So Misguided

James by Percival Everett is a rewriting of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, this time told from Jim’s point of view. The story follows the same general path as Twain’s book. But the central figure is Huck’s enslaved companion, Jim. The novel offers an unsettling reflection on race, freedom, and identity, while still paying homage to Twain’s classic work.

As the story unfolds, we learn that Jim has a wife and child. He is intelligent and perceptive, but also deeply aware of the dangerous absurdities of the world around him. Jim is not just intelligent, he is literate and secretly teaches his friends philosophy and grammar, as well as the accepted (by whites) slave speech.

When Jim learns he is about to be sold and separated from his family, he goes on the run. Jim is hoping to free himself and his family but a slave on the run does not have a lot of options. He has to work within the system in order to get out of it, but systemic racism has a way of being … systemic.

Travelling the Mississippi River with Huck brings its own challenges. The dynamics between the duo are heartily explored. Huck looks up to Jim. But he also knows he has to pretend to own Jim. Likewise Jim wants to protect Huck but not the world Huck represents. The depth of the dilemma is often encapsulated in Jim’s hallucinatory conversations with Voltaire and John Locke where Jim argues against oppression and slavery.

Everett’s writing is subversive and funny. Jim is not a caricature as he is in Twain’s novel, but instead is a blend of satire and social critique wrapped up in a man who has to act without dignity to get through the day safely.

The story is full of moral complexities. It’s a journey to the heart of darkness.

James is a great read with a notable nod to its predecessor. If you enjoy reimagined classics then this is for you. Or if you enjoyed Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, then give this a read.

Remarkably Bright Creatures is the story of the remarkably bright Pacific octopus, Marcellus, who lives at the Sowell Bay aquarium. Marcellus is counting down his days. He was a rescue, brought to the aquarium as a young octopus, and he’s on his last legs. Marcellus has charmed Tova, the aquarium’s night-shift cleaner, who is remarkably clean. She discovers Marcellus on the run from his tank (he’s quite the escape artist) and keeps his secret. But Marcellus has other secrets. For example, when he comes across Tova’s lost house key on the aquarium floor, he recognizes that it is a key he has seen before–at the bottom of the ocean near the pier, which is also where Tova’s son Erik disappeared years ago. Marcellus has clues and he’s dedicated to revealing them to Tova. The third main character in the story is Cam, who is in Sowell Bay looking for his estranged father. Cam is remarkably bright but makes remarkably stupid, short-sighted choices. In his case, it’s Tova who has clues to how he can get his life on the right track.

Remarkably Bright Creatures is a novel about charming creatures, some with 2 legs, some with 8. Each of them is dealing with loneliness and looking for a sense of family and connection in different ways. This is a quiet, gentle read with a few mysterious plot twists.

On the surface, Intermezzo is about two grieving brothers who are both struggling with their relationships. Peter is a 30-ish human rights lawyer in Dublin who presents as a successful human with strong inter-personal skills but who privately is sleeping with a 20-ish Only Fans star and pining over his college girlfriend who broke up with him after she suffered a life-altering accident. Peter needs to move on but is full of himself. Ivan is a 22-year-old competitive chess player, who according to Peter is awkward and talks in robotic monosyllables. Ivan is the most likeable loner imaginable, so likeable that he romantically charms the 30-ish host of a weekend chess tournament. Ivan needs to grow up a little and understand how his reactions can affect others.

On a deeper level, Intermezzo is an existential view of the healing and breaking points of life. The book incorporates quotes from Ludwig Wittgenstien’s Philosophical Investigations, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, several poems including TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” Susan Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation”, and James Joyce’s Ulysses, among others. The book is dark and moody, a bit academic, and awkwardly initiate, sometimes in a funny way. I thought it was a good read.

If you like Larry’s Party by Carol Shields or Less by Andrew Sean Greer then you’ll enjoy the struggles of Peter and Ivan. Intermezzo is a rumination on the human heart; it’s about retracing your steps, and looking for fulfillment.

Last House by Jessica Shattuck tells the story of one family over eighty years. It starts with Bet and Nick Taylor who fall in love just before he goes to the Pacific in WWII. Bet is working in intelligence and hopes to continue studying after the war. She is warned that marriage will curtail that plan, but she’s hopeful that is not the case. What Nick likes about her is that she is smart and keen on her work. Well, 1950s America has other plans for Bet.

