Hello fellow readers,
It’s been too long since the last Cottage Reader. Lent and Easter kept me busy at The Cottage and church, and now baseball season is here. I started a draft of this lamenting the sorry state of the Washington Nationals, but they’ve turned it around a bit lately, so I have to watch ALL the games just in case they might win. This is not helpful to getting a lot of reading done.
I did, as promised in the last issue, read The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. I read another novel, American Sycamore by Charles Kenney, lots and lots of articles and Substack posts, and I’ve begun a study of a new book, A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America, by Richard Slotkin, my favorite professor in college. More about all of these below.
📚Brian McLaren Is Coming to The Cottage
Brian has a new book out, Life after Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart. Diana says it is his best book yet, which is saying something. Here’s how she describes it:
"When I finished Life After Doom, I was overcome by a single unexpected response: gratitude. In these pages, Brian is pastor, teacher, therapist and prophet as he guides us through the multiple crises of our current situation. He challenges both debilitating despair and false hope to awaken our capacity to dream and act courageously for the future... You will thank him."
Brian will be live from The Cottage for a Third Thursday Zoom event for paid subscribers on Thursday May 16, at 4:00 PM (Eastern), just two days after the book’s release on May 14.
Paid subscribers will receive a link to the event the morning of the day of the conversation (it will be recorded and sent to all paid subscribers soon after it conculdes). Bring your questions for Brian; it should be a good one.
If you’d like to be part of Cottage Third Thursday Zooms, you can sign-up at a special May rate below:
📚Our Town Gets Dark Fast
I didn’t know much about The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store before I read it. I knew it was a big bestseller and that Ann Patchett recommended it on one of the podcasts I listened to for Tom Lake. Here’s how the blurb on the inside cover begins:
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new housing development, the last thing they expected to uncover was a human skeleton. Who the skeleton was and how it got buried there were just two of the long-held secrets that had been kept for decades by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African-Americans lived side by side, sharing ambitions and sorrows.
That’s one way to describe it, I guess. Maybe they were trying to appeal to readers who like mysteries? Certainly the mystery of the body in the well starts off the book, along with a lot of other things that won’t make sense until much later, but I wouldn’t call it a mystery about a body in a well. When the reader finds out what happened, it’s more of an “oh yeah” than a long-sought answer. Way too many other shocking things happen in the book for that denouement to register as the solution to the book’s mystery.
Much of the first half of the book reminded me of Our Town, which I’d explored in order to better understand Tom Lake, but with a much more diverse cast of characters and more ferment under the surface of life. Here are the people of Chicken Hill going about their days—the dancehall, the bakery, the shoemaker, and of course the grocery store. Moshe who wants to move off the Hill and Chona who won’t hear of it. The tension between the Hill residents and the white town is ever-present. Only later do you recognize all the clues McBride has been hiding in plain site.
And then things get dark fast. The second half is full of tragedy, and struggle, and perseverance, and justice. Some may say it takes too long to get to the action, but I don’t think I could have taken it any sooner, and it of course took time for McBride to set it up. The book is intricately plotted, and the body in the well isn’t the only event that is introduced, and seemingly forgotten, only to reveal its importance later. It’s a powerful book, and I’m glad I read it.
📚Boomer Lament
I won’t call American Sycamore a powerful book, and I won’t recommend you read it, but I did so here’s what I found interesting about it. I saw the author on Morning Joe one morning, and he talked about how the characters in his novel—a constitutional law professor at Harvard, his historian wife, and their best friend, dean of Harvard Medical School—are “very good people who face difficult times” and how their love and support lift each other up and buoys them through their struggles.
It deals with things aging Boomers face: cancel culture for not fully embracing students’ enthusiasms (in this case, the 1619 project), illness, loss, and, yes, love and friendship. The characters are very privileged, of course, but still confront the same challenges as many of us. No one’s life is without pain and struggle, and even the best health care can fail us.
I read it because I’m interested in the question of how to age well. As an aging Boomer myself, I sometimes feel out of step with prevailing ideologies. But strip away the privileged setting of the book, and an answer to the question emerges: a good life requires good friends who are there when you need them. Unfortunately, that may be as hard for many to find as that perfect house in Cambridge, but probably more worth seeking.
