Monthly Archives: May 2021

Book Review: We Germans

I’ve said that I am tired of World War II novels, and I am. I am positively allergic to all references to the “Greatest Generation” (if this generation was so great, why didn’t it do more about racism and sexism when it got home from the war?). We Germans is a different take on the war, though, and worth your time (at 197 pages, it won’t take up much of it).

The novel is told in two alternating perspectives: that of an ordinary German soldier, Meissner. who is ultimately captured and spend a couple of years in a Russian prison camp, and then marries and lives out a long life, and that of his British grandson, Callum, who writes of his grandfather as fondly as you might write of yours. (The author’s biography notes that his mother is German, and it’s not hard to imagine that Callum’s perspective might be the author’s, at least to some extent.)

Meissner is harder on himself than his grandson is. “[E]ven if all you did in the war was serve lunches at a quiet rubber factory in the middle of Germany, your meals fed workers whose rubber went into tyres that were fitted to trucks that carried people to their deaths,” Meissner says. ” . . . And I didn’t make lunches; I wore a uniform and fought, to the best of my ability.” But Callum shies away from this: “although you could legalistically tease out varying degrees of culpability, I’ve got no taste for it.” Where Meissner says ruefully that only the heroes — the conscientious objectors — emerged from the war unscathed, Callum concludes that “World history impinges more on some lives than others. Because I was born in the 1980s and not the 1920s, the worst my times have done to me is lose me my first job, in the 2008 financial crisis; they’ve never sent me to Russia to dig holes and kill people.”

As I read this novel I frequently thought of my grandfather, an American soldier who was captured and spent about a year and a half in a German prison camp. What if Grandpa had met Meissner in the 1940s? Each might have tried to kill the other. What makes the German soldier in this book different from my grandfather, of course, is that he fought for Hitler’s Germany while Grandpa fought for Roosevelt’s United States. Meissner notes that even during the war he realized he would someday have to account for his complicity, and yet he remained in uniform, doing his duty. And he comforts himself with the small atrocities, perpetrated by the Russian army, that he was able to prevent. He wasn’t a hero, but he wasn’t a sadist. He fell in love, he raised a family, he adored his wife. Isn’t that enough? he asks. “How can I be an evil man?”

It’s a complicated question, more complicated than we usually pretend. If we hold Meissner responsible for Hitler’s actions, must we also hold American soldiers — both of my grandfathers — responsible for the internment of the Japanese, the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (But the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives by ending the war, I hear you protesting. If Hitler had won, how would we be explaining away the Holocaust?) Can we say that one side’s hands are dirty and the other side’s hands are clean, just because one side was unquestionably worse? If the United States had been gassing millions of people, how can we be so sure that our ancestors would have resisted? Is it fair to judge Meissner’s performance on a test that neither we nor our grandfathers ever had to pass? After all, world history has brought to our generation a pandemic, an authoritarian American president, and desperate refugees, and our response to these things has not covered us in glory.

I feel that I should condemn Meissner, who helped prop up Hitler’s regime. But I find it hard to do so without condemning the whole world. “I just hope that my grandparents’ world wasn’t razed to the ground,” Callum concludes, “but ploughed under, like clover is to enrich the soil.” It’s a nice sentiment, but I am not optimistic. If history teaches us anything, it is that humanity does not learn. 

Greece Reading List: The War That Killed Achilles

Book number two in my Greek history reading list! The first book was Thomas Martin’s Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times, which was both a good overview and a tiny bit frustrating when I got interested in the Peloponnesian War and Martin was ready to move on before I was.

After briefly touching on about a dozen different topics with my first read, I was excited to dig into a specific topic. Caroline Alexander’s The War That Killed Achilles was a reread for me; I finished it almost exactly ten years to the day after the first time I picked it up. I had remembered it being more about the war itself and less about the Iliad (I was partly led astray by the subtitle, “The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War”). Still, I appreciated this book more this time around, even though it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. There’s an argument to be made I really should have read In Search of the Trojan War instead of this one, because it seems to be more about archaeology and history whereas this book is very focused on the Iliad. But the Iliad is so worth reading about! Since the first time I picked this book, I have read The Song of Achilles, a brilliant novelistic take on this story, and having that in the back of my mind really enriched Caroline Alexander’s commentary here.

