The Gap in the Wall

Near the home in the metro Detroit area where we used to live is a major intersection. A man sits there at the street corner in his wheelchair, day after day. There he rocks, to and fro, muttering to himself an incomprehensible litany of gibberish. He arrives some time in the morning. Back and forth he rocks until dusk.

The intersection lies along Detroit’s Woodward Avenue, the broad boulevard that shoots north from the river and divides the city into its east and west sides. Competing drugs stores perch like waiting vultures on the corners of the big intersections. It’s at one of these chain pharmacies that the man in the wheelchair spends his days. Summer, winter, good weather, bad. He’s such a permanent fixture there that to most locals he’s merely a landmark on their route somewhere else. Like any landmark along a familiar road, he’s important only for the few seconds it takes to approach him. Once past, a driver’s mind moves forward to the next point in the journey. The man becomes invisible once more. Unremarkable.

When first we moved into the neighborhood, the man’s chair would rest in a distinct basin of dirt his chair had carved into the grassy hummock between the sidewalk and the drug store’s parking lot. Soon after, the store got a renovation. The exterior became brighter and more modern; the parking lot got repaved. Day after day the man in the wheelchair sat there, seeming unaware of the construction as he rocked and stammered to himself.

Then the contractors started to build a wall—a four-foot high wall of red brick that started at the driveway along Woodward and curved gently around the corner onto the mile road intersecting it. With alarm we watched over the course of a couple of weeks the wall’s construction as it approached the man’s spot, unable to imagine what they planned to do.

The next time we drove past, the wall was finished. The drug store had lengthened it all the way to their other driveway; they’d simply left a gap at the spot the man’s wheels had worn their deep and barren grooves. Where before there’d been a man sitting in a wheelchair beside the road was now a long wall of shiny brick that appeared to be propped up in the middle, Atlas-like, by the shoulders of a muttering man in a wheelchair.

Perhaps building a wall with a gap to accommodate a raving man in a wheelchair isn’t the most obvious solution. Then again, in Detroit, my experience is that perhaps it is.

Back in the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties, the city’s most popular slogan was Say nice things about Detroit! The implication being, of course, that nice things were usually the absolute last thing out of anyone’s mouth when it came to Michigan’s most beleaguered city. When I moved there in the mid-eighties, the bad rap was justified. Detroit then had the highest murder rate in the country. Its neighborhoods were unpatrolled and, when it came to city services, underserved. Despite the fact that where I first lived had a large population of students and long-term residents, that area and other large sections of the city were what we now call food deserts. The crime—my God, the crime. Muggings, arsons, carjackings, the reduction of entire residential neighborhoods to crack house after crack house. None of that lay far from my doorstep.

Every new assault against humanity seemed to originate from Detroit and was duly reported in the national news. I grew to expect the worried calls from family after every fresh offense. The city had a rough-and-tumble charm to it, though. When I moved there, it was politically much more liberal than the stodgy South. I carved out a spot for myself and made it my home for twenty-five years, determined for a long time to see the good behind the disheveled exterior, and to say nice things.

I returned to Detroit for a few days this last summer—my first visit since I left Michigan in 2011 for the East Coast. It took a lot of convincing to get me to return. We visited in the days before the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision. The state had made a U-turn in its politics during my years there—one of the primary reasons we wanted to get the hell out. More recently, Michigan was one of the states most determined to dig in its heels against the inevitable and make its gay citizens as miserable as possible in the process. I’d known people who’d had to postpone wedding plans more than once simply because the state wouldn’t quit its vindictive and petty retributions against its gay population.

I was reluctant to take another bath, for however brief a stay, in the state’s bottomless pool of crazy. Shedding myself of its political stink after leaving had taken long enough. When Virginia is a progressive state in comparison, you know you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere.

But to Detroit for a visit I went. The suburbs where we stayed seemed fairly unchanged, close to where we’d lived during our last dozen years there. The wheelchair man, to our astonishment, still rocked and muttered from between his narrow brick enclosure. Some new storefronts had popped up. Others had closed. Some landmarks had been erased from my memories. Enough remained for me to navigate—both through the city’s streets and through my own memories as I calculated the changes around me.

On our first full day back, we went to visit the first house we bought as a couple. We’d originally chosen a tidy little colonial in what used to be a pleasant and green neighborhood just within the city of Detroit’s borders. At the time, it was heavily populated with police and fire fighters who lived there to fulfill city residence requirement. By Detroit standards, it was as safe as it gets—far enough from the city’s core that then the neighborhood seemed immune to the decay spreading through the downtown area.

We lived in that house for only five or six years. During that short time, the fire fighters and police moved away in search of greener pastures. The neatly-trimmed lawns became a little unkempt. Our neighbors grew a little older, got a little poorer. Then, almost overnight, the zip code south of us went toxic; we too moved farther out, but not before our home had been broken into and ransacked several times.

We’d looked in on the old home several times after escaping to the suburbs. The neighborhood always seemed a little shabbier every year. My god, though. This visit. We drove from Woodward across Eight Mile Road, while I looked at the window at the never-ending expanse of ugly just on the other side of the glass. Block after block and mile after mile of pawn shops, of strip clubs, hubcap dealers, shuttered businesses, empty lots, barbed wire fence, of concrete and asphalt and rust. There was greenery—though most of that was either weeds pushing up between cracks turned canyons in the long-neglected sidewalks, or spilling from the gutters of ruined and overgrown buildings. Mostly, though, I was seeing unending dilapidation of a sort I hadn’t witnessed since my departure east. Only worse.

Eventually we turned from Eight Mile down a commercial strip that had housed cute eateries and trusted family businesses when we lived in the area. Now it was mostly shuttered doors, broken windows, and curled, chipped paint for block after block. One bakery was trying to hold on. From the iron security bars covering its plate glass and its doorway, I suspected it wouldn’t be making the attempt for much longer.

Finally, we drove slowly down the broad avenue that had connected our residential street with the place my husband had been working at the time. This was the section that once had been among the safest in the city, where the neighborhood watch had been the active hobby of many a retiree and off-duty cop, where residents had taken pride in their abundant gardens and in the lawns trimmed and edged to a neat finish. Looking down the first street, I could see maybe ten or twelve houses on both sides of the street as we passed. Two were burnt-out shells, blackened and hollow remains of brick and timber, bad teeth in a sickly grin. A couple more of the lots were simply overgrown with waist-high weeds. Houses had been there not long before, but had been burned or demolished. A couple more of the houses had been boarded up and left vacant.

The next two streets proved that the first hadn’t been an anomaly. Visible from our car were more burnt-out homes, more abandoned homesteads, more wild growth, more neglect. The houses that hadn’t succumbed to the rot huddled to themselves on their narrow plots; they seemed drawn-in, cautious, afraid and embarrassed to acknowledge what was happening around them. The houses left whole were the aberrations. Their shabbiness made the ruins seem even more obscene to the eye. As we drove, I kept my hands pressed against the windows. “Good God,” I kept saying, numb at what I was seeing. “It’s a war zone. Good God.”

The street where we had lived during our earliest years as a couple hadn’t been hit quite as hard as the others. There were ruined buildings, and garages that had caught fire and never been replaced. There were broken windows, and abandoned homes, and several where nature had gone feral, but there were also multiple stretches of whole homes in a row. Ours was one of them. The old house had no summer flowers, no plantings, no decorations at all. The iron security bars over the window and doors hadn’t been there during our occupancy. The grass was overgrown, the paint battered and worn and probably untouched since we’d touched it up two decades ago. The house appeared to be hunched up and trying desperately not to attract notice. But it was hanging on.