📚The Stories America Tells Itself
Fifty years ago, I was a freshman at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. A former schoolmate of a friend of mine from California had recently been kidnapped by a group called the Symbionese Liberation Front. It was a shocking story, and we all were soon following the adventures of Patty Hearst. It was of course sensationalized, and we didn’t quite know what to think of it. Into the breach stepped a Wesleyan professor who gave a lecture one night on the role of captivity narratives in American life, comparing Patty Hearst with Mary Rowlandson, the author of the archetypal American captivity narrative detailing her capture by Native Americans in 1676 during King Philip’s War. It was the first time I’d heard Richard Slotkin talk about the stories America tells itself and I was hooked. I took several classes with him during my remaining years at Wesleyan, and majored in American Studies, the department he chaired.
Slotkin published a new book this year, A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America, that both sums up his career and tries to explain the America we find ourselves living in by examining the four myths that have shaped the nation:
These are the Myth of the Frontier, which uses the history of colonial settlement and westward expansion to explain our national character and our spectacular economic growth; the Myth of the Founding, which sanctifies the establishment of our national government and its foundational texts, the revolutionary Declaration of Independence, and the countervailing legal structures of the Constitution; the Myths of the Civil War, which offer conflicting versions of the moral and political crisis that nearly destroyed the nation; and the Myth of the Good War, which celebrates the nation’s emergence as a multiracial and multiethnic democracy, as well as a world power.
“Myths,” he writes, are “broad and consistent patterns in storytelling, which directly address the fundamental character and purposes of the American nation-state.” They are the stories we tell ourselves. They may be true, half-true, or false; they may be helpful or harmful to the nation’s self-understanding. But they are there, and we ignore them at our peril.
In the second half of the book, which I haven’t gotten to yet, Slotkin “shows how these myths have played through the culture war politics and the multiple crises that have shaken American society since the 1990s.” And my goodness, American society has been shaken. You can read the introduction online. I’ll be reading the book; let me know in the comments if you’d like me to set up some chats to discuss it as I go.
📚Around the Web
I’ve subscribed to The New Yorker for a long time, but I’m lucky to just glance through the contents of many issues. I always check out, but don’t always read, the fiction piece, and I scan the critics’ column. I never miss a cartoon story by Roz Chast.
I am drawn to the profiles, and a recent issue had an excellent one on the Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland Confronts the History of the Federal Agency She Leads. She is the first Native American overseeing the department that includes the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Her family, like many, was torn apart when the children were sent to Indian Schools, as were 80 percent of Native children. “My ancestors,” she says, “endured the horrors of the Indian boarding-school assimilation policies carried out by the same department that I now lead.” It is her mission to redeem the department.
📚On Substack
There is so much good to read on Substack. I’ve always been a fan of the personal essay, and that is Substack’s strength, As I mentioned in The Cottage Reader #1, I’m a fan of Nick Hornby, the novelist, essayist, and screenwriter. He just started a Substack. I’m taking his reading advice, and Niagara Falls All Over Again by Elizabeth McCracken is my will-read book of the month.
Who hasn’t thought about buying a bookstore? I’ve wished I could, but the closest I ever got was working one Christmas season at Barnes & Noble. I had some time, and since I’d worked in publishing for many years, I wanted to see what it was like where buyer and book meet. I learned that in this day of Amazon instant gratification, readers come to bookstores because they want service and to talk about books with real people.
Shawn Smucker, a novelist, and his wife, a writer, recently bought a bookstore in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and they are writing about it on Substack. One of my favorite recent discoveries.
Speaking of bookstores, if you are ever at a loss for something to read and want to see what a remarkable bookseller has to say about the new books coming into his shop, with a focus on religion, you should visit BookNotes by Byron Borger at Hearts and Minds Books. He’ll ship the books to you, too.
Thanks for reading. I hope to be back next month with another installment. If you missed the first two installments of The Cottage Reader, you can find them here:
Cottage Reader #1
Cottage Reader #2
Keep Reading,
Richard
📚 WHAT ARE YOU READING? 📚
Share a book or article you love with the Cottage community.
Hi Richard and all Cottage Readers. I too am an aging boomer and I have just finished reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's "An Unfinished Love Story.: A personal History of the 1960s." It is DKG at her best --great story telling and lots of detail from the expereiences of her husband, Dick Goodwin. I am currently reading Drew Gilpin Faust's Necessary Trouble: Growing Up At Midcentury. Also excellent.
Heaven and Earth Grocery Store author McBride's compassion and tender attention to detail, especially in the characters of Dodo and Monkey Pants, brought me to tears. And his seizing on hope in his ending of this (at times) complicated story of those on the fringes enlightened and energized me to see more clearly the worth of creatures.