Must Readers Finish Every Book We Start?

J. Robert Janes, Betrayal, and Chris Cander, Whisper Hollow

I remember telling my students: “Nobody’s ever too tired to read.” Then I started working at the factory. Not only did I find myself leaving my best, most constructive energy on the production floor, but several colleagues admitted them missed having the youthful leisure to read for recreation. I incrementally realized that others jettisoned reading from their priorities like I’d jettisoned learning to restore car engines. Two books recently re-awakened my awareness of this choice.

Canadian novelist J. Robert Janes has published fifteen mystery novels set in Occupied France. His latest novel, the freestanding Betrayal, relocates Janes’ historical thrust to divided Ireland in autumn, 1941. Mary Ellen Fraser, an Ulster doctor’s wife, has fallen in love with a German POW, and volunteers to smuggle letters to her German’s beloved cousin. Except, she discovers too late, she’s actually running coded communiques to Admiral Dönitz, commandant of the Battle of the Atlantic.

Janes lards his prose with passages like this: “By himself, Dr. Fraser was a saint, a prince of a man.” Ignore momentarily Janes double-dipping from the cliché barrel. Rather than having Mary Ellen’s husband reveal himself through action or speech, Janes reveals his characters with adjectival phrases, many lengthy. Descriptions of characters’ appearances occupy entire paragraphs. They resemble character notes from a screen treatment. Would Janes perhaps rather write motion pictures or Downton Abbey-like miniseries?

Between these scenes, lush with description but short on character motivation, Janes frequently lapses into lengthy historical discursions. He makes historical figures, like Dönitz and Churchill, active characters in his story, then translates their internal thoughts into lengthy historical expositions. Besides mind-numbing asides on the burgeoning war, he includes repeated footnotes. David Foster Wallace did this satirically; Janes keeps a straight face. Thus Janes overloads his audience by apparently failing to make basic authorial choices.

American author Chris Cander addresses broadly the same time period, but more epic scope, in Whisper Hollow. The company town of Verra, West Virginia, is a seething cauldron of guilt, repression, and deferred immigrant aspiration. Free-spirited Alta Krol and self-flagellating Myrthen Bergmann live in constant cross-purposes, their feud symbolizing the competing drives of poor immigrants’ children throughout the Twentieth Century. Meanwhile, Giovanni “John” Esposito squelches his modern ambitions under economic necessity until they finally explode.

I wanted to like Cander’s Colleen McCullough-like ambition and sprawling historical backdrop. But she lost me when I recognized two early scenes she’d recycled. Young Alta’s first encounter with her glamorous new sister-in-law, and the dreams this inspires, recollect Fitzgerald’s classic “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.” And John’s argument with his father, “If the mine was good enough for me, it’s good enough for you,” is so wheezy, Monty Python mocked it over 45 years ago.

After that, I couldn’t stop recognizing borrowed moments. Cander ransacks the Twentieth Century American canon; it’s impossible for well-read audiences to avoid recognizing Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Jim Harrison, and others in Cander’s prose. Even her prose stylings evolve as she proceeds, from Jazz Age tones in the 1920s, through the clipped austerity of the Depression, to the Found Poetry patter of the 1950s and 1960s. This reads like a jigsaw puzzle of other, better-known authors.

Though Cander and Janes are established writers with lengthy CVs, these novels both feel like student efforts. Janes has about 250 pages of story in a 470-page book, but keeps adding in historical details like he obsessively needs to include everything he discovered during research. Though he has moments of character interaction between windy expositions, he situates them so far apart, I’ve forgotten what happened previously, and must strain to understand why anybody does anything.

Cander, by contrast, overwhelms readers not with facts, but with influences, like she’s afraid the story she wants to tell couldn’t measure up to whatever she read in literature class. Trained writers knows that type. Their workshop submissions resemble last summer’s Hollywood blockbuster, or slavishly mimic the Dead Masters dominating AmLit courses. Maybe some people prefer not encountering anything new. But I suspect Cander’s well-read target audience will consider this an interesting pastice, at best.

Self-help author Gretchen Rubin writes about struggling to accept that she needn’t finish every book she starts. Many critics insist you cannot really savvy a book without finishing every page. But such critics are career paid writers; words are their life. My factory colleagues, many with families and second jobs, have limited reading time. Boring, derivative, or needy novels are an active imposition. Writers who want actual readers today should keep this limitation in mind.

