The Other Ever After

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 71
Amber Sparks, May We Shed These Human Bodies: Stories

A desperately solitary suffragette finds love in a bitter winter, and hates it, cursing her heirs for the burden. A banal schoolteacher, riven with heartbreak, finds himself the only survivor of a family plagued by heart disease. A school devises a curriculum for future teenage superheroes, but finds itself accidentally cradling a nascent supervillain. A young girl escapes her family ghosts, only to find the ghosts are her actual family.

Amber Sparks’ debut collection channels fairy stories and folktales, but in a contemporary setting, a permeable world where dream logic infiltrates our banal technological lives. It’s tempting to compare her work to Magic Realist authors like Borges and Kafka. But these very short stories, some under one page, represent a distinct Amber Sparks style that accepts influences, without remaining slavishly dependent upon them.

Early stories in this collection more obviously imitate Sparks’ fairy tale influences. The opening story, “Death and the People,” features a literally embodied Death simultaneously vacating the entire Earth. But massed humanity, initially embracing the opportunity for a clean break, discovers something unexpected in the Afterlife: eternal, transcendent boredom. This story, and some closely following it, blatantly resemble the narrative voice of the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault.

Like the classic fairy stories, Sparks’ narratives are a collision between tone and content. Her voice of naïve innocence suggests a storyteller unaffected by life’s petty discontents. But like Red Riding Hood, her characters’ attempts to display basic independence explode in their faces. Hers is a world where people find themselves blown back into dependent, pre-written roles, though less from moral veracity than because it’s tough to fight indoctrination.

As the collection progresses, however, Sparks breaks from the storybook voice. Her tone becomes darker, more aggressive, deeply unsentimental. Stories like “Cocoon,” about a visit to an old-folks’ home gone terribly wrong, or “Vesuvius,” wherein a public figure’s wife reclaims control of her life by destroying what her husband loves, maintain the ethereal tone while refusing to be cute. These stories brim with the violence implicit in our postmodern situation.

Amber Sparks

Individual stories vary in tone from whimsy, to seductive bedtime story, to outright horror. Collectively, however, a through-line develops of a world still suffused with the wonder children take for granted. Though only a few tales involve recourse to the supernatural to explain this wonder-working influence, Sparks nevertheless evokes the speculation that, behind the world we all equitably see, resides another world visible to the blessed, or cursed, few.

Reading Sparks, I cannot help remembering Maria Tatar, who writes that children enjoy stories for different reasons than adults. Reading, for children, involves immersion into a deeply sensory world to which they haven’t become inured, like the adults around them. Children want experiences that, with their underdeveloped bodies, they cannot directly have. Stories then become ways, not to escape real life, but to immerse themselves more fully in reality.

Something similar happens reading Amber Sparks. We, as adults, have the bodily capacity to participate in real life’s wonder. But a life comprised of compromise, belittlement, and need, inevitably stunts our spirits: adults are capable of doing profound things, we just don’t do them. Sparks attempts, mostly successfully, to recapture the grand spirit children share, reconstituting that magnificence in full-grown bodies. She encourages the audacity we craved as kids.

“Urban fantasy” has become a mainstream genre in today’s publishing world. Generally, this means fantasy stories with contemporary settings, heroic quest epics that superficially resemble noir thrillers or bodice-ripper romances. But arguably, Amber Sparks deserves the “urban fantasy” moniker better, because her narrative uses the ambling, transcendent fantasy of childhood bedtime stories, transplanted into a close-set, claustrophobic adult world of city streets and sooty jobs.

Even the book’s physical design emulates this childlike clarity. Running under 150 pages (plus back matter), this book’s mass resembles children’s storybooks. Many pages are tinted to look faded and old, like yellowed heirloom pages: Mommy and Daddy are sharing the stories we loved when we were your age, Sweety. In that moment, we’re all immersed in childhood storytelling passion together, untethered by jobs or boring old physical age.

As a storyteller, Sparks captures the collision between childhood wonder and adulthood capability, often overlooked by other writers, because audiences overlook it in themselves. She encourages us to believe, unencumbered by demands of money or responsibility. Even if we can’t stop being boring grown-ups every day, Sparks gives readers permission to dream big for an afternoon, an hour. And we finish reading, feeling like we’ve been given a gift.

Stockholm Syndrome—the Home Game!