Alexander isn’t interested in writing about the ruins of ancient Troy or the historical roots of the myths around the Trojan War. What she wants to write about is War with a capital W, and how the themes of an epic poem about ancient war still resonate. In some ways, Homer’s work even anticipates the spectacle of modern warfare. This passage reminded me forcibly of sitting in my office with coworkers in 2003, watching a video of bombs being dropped on Iraq:

Yet, as the Iliad makes clear, notwithstanding the attractions of their abode above the clouds, the gods cannot tear themselves from the world of men. This is not only because mortals provide the savory savory burnt offerings and sacrifice they find so gratifying but because the lives and deeds of men are objects of endless fascination to them. The war at Troy provides the gods with excitement and stimulation. Seemingly, they cannot get their fill of watching it, arguing about it, and participating in it; the Trojan War is the best show playing.

The War That Killed Achilles is uneven; sometimes I wished for a clearer thesis or a bit more of a narrative flow. Sometimes it felt as though Alexander had forgotten that her readers did not know the plot events and characters of the Iliad as well as she did. One chapter is devoted entirely to Alexander’s own translation of a scene from the Iliad, which felt jarring and a little self-indulgent. But overall this is a moving and thoughtful discussion of the themes of the epic, and Alexander makes her case that the work is not simply a celebration of valor in glorious battle. “The Iliad . . . never betrays its subject, which is war,” Alexander writes. “Honoring the nobility of a soldier’s sacrifice and courage, Homer nonetheless determinedly concludes his epic with a sequence of funerals, inconsolable lamentation, and shattered lives. War makes stark the tragedy of mortality. A hero will have no recompense for death, although he may win glory.”

Henry III and Simon de Montfort

I’ve read two biographies by Darren Baker recently and it pains me to report that I am not a fan. What I was looking for was a couple of approachable books about Henry III and Simon de Montfort, who both sounded like compelling subjects. Having found this pair by Baker, which were described as engaging and which seemed to have a very clear thesis and point-of-view, I thought I’d hit the jackpot.

Alas. There are two issues here, I think, and they are present in both books. First, although Baker’s writing is certainly not academic, it is also not clear. Granted, he was not assisted in his task by thirteenth-century parents, who seemed to delight in naming their children Edward, Eleanor, Richard, and Henry. But Baker did nothing to clearly differentiate between all of the Edwards and Eleanors and so I was forever flipping back to remind myself of whom he was writing at any given moment. This is just a symptom of the larger issue: Baker struggles to give the reader context for anything that happens, and so the reader struggles to understand why, for example, Henry III is suddenly being held captive in his own tower.

Secondly, Baker has an odd fixation with the idea that Henry III was a great king. Look, you guys, I am not claiming to be an expert on the medieval British monarchy but I have now read two books by Baker that make this argument and I am not at all convinced. I’ll grant you that Henry was pious and a lover of the arts, and that he seems to have been relatively generous and charitable. Still, if I were to use two words to describe Henry III, “hot mess” would leap to mind long before “great king.”

I have often said that if George W. Bush had just been allowed to become a baseball commissioner, he would have led a happier if relatively more obscure life and spared the country an absolute disaster of a presidency. Henry III was much the same case. He was born to be an artist. If only fate had not intervened and made him king at the age of nine, he might have been a happier man, and England might have been the better for it. Unfortunately, though, he came to the throne at a young age, his mother abandoned him soon thereafter, and he was subsequently raised by courtiers to believe that he was born to rule. And so he seems to have grown up to be a spoiled and entitled adult, constantly running out of money, rarely thinking through his actions, and often making decisions out of fits of pique instead of any kind of strategy or principle.

(To give Henry his due, he loved Westminster Abbey and his attention to it is much of the reason that it is as beautiful and well-kept as it is today, and I sincerely respect that because it is one of the most glorious buildings I have ever set foot in.)

As for Simon de Montfort, I never got a good sense of him because Baker — even when ostensibly writing a biography of Simon de Montfort — is far less interested in him as a person, and never makes an effort to look at him without applying the prism of Henry III’s perspective. I often had the feeling that Baker was repurposing his Henry material into a second book.

So this brace of books was disappointing. After getting a very good grounding in Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and their children, I don’t feel that I’ve learned a huge amount about this period. Which is a shame, because the rise of Parliament and the captive monarchy seem both interesting and significant.