The Wandering Jew Redux

Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return: A Memoir

Shulem Deen found his home among the New Square Hasidim in his teens.They provided him everything a good Hasidic boy wants: acceptance, family, guidance, home. But not answers. Moving into adulthood, embracing an arranged marriage and a lifetime of Torah study, he found millennia-old dogma unsatisfying. And when modernity intruded upon his obstinately unchanging community, his boyhood faith slipped away. So one day, amid ordinary ritual and family life, Shulem Deen found himself expelled.

Hasidim, like Shakers or the Amish, draw admiration and scorn in equal measure from outsiders for their exceptional devotion, besides their rejection of modernity. But like Amish, Hasidic communities are independently governed, and each population enjoys (if that’s the word) unique standards stemming from tradition and reason. Deen’s community, the Skverers, founded by Ukranian exiles during Stalin’s purges, are so conservative that, in Deen’s telling, even other Hasidim find their insularity and single-mindedness forbidding.

Nevertheless, Deen recounts a conversion experience so passionate, it’s hard to doubt his one-time sincerity. Raised among diverse Hasidic communities in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Deen stumbled across the Skverers accidentally, almost lazily. Once there, however, he discovered a people deeply unified behind shared customs, profound mutuality, and Daniel-like refusal to accomodate this world’s influences. Deen elegantly captures Emile Durkheim's assertion that religion emerges, first, to unify the people; God appears in religion, if He does, only subsequently.

What they’re unifying into matters, though, in ways Deen initially misses. The Skverers share an appalling fear-based ethic: fear of outsiders, fear of heterodoxy, fear of their own flesh. As Deen describes the events preceding his wedding, observant readers will feel afraid for him: he lacks vocabulary to identify his own body parts by name, and his elders deliberately obfuscate factual knowledge. Deen’s community so fears change, that any frank discussions produce reflexive primal terror.

This includes important faith-based issues. Though Deen, like all observant Hasidic men, spent years studying Mishnah and Talmud, records of Judaism’s great historical debates (rather than studying, say, algebra or job skills), the Skverers consider all debates closed after Maimonides died. When Deen’s modern experience differs from historical precedent, he cannot manufacture pat explanations. Worse, modernity’s three great temptations—AM radio, a library card, and the Internet—increase Deen’s questions. Blind faith no longer suffices.

In Deen’s description, moving outside faith lacks Richard Dawkins’ beloved Road-to-Damascus conversion to secular clarity. Instead, dawning unbelief is scary, trapping Deen outside his beloved community, lost in modernity’s solitary, nihilistic hinterlands. Lacking the experience secular peers obtained decades earlier, modern life becomes fraught. Deen must negotiate such minefields as job hunting, making friends, and building a life without community support. Meanwhile, his ex-wife demands the kids remain Hasidic, permanently dividing him from his children.

Religious memoirs, including memoirs of agnosticism, never really describe situations as they existed. Deen crafts moments to expose how the Skverer community attracted and embraced him, then how it failed to encompass his growing needs. Therefore, we cannot read Deen’s account as objectively describing what happened. People, including his rebbe, wife, and children, become essentially characters in Deen’s arc; life’s sloppy, chaotic events get reorganized into a plot. Deen admits structuring events into a story.

Within those confines, Deen describes the terrors that accompany losing faith. When one’s community prizes uniformity of thought above all else, knowledge becomes sinful, so we share Deen’s stolen thrill of reading children’s encyclopedias at the public library. When one’s community cultivates a fortress mentality, besieged by vast worldly wickedness, discovering like minds outside undercuts everything else, so when Deen discovers conservative Christians on AM radio feel persecuted, too, he realizes his people aren’t unique.

But where modern necktied atheists proclaim secularism as onerous religion’s antidote, Deen learns, discovering himself means leaving others behind. Though forced into an arranged marriage, he loved his wife, and cherished his children. But they didn’t share his journey. When the Skverers expelled deen, his family tried following him, but ultimately couldn’t. They belonged among their people. He didn’t. Modernity, like religion, requires embracing important ideas, and those who do, must abandon those who cannot.

A Jewish friend tells me ex-Hasidic memoirs have become real hot commodities recently. Though outsiders frequently lump all Jews together, Judaism in today’s society is as fragmented as Christianity, and while some seek religion’s nourishing community, others reject its burdensome bonds. That’s why this book succeeds, because it ultimately isn’t about Shulem Deen. It’s about us, and the frightening, ambiguous, transcendent questions we face daily. In today’s turbulent world, can we ever know certainty again?