I was shaken as we drove away in search of less depressing ways to spend our vacation time. All throughout that trip, when we’d encounter old friends I’d attempt to articulate how extensive was the devastation we’d witnessed. I tried to ask what, beyond the obvious ills of economic downturn and of a poverty that spread like cancer, had caused such rapid and near-complete ruin. They didn’t know, of course. They lived in areas far out from the crumbling wreckage—just as we’d thought we lived far enough away to avoid it, in those first years.

I don’t know the history of the man in the wheelchair. I don’t know what, if anything, area social workers and mental health professionals have tried to do for him. Another city faced with his problem would have solved it by building the wall anyway, consequences be damned, even if (maybe even preferably if) it drove the poor guy away from a place he’d called home. A small price to pay for a pretty new drug store, right? Still another might forcibly have put him into an institution. When I think of the man in his wheelchair, and of the gapped brick wall the drug store built around him, it occurs to me that the solution the arrived at here is very much the Detroit solution to things.

It seems kind, to let him have his space. It seems nice. But it doesn’t solve the problem at all. The man still sits there without supervision or proper care in all kinds of weather. And the drug store has a weird-looking wall with a huge gap in an odd place by night, and a sick man scaring away customers during the day. It’s a compromise that benefits no one. A side-stepping of responsibility that allows everything to continue, without helping anybody to progress.

Detroiters tend to get upset when outsiders concentrate so much on its images of ruin. A lot of Detroiters want those outsiders to avert their eyes, to focus upon the city’s nice parts—the new stadiums, the lights on the Fox Theater, the handful of acclaimed downtown restaurants, the very narrow section of downtown that isn’t falling apart at the seams. They want their own to say nice things about the city, so that the rest of the world has nice things to say as well. Nice words, though, don’t solve the very real problems the city has in the vast crumbling expanses that nobody wants to talk about.

There’s a reason outsiders are fascinated by those many images of Detroit’s ruined buildings: such disintegration doesn’t happen elsewhere in this country. Certainly in any city there are dilapidated structures, even run-down neighborhoods. None of that, though, compares to what has happened in Detroit in the last several decades. Nothing. Not in the epidemic size of it. Not in the severity. The fact that a number residents of the metro Detroit area assume the cancer has gotten just as bad everywhere else only confirms how willfully blind they are to the decay spiraling around them.

Many of my friends in Detroit know the issues their city faces. Many of them fight the good fight and work daily to combat them. But there’s a significant population whose automatic response is to limit themselves to nice places, limit their talk to nice things. They build a wall that solves no one’s problems, they side-step a little further away. And the deterioration continues.

Conversations with My Father: Gotcha Siri Edition

ME: Now, unlike your old iPad, this iPad has Siri.
MY FATHER: Re-ally now!
ME: Yes. I know you have longed for Siri.
MY FATHER (grabbing for the iPad): Let me try to stump Siri.
ME (grabbing the iPad back): The goal here is not to stump Siri. It’s that Siri can help you out with a few little tasks that ordinarily you’d have to open up apps to do, thus saving you a few steps and—
MY FATHER (grabbing for the iPad): Oh, I’ve got questions for Siri.
ME: God, you’re like a child. Just wait. Please. Okay?
MY FATHER: Fine.
ME: Okay. Now, to use Siri, you have to hold down the button until it makes this noise. . . .
IPAD: Buh-boop!
ME: Then you ask your question in a loud, clear voice. And that’s it. Got it?
MY FATHER (grabbing for the iPad): Got it. Now—
ME: There are certain things you can ask Siri. You can ask Siri about the weather. You can ask Siri questions about what time movies are playing. You can ask Siri to set an alarm for you. You can ask Siri for directions. All of these things are things you’d ordinarily do. So let’s try—
MY FATHER: I said I’ve already got some questions for Siri.
ME: SO LET’S TRY SOMETHING SIMPLE. Okay? SIMPLE. Let’s do this.
IPAD: Buh-boop!
ME: What’s the temperature outside?
SIRI: The temperature outside is seventy-two degrees.
ME: See? Easy, and I didn’t have to open up an app to—
MY FATHER: Ask her the temperature inside.
ME: What? Why? No, your iPad isn’t actually monitoring the temperature. It’s retrieving information from the National Weather Service. It’s not going to know the temperature inside your house.
MY FATHER: Let me try.
ME: I’m not sure you’ve grasped the—
MY FATHER: It’s my iPad.
ME: Fine. It’s your iPad. Go ahead. You remember what to do?
MY FATHER: How could I not? You go into exhaustive detail about everything.
ME: Fine. All yours. Go for it. Push the button until it beeps, and ask your question.
MY FATHER: Excellent.
IPAD: Buh-boop!
MY FATHER: (stares at the iPad silently)
ME (after a long moment): And ask your question.
SIRI: I’m sorry, I don’t know and ask your question.
MY FATHER: That was it?
ME: After the beep, you need to ask your question.
MY FATHER: Ohhhhh. Okay.
ME: Try it again.
IPAD: Buh-boop!
MY FATHER: (stares at the iPad silently)
ME (after a long moment): Did you hear the beep?
SIRI: I’m sorry, I don’t know about hear the beep.
ME: When you hear the beep, ask your question. You told me you had questions.
MY FATHER: Oh, I’ve got questions!
ME (suspicious): Wait, what question are you going to ask?
MY FATHER: I’m going to ask how many—
ME: No. You are going to ask, What’s the weather forecast for tomorrow.
MY FATHER: That’s boring.
ME: You are going to ask, What’s the weather forecast for tomorrow. What are you going to ask?
MY FATHER (begrudgingly): What’s the weather forecast for tomorrow.
ME: Right.
IPAD: Buh-boop!
MY FATHER (in a mincing voice): What’s the weather forecast for tomorrow?
ME: HEY.
SIRI: Tomorrow looks like a beautiful day—sunny and 76 degrees!
ME: See? Now you’ve got it.
IPAD: Buh-boop!
MY FATHER: Hey Siri, how many goals did the U.S. men’s lacrosse team score during the 2012 season?
SIRI: I’m sorry, Alicia. I don’t know anything about Lacrosse.
MY FATHER: Hah!!
ME: Siri’s not going to know—hey, why is it calling you Alicia instead of Alan?
IPAD: Buh-boop!
MY FATHER: Siri, I bet you can’t tell me how many witnesses were present at the signing of the Treaty of Appomattox.
SIRI: Sorry, Alicia. I don’t know about the Treaty of Appomattox.
MY FATHER: Hah!!
ME: You can’t—why is it calling you by my sister’s—
IPAD: Buh-boop!
MY FATHER: Siri, who took over leadership of Bacon’s Rebellion after Nathaniel Bacon died, and what did Bacon die of?
SIRI: I’m sorry, I can’t answer that question.
MY FATHER: Hah!! Gotcha Siri!
ME: I think you’ve got an overinflated idea of what Siri—
IPAD: Buh-boop!
MY FATHER: Okay, Siri, a brewery was connected with the Baltimore Orioles during the 1964-65 season. What was the name of the brewery and how was it connected?
SIRI: I’m sorry, Alicia. I don’t know about a brewery was connected with the Baltimore.
MY FATHER: HAH!! GOTCHA!!
ME: Why don’t I just go watch some television while you amuse yourself.