I was tempted to find another biography of Henry III — I did, after all, read four books about Alfred the Great all in a row — but as it turns out I do not have the same investigative zeal for Henry and Simon. For now, I am moving on to Edward I, but I’m prepared to backtrack once David Carpenter’s two volumes on Henry III are complete.

Book Review: The Kindest Lie


The most frustrating sort of book is the book that you desperately want to love but simply can’t. Sadly, this is the sort of book that The Kindest Lie was for me. It seemed to have so much going for it: the intersection of the personal and the political; timely themes about race, class, and identity; a protagonist with a secret and ambivalent feelings about her childhood home.

Unfortunately, things didn’t work out between me and this book, and I’m sad about it.

I had two issues: first, the characters never came alive for me; and second, the author did not trust the reader and this grated. (Well, two-and-a-half issues, because the ending felt unearned but I would have forgiven that if the characters and writing had worked.)

First, the characters. I just never got the feeling that the characters had been deeply imagined. I did not learn anything about them that wasn’t required for the plot. Ruth, the protagonist, makes decisions that make sense for the plot the author has in mind, but don’t add up to a coherent character — especially not one as smart as Ruth is supposed to be. And I defy anyone to read this novel and explain the marriage of I found myself applying a version of the Julie Taylor test — could I imagine these people’s lives outside the confines of this book? I could not. I experienced these characters the way I experience mannequins in museum dioramas. I found it very difficult to invest emotional energy in stick figures.

Secondly, the lack of trust in the reader. I found this immensely frustrating because every time I started thinking about the deeper issues that the book raised — and these are vital issues that we should all be thinking about! — the author told me exactly what to think. This passage, for example, in which the author essentially highlights a section of her book and writes “IRONY” next to it in all caps:

Ruth had made a vow to never become the girl the world expected her to be, the one who slept around and got pregnant by a guy who walked away. Yet that’s exactly who she had become. Her mother’s daughter. Her greatest motivation to excel in school and become successful had been the driving desire to reverse that fate.

Similarly, near the end of the book the author explains the meaning of Christmas to her readers. No one who has watched and comprehended It’s a Wonderful Life should need this spelled out to her:

She had attached almost every grievance in her life to someone here. But on Christmas, everything came into focus more sharply and she saw them all with new eyes—their flaws and their beauty—and she chose to appreciate them because, in the end, they were family.

These are conclusions the reader should be drawing for herself, and if you as an author read your chapter and worry that the reader won’t get it, the solution is not to write it out in explicit detail (unless, I suppose, you are actually composing a Sunday School lesson).

I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed. I very much wanted to like this book. The questions that the author wants to ask are interesting and important. But these flaws are, for me, fatal to a work of fiction. If the themes of the novel — questions about Blackness in America specifically, and questions of identity generally — are what draw you to this book I think you are better served by the novels of Yaa Gyasi and Brit Bennett.

On Blake Bailey and Philip Roth

One morning in April, I was a quarter of the way through the new Philip Roth biography, contemplating Blake Bailey’s take on Roth’s first marriage. I had been a huge fan of Bailey’s work for years — I’d read all his previous biographies, I’d read Richard Yates’s novels largely because he had been Bailey’s subject, and I’d long believed that that Bailey’s life of John Cheever was one of the four or five best biographies I’d ever read. But the Roth book was beginning to unsettle me. As best I can tell, neither Roth nor his first wife covered themselves in glory during this marriage. Still, I was beginning to be a little annoyed that Bailey seemed to not quite understand how unkind and self-centered Roth’s behavior toward his wife was. He seemed much more forgiving of Roth’s excesses than his wife’s. The perils of an authorized biography, I thought. But I was beginning to actively dread the Claire Bloom section.

Then–that very morning–this news broke. Credible accusations against Blake Bailey — that he’d groomed his middle-school students, that he’d harassed and assaulted them when they were older, that he’d raped two women. I felt sick. But the news explained so much! More than that, it cast an entirely different light on Bailey’s depiction of Roth’s first wife, and it made me question the portrayal of all the other women in all the other biographies. I found myself in the perverse position of wishing to reread and reevaluate all of Bailey’s books, and yet also not wanting to read another word by him.