A Real Manifesto For American Schools

Tom Little and Katherine Ellison, Loving Learning: How Progressive Education Can Save America's Schools

Tom Little joined Oakland, California’s Park Day School in 1976 as a volunteer; he became a teacher, then the school’s principal, ultimately dedicating 37 years to one community-minded school. When its founders began, Park Day simply wanted to expand what citizens believed schools could accomplish. Then Little discovered the history of Progressive Education, a movement that became highly influential after World War I. Little discovered that he existed within a century-old continuum of educational aspiration.

Progressive Education, like its rough contemporaries Waldorf and Montessori schools, arose in the early Twentieth Century, from broadening awareness of deep psychology and dissatisfaction with rote memorization. Its foremost proponent, the philosopher John Dewey, popularized an educational model based on activity, cooperation, and social justice. It won international acclaim, and influenced Finland’s much-lauded national education system. But it fell on domestic disfavor in its American homeland during McCarthyism, when the word “Progressive” became political poison.

Despite criticism and mockery, Progressive Education remained viable, continuing as the dominant philosophy in several private and public schools, scrappy bootstrap educational startups, and even occasional entire school districts. Armed with Lawrence Cremin’s The Transformation of the School and zeal for education, Little helped reestablish Progressive schools’ nationwide support network, and became downright evangelical for his newly rediscovered theory. His book mixes memoir, history, and educational theory for a diverse introduction for educators and parents.

This theory will initially attract diverse adherents from across the political spectrum for one simple reason: it openly rejects standardized tests. Park Day doesn’t have any standardized testing in lower grades, permitting it only among high school students. Some are even stricter. As Americans balance declining STEM scores with revulsion for “teaching to the test,” Progressive Education actively resists reducing educational principles to Scantron sheets. It emphasizes students as developing human beings, not future workers.

But it’s far more than anti-technocratic jargon. Progressive Education, in Little’s telling, stresses holistic child development, including psychological well-being and bodily health, alongside academic standards. It positions teachers as guides and fellow travelers, not taskmasters or bosses. It utilizes students’ natural interests, rather than forcing them into obedience and regimentation. It cooperates actively with parents and community leaders, emphasizing education as lifelong participation, and school as preparation for, not separate from, students’ future adult life.

The late Tom Little

This means complex, intensive curricula starting early. Students study art and music, not because these topics are nice, but because they develop well-rounded citizens who’ll embrace science and public policy without sullen resistance. When teachers voluntarily relinquish authoritarian control, permitting students latitude to experiment and discover (with guidance), they enjoy learning. Little notes that, when many Progressive school graduates enter college and the workforce, they struggle to understand why conventionally educated peers resent taking initiative.

Though Little doesn’t say this explicitly, Progressive Education touches deeply on something running through American education. Despite school’s compulsory ubuquity, as Dana Goldstein observes, we’ve never agreed what schools should do. Progressive Education has a thoroughgoing mission of social betterment through personal development. Little gives examples of what this means, far beyond simple bromides about “volunteering.” Progressive Education isn’t about fitting students for possible future jobs. It’s about expanding justice by creating engaged, curious citizens.

Little dodges one obvious objection. He admits one year of Park Day tuition runs over $20,000, meaning students are either born rich or subsidized by scholarships. The emphasis on small classes, intensive participation, and field learning inevitably drives up costs, and Americans today notoriously don't want to pay for anything. To really apply Little’s precepts broadly, as we arguably should, we’ll need money from somewhere. Little kicks that important problem problem to policy wonks.

Even notwithstanding this, Little’s precepts deserve broader study and discussion. Diverse writers like John Taylor Gatto and Jonathan Kozol have observed that we compel children into schools, then starve teachers for money, structure students’ days to ratify unjust social hierarchies, and blame teachers when nothing gets better. Little presents a theory that rejects top-down “reform” proposals that bind schools’ hands. Teaching, in Little’s telling, happens at ground level, and is about relationships, not test scores.

This is Tom Little’s first book; it’s also his last. He admits he researched this book for twenty years while organizing America’s Progressive schools into a veritable union. But in the final stages, doctors diagnosed Little with Stage IV bone cancer. Having passed in April 2014, this book represents his lasting legacy, his manifesto for meaningful school reform. He poses challenges and offers solutions that all schools should take seriously. This book is unbridled opportunity.

