Literary Arts

By Haley Huchler

This article was originally published in the Washington Independent Review of Books here.

It’s nearly impossible for me to resist a good campus novel. Any setting that throws together people from different backgrounds and cultures is bound to create the sparks required for interesting literature. In Come & Get It, author Kiley Reid takes full advantage of her college locale to craft a drama fueled by the financial tensions her compelling, complicated characters endure.

Reid’s sophomore effort has been eagerly anticipated since the success of her debut, Such a Fun Age, about a young Black woman entangled in the lives of the wealthy white family she nannies for in Philadelphia. Come & Get It returns to the author’s fascination with issues of race, privilege, and class, this time at the University of Arkansas. The narrative alternates among the perspectives of three women: Millie, a student and resident assistant saving up to buy her own house; Agatha, a writer and visiting professor dealing with a recent breakup; and Kennedy, a transfer student struggling to adjust and make friends.

The story begins with Agatha interviewing three undergrads in Millie’s dorm for a book she’s writing on weddings. After they pepper her with anecdotes about “practice paychecks” from their parents and the “fun money” they earn at their campus jobs, though, Agatha leaves the interview more interested in the girls’ economic backgrounds. She enlists Millie’s help to continue listening in on the lives of these wealthy, out-of-touch students. Soon, both Agatha’s book project and her relationship with Millie get messy.

Abundant references to contemporary books, movies, and brands make the novel feel truly of-the-moment. Reid leaves the reader with no doubt that her story is anchored in a specific time and place. Birkenstocks, “Pitch Perfect 2,” and Victoria’s Secret all appear within the first two pages; Millie’s bookshelf holds Americanah, Sweetbitter, and The Omnivore’s Dilemma; and Kennedy’s homesickness is personified by her weeknight plan to watch “27 Dresses” while her mother simultaneously streams it at home. Such specificity makes the characters feel incredibly real; anyone who’s spent time at a Southern university in the past few years would recognize them instantly.

This plethora of detail falls in line with Reid’s style of writing. You can be sure upon meeting any character that you’ll soon know everything about them, from where they grew up to what they ate for breakfast last Tuesday. These details are particularly important in illustrating the financial tensions at the heart of the story. For example, we learn that much of Agatha’s incompatibility with her former partner stems from their out-of-sync spending habits, and that Millie’s desire to save for a home drives her every decision. In Come & Get It, everything comes back to finances. Unfortunately, it’s not always clear why.

Unexpected plot twists also make this a slightly darker book than readers might initially expect. In the first half of the novel, the stakes aren’t all that high — it feels almost like a character study — but a rapid turn of events shakes things up. While Reid certainly knows how to keep readers hooked, the story’s climax feels oddly disconnected from the book’s earlier acute emphasis on wealth (or lack thereof).

Despite the intense and unwavering focus Reid projects onto each character’s relationship with money, I can’t tell what she wants us to make of it all. Yes, Come & Get It presents a world divided by privilege and class, but it offers no conclusions. Getting to know Millie, Agatha, and Kennedy felt like peering into a zoo and being intrigued by the inhabitants’ understandable, sometimes deplorable behavior. You walk away entertained but unenlightened.

Nonetheless, it’s an enjoyable, easily digestible read with characters who’ll stick with you long after you’ve closed the book. And if you happen to be anywhere near an American college campus, you just may run into them.

By Samantha Neugebauer

This article was originally published in DCTrending here.

It was standing room only at Politics and Prose on Sunday for an event with Emily Wilson, acclaimed translator of Homer’s Odyssey and, most recently, The Iliad. With a deep and frightening cadence, Wilson began by reciting the ancient text in its original Greek, and a pin drop could be heard throughout the crowded aisles as attendees were transported to a time of the Trojan War. Eventually, however, after too short a time, Wilson broke the spell she set over the bookstore by switching back to English. 

For Wilson, who lives in Philadelphia and is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, contemporary readers of Homer need to undergo the sonic and rhythm experience of his text as much as the narrative experience. For this reason, in both her Homer translations, she uses iambic pentameter (da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM…) instead of the free verse preferred by many other renowned English translators. In her forward to the Iliad, released this October, Wilson explained that “Ancient Greek verse did not rhyme, but it always used regular rhythm” and that “sonic patterns were created by the length of syllables, rather than by patterns of stress, as in English verse.” She believes that the iambic pentameter is our closest equivalent to the original’s dactylic hexameter. Indeed, English speakers often enjoy verse in iambic pentameter; its musicality not only reminds us of Shakespeare but also of our heartbeat. As a result of Wilson’s metrical choice, her short lines are straightforward yet mighty, mimicking Homer’s lineation.