I’ve seen some people argue that Bailey’s sins have nothing to do with the book he wrote. A stranger posted a grumpy Oscar Wilde quote on my GoodReads commentary on Roth and Bailey: “Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” That may be true as far as it goes, but when you are looking for someone to offer an analysis of an author’s life — and especially when that author has had, let’s say, contentious relationships with women — surely his own attitudes toward women are relevant. How can you look at the very plausible accusations against Bailey, and think, yeah, this is the guy I want to declare that Philip Roth is not misogynistic? How can you trust Bailey when he assures you that Roth’s first wife was an unreasonable shrew?

W. W. Norton dropped the Roth book within days of the accusations. But Bailey’s found a new publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, the house that has also brought you the memoirs of Woody Allen and Roger Stone. One wonders what Bailey thinks of being among such illustrious company–certainly being published by Skyhorse won’t do much to burnish Bailey’s destroyed reputation among the literary elite; all hope of a Pulitzer seems to be gone, and it’s unclear whether Bailey will ever again have the opportunity to write another of his magisterial biographies.

For myself, I haven’t read a word of the Roth bio since that morning in April. But I think it should be read, though not right now, and perhaps I will even finish it myself one day. Roth was, despite his many faults, an important writer of the twentieth century, and Bailey did have access to sources that no one may ever see again, or at least not for a very long time. Still, Bailey’s take on Roth can never again be thought of as definitive, and in the future it should be read with an eye toward what we are willing to forgive of men we consider geniuses, and how we determine who these geniuses are in the first place. Because it seems to be the case that the gatekeepers who anoint our brilliant writers are often themselves men who treat women very badly indeed. It is just possible that this clouds their judgment when they come to consider misogynists who happen to construct sentences well.

Book Review: Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times

Cover of Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times

I’ve always had a bias toward secondary sources. I’m not proud of this. But something in me seeks the highlights, looks for someone to explain a text to me instead of puzzling it out myself. So when my husband and I sat down to plan to vacation in Greece this September, to celebrate both the end (ish) of the pandemic and our newly empty nest, I immediately sat down and composed a twenty-two-book reading list because of course I did. And I left off Homer and Sophocles and Aristotle because. Because I don’t have time. Because how good are the translations anyway? Because will I even understand it without a good teacher? Because do I even have a good idea of what I should read? Because I have four months and I just need a survey of the main points.

I chose Thomas R. Martin’s Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times to get a quick overview of the history of ancient Greece, because I haven’t really studied it since I took  Search (a two-year-long survey of western civilization at Rhodes College) in 1990. And if an overview is what you’re looking for, this is the book for you.

The sheer sweep of this book can be sobering. America’s piffling 240-odd-year history looks paltry indeed, set against Greece’s history, which begins before people were bothering to write things down and is still going on these several thousand years later. This 283-page book covers roughly four thousand years, give or take, although it really zeroes in on the Archaic and Classical Ages (750 to 323 BCE).

Martin surveys the major highlights of ancient Greek history as well as a few biographical sketches and a few paragraphs on major philosophers and playwrights. Reading this book can be an exercise in frustration at times, because you get interested in something (the Peloponnesian War was much more interesting then I remembered it being, and Alcibiades was a hot mess, y’all) and then Martin briskly moves on after a page or two.

Martin does a great job of pointing the reader toward additional resources. He especially encourages us to read primary sources: Plato! Aristotle! Herodotus! Thucydides! But as I said above, my brain immediately goes to the books that will explain the primary sources to me instead of the sources themselves. (In a passage apparently directed specifically to me, Martin scolds, “The best way to learn about ancient Greek history and form one’s own judgments is to study the ancient evidence first and then follow up on particular topics by consulting specialized works of modern scholarship.”) But I’m probably not going to read the works of Plato before September, nor will I most likely get around to the Greek playwrights. I feel bad about that. I did not appreciate Plato’s Republic or Oedipus Rex when I read them in college, and now that I have the right perspective for them I don’t have the mental energy to apply to them. At least that is what I tell myself.

But how amazing it is that scraps of philosophy and history and plays have survived thousands of years so that Socrates and Aeschylus and Euripides can continue to talk to us. What a miracle that we can still find so much of what they say relevant! Or maybe it is just proof that human beings never change, not really — over dozens of centuries we just keep making the same mistakes, or at least the same choices, over and over again.