The Well-Engineered Self

Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives

Attorney turned author Gretchen Rubin has previously written about how people become happy, and why they don’t. A trained legal researcher, she brings a scholarly eye to her projects that isn’t exactly journalistic. She writes with a mix of acumen, anecdote, and humor that reaches certain audiences where they live. Now she turns her attention to the question: how can we make happiness self-supporting?

Humans, Rubin writes, are necessarily creatures of habit—we have to be. Easily forty percent of our daily activities function habitually, on neurological automatic, because we cannot spare the mental focus to make every decision consciously. But often, we fall haphazardly into habits that don’t bring satisfaction, and often obstruct productivity. Rubin encourages additional mindfulness about our habits, and engineering them directly.

Well-built habits begin with self-knowledge. Rubin acknowledges that many self-help books falter because authors assume their personalities are somehow normative. Rather than one-size-fits-all prescriptivism, Rubin begins by coaching readers through steps to recognize their personality types. She broadly outlines what she calls the Four Tendencies, which somewhat resemble the MBTI types, but not really.

I concede doubts about these Tendencies immediately. Rubin’s descriptions of Upholder, Questioner, Obliger, and Rebel run broad as newspaper horoscopes, so inclusive that most people could recognize themselves in these categories. I recognize Questioner and Rebel in myself by natural tendency, and Obliger and Upholder encultured by my upbringing. Actually utilizing these tendencies will require substantial efforts at winnowing.

Leave that aside momentarily, though. Because subsequent chapters on the “Pillars of Habits” have robust roots in hard science and personal observation. Too often, we reprimand people for not fixing their own hash by undifferentiated willpower; pop visions of habit formation rely upon common sense, not replicable science. But as Duncan J. Watts writes, common sense is often neither common nor sensical.

Gretchen Rubin

Some of Rubin’s pillars are internal, particularly her emphasis on diligent self-monitoring, while others are more external, like the need for human accountability. Some straddle this divide, like writing firm schedules, which start internally but create an external document which demands users’ respect. Either way, they underscore that humans need a combination of self-awareness and public mutuality that’s become too rare anymore.

Once habit-forming behaviors commence, Rubin unveils the steps necessary to encourage productive habits, and discourage counterproductive ones. For instance, we’re more likely to continue patterns which we perceive as convenient, and halt those we consider inconvenient, so engineering our lives so desirable behaviors are also handy matters. Similarly, she suggests “pairing,” or linking something we ought to do with something we want to do.

Readers may find Rubin’s abstention chapter most controversial. We’ve heard the claims: I can occasionally indulge this behavior without becoming habitual, or once an addict, always an addict. Debates over addictive habits, from drugs to porn to workoholism, rehash this point, with people insisting that whatever works for me, works for everyone, QED. Rubin dares suggest that humans are individuals, and you’ll know whether you can safely chip.

Perhaps Rubin’s most revealing chapters deal with rewards versus treats. Though we may consider these interchangeable concepts, Rubin demonstrates they’re definitively not. Treats uplift our spirits, giving us motivation to continue onward. Rewards, and their close cousin, finish lines, permit us to consider the process “done.” As Rubin notes, and you’ve probably noticed yourself, once we halt desirable behaviors, getting started again is nearly impossible.

This book essentially isn’t for me. Rubin’s message often overlaps with Charles Duhigg and Kelly McGonigal, without their scientific grounding. In my experience, I (and many others) need the science to remind ourselves why certain processes work, and aren’t just mindless ritual. With her instructional bromides and coupled with upbeat anecdotes, Rubin more resembles a motivational speaker, and writes for audiences who need motivation over data.

Also, my opinion is somewhat colored: I read Rubin directly after Johann Hari’s Chasing the Scream, about the drug war. Quoting multiple researchers, Hari demonstrates that addictive behaviors—the worst of all bad habits—result markedly from childhood abuse or social isolation. Since many of Rubin’s precepts involve social connections and unearthing buried causes, she’s perhaps stumbled onto principles with yet-unexplored mass social implications.

Within those caveats, Rubin writes an engaging book with many actionable principles. Though she doesn’t get into technical details, her points are specific enough that most people could actually apply them in ordinary circumstances. And though early precepts sometimes run vague, Rubin’s overall approach gives readers tools enough to improve their regular choices to create better circumstances and better lives.

