feeling of helplessness, of utter lack of control that drives people to do the things that these characters (or real people, in Land’s case) do. Why would a successful actress–a movie star, for crying out loud–nearly throw away her career on a foolish little social media scandal? Why would a person endure unendurable working conditions on unsustainable wages? Why would a person feel that her only option is to rob a bank? Why not just go out and shape the world, remake it in your own image, force it to bend to your will? 

At least that’s what I think that Marian and people of her generation would think. I think that people at that time believed that they had more control than people actually do. Though most of her book is set in the 20th century, Maggie Shipstead was really writing about how we ended up in the 21st century. When I really think about it, Marian isn’t that much different from Hadley. She makes foolish decisions, too. She allows herself to be trapped, too. But she moves forward and doesn’t look back. Her approach to life is based on possibility, on wide-open spaces and freedom and an intrepid spirit of adventure. She doesn’t ruminate, and she doesn’t second-guess herself. She makes a decision and she sticks to it, for better or for worse. She suffers, but she doesn’t think much about her suffering as she undergoes it. She doesn’t allow herself to think of herself as a suffering being. 

Beginning in the late 19th century, the world had begun to shrink thanks to the telephone and telegraph. It shrank further during the 20th century, thanks to radio, television, and especially air travel (a central theme of Great Circle). But it was still big enough and wide-open enough that most people would not really have much interaction with people or things or ideas that originated in far-away places. Then thanks to the internet, the world shrank so much that everything became global. 

And that was supposed to be a good thing. A global economy, with free exchange of ideas and commodities and products, was supposed to benefit everyone. It was supposed to alleviate poverty, expand opportunity, and spread the wealth. Instead, it made everything seem claustrophobic. It took the literal poles of the world and made them metaphorical; everything is polarized now, left vs. right, rich vs. poor, have vs. have-not, lucky vs. unlucky. 

The protagonists of these three books, three fictional and one real, are wildly different but they all have one thing in common: They are all white women, born in 20th century America or Europe and thus arguably among the luckiest people ever to exist; certainly among the luckiest women ever to exist. In "On the Morning After the Sixties," Joan Didion (another lucky Western white woman), writing about college life in the early 1950s, lamented "the extent to which the narrative on which many of us grew up no longer applies." 

More than anything else, these three books right in a row made me think about how a whole frame of mind about possibility and the future, especially for women, but really for all people, all non-rich, non-powerful people, is endangered. Maybe it’s gone forever. The narrative on which these characters grew up, on which I myself grew up, no longer applies. Maybe it never will again.