Ponder: Everything I Never Told You

Everything I Never Told You ©2014 by Celeste Ng opens with a spoiler.

Lydia is dead. But they do not know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast.

Lydia is the 16 year old daughter in a mixed race, Chinese/Caucasian family of five with the struggles to fit in and failure to communicate amongst themselves. It is a story of loneliness, longing, and dysfunction. The characters are well developed and the sad emotions conveyed well – to the reader but not between family members.

The Chinese father, James, marries the Caucasian mother, Marilyn, in 1958 in Boston in a small ceremony. Marilyn's mother had come up from Virginia for the event. In Chapter Two the climate in the country is revealed.

Marilyn realized, suddenly what her mother was imagining. It was 1958; in Virginia, in half the country, their wedding would break the law. Even in Boston, she sometimes saw disapproval in the eyes of the passerby. Her hair was no longer the white-blond of her childhood, but it was still light enough to catch attention when bent toward James' inky black head in move theaters, on a park bench, at the counter of the Waldorf Cafeteria.

1958 was the same year that white man Richard Loving married black woman Mildred Jeter in Washington, D.C. and the couple were jailed for a year for their "crime". Not until 1967, did the Supreme Court rule that banning interracial marriages was unconstitutional, per the Wikipedia article on the Loving vs. Virginia case. Dates when mixed race marriages were allowed by state is given in the following chart. 

I learned a new vocabulary word from my mixed marriage research that I had never even heard before. Per the Merriam Webster online Dictionary definition

Definition of miscegenation:
a mixture of races
especially : marriage, cohabitation, or sexual intercourse between a white person and a member of another race

Discrimination is the theme in this novel. Marilyn is an intelligent women, smart enough to attend Radcliffe, and James is a Harvard grad. They are denied opportunities: James because of his race, Marilyn because of her gender. The mixed race children do not fit in at school. Policemen looking into Lydia's disappearance (and suspected suicide) allude to the fact that blended race children have a hard time finding a place and making friends. James' attraction to his Chinese teaching assistant further weakens the case for the stability and longevity of inter-racial bonds. All of this is sad, very sad. 

But what irks me about this book is that the family does not pull together and confide in each other.  James actually shows a favoritism for his eldest daughter because she has blue eyes; Marilyn showers Lydia with the most attention because she wants for her what she never had for herself due to gender. The family does not draw strength from each other. Marilyn wants intellectual success for her daughter and James wants popularity and friends for her.  Lydia deceives her parents into believing both those things are happening for her when in reality she struggles in her studies and is socially isolated. Was Lydia abducted or is suicide an explanation for her death? The answer is not totally obvious.

As a positive, this novel did make me regard discrimination in a spectrum broader than "Black Lives Matter", so that is a valuable thought expansion. But I have several friends who are in mixed marriages, and I see them accepted in our social circle at least in today's age; true, I cannot imagine what it would have been like decades ago. However, I found it extremely difficult to relate to the lack of communication within the family unit, regardless of the time period. 

I cannot recommend this book highly, giving it two stars which in my system translates to Ok, not great; some redeeming features; I finished it. It predates Celeste Ng's later successful novel Little Fires Everywhere (three stars in my post of 8/14/20) and I felt it was less mature than that work, which did not inspire me either. Everything I Never Told You was a quick read so I was not depressed for too long and I can check the box that I've read Celeste Ng's other work. I am not going to rush right out and read her next novel. She seems unable to decide her focus amongst an array of injustices and dysfunctions. This author is not for me.

Local Wandering

Yesterday Frank and I were on our way for our Sunday visit with Alex at his St Denis home in San Ramon. We were a bit too early and would have arrived right when he was being served his lunch so I asked Frank to drive around for a little while to delay our arrival. As our boredom with isolating at home and social distancing grows, our traveling expectations have lowered. I needed another Wander post to offset all the Ponder posts. We came upon some Halloween decor that was worth stopping the car, getting out and taking some photographs. These people turned their front corner yard into a graveyard, fenced in with the classic horror movie typical wrought iron fence and a resurrected spirit trying to break down the chained and padlocked gate to escape.

Around one side was a skeletal horse pulling a hearse.



Behind the hearse was a trio of formally dressed skeletons working to load (or unload) a huge wooden casket. Perhaps they were trying to free whoever or whatever was within.

On closer look, that spirit approaching the gate is a grave digger with a shovel.

Whoops. I'd better watch myself and maintain social distancing from that pumpkin-headed guy. I prefer to be anti-social with him. The gravestones are perhaps a bit safer to approach and bear clever names.