See Wilson’s opening compared to noteworthy translations by Alexander Pope and Richmond Lattimore.

Wilson

The Quarrel 

Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath

of great Achilles, son of Peleus 

which caused the Greeks immeasurable pain 

and sent so many noble sons of heroes 

to Hades, and made men the spoils of dogs…

Pop

Argument

The Contention of Achilles and Agamemnon.

In the war of Troy, the Greeks having sacked some of 

the neighbouring towns, and taken from thence two beautiful

captives, Chryseis and Briseis, allotted the first to Agamemnon,

and the last to Achilles…

Lattimore

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilles

and its devastation, which put pains thousand-fold upon the 

Achaians, hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls

of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting

of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished

In Wilson’s telling, her reverence for English literature and anglophone metrical poetry tends to set her apart from other classists. At the event, she detailed her academic background, describing how she and her work are the product of interdisciplinary studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Classics and Comparative Literature from Yale, and a B.A. in Classics, and an M.Phil. in Renaissance English Literature from Oxford.

“Most people trained in the classics,” she said, “are not as interested in the tradition of English literature as I am.” It’s perhaps not surprising then that Wilson appears interested in the development of the English language and doesn’t shy away from employing modern language and syntax in her translations: “He will not come home/ from the war and cruel conflict, and his children/ will never clutch his legs and call him Daddy.” In general, Wilson sought to capture the “folk-poetry feel of the original.” Simultaneously, however, Wilson doesn’t aim for overt vernacularism. She likes some artifice, she says, and avoids contradictions in her translation. 

A lot has been made about Emily Wilson being the first woman to translate the Odyssey, however, for Wilson, that fact is not as essential as the media makes it out to be. Frankly, it’s refreshing to see a creator gesture toward the merits of their creative and intellectual choices over the personal biography. At the same time, she told the audience that this does not mean she is uninterested in discussing what’s going on with gender within Homer. She very much welcomes that discussion. 

Near the program’s conclusion, an attendee asked Wilson if she considered The Iliad an anti-war poem. Wilson responded that she doesn’t think it’s a “pacific book.” Moreover, she says, that while it’s true that the text does not imagine a world without conflict, it does imagine ways that society may not have to be as deadly. Nevertheless, The Iliad is a violent book; it’s a story where life and death stakes marked page after page, where the human body is constantly being unknotted. 

While the book’s violence might seem to some relevant, the audience was looking for why to revisit this ancient text; Wilson doesn’t care about ‘relevance’ either. On Twitter, Wilson commented: “When people ask me about the “Eternal Relevance of The Iliad”, I sometimes say: read it because it’s not relevant. The human experience is so much bigger than here and now.” 

By Imani Nyame

This article was originally published in the Washington Independent Review of Books here.

In her debut novel, River of Crows, the first installment in the Arcanium series, Canadian author N.P. Thompson takes readers into the magical and dangerous world of Arcania, where 12-year-old Ty Baxter forges life-changing friendships as he takes on responsibilities quite frightening for such a young boy. Inspired to write the series as a way to give middle-grade readers substantive stories all their own, Thompson has nonetheless crafted a narrative that will captivate bookworms of every age.

Among other things, the Arcanium series explores the symbolism of different animals, including crows, wolves, and serpents. What do crows symbolize for you?

Where I live in Ottawa, Canada, there is a huge flock of crows that roosts near one of the hospitals throughout the fall and winter. Every morning, you can see them fly across the sky in long, waving rivers as they head out to the edges of the city to search for food. And every night, the process reverses itself, and you can watch those same rivers going the other way as they all fly back to that central roost for the night. It’s just a beautiful thing to see, and I’ve been known to drop whatever I’m doing at the time to just stand there watching that river of crows cross the sky.