Elizabeth LaBan, The Restaurant Critic's Wife: a Novel

Lila Lippincott Soto is restless. She left a high-powered but rootless executive job to marry a journalist, who conveniently made a nest for her. But Lila’s husband, Sam Soto, has become an influential restaurant critic, a job that’s distorted his goals: his desire for anonymity, while pursuing a highly public career, has created pressures on Lila. Stranded at home with two children under five, she starts questioning her life choices.

Reading Elizabeth LaBan’s most recent novel, I initially thought I’d uncovered the author’s fictionalized couples therapy session. LaBan, like Lila, lives in Philadelphia. Both have two children. Both are married to restaurant critics. The early chapters broadcast the novel’s possibly autobiographical nature, leaving me feeling voyeuristic and creepy. I don’t read novels to roll, puppy-like, in the author’s dirty laundry.

As the story unfolds, however, circumstances turned dark. Lila, our first-person, present-tense narrator, keeps playing Sam’s increasingly desperate need for anonymity as frustrating but charming. He invents costumes to pass as pop stars, businessmen, and other non-journalistic people whom three-diamond restaurants would never pander to. (Seriously? Elton John is your safe disguise?) And he demands his wife participate, even as her pregnancy goes beyond her due date.

What a card, huh? Except, amid all that, Lila starts becoming afraid to answer the phone or door, lest she somehow compromise Sam’s anonymity and earn his ire. She notes Sam wants to exercise authority to veto Lila’s friendships, since one neighborhood friend’s husband owns a restaurant Sam will likely eventually review. Sam keeps Lila isolated on their pedestrian-unfriendly suburban street, not working, raising a preschooler and a newborn full-time.

These are classic textbook warning signs of domestic abuse. Sam’s behavior, which becomes increasingly demanding and disruptive, could’ve come directly from the pamphlets distributed free in battered women’s shelters. Though Sam never raises a hand against her (in the portion I read before disgust stopped me), his psychological manipulation tactics, designed to shame and silence his wife, filled me with visceral horror.

Elizabeth LaBan

Yet LaBan never stops playing Lila’s story like domestic comedy. Lila describes Sam’s latest unreasonable demands with rueful humor; you can practically hear her scoffing, “Garsh, what a dork.” She seemingly thinks resuming her old executive career will give her life meaning, as though nesting, a common behavior of people with kids, were somehow the cause of her malaise. Like, to shake her pervasive despair, she need only rediscover herself.

And I’m reading, thinking: “Holy shit, she thinks this moonshine is cute!” By “she,” I might mean Lila or LaBan. Since one is apparently the other’s proxy, the difference is slight. But throughout, Lila reveals circumstances profoundly horrifying to people familiar with abuse patterns. Sam proposed because Lila got pregnant. He expects his career to dictate her behavior. He makes grandiose proclamations about money. And it’s always, somehow, endearing.

LaBan’s storytelling suggests she thinks she’s writing about a woman who needs to reclaim her personal identity, and just needs to figure out how. Well, arguably so. By persuading her to abandon her career, friends, goals, and autonomy, Lila’s husband has debatably seized her identity, which she needs to grab back. She should start, at least, by telling her husband to back down. Possibly from the safety of a shelter.

I have personal reasons this worries me. Three women I know got trapped in abusive relationships. One wasn’t physical, though that marriage still demonstrates external signs that make me cringe. Another ended in acrimonious divorce. The third escalated in ways outsiders didn’t see, because she didn’t tell anyone what happened. We only realized the relationship had entered a doom spiral when it ended, abruptly, in gun homicide. Totally not kidding.

This book weighs in around 300 pages; I quit reading around the one-third mark, because Lila kept making joking excuses for Sam’s behavior. She never demonstrated enough self-awareness to challenge Sam’s pernicious abuse. I was promised a domestic comedy, but received a joking exposé on a psychological manipulator and his enabler. And I can’t tell whether the author even realizes what she’s created—possibly what she’s lived through.

Maybe circumstances changed after page 100. But that’s too late for me; I already felt like I’d stepped in manure, and it was creeping up my leg, and couldn’t wash it off. Maybe the abuse turned physical, and thus inarguable. Maybe Lila has her fill, asserts herself, and reëstablishes balance in her marriage. But after LaBan played abuse as cute for 100 pages, I couldn’t stomach any more. The horror was just too much.