During one last overview, before we moved on, I noticed a tangle of electrical cables leading to an array of floodlights in the grass. I surmise that this front yard must be spectacularly spooky at night. Since the figures are about life size, Frank and I discussed how scary it would be for the home owner to stand out there stationary among them but then lunge or move eerily when people pass by. BOO! 

Circling around to head back to Alex's, we passed a park whose name caught my eye. We are in northern, not southern, California so I wondered why it had that name.

Sure enough farther down the road, adjacent, was Walt Disney Elementary School. That name? This far north?

Once home I checked out the website for the school and learned its background. I did not know we had such a unique namesake so close to home in Alex's neighborhood.

Back in 1974, Disney students [from this school] were housed at Neil Armstrong School while awaiting completion of this facility. The district had asked the students who would attend the new school to select a name. The criteria for the name selection was that this be an American hero. The students voted to name the new school after Walt Disney, the man who had brought so many wonderful children's films into existence. ... There are three Walt Disney Elementary schools in California. The other two are in Anaheim (the home of Disneyland) and Burbank (the home of Disney studios).

So it appears there are interesting sights to see, even if travels are restricted to those close to home. Wandering, although curtailed in scope, is still an option.

Ponder: The Cruelest Month

My timing is excellent. The Halloween season with its ghosts is so appropriate for reading the murder mystery The Cruelest Month ©2007 by Louise Penny. The victim is frightened to death at a seance while summoning the spirits from another world. Can that really happen... the frightening to death ... or even the arrival of spirits, for that matter? It is also not immediately obvious who exactly died at the seance.

 

Paradoxically the novel is set at Easter, an unlikely time for a seance. The entire text of Chapter 1 of The Cruelest Month is on  Louise Penny's official website giving a representative  sample of the book and the author's style. The following is an excerpt from that first chapter. 

Kneeling in the fragrant moist grass of the village green Clara Morrow carefully hid the Easter egg and thought about raising the dead, which she planned to do right after supper. Wiping a strand of hair from her face, she smeared bits of grass, mud and some other brown stuff that might not be mud into her tangled hair. All around, villagers wandered with their baskets of brightly colored eggs, looking for the perfect hiding places. Ruth Zardo sat on the bench in the middle of the green tossing the eggs at random, though occasionally she'd haul off and peg someone in the back of the head or on the bottom. She had disconcertingly good aim for someone so old and so nuts, thought Clara.

'You going tonight?' Clara asked, trying to distract the old poet from taking aim at Monsieur Béliveau.

'Are you kidding? Live people are bad enough; why would I want to bring one back from the dead?'

I am familiar with this author since I have read and enjoyed Penny's first two novels in her Chief Inspector Armand Gamache detective series, Still Life ©2005 (2/28/20) and A Fatal Grace ©2006 (8/30/20). The characters are well developed and are humorously described in large part by behavioral examples. I already had a vivid mental image of the quirky characters Clara Morrow, Ruth Zardo, and Monsieur Béliveau residents of the Canadian village of Three Pines. I was looking forward to their next adventure and was not disappointed. Ruth Zardo, the ornery character clobbering people with Easter eggs in the opening, revealed a soft side later on in the story.

Gamache remained endearing as well. His mannerisms and attitudes are key in drawing me back to the next book in this series. His style of detective work is unique. From Chapter 14:

He listened to people, took notes, gathered evidence like all his colleagues. But he did one thing more.
He gathered feelings. He collected emotions. Because murder was deeply human. It wasn't about what people did. No, it was about how they felt, because that's where it all started. Some feeling that had once been human and natural had twisted. Become grotesque. Had turned sour and corrosive until its very container had been eaten away. Until the human barely existed.

One of his assistants was also described in an intriguing way. From Chapter 17:

Agent Yvette Nichol like secrets. She like gathering other people's secrets and she liked having her own.

As clues are revealed, Louise Penny still manages to keep the murderer concealed until the final pages. All the puzzle pieces are there but it takes the finesse of Armand Gamache to fit them all together. There is also a back story throughout this book giving two mysteries in one.

I was very fond of the TV series Castle, not only for the cases that were solved weekly, but also for the ongoing saga of a more involved, slowly revealed background life challenges of the main characters. Most successful TV series are like that. In Grey's Anatomy, tuning in weekly allowed the viewers to see who was in a growing relationship with whom. In Bones, the lives of the members of the forensic team were every bit as engaging as the gruesome murders they solved.  The trusting relationship between Gamache and his second in command, Jean Guy Beauvoir, always strong between the two men, strengthens in this third book. The reader learns more about Armand Gamache in a subplot. The backstory is full of plot twists and betrayals, making The Cruelest Month my favorite book in the series thus far. 

