JUST KIDS by Patti Smith

Patti Smith’s music was mostly not mainstream enough to appear on my radar, but this memoir garnered a lot of attention and accolades when it came out.  Her rags-to-riches story is amazing, as she traverses NYC in the 1970s, initially working in bookstores to pay the rent.  As a struggling artist and poet, alongside artist Robert Mapplethorpe, she namedrops Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Todd Rundgren and William S. Burroughs, to list a few.  Robert aspires to a higher social class, but sometimes Patti reaps the rewards of his endeavors.  She and Robert are lovers and then roommates after he acknowledges his homosexuality.  Patti then has other famous lovers, including Allen Lanier of Blue Oyster Cult and Sam Shepard.  As another reviewer noted, Mapplethorpe does not leap off the page as charismatically as he should, since his and Patti’s relationship is the thread that ties the entire book together.  When Robert gets low on funds, he takes to hustling, inspired to a degree by the movie Midnight Cowboy.  Finally, his photography earns him the attention he deserves, some of which derives from the controversial eroticism of his work.  Patti herself, on the other hand, has a spirit that drew me in and motivated me to listen to some of her music.  One of my favorite moments is when she cuts her hair in the style of Keith Richards’, to match her androgynous looks.  In fact, Allen Ginsberg buys her lunch at an automat, apparently because he thinks she is a man.  Unfortunately, the celebrity sightings and memorable anecdotes were not enough to carry this book for me.

SUMMER OF '69 by Elin Hilderbrand

Against the backdrop of Woodstock, the moon landing, civil rights, Vietnam, Chappaquiddick, and the feminist movement, the women in this novel are anything but feminist.  Blair is pregnant with twins and has sacrificed her own career at the insistence of her husband, who is a scientist working on the Apollo 11 mission.  When she suspects that he is cheating on her with a prostitute, she packs her bags for Nantucket, where her family has summered for decades.  Kirby, a college student, opts for a change of pace at Martha’s Vineyard, where she has a job at a hotel and falls for a black guy.  Jessie, half-sister of Kirby and Blair, is thirteen and has taken to shoplifting as an act of rebellion, I guess.  Kate is the mother of all three girls/women, but she has turned into a lush after her only son was drafted.  These women all have too much money and time on their hands, although they do grapple with real world problems.  However, it’s hard to take a book seriously when the chapter headings are all 1960s song titles.  The author goes to some length to contrive a match between the plot and the song title.  For example, in the “White Rabbit” chapter, Kate and Jessie dine at a restaurant called the Mad Hatter.  This was all just way too cutesy for me, and I felt that the author was trying to touch on a smattering of feminist issues, including physical and sexual abuse, without giving these women the gumption to stand up for themselves.  Their lives revolve around their men, who are tangential as far as their character development but instrumental in shaping the summer of ’69 for these women.

ASYMMETRY by Lisa Halliday

This novel may be a little too clever for me.  It contains three sections, and I had to reread the third in order to determine how the Kafkaesque middle section related to the other two.  The middle section is narrated in first person by an Iraqi-American who is stranded at Heathrow for no rational reason.  Although he holds an American passport, he is detained by airport officials and has to adjust his itinerary accordingly.  I did not love this section, in which the narrator reflects on other periods of his life, partly because I loved the completely different preceding section and partly because in my mind I merged this middle story with Homeland Elegies, which I finished right before starting this book.  The delightful first section is about Alice, a young woman working for a publishing house and having an affair with a much older famous writer named Ezra Blazer.  Even I am clever enough to recognize the similarities between Ezra, who keeps hoping for a Nobel prize, and Philip Roth.  He educates and assists his young lover, both financially and intellectually, correcting her anglicized pronunciation of Camus and recommending books for her to read.  The relationship between these two is complicated.  In one sense, they are using each other, and yet they genuinely care for one another, although perhaps asymmetrically.  Alice is no slouch when it comes to verbal sparring with Ezra and is obviously ambivalent about whether their relationship is ultimately a beneficial experience for her.  His friends ask her repeatedly about when/if she plans to have children, and her frank answer is that she does not want children until she is forty, indicating to me that she has professional ambitions.  The short third section of the book is an interview with Ezra regarding his favorite classical music pieces.  However, he also drops a few other new tidbits of information, including the one that provides a tie-in to the middle section of the book.

DISAPPEARING EARTH by Julia Phillips

This novel opens with the abduction of two young girls, age 8 and 11, but the subsequent chapters are just as compelling, the most gripping of which involves the disappearance of a beloved dog.  The setting is a remote Russian peninsula where various characters lament the dissolution of the Soviet Union, deeming the past to have afforded a measure of security as a welcome byproduct of its rigidity.   Each chapter is a separate story of a woman who lives on the peninsula, and the ties that bind them are revealed near the end of the book.  Unfortunately, I lost track of a few of them, but others stand out in my memory.  One is about a college student torn between two very different men.  Another is about a woman who fantasizes about having sex with migrant workers as an antidote to her humdrum life as a wife and mother.  One woman flees to her hometown because her otherwise decent boyfriend has allowed their home to be flooded with icy water due to broken pipes.  All of these women experience loneliness and grow frustrated by their lives’ limitations.  Particularly exasperating is the lack of urgency that one would expect on the part of the police with regard to a third missing girl—a teenager with an unsavory reputation.  One of the chapters is devoted to a young woman who witnesses the abduction of the younger girls but does not realize at the time what is happening.  The police hound her for a more explicit description of the man who lures the girls into his car, and then they ultimately discount her story entirely.  Amidst so much sorrow and ineptitude lies a sense of community, and I am reminded of the words we have heard so often during the pandemic:  We are all in this together.  However, some of us are in deeper and more tragically than others.

THE NICKEL BOYS by Colson Whitehead

The author has changed the name of the place, but this novel is based on an actual boys’ reform school in Florida that finally closed in 2011.  Set in the Jim Crow era, this book exposes the horrific cruelty and corruption that prevailed at this school.  Behavioral infractions met with scores of lashes that often resulted in months in the infirmary or even death.  Food and supplies that the state provided were sold to local businesses, with school administrators pocketing the profits.  This book reminded me of Unbroken in its explicit renderings of torture, but at its heart it is the story of one teenager, Elwood Curtis.  His crime is for stealing a car in which he was just an unwitting hitchhiker, on his way to a college prep class.  Not only has Elwood never been in trouble, he is a model citizen, raised by his grandmother and inspired by Martin Luther King Jr’s speeches.  Even at the reformatory, Elwood strives to live by MLK’s words and holds fast to the belief that love and justice will ultimately win out.  However, as we’ve seen in recent months, evil seems to beget more evil, and those who perpetrated the horrors in this book are egged on and riled up by similarly minded men.  This book stirred up my emotions, particularly rage and horrified disbelief, just as the insurrectionists did on January 6.  If people are charging into the Capitol with Confederate flags and African-American boys are being dispatched with shotguns in the 21^st century, we still have a very long way to go toward any semblance of racial equality.  I am particularly outraged that the school administrators committed countless brutal murders and got away with it.  The twist at the end was a well-disguised surprise for me, but it did not improve my opinion of some of my fellow Floridians.