Coronations and Conventional Wisdom

The New Yorker magazine ran the cartoon above in January 2012. They meant it at a joke, of course—why, the very idea that, four years in advance, the election was already decided! Ha ha, who’d believe that? Except that, in the tone of the media then prevalent, many people apparently did believe that. Following the Romney implosion, the GOP had no clear vision, and its leadership had taken a powder during a key campaign.

Fast forward three years. When Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in the summer of 2015, only one day after formally joining the party, I admit I cheered. Hillary Clinton’s nomination, if not her election, had been a foregone conclusion so long, she’d visibly begun hibernating until the general election campaign. I liked Bernie simply because he forced a legitimate primary.

(Also I dislike the idea of political dynasties in democratic societies. Or do you think having Kennedy and Bush families hanging around for generations has helped the body politic?)

So when the Bernie Bros attempted to disrupt the Democratic National Convention this week, in manners ranging from coordinated shouting to simple street theatre, I wasn’t altogether disappointed. It means people cared enough about a cause, embodied in a personality, to put their names and party standing in jeopardy. It means people perceived the future of American democracy as something that mattered. Isn’t that good?

Not to hear some people tell it. The complaints from party loyalists and longtime Clinton supporters, have implied that taking a stand for Bernie is tantamount to voting for Mussolini. Especially after this week’s revelation that party leadership attempted to pre-pick the winner without consulting the base membership (and oh, look), the simple willingness to make some noise in defense of a principle has become, in Sarah Silverman’s words, “ridiculous.”

Interestingly, the people most eagerly willing to condemn the Bernie Bros for their disruption are, if my Facebook feed is typical, the same people who thought the loud disruptions from “Anybody But Trump” agitators were downright heroic. Whether the people willing to go down fighting are martyrs or villains apparently depends on who’s doing the asking. But in both cases, I see people who care enough about the outcomes to risk failure.

It’s easy to forget that political conventions weren’t always coronations for pre-selected candidates. A political convention hasn’t gone to a second ballot for its presidential nominee, or had its pre-written platform voted down, in three generations. Therefore, we’ve grown accustomed to lukewarm displays of balloon drops, smiling candidates with their spouses, and bland heartland rock from loudspeakers. It’s become a sleepwalk.

But what happens at political conventions used to matter. The famous “smoke-filled rooms,” secret log-rolling sessions, and under-the-table agreements that made national figures out of men like William Jennings Bryant and Alf Landon, happened because people believed conventions mattered. Debates happened; sometimes they descended into fistfights. And people fought because serious people believed serious causes.

In 1904, when the immensely popular Teddy Roosevelt’s re-nomination was such a foregone conclusion that the Republican National Convention risked running a day short, the party considered this an embarrassment. They needed that extra day, not to feed the 24-hour news cycle, but to create momentum for the actual election debates. Historian Michael Wolraich writes that party leaders manufactured a fake crisis, over the status of newly-conquered Hawaii, to keep the convention going.

Nowadays, when there’s a legitimate crisis at a convention, say over whether the Democrat really represents the party, or whether the Republican is a full-on narcissistic whackadoodle, we consider the protests unseemly. We want the scripted pablum, the room-temperature gruel of a coronation. We want the same pageantry in selecting our candidates that Britain put into Prince Charles’ first wedding, and for largely the same reason.

But at what cost? Though a hotly contested presidential contest gets decent turnouts, we already know getting voters into booths is difficult. Though a narrow majority of eligible Americans really do vote, a powerful plurality have opted out of our democratic processes. And poll after poll returns the same result when we ask non-voters why they stay home: because they think it doesn’t matter. Because outcomes vary little with personalities.

The booing during ritual nonsectarian prayer in Philadelphia this week is certainly unseemly. But it signals that true believers think this election matters. It tells Americans that consequences go beyond mindlessly pulling a lever. And while I’d prefer party loyalists honor the vote, I nevertheless cannot help thinking: thank God they care enough to make some noise.

The Power and the Glory, Forever

Julie J. Ingersoll, Building God's Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction

Christian Reconstruction doesn’t believe the Rapture is nigh. They don’t expect to escape Earth next Thursday; they plan to live among us for generations, centuries, or longer. More important, they have concrete plans to rebuild America’s core values according to Christian Gospel and Levitical law. Even most non-seminarian Christians haven’t heard of them, but their influence touches Christian homeschooling, anti-abortion activism, Quiverfull, conservative politics, and beyond.