Conversations with My Father: Button-Pushing Edition

ME: Okay. We are going to set up your new iPad so that you can keep it secure and unlock it with your thumbprint.
MY FATHER: How long does the thumbprint last?
ME: What?
MY FATHER: If I give it my thumbprint, how long does the thumbprint last?
ME: How long does your thumbprint last? The iPad will store information about your thumbprint in its memory, so that when you place your thumb on the sensor, it will compare what it sees to what’s it has on record. If it recognizes what it senses as your thumbprint, it will unlock. . . .
MY FATHER: What if there’s a thief. . . ?
ME: He won’t be able to unlock your iPad.
MY FATHER: Because my thumbprint will have faded?
ME: No, because the thief’s thumbprint won’t match yours. Your thumbprint won’t fade. It’s stored away. The iPad will ask for his thumbprint, he’ll put his thumb on the sensor, and since it won’t match yours, he won’t be able to get your sensitive information inside.
MY FATHER: Like my clouds?
ME: You mean your information stored in the cloud? Yes, like that.
MY FATHER: Is my thumbprint in the cloud?
ME: No. Your thumbprint is in the processor inside the iPad.
MY FATHER: So how long does my thumbprint last?
ME (sighing): Your thumbprint will last forever. As long as the planets spin eternally around distant suns, so shall last your thumbprints.
MY FATHER: What if the thief has the same fingerprints as I?
ME: How many of those CSI shows have you watched?
MY FATHER: There are only four of them.
ME: And all four are all dreadful.
MY FATHER: I have learned a lot from CSI.
ME: Apparently not about fingerprints.
MY FATHER: Can thieves steal my fingerprints from my iPad on the dark web?
ME: Your iPad is not connected to the dark web. I’m pretty sure that the dark web is something that your CSI: Cyber show made up to scare people.
MY FATHER: That’s what hackers using the dark web would like you to think.
ME: Do you really think it’s likely that a thief would have the same fingerprints as you?
MY FATHER: In one episode, thieves stole the victim’s fingerprints by. . . .
ME: No thief is that desperate to get your iPad. So I want you to put your right thumb over the button. You’re going to lower it down and touch the button and lift it again, but don’t press—
MY FATHER: (presses the button)
IPAD: Beep!
ME: No, don’t press—
MY FATHER: (presses the button)
IPAD: Beep!
ME: No, I said don’t press the—
MY FATHER: (presses the button)
IPAD: Beep!
ME: DON’T PRESS THE BUTTON. God.
MY FATHER: Well you said—
ME: I said Don’t. Press. The. Button. Christ! Don’t press the button! Don’t press the button!
MY FATHER: You don’t have to get so worked up.
ME: Now listen. When I tell you, you are going to lower your finger onto the sensor. Just rest it there. Don’t push it. Then you will lift it up and put it down again. Okay? Do we understand what we’re doing?
MY FATHER (stiffly): I believe you’ve made yourself adequately clear.
ME: Okay then. Now. Lower your finger.
MY FATHER: (presses the button)
IPAD: Beep!
ME: I swear to god. I am going to take this ffffff. . . so-and-so iPad and just give it to the thieves.

Book Review Roundup

Back in my grade school days, writing book reports always seemed like a grim and tedious task. Perhaps it was the way we were taught to write them as dry summaries of the plots, devoid of any real opinions of our own.

Nowadays, of course, it sometimes seem that sitting down and writing the report afterward is the best part. Particularly when the book is dull (hello, How to be a Victorian) or downright offensive (I'm looking at you, William Goldman and The Season. I knew there was a reason I never liked The Princess Bride).


Cured: How the Berlin Patients Defeated HIV and Forever Changed Medical Science
by Nathalia Holt
4 of 5 stars
The ability to explain complex scientific issues in layman's terms is a rare enough gift. Nathalia Holt's ability to explicate the intricacies of the HIV virus and its workings without condescending to the reader is nothing short of astonishing. In her assay of the various clinical attempts to analyze and develop strategies to rid the virus from the human body—or at least to effect a 'functional cure' for those affected by it—Holt manages to shed light into areas of medicine and biology normally murky to those of us with little exposure to the science of HIV and AIDS. In doing so, she has created a comprehensive and readable survey of current approaches to treatment—and identifies areas in which attention and funding is lacking.

Holt's book is also the only scientific work I've read in which a researcher is romanced by an Arab prince on a white horse. Thumbs up for that alone!

Miss Pym Disposes
by Josephine Tey
4 of 5 stars
Miss Pym Disposes is a curiously tough nut to classify among Josephine Tey's crime stories. There's no face-to-face murder, so it's not really a murder mystery. Miss Pym herself is a self-taught psychologist, so the novel's not a detective story per se (nor does it delve with much clinical rigor into psychology). No crime actually occurs until the eighty-percent point, by which juncture many readers might have forgotten that they were reading a mystery at all. There's no arrest, no confession from the murderer. Very few of the hallmarks of the actual murder mystery can be found in this one-off story.

Yet the novel, set in a young women's physical training college in post-war Britain, reads almost as if Tey was attempting in some abstract manner to subtract as many traditional elements of the cozy detective novel as possible and still come up with something identifiably of that genre. It's a wry comment on her readers' determination to make an amateur detective out of the most unlikely character, even as the author digs in her sensible heels and absolutely refuses to give them what they expect. Tey's unique readability shines through in the volume, though, and as in Brat Farrar, her many memorable characters give the narrative a timeless charm.

How Music Works
by David Byrne
4 of 5 stars
There's a little bit of something for everyone in this book by the former lead singer of Talking Heads. For music theorists and historians, there are chapters devoted to the how and why music takes the forms with which we're familiar, based on the prevailing modes of performance, the technology, and the ways in which people have listened to music during any given historical period. For fans of the celebrity biography, there's background and an exceedingly brief and glossy account of the rise of Talking Heads. Composers may be fascinated by the detailed accounts of how Byrne writes his lyrics. Aspiring musicians interested in how bands make money should read the comprehensive discussion of how the music industry has changed over the last century, and the current types of contracts available to those who want to make a living through song creation. Hipsters get a chapter of their own on how to make a 'scene' popular. And anyone vitally interested in Byrne's income from his last few albums—his accountants, perhaps—will find down-to-the-penny descriptions.

Ultimately Byrne's choice of title is telling; his book isn't so much about what music is, or can be, as it is a collection of essays on the business of music from creation to recording to distribution and beyond. Its episodic nature might cause a reader's attention to flag in some sections, but there's almost certain to be something of interest in Byrne's interesting and literate book that's half analysis and half autobiography.

Turnabout
by Thorne Smith
5 of 5 stars
Just as one doesn't turn to Wodehouse for deep thought or characterization, one doesn't pick up a Thorne Smith novel hoping for trenchant realism. From the former author we expect a merry cavalcade of simpletons, wise butlers, tart aunts, and cow creamers; from Smith you get bootleg gin, hip flasks brimming with rye, supernatural antics, courtroom scenes with crabby old judges, and, inevitably, women's step-ins.

The premise of Turnabout involves a husband and wife body switch, executed by means so trivial that even the author barely spends any time justifying it. The comic results, however, are snicker-out-loud funny, as the pair stretch and snap their gender roles to lengths greater than Silly Putty itself could bear. Sure, the effort is lightweight, but who really cares when Smith's effortless style elicits so many belly laughs?

The Illusionists
by Rosie Thomas
4 of 5 stars
Rosie Thomas' The Illusionists is a satisfying tale of late nineteenth-century stage magicians at the romantic height peak of the Victorian stage. The illusionists of the title are a theatrical troupe formed out of motley backgrounds—a flashy show-off with a humble background, a young woman desiring independence and modern freedoms, a dwarf with significant skills in legerdemain, a German maker of complicated automata, a technician with a broken heart, and a stage hand with an uncanny gift for mimicry. The illusionists' individual desires for fame and fortune often at odds with their intersecting love triangles, and their struggles for power over the theater and its audiences cause constant conflict among the group, yet Thomas manages to keep the tale afloat like a particularly gripping old-fashioned stage show—a literary light entertainment with thrilling interludes of danger.

