"Even his griefs are a joy"

I usually try to buy used books, but when I found out Amor Towles had a new book coming out, not only did I buy it in hardback, I pre-ordered it so long ago that its arrival was like an early Christmas present. Last Sunday morning, I finally found time to start on its 592 pages at breakfast. By bedtime, I was relying on a booklight to finish the last few chapters.

The Lincoln Highway, as you might suspect, is a road trip tale. After the singular setting of his last novel A Gentleman in Moscow, Towle’s scope of story (and cast of narrators) can at first be a bit disorienting. Emmett has arrived home after his sentence at a juvenile work farm to find out his family’s farm has been foreclosed upon. So he and his younger brother decide to make a new start in California. 

Before they can head west, however, what was supposed to be a brief detour turns into a destination. For in the best adventure stories, it’s the dragons to be slayed, not the princess to be saved, that keeps the reader hooked. 

Literary Executioners

Occasionally I think back to an essay prompt our teacher gave us in high school about measuring time. Some people might reference an event by who was president or pope, others might mark its relation as occurring before or after a traumatic experience (pre-COVID, anyone?). For me, I’ve always thought about time, both as a student and teacher, and even now as a parent, as a school year. September brings beginnings; May conveys closure.

I was pleased then, by the structure of Maggie Pouncey’s novel Perfect Reader which begins, as things should, in the fall. Flora Dempsey’s life in the city comes to a halt when her father dies, leaving her the executor. She returns to her childhood home of Darwin, where her father was president of the local college as well as a renowned literary critic. Just before his death, he’d bequeathed her a folder of his poems, which she hasn’t had the courage to read. As she tries to get his affairs in order, she can’t help but remember her childhood, and the move that prompted her parents’ divorce.

“On the day they moved to Darwin, Flora’s mother went shopping. She bought a rough-wooled cardigan and a white bumpy bedspread. She bought them, not liking them, because it’s easier to focus on disliking small, specific things than your life in general.”

Pouncey not only captures the spirit of each season in this small college town, but the various ways people cope with grief. Over the course of the book, Flora seems unmoored by the task ahead of her. But bolstered by renewed friendships, mornings spent reading poetry, and walking her father’s dog in the commons, she begins to see how life might just recommence.

we know where the boys live

When #metoo appeared on the scene, my daughter confided in me that she is always conscious of her surroundings, planning her escape route, how loud she would need to scream. Although I’m glad she can articulate that awareness, I’m devastated that her fears seem grounded in something much more concrete than the nebulous stranger offering candy from a van we were warned about when I was a kid. 

Revisiting that time in Vendela Vida’s new novel We Run the Tides, I realized navigating a teen girl’s friendship might have been more harrowing than our fears of kidnapping. Eulabee and her best friend Maria Fabiola attend an all-girls’ school in the Sea Cliff neighborhood of San Fransisco. They watch The Breakfast Club, wear Laura Ashley, play Centipede, and scale the cliffs of their local beach. When the girls disagree on an incident involving a man in a white car, Eulabee finds herself on the outside of her clique. When Maria goes missing, reports of her kidnapping rock the enclave. But Eulabee suspects the whole thing is a hoax and goads the police officers interviewing her:

“Have they ever made you feel uncomfortable?”

“Everyone makes me feel uncomfortable,” I say. “I feel uncomfortable right now.”

From adults who take advantage to awkward solutions to unwanted body hair, We Run the Tides captures the discomfort, and yes, even trauma, of being a teenager.

In the final chapter, Eulabee, now almost fifty, randomly encounters Maria at a seaside resort. She reminds us that we all still carry that thirteen-year-old inside. Along with her insecurities, fabrications, and longing to grow up.