In her introduction, Julie Ingersoll, professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida, describes her early upbringing in Reconstruction-affiliated conservative Christianity. She describes marrying into one of the movement’s leading families. She once fought for the cause, but eventually grew disgusted when the movement’s inherent violence became inarguable. Now she mixes scholarship, journalism, and history to expose a movement that specifically desires to change how you think.

Ingersoll traces Christian Reconstruction’s roots to RJ Rushdoony, Presbyterian pastor and son of Armenian immigrants. After Rushdoony’s passing in 2001, the leadership mantle passed to his son-in-law, Gary North. Between them, Rushdoony and North have assiduously created a matrix of thought and philosophy literally encompassing every aspect of life. Their thoughts are voluble, their knowledge vast if slanted, and their influence touches many Christians who’d ordinarily find their teachings weird.

Reconstructionist thought is firmly grounded in very old-school Five-Point Calvinism. Don’t worry if terms like “Five-Point Calvinism” sound opaque. Ingersoll writes for generalist audiences, and defines specialist terminology in vernacular English. She also defines very important words like “presuppositionalism” and “theonomy,” words she reuses generously. For our purposes, they mean: all knowledge comes from somewhere, and all authority derives from God. This matters for Reconstructionists’ all-encompassing philosophy.

For starters, Reconstruction’s critics often lambaste them with terms like “theocratic” and “patriarchal.” While critics mean these terms insultingly, according to Ingersoll, Reconstructionists actually embrace these terms. Since they believe all authority derives from God, and expresses itself in family, church, and state, we already have theocracy, they say; secularists just don’t recognize God’s authority. And yes, they’re patriarchal: a stern father drives all Reconstructionist social order.

Julie J. Ingersoll

Importantly, Reconstructionists deny political motivations. But unpacking their supposed apolitical leanings, we realize parties are just talking past one another. Here, as elsewhere, Reconstructionists use the same words outsiders use, but mean something altogether different. Because “politics,” for Reconstructionists, refers exclusively to state authority, which they consider limited, they believe they themselves aren’t political, although their entire philosophical structure is dedicated to the relationship between individuals and power.

When Christian Reconstructionists intend to rebuild American society along Christian lines, they don’t mean what I would. They don’t highlight issues of justice, feeding the hungry, and comforting the afflicted. They want to establish society, meaning specifically America, according to strict Levitical law. Most Christians today feel squeamish about Leviticus, and apply it selectively at best. But Reconstructionists want to apply Leviticus culture-wide, through power structures beginning with household patriarchs.

To accomplish these goals, Reconstructionists have established networks of Christian homeschoolers, political firebrands, and preachers who deliberately court problems with the state. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that every homeschooler, Tea Party sign-waver, and activist preacher is a Christian Reconstructionist. But the Reconstructionists have integrated themselves, often invisibly, into these circles. It’s impossible to pursue these goals without some Reconstructionism rubbing off on you.

Besides just scholastically describing Reconstruction from historical sources, Ingersoll dives into their world. She meets founders of Reconstructionist private schools, attends Reconstructionist conferences and gatherings (many of which tellingly have the word “Vision” in their titles), and dives into their circles. She records their motivations directly from their mouths, expressing how they want the world to perceive them. This sometimes includes telling society one thing, while doing another.

The world Ingersoll ultimately describes herein isn’t only religious, or political, or social. These words don’t convey the sweeping motivations that drive Reconstructionists. They literally believe they’re charged by God, from the Bible itself, to reorganize society according to God’s vision. They insist they’re only following the Bible literally, and everyone else is apostate, a common far-right Christian belief: they insist they’re only following God, everyone else is the problem.

Secular audiences will read this book and feel chilled. They’ll see the pervasive ways a little-known sect has permeated discussions that aren’t specifically religious. They’ll recognize the violence implicit in a Levitical system. But Christian audiences should feel horrified at this book too. Because what Ingersoll describes isn’t limited to fringe elements. This shockingly violent, authoritarian message has permeated mainline Christianity, often unseen. And it’s changed our discourse, possibly forever.