Although it's not anywhere nearly as lavish with period detail as a Sarah Waters novel, and although there aren't really any twists or turns that a sharp-eyed audience member couldn't spot coming from the back of the mezzanine, The Illusionists is still a fun and more than occasionally touching read. For those who are, like myself, a sucker for either novels of the Victorian era or for tales about magicians and actors, it's a sure-fire bet.

Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal (Faber Finds)
by Roy Horniman
4 of 5 stars
Roy Horniman's 1907 novel Israel Rank is better known as the inspiration for the 1949 Alec Guinness film Kind Hearts & Coronets, as well as the 2013 Best Musical A Gentleman's Guide to Love & Murder. All three entertainments share the similar high concept, in which a low-ranking aspirant to a high-profile estate and title faces the gallows after concocting a series of comic murders designed to make him the sole inheritor.

Black comedy, indeed. What might be interesting to modern readers, however, is how much more thoroughly dark and nasty the novel is in comparison to the giddier pleasures of the film and musical. Horniman's creation is hornier as well, for while the heirs in the adaptations both juggle the sexual attentions of two women, Israel Rank manages to keep on the hook no less than three. Also, Horniman's titular hero is as unreliable and criminally self-deluded a character as his literary serial-murderer cousin, the narrator of James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner—and the results are undeniably comic. Still, the murders in Kind Hearts and Gentleman's Guide both tend to be bloodless—and Israel Rank never lets the reader forget that murder is a dirty, foul business with actual consequences.

In Israel Rank the main character's mother is expelled from the noble Gascoyne family for marrying a Jew; its adaptations graciously avoid the sticky issue and rather genteelly look down upon their protagonist's late father for being . . . shudder! . . . a musician. Horniman's approach, however, is a more aggressive means of challenging not only the gentry's abundant prejudices, but as well the assumptions of his contemporary readers as well. While it's not as lightweight a confection as either Kind Hearts or Gentleman's Guide, for lovers of visceral, dark period literature, this little-known novel might prove a gem.

The Magician's Land
by Lev Grossman
5 of 5 stars
Lev Grossman's Brakebills novels have always seemed a bit like multi-headed hydras. The first entry in the series, The Magicians, was a little bit Harry Potter, a little bit Narnia, and a little bit any of those novels from the nineteen-nineties featuring disaffected youths in big cities with too much money, time, and drugs on their hands. The Magician's Land is no different, really. It's story is part caper, part fairy tale, and a whole mess of Narnia.

It's a good read, though. The characters it reunites for one final go-round in the magical land of Fillory have softened considerably since their introduction—the main character of Quentin, in particular, is no longer as unlikable as he once was. The novel's many action sequences are as exciting as ever, and the stakes for this last entry in the trilogy have increased exponentially. It's something of a feat that Grossman manages to tie up as many loose ends here as he does, while still bringing the series to a satisfying and tender conclusion. Highly recommended—especially for readers who feel they're too cool for old-fashioned fantasies even as they have a secret sentimental soft spot for them.

Timeline
by Michael Crichton
3 of 5 stars
I'd forgotten there was a recipe for a Michael Crichton thriller: one part brief boilerplate character sketches, two parts regurgitation of science voodoo to get the premise across, followed by three parts of competently-written action sequences. Literature it's not, but it gets the pages turning in a hurry.

The Marvelous Land of Oz
by L. Frank Baum
5 of 5 stars
The Marvelous Land of Oz is certainly the queerest of all the Baum Oz books. It would take nearly twenty-five years for another novel to be published—Virginia Woolf's Orlando—that would so prominently feature another transgender main character. Thrown in some explicit witch-on-princess lip wrestling and some Scarecrow-on-the-metrosexual-Tin-Man action in John R. Neil illustrations, and you've got yourself quite an interesting list of stereotype-refuting sexualities for a book published in 1904.

May I take a moment, though, to mention General Jinjur, leader of the women's revolutionary army against the Emerald City? Easily the most progressive and the coolest of all of Baum's characters—not to mention the most fashion-forward—she gets a bit of a short shaft here. After Jinjur uproots and remolds gender roles in Emerald City households to assert the equality of women fifteen years before they got the vote in the backwards U.S., she's deposed somewhat abruptly by the totalitarian forces of Glinda the "Good." And for what? Kicking back and enjoying a few caramels after her coup? Poppycock. Jinjur deserved a book of her own, if not a whole series.

The Paying Guests
by Sarah Waters
4 of 5 stars
With its obsession over the minutiae of housekeeping, its decidedly middle-class focus, and its nearly camp levels of stiff-upper-lip British earnestness, Sarah Waters' The Paying Guests is very much a pastiche—if not an outright parody—of the middlebrow feminine novel of the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties. The genre, typified by such writers as Nancy Mitford or Elizabeth Taylor or Stella Gibbons, saw its writers straddling the fine line between modernity and conservatism as well as the vast divide between high ideals and so-called 'low' topics involving violence and sexuality. Particularly female sexuality.

Throughout its domestic first half, The Paying Guests remains true to the genre's breezy, chipper spirit as its protagonist, Frances Wray, faces social and economic change in post-World War I London—a world in which her household has been stripped of patriarchy and servants and in which she and her mother are forced to take boarders in order to make ends meet. But it's also a world in which Frances has almost unlimited opportunity to embrace the upheaval, particularly when it comes to her own lesbianism, which Waters and her heroine both present with unapologetic frankness.

That the second half of The Paying Guests appropriates many of the tropes of an equally popular form of literature of the period—the British murder mysteries of writers like Agatha Christie or Josephine Tey—should surprise none of Waters' fans. Most of the author's books focus on criminals, from the grand schemes of hardened pickpockets and thieves in the Dickensian pastiche Fingersmith, to the lurid deceptions of Affinity, to the almost too-subtle-for-most-readers manipulations of the narrator in the du Maurier-flavored The Little Stranger. The tension resulting from the unlikely amalgam of the two genres is inexorable as the gears of justice grind slowly away. Waters' novel may not have the dark twists of plot that characterize her other novels, but its sense of impending doom, and the questions it raises of whether the protagonist's seeming dismal fate can ever be overcome, are just as pungent . . . if not even more so.

Read as a literary novel commenting upon, and occasionally mocking, its genre forebears, The Paying Guests is actually something of a gem. I question, however, whether the feminine middlebrow novel is something with which most readers today are familiar, or even know exists. Without that context, to the casual reader Frances might easily come off as some unlikely tiresome creature who, despite proclaiming herself a lesbian, sticks doggedly and without much reason to a traditional middle-class morality. The crimes to which she is witness might be viewed as so much police procedure without payoff. The novel is still a great read—yet it admittedly lacks the intricate plotting and serpentine delights that have epitomized Waters' other ventures into playing with literary genres.

The Sundial
by Shirley Jackson
4 of 5 stars
Shirley Jackson's 1958 novel The Sundial would be a hard sell to today's publishers, none of whom would want to touch a misanthropical allegory involving the residents of a single estate, each more thoroughly dislikable than the last, awaiting a destruction of the world as revealed in a oracular epiphany. Jackson's claustrophobic setting, which rarely ventures beyond the front gates of her Halloran House, foreshadows her next work, the classic The Haunting of Hill House—yet it's deliberately neither as atmospheric or as chilling in construction.

What The Sundial happens to have working in its favor is Jackson's abundant and subtle dry humor. It leavens the cynical proceedings, rendering them more wry than sour. Whether the Halloran family's prophesied utopian future comes to pass may be doubtful, but the workings of its insular and dystopian present are laid bare in Jackson's unique, deadpan style.