In my reading I usually try to figure out why the author chose the title for the book. In Chapter 37 an allusion to the title is given in a conversation between Gamache and Peter, a Three Pines villager.

'Sunny and warm one day then snow the next,' agreed Gamache. 'Shakespeare called  it the uncertain glory of an April day.'
'I prefer T.S. Eliot. The cruelest month.'
'Why do you say that?'
'All those spring flowers slaughtered. Happens almost every year. They're tricked into blooming, into coming out. Opening up. And not just the spring bulbs, but the buds on the trees. The rose bushes, everything. All out and happy. And then boom, a freak snowstorm kills them all.'

I googled the lyrics to the T.S. Eliot poem, The Wasteland. It is a long, long, poem, way beyond the length of my attention span. Still curious, though, but not wanting to exert gargantuan effort, I also looked up the T.S. Eliot reference to April as being the cruelest month and found the article, Why is April “the Cruelest Month”? T.S. Eliot’s Masterpiece of Pandemic Poetry. That I should happen to read this book now, with this reference is uncanny. A few sentences from the article explain the poem's relevance to our present day pandemic. 

As we enter the month of April in what amounts to a global quarantine, expect to hear a lot of people quoting TS Eliot’s poem The Waste Land....
Eliot wrote his famous poem in the aftermath of the last global pandemic to shut down the world. He and is wife caught the Spanish Flu in December of 1918, and he wrote much of the poem during his recovery...
In The Waste Land, nothing can be crueler than hope, since it can only lead to disappointment. It always leads to disappointment. In the Waste Land, hope hurts, and April hurts most of all by mocking us with possibilities that can never be realized. And not just in the Waste Land, either. The more I have read the opening lines of Eliot’s great poem, the more I have realized just what a dangerous emotion the great theological virtue of hope can be. Cynicism and irony are safe. To hope, one must open the door to disappointment, rejection, and disbelief.

In today's environment with social distancing and masks, I found this view of hope as food for thought. But enough going down the rabbit hole of current relevancy. Perhaps this cruelest month allusion has something to do with Gamache's back story... ?  I believe it does. Read The Cruelest Month and decide for yourself. I may be biased toward this author's novels, but I give this book five stars ★★★★★ which translates in my rating system to Great! Read it! Perhaps you may need to deduct one star if you have not read the first two in the series and struggle to familiarize yourself with the recurring characters. By way of comparison, Amazon's rating for the book is 4.6 out of 5 stars.

Halloween Decor

 A couple days ago Frank helped me get some fall decorations from our attic. This decor should put us in the Halloween spirit. First the living room hearth is outfitted with stuffed jack o' lanterns and pumpkins of different textures – velvet, painted wood, and woven straw. Glass bottles of varying heights hold shoots of straw bedecked with candy corn and mini-pumpkins. OK... that is not a black cat. It is a black dog. But pretend it is a black cat. I did not have the heart to disturb Snoopy for the photo.

To the left of the fireplace are two vases of gourds on a pumpkin placemat. They used to be inside my glass candleholders but I decided to change it up this year and give them a display of their own.

Continuing to circle on around toward the dining room, I have placed two quilts on the rungs of a rack.

 

Next I put placemats on the dining room table from a fabric pattern called Raven's Claw. When I googled it to buy more, I inadvertently left out the "s" and combined the two words. What did get? Ravenclaw! Ravenclaw is one of the four Houses of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, also appropriate for Halloween. (To jog your memory, Harry Potter is in Gryffindor.) Inside the glass candleholders are white and black lettered ceramic eggs. They spoke spooky Halloween to me as if they might spell out a magic incantation like the letters on a Ouija Board.

The far end of the kitchen table has a ceramic pumpkin, a metal pumpkin and candles to promote the seasonal ambience at mealtimes and game times.

Not to leave out the family room I spread this quilt on our blue leather chair and a half. It is where I will  curl up to read my current book, author Louise Penny's fourth novel, A Rule Against Murder. A murder mystery fits in well with the mood of those grinning Jack O' Lanterns set against a background of swirly spider webs and surrounded by a border of haunted houses and skeletons.

There will be no Trick or Treaters or handing out of candy this coronavirus year. Guess we will just have to eat all that candy ourselves. Shhh... I am ignoring the obvious – to refrain from buying it in the first place. Some traditions are too strong to resist. Happy Halloween.