Bring Back Virgil Tibbs

When a tired, disgruntled sheriff’s deputy first arrests Virgil Tibbs, in Norman Jewison’s 1967 classic In the Heat of the Night, the police target Tibbs for one reason: because he’s a Black man, a stranger, carrying large amounts of cash. Because a white man was robbed and murdered just hours earlier, it makes sense to Sparta, Mississippi’s all-white police force that money in a Black man’s wallet is incriminating. One wishes this didn’t sound familiar.

Hollywood today likes to consider itself bold because it includes language, sex, and violence in liberal quantities. Yet in many ways it has become startlingly risk-averse. Not only is its business model reliant on blockbusters and star vehicles, leading to an endless array of lukewarm sequels, but it has become less welcoming to women and minorities. The desire for guaranteed mammoth returns, at levels that would make Mexican drug cartels blush, has undercut basic storytelling.

But Virgil Tibbs retains his timely qualities. As a quintessential outsider, a man unconnected to the town where he’s investigating a crime, or to the people with whom he must work, he reflects the dislocation Americans feel coming to grips with the fragmented, often adversarial qualities of modern culture. Targeted for his skin color, arrested on exceedingly circumstantial evidence, his plight touches not only Blacks, but anybody ever targeted on flimsy pretexts by police bureaucrats.

Seems Sparta, Mississippi, isn’t equipped to handle a legitimate murder investigation. So eventually, when police chief Bill Gillespie clears Tibbs—after an absurdly lengthy alibi check, dragged out to maximize humiliation—and discovers Tibbs is a decorated homicide detective, he asks Tibbs to join the investigation. Well, he doesn’t ask, since he dislikes Blacks, outsiders, and newfangledness. His boss, the town mayor, demands he bring Tibbs aboard, which Tibbs’ superiors approve. Talk about unequal yoking.

Sociologist David Graeber, currently at the London School of Economics, notes that in American crime dramas, we don’t celebrate police officers who follow rules. We don’t like police who honor the bureaucracy. Hero cops either have a casual disregard for rules, or else begin their narratives by quitting, getting suspended, or otherwise leaving the force. Because in America, on-duty police officers don’t really represent justice, they represent order. To be just, they must go guerilla.

Sidney Poitier as Virgil Tibbs

Virgil Tibbs starts the story already off the force, on leave from the Philadelphia PD (changed from Pasadena, in John Ball’s original novel). Dragooned into the investigation by his own chief, at Sparta’s mayor’s request, Tibbs uses his best investigative skills. Apparently he never gives less than his best. But he never overcomes the angry, adversarial relationship with Sparta’s police department, whose members insist on calling him “boy” and treating him like an unwanted interloper.

Jewison’s movie, like Ball’s novel, is unstinting in its criticism of Southern American racism. Its depiction of the modern plantation system, in the form of local cotton baron Eric Endicott, doesn’t even pretend that it isn’t showing updated slavery practices. But Sparta, Mississippi, for all its shortcomings, isn’t exclusively opposed to African Americans. It simply hates outsiders; the deputy who first arrests Tibbs was trawling the local train station, assuming the thief would logically run.

By the closing scene, Gillespie does thank Tibbs and express the honor he feels having worked with such a fine cop. The smile shared between Sidney Poitier as Tibbs, holding his cardboard suitcase, and Rod Steiger as gum-chewing Chief Gillespie, is iconic. But one never stops wondering: would Gillespie have thanked Tibbs, or ever reversed his racist suppositions, if not forced to witness Tibbs’ investigative prowess? Probably not. His underlying racism probably hasn’t been resolved.

After a local bank robbery, police stopped me in a grocery store and questioned me, simply because my haircut resembled the suspect. I visibly couldn’t have been the suspect, who was older, shorter, and stockier than me, but because some suspicious neighbor phoned in about my hair, they had to investigate. I know, that’s not like being born into a permanent racial underclass, often systematically targeted by law enforcement. But ham-handed policing is painfully common.

That makes Virgil Tibbs a relevant character today. Not because his character faces a race-based struggle in 1967, but because the struggle he faces transcends race, place, or time. Chief Gillespie isn’t a bad chief because he targets Black men; he’s actually good at enforcing order, which is what he’s supposed to do. But he, like American police today, needs reminded that upholding the rules isn’t the same as bringing justice to America’s fractious streets.