A Plague of Angels
by Sheri S. Tepper
4 of 5 stars
Sheri S. Tepper's 1993 outing is a bit of an oddity. Fairytale villages complete with creatures from fable mingle freely in its pages with gang-ruled dystopian post-apocalyptic cities seemingly straight out of a nineteen-eighties Pat Benatar music video extravaganza. The author takes the then-current topical hot buttons of sexually-transmitted diseases, women as sexual commodities, and the dangers of technological development gone wild, mixes in some of her favorite eco-feminist concerns, and finally throws in some talking animals and saintly former Native Americans with a what-the-hell authorial vim.

The recipe sounds like a bit of a mess. Although A Plague of Angels is one of Tepper's most sprawling novels—almost sometimes to the point of seeming unfocused—two decades on it still holds together quite well, thanks to its vigorous storytelling. As science fiction, it's nothing like anything anyone else has written. As always, however, Tepper's oracular urgency comes through loud and clear.

The Waters Rising
by Sheri S. Tepper
4 of 5 stars
I confess: in 2012 when I first read The Waters Rising, Sheri S. Tepper's sequel to A Plague of Angels, I thought it was the pokiest, most incredibly dull entry of all the author's novels. I found it slow-paced, confusing, pointless, and downright weird.

I'm a little surprised with myself, frankly, because when approaching the book again (with mighty low expectations), I found it engrossing. The parts I found sluggish now seemed paced with fine, deliberate intrigue. Sections that originally had seemed torpid now seemed subtle. Tepper's world-building is always weird, but that's one of the reasons I tend to like her.

Readers expecting a fast-paced Tepper novel like Raising the Stones or even one of her more hectic creations like A Plague of Angels will feel ill-served by The Waters Rising. Readers willing to accept the books intricacies and measured pace, however, will find it a rewarding investment of time.

Fish Tails
by Sheri S. Tepper
4 of 5 stars
It's fitting—and a little weird—that Fish Tails, Sheri S. Tepper's thirty-fifth novel, features a handful of major characters from her very first novels published over thirty years ago. Weird, because the connection between her The True Game series and the books in her most recent Plague of Angels trilogy seems tenuous at best. Fitting, because the interplay between the two knits together both ends of Tepper's career as a writer, and highlights the fact that for most of her career she's shown an unflagging passion for one central theme: bringing mindfulness to the human race's relationship to the planet and the diverse ecosystems of which it's a part.

Fish Tails is a picaresque escapade of sorts that follows the protagonists of The Waters Rising as they travel through their world to spread warnings of an impending watery apocalypse. Read as an exercise in world-building, it's an impressive feat; Tepper can go on at considerable length about the aerodynamic makeup of a griffin wing, for example, or the intimate details and mating habits of extra-planetary cultures. (And she does.) The book's garrulous characters spend so much time explaining their cultures, however, or acting as the orators of Tepper's ecofeminist brand, that the book is actually fairly free of Tepper's multi-threaded plots. Readers looking for a tense read with strong antagonists, as in Raising the Stones or her Marianne series, or any of the books from the height of her career, are likely to remain unmoved.

It's rare to encounter authors who, over the course of several decades, remain uncompromising and so focused upon a single message. Tepper's often faulted for being preachy. It's tough, however, to claim she's not right.

How to Be a Victorian
by Ruth Goodman
2 of 5 stars
Ruth Goodman's cross-class survey of life during the Victorian age is designed for the most casual of readers. Structured to follow the typical day of a British citizen during the era, it begins at dawn with the daily ablutions and breakfast, and ends after sunset with bed. And by bed, Goodman means with sex, which apparently she couldn't wedge anywhere else.

None of the information Goodman presents is unavailable elsewhere, and her survey format has been done before—and better, including in Daniel Pool's What Jane Austen Ate & Charles Dickens Knew The author, a social historian who has been a presenter on historical re-enactment television programs for the BBC, doesn't bring anything particularly special or insightful to the table here. In fact, I find her hyperbolic assertions, such as that a diet of bland Victorian fare with no seasonings stronger than an onion awakened her palate to a sensory rainbow of subtleties, to be absolute hogswallop. Take How to Be a Victorian for the light social history it is—but you'd do better to get your information elsewhere.

The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway
by William Goldman
2 of 5 stars
There's a moment every gay man dreads—the split second when the topic of sexuality arises and somebody's smile turns into a snarl. It might happen when a relative unknowingly drops some sexual slur; it might come when a friend makes a cutting aside about gays, or a stranger on the street letting an epithet fly. Or for gay readers, it might be the moment that a book turns sour when the author makes his prejudices known. Even though a particular insult might not be directed at us—especially when we're merely a reader—it still stings like a slap across the face. And for gay readers of a certain age, we remember well a time when we were expected to shut up, take the slaps, and keep our opinions to ourselves.

William Goldman's The Season, a nonfictional play-by-play account of the 1967-68 Broadway theatrical season, is a relic of that age. Hoo boy, does it show. The first hard slap arrives barely before the first paragraph's conclusion, when the author sneers at 'a flutter of fags' who've arrived to see Judy Garland in performance—then, for readers who didn't quite get the jargon, adds that they're 'obvious homosexuals.' A scant couple of paragraphs later, he has someone opine that it was a pity they didn't get all the fags at Auschwitz.

It's the kind of opening that, forty-five years after its publication, makes one grateful for all the progress since.

Because it really doesn't get any better, as the book progresses. Goldman asserts once that there's "nothing remotely wrong with liking plays that have homosexual themes, productions, or performances", except "when homosexual taste becomes distorting to the play itself"—but just about everything he dislikes about the theater—heck, about the entire world—boils down to what he imagines as distorted homosexual taste. He's worried when an actor "swishes too much." He's upset at plays in which women change their minds and switch from one love interest to another—because switching partners for novelty is what the fags do, he explains. He gets into a lather about a spate of plays that examine the institution of marriage as fundamentally unsound, because that's what the sneaky homosexuals want it to be.

Goldman's angry that the New York Times has features of "no real news value" that are included because homosexuals like them. He spends several pages scribbling angrily about pop culture ukulele sensation Tiny Tim, whose high falsetto and stringy hair obviously reveal him to be a blatant and unapologetic homosexual. (Was he? I don't know.) He's thoroughly flummoxed by the fact that in a Cosmopolitan article talking about Jacqueline Onassis' friends, "at least four of the men listed are internationally famous homosexuals." (When I start a rock band, by the way, Internationally Famous Homosexuals will be the name.) Even a manly man's man like writer Ernest Hemingway isn't masculine enough for Goldman. Hemingway, in his autobiography, said something or other that proved him to be, and I quote, "a bitch."

By the time the book nears its conclusion, Goldman is frothing at the mouth at how Hair is an utter failure primarily, as he explains in exquisite detail for three pages, because it actually and relentlessly forces him to endure, at face level, actor's penises. Goldman doesn't want or need to see those! But it's fairly clear that he has other targets as well. He's not particularly fond of women—he has little to say of noted theatrical females except that a few of them "really need to lose some weight." He loathes intellectuals, and goes out of his way to present some pretentious twaddle that he passes off as dialogue from a lauded play with snob appeal, invites his readers to sneer at it, and then reveals that he wrote it himself—as if to prove that any ol' regular Joe could be a playwright. And most of all he dislikes critics, giving them a vicious savaging (especially if they work at Newsweek, which in 1970 was apparently flush with internationally famous homosexuals) that seems less the work of Goldman the dispassionate journalist, and more an act of Goldman, novelist and screenwriter with a few grudges against critics under his belt.

