Tag: Richard Powers

Old Characters, New Problems – Book Reviews

I  recently read a number of new and old books which feature older characters, and so would like to pass on some observations and recommendations.

I was excited about Anthony Doerr’s new book, as I had loved (and learned much from) his last novel, All the Light We Cannot See.  Cloud Cuckoo Land is a very different kind of book, and the main character is Zeno, an old man who thinks that life has passed him by until he connects with five young people whom the kind librarian sends his way.  Doerr writes about the endurance of story, as we follow an old Greek text through the centuries, until – encouraged by his young friends – Zeno turns it into a play, the performance of which is interrupted by an ecoterrorist attack.  In flashbacks, we follow the life of the manuscript, of Zeno, and the immature and misguided terrorist.  In flash forwards, we see Doerr contemplate what may be the fate of books, people, and the planet. It is all wonderful, but Zeno is the best of all, working on his Greek with the help of the library computers and exciting his young friends with the things he is still enthusiastic about.

In Richard Osman’s mystery, it is the old people who put the world to rights with their wisdom and experience and lack of self-importance (most particularly the latter).  The fact that they are continually underestimated and unnoticed works to their advantage.  The Man Who Died Twice is the second in Richard Osman’s series about this group of elderly sleuths; it is devastatingly funny and real.  His senior-living residents have all the challenges of old age: recovering after falls, bladder control, going into nursing homes, facing death.  One of the group has a husband at home in the early stages of dementia.  But the oldsters egg each other on, comfort each other, and care about the world that they know they will be leaving soon.  A really enchanting read – but please start with The Thursday Murder Club,  the first in this series.  I hope there will be many more.

Old age and climate change also are topics of concern in The Emissary by Yoko Tawada. This dystopian novel takes place in a secluded Japan after an undefined period of war and climate change.  The younger generations are growing weaker and weaker from pollution, radiation, who knows what else. (In the UK, the title of the book was Last Children of Tokyo.)  It is the old who are forced to be strong, to push the wheelchairs, provide food, take charge.  Our hero here is 108-year-old Yoshiro, who is taking care of his weak (but wise) great-grandson Mumei.  Retirement is unheard of – then there would be nobody to do the work.  The extremely old do what they need to do, but they still age, ache, falter:

Stumbling as he took his shoes off, Yoshiro rested a hand on the wooden pillar to steady himself, feeling the grain of the wood under his fingers.  The years are recorded in rings inside the trunk of a tree, but how was time recorded in his own body?  Time didn’t spread out gradually, ring after ring, nor was it lined up neatly in a row; could it just be a disorderly pile, like the inside of a drawer no one ever bother to straighten?

Yoko Tawada is a wonderful writer (The Emissary won the National Book award for a work in translation), and the novel has much to say about what we have done to the world around us and the possible consequences for future generations.  It is a book to read slowly and ponder.  It will scare you, but it will also give you faith in the ability of the old to persevere, to face the challenges that are presented to them.

I also re-read Thornton Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey  recently.  Surely you have read (or were forced to read) it many years ago.  If so, you probably did not fully appreciate the old characters –  the most memorable being the Marquesa de Montemayor.  The book purports to be based on the work of Brother Juniper, who is convinced that the death of five people when the old bridge collapses cannot be a random act.   In trying to make sense of their lives, he tries to make sense of all lives.  If you have never read it or cannot remember it, pick it up again some time and try to decide whether Brother Juniper comes to the right conclusion.

I cannot leave any discussion of recent books without recommending Richard Powers’ new novel Bewilderment.  For the most part, the characters are not old; the main character is a young boy.  But it is about memory and loss, climate change and mass extinctions, love and mourning.  It is about the promises and dangers of technology and what happens when we can’t bear what we are doing to the world.  And it is a good read.  If technology could put you in communication with a loved one you had lost, would you be interested?  This is a book that challenges us to think about the meaning of relationships – between people, between people and animals, between people and technology, between people and the earth. 