Nick gets his law degree and is involved in the oil negotiations with Iran and the plans to reinstate the shah. His buddy Carter Weston is in the CIA and has roped Nick into the role. It’s America’s golden age and they are wheeling and dealing across the international stage. Bet is stuck at home folding napkins and editing the Mapleton ladies’ cookbook.

It’s not a rescue but Carter sells the Taylor family a house in rural Vermont. He has inherited a couple of houses in a valley and sells them to his closest friends and allies as part of the “End of the World Club”.

The middle part of the novel shifts to the Taylor kids. Katherine and Harry like the freedom of exploring the woods but by the 60s Katherine is living in New York and is caught up in the protests against the war and the race riots. She’s writing for a radical newspaper and struggling to reconcile her ideals with those of her parents. Nick still works for Big Oil. American youth are getting more and more restless in the face of unwavering government policies, the shooting of Martin Luther King, and the heavy fist of the government. There are groups that resort to violence and Katherine and Harry suffer the consequences of their own activism.

By the end, the novel sweeps along to the point where Katherine is in her eighties and Last House is still standing.

Having just finished The Women by Kristin Hannah, I am struck by the similarities of the political situation in the 1960s and today.

Both books portray the 1960s in the US as a turbulent decade marked by social upheaval and political shifts. The Women outlines how attitudes toward the Vietnam War shifted from initial support to widespread opposition, fuelled by rising casualties and the draft. Last House picks up from there with the racial tensions that led to major civil rights movements, but also to the violent race riots in cities like Detroit and Watts, and then Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination in 1968. Underlying the story of Last House is how Big Oil expanded as an economic force, with rising global influence.

I came away from these books thinking that the central lesson is that social and political progress is neither linear nor guaranteed. The issues of today—war, inequality, and cultural divides—are rooted in unresolved tensions from the past, demanding vigilance, activism, and a willingness to learn from history. We are probably going to get things wrong, but we won’t make them worse by standing up for each other.

If you enjoyed, Long Island (role of women in 1950-70s America) or The Briar Club (different angle on the McCarthy era), then you’ll like Last House.

Give it try. Available at Indigo.ca and fine local booksellers.

The Women by Kristin Hannah is about the women who went to Vietnam and returned to the US during a time of deep political division and contempt for the war. They were not seen as heroes and they were often not acknowledged as even being there. “Women weren’t in Vietnam.”

The shunning meant that these women were not given support for the trauma they saw as surgical nurses. They dealt with soldiers and villagers who had unsurvivable chest wounds, their limbs blown off, or gangrene. They lived in field hospitals or evacuation hospitals under bomb threats and had minimal downtime. Like the men who went to war, they suffered from nightmares and addiction. The only saving grace was the deep friendships formed in those intense tours of duty.

The story follows Frances McGrath who signs up shortly after her brother. Both are following in the footsteps of their forefathers who are honoured on the family “heroes wall” in their father’s study. Sadly, Frankie’s commitment to service is frowned upon whereas her brother is given a party.

Many new nurses were not accepted into the navy or airforce unless they had 2 years of service at home already. But the army was desperate for men and women. Often those going to Vietnam were so green they did not know the basics. They had to learn on the job. Frankie finds support from her bunkmates Ethel and Barb, who take her under their wing. She finds love, loses that man to the war, finds love again, and then loses that man to war. It’s a heartwrenching story that doesn’t end with the war.

When Frankie returns to her family home, she finds out that her father has told people at the club that she was in Florence. They deny the love and attention she needs. Ethel and Barb, despite being scattered across the US, reunite to support Frankie in her darkest days.

The latter half of the book hammers home how underappreciated these nurses with military training were. Upon their return to civilian life, if they sought medical jobs, they often started at the bottom of the hierarchy, being given light duties like emptying bedpans and fetching water. These women often stood in for doctors on the front when they were short of staff. They knew how to successfully carry out many medical procedures. None of that mattered. Even when they went to peace marches as veterans to support the end of the war, they were scolded by their male peers. “This is a march for veterans.” Given the number of men who were wounded or died in Vietnam, it’s hard to believe that soldiers missed the 10,000 military women who were there as nurses, medical personnel, air traffic control or military intelligence. But it seems like an angry time. The book ends on a happy-enough note but the story is a dire reminder of what war does to people.