When Goldman takes the time to examine what makes a play work or not work, he makes a compelling case—as he does in the outstanding chapter on the musical Golden Rainbow, in which he dissects all the ways a musical involving Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme went terribly wrong. When he squanders his opportunities, it's disappointing. In a chapter ostensibly about the classic play, Loot, he notes in the space of a single sentence that Loot opened and on Broadway and that it was authored by Joe Orton, then proceeds to write a couple of dozen unrelated pages about corruption in the box office in which Loot is never again mentioned. When he's supposed to be writing about Edward Albee, he instead carps for an entire chapter about the depravities of internationally famous homosexuals. As interesting the topic and as readable the prose, I found The Season too full of slaps to retain appeal.

Perhaps at the time of the book's publication it might've been argued that Goldman was fairly progressive in his stance. He does, after all, refer to gays as a "persecuted minority group." But then he'll turn around and administer a backhanded rebuke, like making the grandiloquent generalization, "If homosexuals have an enemy, it is age."

No, Mr. Goldman. If homosexuals have an enemy, it's guys like you and your buddy who wanted Auschwitz to finish the job.

Time and Time Again
by Ben Elton
3 of 5 stars
Aside from some subtle comedic flourishes, there's precious little in Ben Elton's time-travel extravaganza, Time and Time Again, to betray the author's substantial fame as a humorist of both stage and many a screenplay. What Elton has produced, however, is a fast-moving science fiction adventure that, while competently told, isn't really much more.

Most time-travel tales fall flat for me in the initial set-up; it takes a delicate balance of explication and believable motivation. In Stephen King's 11/22/63, for example, I never really bought into the reasons why an ordinary Joe would travel back to the Kennedy era merely on the say-so of a stranger in a restaurant. King managed, however, to wrangle a touching ending from a weak foundation. Elton, on the other hand, grapples with the opposite problem: though his book provides a rock-solid reason and basis for its hero to take the leap from 2024 to 1914 in order to prevent World War I, he fails to make much of anything that happens afterward. Along the way to his vague and unsatisfactory conclusion, Elton does manage to bring up one or two interesting alternate-history mind-distortions, but it's not really enough.

It's a shame when a book has a ripping first and second act, but fizzles completely in the third. Although it's eminently skippable, for curiosity seekers or for fans of the most lightweight of alternate history sagas, Time and Time Again is at least a quick and easy read.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
by Alan Bradley
5 of 5 stars
The juvenile heroine of Alan Bradley's not-at-all juvenile mystery series reads like a hybrid of the naively charming Cassandra Mortmain of I Capture the Castle and of the poison-obsessed Merricat Blackwood of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. And that's just fine with me.

The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag
by Alan Bradley
3 of 5 stars
Eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, expert both in the chemical analysis of poisons and the art of detection, is as sharp and charming as ever in her second outing as amateur sleuth.

The book suffers, however, from a problem in pacing; the murder itself doesn't take place until near the midway point, leaving Flavia for much of the volume a fairly passive observer to the fairly dull antics of the adults around her. The real charm to the first book in the series was watching the girl detective's mind at work as she puzzled, connived, and charmed her way to the solution. Having the good stuff all confined to the rushed chapters in the book's second half is a bit like having to eat a heck of a lot of undesirable veg in order to have a few bites of pudding.

A Darker Shade of Magic
by V.E. Schwab
4 of 5 stars
A Darker Shade of Magic is a rip-roaring fantasy adventure set in a series of parallel-universe Londons—apocalypse-torn Black London, magic-hungry White London, magic-rich Red London, and the magicless Gray London.

As compelling and relentless as the writing is here, however, and as richly-described the various Londons, I'm more than a little baffled at how little a sense of period and time Schwab lends to the book. The year is supposed to be 1819, and even Gray London—the equivalent of our world—seems barely to be of that decade, much less of the nineteenth century. Little inconsistencies abound; even given the flexibility afforded a totally different parallel universe, I seriously doubt any monarch of any world's 1819 London would utter as banal a sentence as "Everything going to be okay."
Nitpicking aside, the novel's a swift-moving and vividly-imagined gem.

Vicious
by V.E. Schwab, Victoria Schwab
4 of 5 stars
V. E. Schwab's take on college students granted superpowers after a lab hypothesis gone terribly wrong is chock-full of unlikable and deeply unsympathetic characters. That's perfectly fine, given that the novel is one of the most tense, most fun-to-read page-turners I've had in my hands for years. Intensely blinkered as her super-villains are, and as impure their every motive, Vicious progresses at such a pace that it's nearly impossible to put down.

Boxes in the Attic

When it came to holiday decorations, my parents tended to be hoarders. I'm not talking about ceiling-support-beams-groaning-from-the-weight-of-life-sized-artificial-reindeer-filched-from-the-city-dump levels of accumulation, but certainly a level of pack-rattiness that led to a labyrinth of overstuffed cardboard boxes in the old family attic. My mother found it impossible to throw out anything her darling children might have made or brought home at any festive point of any given year. We might not have always used them. But we sure had them, just in case.

Although we never formally decorated for Halloween, my mother still maintained a large cardboard box crammed with October’s refuse. It included apple-head witch dolls that had reached such an advanced stage of desiccation that they resembled voodoo fetishes, leering pumpkins cut with pinking shears from construction paper, limp orange and black garlands of crepe paper, and a particularly hideous wreath made of macaroni and candy corn that I'd made in church kindergarten. I'd used more paste than pasta in the laborious construction, and the candy corn’s sugar had blurred into a vaguely coral haze, but my mom wasn't going to let it go.

For Easter, my parents used to tap pinholes into the ends of eggs and blow out the insides. (We weren’t a hard-boiled egg family. Nobody liked the texture.) We'd spend a night filling little bowls with vinegar, then dropping Paas tablets into the liquid and thrilling at the fizz. Delicate as the empty shells were, my parents loved them because they could be stored away in Styrofoam eggs crates to keep for succeeding years. Even when I was in high school, my mom was hauling out the eggs I'd made at the age of four. There they'd sit among the newly-dyed specimens that still smelled vaguely of pickles. Their purples and greens and pinks were nowhere near as lurid as the newer eggs; they'd acquired a patina of age that rendered their cracked and chipped exteriors gently mottled, like old marble. Old marble, that is, slapped with crumpled and fading bunny stickers.

It was with Christmas decorations, however, that my mother’s magpie tendencies really came to the fore. Nothing that ever had been employed as decoration during the merry month of December escaped the eternal grasp of her packing box sarcophagi—no mater how old or crumbling or non-functional they might be.

One of the very first craft projects I ever undertook was with out next-door-neighbor, an aspiring school teacher in the Lakeside apartment complex that was our first Virginia home. She had me squeeze a heavy white frosting-like substance from a piping bag onto wax paper, into which she pressed metal ornament hooks and then set to firmness in the oven. Though they were intended (I think) to resemble drifts of snow, these goopy blobs resembled nothing so much than dog turds ossified white in the hot sun. Still, my mother kept them wrapped in tissue paper in old Thalheimer’s boxes, year after year. Despite my protests about how hideous they were, she would pull them one by one from their wrappings and hang them on the lower branches of the tree . . . which in theory were the only branches sturdy enough to support the decorations’ cement-like bulk.

My sister and I, at some point when we were very young, received some kind of holiday craft kit from a neighbor or piano teacher comprised of very thin sheets of balsa wood and tiny tubs of cheap paints. The idea was that one was supposed to push out the pre-printed and perforated shapes from the balsa—various Santas, snowmen, Rudolph, and patrician New Englanders riding in sleighs while wearing top hats and muffs—then paint them delicately and cherish them as handcrafted keepsakes. Our problem was that the wood was cheap and so paper-thin that it disintegrated from the pressure of the paintbrush, much less the twenty chubby juvenile fingers attempting to separate them. No matter. My mother risked splinters to hang the garishly- (and not exceedingly accurately-) painted monstrosities year after year.