All of it is fine reading as we head into the colder, indoor months.  Enjoy.  There is a certain amount of divination in all these books, but if you want to read about bibliomancy (the process of divination through the use of books), try  my short story, “By the Book.”

Failing Bodies and the Failing Planet

First of all, you must read The Overstory by Richard Powers. It is a powerful novel –a story in the best and oldest sense of the word – about trees, nature, and the place of humanity in the cosmos. And it’s about psychology – how much we are affected by our peers, our culture, how hard it is to step aside, how dangerous it can be to think outside our conditioning, but also how necessary. The mood of the book is at once lyrical and dire. Humankind does not appreciate the intricacy and power of nature and seems not to want to learn.

As elders, we will be especially moved by this book and its characters, many of whom we follow into old age. We will want to warn the next generation. But how are the old (myself, the author, all of us) to tell the young and the disenfranchised that they cannot have what we had – new cars, wooden houses, air conditioning in home and vehicle, all of it?  And we had it without guilt. We had the advantage of not giving any thought to clearing a lot, building a house, driving a big car just for the fun of it, having as many children as we could afford to support – and never considering what the earth could support.

We know better now. In part, we learned from our own bodies. We are paying for our early smoking, drinking, drugs. We take statins, use inhalers, go to physical therapy. Athletes are getting joints replaced and hoping they did not land on their heads too many times. Surgeons replace arteries clogged with the fat we ingested thoughtlessly. Dayspring mishandled. And as we retire, we have time to look around at our devastated planet – a devastation that we funded with our new houses and cars and expectations that progress meant we could have more and more. Our bodies and minds know that perpetual progress is a myth. We know this as we nurse our knees and grope for that name we can’t remember. We know this by going back to the neighborhood where we grew up and looking for the woods we played in. The planet too has paid for our mistakes: global warming, plastic continents floating on the ocean, butterflies that never return.

In the middle ages there was the idea that the human body was a microcosm of the universal macrocosm – and each individual grew old in this post-lapsarian world just as the world also grew older, decayed from its Edenic beginnings. But the Enlightenment assured us the world was progressing, not regressing. In the seventeenth century, George Hakewill made an early appeal for the idea that life on earth, that earth, was improving, progressing – and yet even he realized what this meant for the idea of microcosm/macrocosm: “And though whiles I have laboured to free the world from old age, I feele it creeping upon my selfe.”

But the truth is, whether or not humans are accurate microcosms of creation, we are most definitely part of the macrocosm and most definitely not in charge – as much as it might temporarily seem so. In trying to overcome and overwhelm the natural world, we have forgotten we are only part of that world. Irretrievably imbedded in the macrocosm. It is true of a tree; it is true of homo sapiens.

One of my favorite characters in The Overstory is the (fictional) scientist Patricia Westerford – at one point she says: “Trees stand at the heart of ecology. And they must come to stand at the heart of human politics. Tagore said, Trees are the earth’s endless efforts to speak to the listening heaven. But people – oh, my word – people! People could be the heaven the Earth is trying to speak to.”

This novel is full of stories and statistics that will frighten you. They should frighten you. But it is also full of the glory of creation. There is a theory (from Carl Sagan among others) that if humanity was evolved by creation for a purpose, we are perhaps an effort by the cosmos to become aware of itself. Through us. Perhaps our task is not to overcome, but to appreciate. Old people should be good at this. We are also, perhaps (because elders have often stepped out of economic and romantic competition), capable of what one of the characters in Powers’ book calls unbinding. His question is this: Can people come to independent moral decisions that run counter to their tribe’s beliefs? Unbinding. Seeing things outside of cultural norms.

We have lived long enough to know the costs to the world we live in for the lives we have led. To recognize the difference between cost and value. Look around you. Unbind. And read the book. Richard Powers says it far better than I can.

And for more on trees, look at my “Fable About a Soccer Mom.”