Antigravity's Rainbow

Daniel Torday, The Last Flight of Poxl West: A Novel

Veteran magazine writer Daniel Torday’s debut full-length novel starts strong. His parallel narrative, of an aging war hero’s renewed glory and his young admirer’s unquestioning reverence, carries readers’ attention gracefully for a while. But pages accumulate upon pages, and Torday starts making weird choices. Veteran readers quickly see where he’s headed. And I find myself struggling to pick the book up again.

In 1986, Poxl West, who joined the RAF during World War II and later became a Boston-based Shakespeare scholar, publishes Skylock, his memoir of flying sorties over Hamburg. He quickly finds himself thrust into the rare air occupied by luminaries like Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. Poxl’s nephew, Elijah Goldstein, watching from the sidelines, admires his uncle’s stratospheric rise. But, they both discover, increased renown leads inevitably to increased scrutiny.

Torday runs his narrative along two tracks. In one, he reproduces West’s full text of Skylock. Born Leopold Weisberg in Czechoslovakia between the wars, Poxl wants only to inherit his father’s factory, avoid his mother’s infidelities, and fly open-cockpit aeroplanes. But Anschluss changes his plans. Poxl flees the coming disaster, beginning a years-long pattern of running away. Until one day, during the London Blitz, he finally takes a stand, and joins up.

In the second track, Eli Goldstein recounts the whirlwind surrounding his uncle’s book release. A genuine Jewish war hero! What’s not to love? But as fame increasingly embraces Poxl West, the unprepossessing uncle who introduced Eli to Shakespeare vanishes into the past. Hero worship quickly transitions into resentment as the very triumph that brings Poxl global acclaim estranges him from the family who supported him through lean times.

Torday’s book spotlights the lingering consequences of guilt. Poxl West’s memoir reveals a prodigious capacity for love, but an equal capacity to flee conflict. His repeated flights from life’s un-pretty aspects exact their toll: he leaves pieces of himself in Leitmeritz, Rotterdam, Grimsby. Even joining the RAF costs dearly, as German bombs find the woman he left behind. Flying bombing runs becomes the embodiment of “flight,” in all its aspects.

Daniel Torday

Young Eli, simultaneously, can’t reconcile his feelings about Uncle Poxl. He extols his uncle to anybody who’ll listen: friends, classmates, Hebrew school peers, complete strangers. He defends Poxl against creeping bourgeois animus. But his own increasing resentment at Poxl’s absence weighs upon him. He cannot admit his feelings, even to himself. The harsh collision between boyhood illusions and reality’s unforgiving existence becomes Eli’s unwanted coming of age.

But if guilt colors everybody’s perceptions, Torday also inflects that theme with issues of time. Poxl, writing his memoir forty years after the war, represents a man outside his era. A scholar of the long-dead, he’s also the last surviving member of his bomber crew. He deals poorly with the living. Eli, recounting events nearly thirty years later, cannot prevent everything he knows now transforming his perceptions of what happened then.

Torday’s premise and theme set such high standards, I feel bad reversing myself and submarining all the praise I’ve previously heaped upon him. But everything happens on exactly the same level. Poxl’s ardent wartime romances, made more urgent by death’s imminent specter, vary little in tone from his midnight bombing runs. Eli’s admiration for his uncle, and his later demand for answers, have the interchangeable uniformity of Mad-Libs.

Seasoned readers feel Torday’s parallel tracks building to an inevitable collision. It’s an axiom older than Sophocles that, the more characters feel one way at first curtain, the more certainly they’ll feel the exact opposite when the final curtain falls. Love must inevitably transition to heartbreak, devotion into disappointment. Torday leaves himself little wiggle room to impress his own creativity into this apparently inevitable arc.

Our final confrontation feels so foreordained that, somewhere beyond page 150, I began skipping huge chunks, trying to reach the destined conclusion. And, sunny gun, I was right. In 1986, Poxl West’s self-imposed tragedy might’ve seemed surprising and sudden. But today’s climate of magazine scandals, Oprah’s Book Club, and deadline journalism brings its own perspective. We’re only left to sort victims from perpetrators, tragic heroes from arrogant postmodern myth-makers.

I’ve religiously avoided spoiling Torday’s climactic reveal, though that probably matters little. Torday, sadly, signposts his destination almost from the beginning. Torday’s early chapters beautifully establish the tension inherent in Jewish identity following the Shoah. His later chapters become fatalistic, inescapable, less an act of art than a phenomenon of gravity. Maybe he put himself into an impossible literary situation. Oh, I just wanted him to do better.