Likewise, she cherished a set of ‘stained glass’ ornaments we made by doling plastic pellets atop metal frames and then melting them at a high temperature in the kitchen oven until the house smelled like a Dow Chemical plant. Even years later, after the plastic had long fallen out, she'd still hang the metal skeletons.

Naturally, my mother had real treasures that she cherished. There were a few real eggshells that had been sliced open at an oblique angle and painstakingly hand-painted and decorated on the inside. The artist had set wooden figurines within to make miniature dioramas of manger scenes and Santa on his sleigh. My sister and I could be trusted to hang the white frosting turds or the more indestructible ornaments. The eggshells were so delicate, and so laden with gold braid and tiny pearl-like beads that when we’d decorate our tree, my mother would insist on hanging them herself. She had a handful of other ornaments from her youth she considered sacred; these she kept packed in layers of musty-smelling tissue so old that it crackled like wildfire and disintegrated at the touch. She’d hang her keepsakes high upon the boughs in places of honor, beyond the reach of little children and the packs of tree-climbing house cats that roamed our home.

The true valuables, however, were very much in the minority. They were buried in an avalanche of Styrofoam stars blotched with glitter, by halos fashioned from bent clothes hangers wrapped with sad lengths of pink garland, by plastic cranberries and kindergarten handprints in clay. They were outnumbered by the artificial pinecones encrusted with spray-on snow from a can, and leering felt elves, and tiny stockings given out as party favors at school.

And on New Year’s day, the family would pack away antiques and ephemera alike into the dozens and dozens of boxes from which they came, and store them away for another year, when they’d be rediscovered and treated like heirlooms of old.

The Bridge Game

Whenever I write about my distant and far-off childhood, I always feel uncannily like Laura Ingalls Wilder must have, sitting down to a rough-hewn old school desk with a scratchy fountain pen in hand, to nostalgically describe frontier life in the Old West. I always halfway expect, in my narratives, for Pa to come strolling in from the Dakota Territory bearing a rucksack stuffed with meat from a freshly-killed b’ar.

In the far-off antique lands of my youth, Saturday nights were game nights in my family. Well, most nights were game nights around my household, anyway, for some of us. During my middle and high school years in the nineteen-seventies and early nineteen-eighties, our household didn’t have cable and we didn’t have a hundred electronic devices to whittle away our time. When the sun set, our entertainments were books, the four channels we could receive on our primitive TV sets, telephone calls made on a rotary phone, or board or card games.

My mother and I both loved games and preferred to spend our free evenings matching wits at the kitchen table. My favorites were those with a detective theme that employed logic and deduction to arrive at a conclusion, like Clue, or the jewel-themed Sleuth, or the Eurogame Scotland Yard, or a primitive bleeping console called Electronic Detective. My mother’s favorites were spelling games like Scrabble or Word Rummy or Upwords, or card games from traditional canasta to the exotic, mahjong-based Mhing.

Once a week on Saturday nights, however, with a lot of wheedling and cajoling from his children and heavily-coached reminders that we, his next of kin, would soon be grown up and out of the house and eventually have the powers of attorney to put him in a particularly disreputable home of our choice for the aged and decrepit, my father could be persuaded to join the family around the kitchen table for an hour or two of jolly competitive fun. We would sometimes play a few super-vicious rounds of Pit or the much calmer Probe, another Parker Brothers word game.

But mostly we played contract bridge.

I was eleven or twelve when my parents decided they’d teach bridge to my sister and me. At seven or eight, my sister was able enough to count the value of face cards and add them up to thirteen—the magical number at which it’s permissible to start bidding. I was old enough to grasp a little of the deeper strategy. And besides, my parents assured us, knowing contract bridge was an absolute must for college. All the right people played bridge. If I had the knowledge to pull off a grand slam, doubled and redoubled, well, my mother said. That kind of derring-do would prove the key into any social circle I chose.

She sold me. Already I was apprehending that my likely social circles in college, if they resembled anything like those I’d enjoyed during my pimply adolescence, were likely to be fairly limited. Limited to the cootie-infested, the unpopular, and the new kids who hadn’t yet learned to shun me as a social leper, in other words. Inspired by my parent’s Eisenhower-era reminiscences of hot coffee, crustless sandwiches, and vigorous rubbers with the coed smart set, I threw myself into learning the game.

Never once did it occur to me to question my parents’ faith in bridge as the primary undergraduate social lubricant; enough of their own generation still played the game that at the time it was still an everyday commonplace. The Times-Dispatch carried bridge columns both by Goren and by Omar Sharif. The local library had a whole shelf of books on the game that saw enough circulation so that they weren’t yanked and replaced by something more current.

We were all fairly competent at playing out the hands. Slapping down cards, selecting the proper club or diamond from the dummy, and collecting tricks occasionally requires a little finesse, but for the most part it’s a pretty mechanical process. The problem with our Saturday night bridge games was that we were all wildly different in our approaches to bidding. Omar Sharif, listening to our bridge-table banter on a typical Saturday, would have walked away scratching his handsome Egyptian head and permanently swearing off the game.

My father, for example, was a small-potatoes player who aimed at plucking fruit from the lowest-hanging branches—and plenty of it. He was happy to stop bidding at one spade or two diamonds, tops, so that he could play out the hands quickly, hit his low contract, and insist everyone toss in the rest of their cards so he could reshuffle and move on. It might take him more hands to get a win, but when you’re only playing out half the deck, they surely didn’t take long. Very practical, my father.

My sister was usually his partner; her approach to bidding, given that she was four years my junior and playing contract bridge at an age most kids were still mastering Candyland, was pretty much to state exactly what was in her hand. If my father would open with a conservative bid of one diamond, my sister, with all the subtlety of Norma Desmond auditioning for Salome, would crazily bat her big eyelashes over her cards and intone, “SIX HEARTS. I mean, FOUR SPADES. I mean, two DIAMONDS.” Which all of us quite correctly interpreted to mean that she had a hand containing six heart cards, four spades, and only two diamonds, leaving my father to pick whichever suit he thought he could best handle. The American Contract Bridge League would’ve hounded her out of any tea room, but as she was only in second grade, we were a little more forgiving.

Ever since I learned that bridge was my certain in among the undergraduate beau monde, I applied myself to a study of the game with infinitely more vigor than I displayed for any actual school homework I ever did. I checked all the books out of the library multiple times, read the daily columns and did the puzzles, subscribed to the American Contract Bridge League newsletter, took notes, and memorized every trick and convention that I could cram into my noggin.

Playing with me was likely excruciating. If I had a partner bid one no-trump, I would agonize for long minutes over whether to respond with a Jacoby transfer or a weak two, or whether I should bank on my partner understanding what I was tell them when I resorted to the little-used Chittleton defense. Post-hand autopsies with me were a form of torture on par with anything Guantanamo Bay inmates might have known, as I’d splay out the tricks and lecture everyone on what they ought to have played, according the Hoyle. I might have known my stuff, then, but I surely didn’t know my audience . . . though they were more aware than I how irksome I was.

My mother was usually my partner. We were singularly ill-suited for each other. I was mathematical, precise, and by-the-book; she relied heavily on the psychic bid. I could feel my blood pressure slowly rising right from the evening’s first hand. I would make a calculated and reasoned opening bid of one spade, based on the count of my face cards, the length of my suits, and the probability of our being able to make book plus the requisite number of tricks to win a rubber. My mother, on the other hand, would gaze at the bottom of her coffee cup as if contained tea leaves she might read, then close her lids and attune herself with the great spirits of the universe and consult some internal Ouija board, and finally, with veiled eyes and a dark, eerie, hollow, oracular intonation, respond, “FIVE SPADES.”

Of course my father and sister would instantly pass. When my mother would lay out her hand for the dummy, I’d discover that she’d have no spades at all to support me, perhaps one or two jacks at most among the face cards, and a multitude of low diamonds that were of zero use. Then, smoking heavily throughout my squawkings, she’d ignore my outraged postmortem and my appeals to Omar Sharif and say mysteriously, “I thought you were sending me five spaces telepathically.”

“Telepathy has no part in bridge!” I’d yell. "Bridge is a science!"

“Hush now,” she would whisper, curling the new hand that my father had dealt. “I’m trying to be in tune with my cards.”

“You should try to COUNT your CARDS!” I’d shriek. “There is no way that five spades—“

“One club,” my father would say.

“Pass. There is no way that anyone could bid five spades when her partner—“

“SIX DIAMONDS,” my sister would say. “I mean, ONE DIAMOND.”

That would get my attention. “Are you really going to let her—“ I’d try to protest.

My mother, in the meantime, would have studied her hand deeply, gazed through the bathroom plumbing and the second floor ceiling and the house’s roof to the constellations above, decided that Mercury was in the seventh house and that her internal I Ching had fallen onto the thirty-second hexagram, and announce, out of the blue, “Four no-trump.”

It’s something of a wonder I emerged from that particular cauldron with a working knowledge of bridge at all.

The sad punchline to devoting my adolescence to contract bridge is that when I arrived at college in nineteen eighty-one, none of my peers played the game. Not at all. Whatsoever. My vision of a spirited repartee and crustless sandwiches among the college smart set was quickly erased by the mundane reality of being on a beer-swilling freshman dorm hallway full of drunken frat pledges throwing keggers in the lounge across the hall, new Asia LP blaring at rib-rattling volumes, while I sat solitary, holed up in my room trying to brush up on my overcalls and Blackwood convention.

A couple of times I attempted to place ads to see if anyone else on campus might be interested in forming a bridge club. The only responses I got were from kids pastier and pimplier and even more fantastically less popular than I—the sort of kid who would look at me and think that I was the smart set they’d been promised to meet by their bridge-playing parents and grandfolks.

If someone was desperate enough to think I was the beau monde, they clearly were not the kind of person with whom I cared to associate. I bit my tongue, put away my Goren, and licked my wounds. I took up gin rummy instead. It was a simpleton’s game, but hey. When in Rome.

Kefir Madness

Sometime when I hit my forties I started encountering a symptom I’d never in my life before experienced: the ever-present notion that I had to burp. It was heartburn, of course. All through my twenties and thirties I’d eaten what I pleased, without remorse or a thought to the aftereffects. Suddenly I was being required to consider the potential pH level of my digestive system at every turn, and to cast dark, suspicious glances at that innocent glass of lemonade or an innocuous marinara, lest they disrupt my tummy’s delicate balance and leave me sleepless and belching all night.

Pills helped, of course, but who wants to pop pills all the time? Over time I found I could regulate my system more effectively by both watching my diet and eating yogurt. The yogurt seemed to settle things down considerably, thanks to its probiotic bacteria and its dairy. I found that when I’d go on vacation, especially, where I’d not have full control over what was going into my meals, eating a little cup of it in the morning would keep my stomach calm and steady for most of the day.

Then a few years ago, I discovered kefir in the grocery store. Like yogurt, kefir is a form of fermented milk. It’s simply less like pudding in consistency, though, and more like a slightly melted milkshake. I grew to prefer the stuff over yogurt, actually—I liked the slightly tart taste, and preferred swigging the stuff down to dealing with all those little plastic yogurt cups.

When last year I started on a medication that expressly forbade me from using any kind of antacid medications, I had to step up my kefir ingestion. I was bringing up two quarts of the stuff from the store rather than one. The weeks when I couldn’t find any at all—it’s in most of the supermarkets, as I said, but it’s still not so mainstream a product that store managers would panic when they run out—would send me into a tizzy. So although it very much sounded like the sort of thing the hippie-dippy parents I knew growing up might do, I started looking into making my own.

The primary thing that convinced me to take the plunge was the cost. I was shelling out four to five dollars for a quart of kefir at the supermarket. Milk, on the other hand, is local and fresh here, and can be had for about two dollars a half-gallon. A starter culture of kefir would only cost a couple of bucks. Sold! So in the spring I purchased some starter grains (grains are what the bacterial cultures that make kefir are called) and was on my merry way.

The grains arrived in a tiny Ziploc bag. They didn’t look like much. The instructions informed me I should pour the contents into milk and let them hydrate. I did so, feeling all the while like I was embarking on raising sea monkeys.

For a couple of days I strained out my tiny little grains as instructed, and changed the milk. I’d cover the jar with a rubber band and paper towel and leave it on the kitchen counter overnight to ferment. I was waiting for that moment when magically the grains would expand and start turning the milk into delicious (and slightly alcoholic) kefir. It didn’t take long in coming. By the third day, the grains swelled from pea-sized globules of nothingness into all-consuming colonies of sticky bacteria that looked very much like glossy heads of cauliflower. The kefir they produced, as they consumed all the lactose, came out thick, whiter than white, and sweet-smelling. I was on my way.

After a few days I had enough to start making smoothies for my breakfast meal. All I had to do is drop some frozen fruit in the blender, add a little sweetener, fill it up with kefir I’d been collecting every morning, and let it blend. The result was even better than the stuff I’d been buying in the store. If I get bored with strawberry, I can switch to raspberry. Or blueberry. Or pomegranate. Or I can just squeeze in some chocolate syrup. Or I can add coconut, or honey, or vanilla. It all tastes good.

So I’ve been very satisfied with this particular aspect of kefir making. It’s healthy, it’s easy, it’s cheap, and I get the satisfaction of having done it all myself, with the aid of some friendly bacterial colonies.

What I didn’t count on, however, is how rapacious the kefir grains are, or how rapidly they reproduce. It really only takes about a tablespoon of the grains to produce a quart of kefir a day, and I usually only make a pint. The little quarter-teaspoon of starter grains I used rapidly burgeoned into roughly a half-cup of huge, hungry, slimy cauliflower heads that were demanding, Audrey II-fashion, that I FEED THEM, SEYMOUR.

I’ve gotten ruthless in culling the colonies. Originally I was trying to give the things away to locals—I was even willing to attempt to dehydrate grains in order to send them long distances, if necessary. Apparently no one is as crazy enough as I to grow his own kefir, however. (Wonder why?) So now, when the grains get too big and aggressive, I’m ruthless about splitting the colonies in half and tossing a good deal of milk-hungry bacteria into the garbage can.

Even with that, I’ve still got kefir coming out of my freakin’ ears, man. I have enough to make more smoothies than I can possibly drink in a week, and still have leftovers. So every new recipe I’ve tried lately has used kefir out of desperation and a fear that the stuff will take over the kitchen more than it already has. Anything that requires kefir’s cultured cousins, buttermilk or sour cream, I now make with kefir. Kefir ranch dressing. Kefir gingerbread. Chicken stroganoff with kefir. I make pancakes with kefir. Brownies with kefir. Scrambled eggs with kefir. It’s gotten to the point where Craig will sniff with suspicion at anything I make and ask, “This has kefir, doesn’t it.”

Don’t get me wrong. I love the stuff still. But my nightmares now all involve alien bacterial colonies, ruthlessly replicating as they stretch out their cauliflower-like tendrils to force mankind to do their bidding. Their quest: world domination. Their headquarters: my kitchen counter.