In terms of the books, though, the crows are very much a symbol of pain and fear and loss. The villain in the books, Gideon Blackthorn, has a personal army of enchanted crows that are completely loyal to him. A great many of these crow-soldiers are kidnapped children that Gideon has transformed into birds and then enslaved. So, the people of Arcania have a very complicated relationship with these crows — they’re utterly terrified of them, but they’re also afraid to fight them because harming the crows could mean harming transformed children who cannot refuse Gideon’s orders because they’ve been enchanted to obey his every command.

But I went with crows because they’re so fascinating. They do have an ominous mythos around them, and a lot of old tales from all around the world present crows as harbingers of death or evil. But in reality, they’re also really smart birds. I loved that duality. It made them perfect for the story I wanted to tell.

Did any particular YA fantasy novels inspire the Arcanium series?

I think, throughout my life, the books that I’ve most enjoyed as a reader are the ones that have an ensemble cast where even the secondary characters are so well fleshed out that they feel as real as the main character does. I really loved David Eddings’ Belgariad and Mallorean books for that. I also read them because that world had a very richly defined history that occurred long before the story that was currently being told, and I think that helped to make that whole story feel so real, so compelling.

I really enjoy having more than one character to get attached to and root for, and I love exploring how everyone’s different personalities and unique talents can both cause some friction within the group and also help make the group stronger. I guess that’s probably why my books are told from multiple characters’ points of view. Ty is the main character, so you mostly get things from his perspective, but you also get to experience the world through other characters’ eyes — even the villains’, at times.

What was your favorite part about writing this book? And why do you feel drawn to YA novels?

My favorite part of writing the first book was watching the friendships growing between all the kids — they are all so different, but they’re very much a team…In my writing, I seem to be drawn to that grey area between middle grade and young adult. When my oldest was small, he was reading far above his grade level, and I had such a hard time finding books that were both age-appropriate but also geared toward a more advanced reader who wanted a more complex and nuanced story. I think maybe my love for this niche came from that time — wanting to write the kind of book I wished I could find for him. One of the most appealing things I find about writing for this age range is that we can help kids explore some of the really big things in life. We can show that the world can be dark and scary and unfair sometimes — because it absolutely can be, and hiding that fact from kids does them a disservice, I think. But, through stories, we can help kids understand how to process and deal with that and find agency in a world that sometimes makes us feel like we have none.

In what ways does the world of Arcania reflect reality?

Stories are one of the best methods we have for getting us to really think about what’s happening in our own world and how we want to shape it. The bulk of River of Crows was completed in the years immediately following America’s 2016 election and, from a non-American perspective, I think a lot of us who had never really paid much attention to politics before suddenly found ourselves taking a much closer look at what was happening in our own countries. I think a lot of the more political themes in the book were born out of that. There is also an environmental theme woven into the series that is just hinted at in the first couple of books but which becomes more prominent as the series progresses. Beyond that, there’s a very diverse cast of characters because the world is diverse. And I wanted that diversity to be the norm in Arcania.

What’s next for you?

My main focus for the foreseeable future is to finish the Arcanium saga, and then I have another series planned around a new world and new set of characters. Book three of the Arcanium, Stone of Serpents, should be out this spring. Book two [Mirror of Wolves] ends on a pretty significant cliffhanger, and Stone of Serpents picks up right where it left off. There are some major twists with this one that are going to change everything for our intrepid Team Arcania, and it’s really going to shake all of these characters up and affect their relationships with each other as they head into book four.

By Samantha Neugebauer

This article was originally published in DCTRENDING, here.

David Brooks likes asking questions, and last week at Sixth and I, he shared some of the questions he’s been thinking about with an attentive audience. His current ponderings include: What kind of attention should we give others? How can we improve at making people feel seen, heard, and understood? And how do you serve a friend who is in despair? Among his other titles and many accomplishments, Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and the author of the new book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, a guide to some of these questions and the art of truly knowing another person. 

Brooks dispensed a mixture of biography, self-deprecating humor, and practical advice for building relationships in what he calls our ‘harsh times.’ Beginning with anecdotes from his childhood, he explained how he wasn’t naturally chatty or emotional. “In our family,” he explained, “it was think Yiddish, act British.” In fact, throughout his childhood and a good portion of his adulthood, he was aloof. As a student at the University of Chicago, he joked, “I was fine living up in my head and not down in my heart. Those deep people were sad. I was shallow and doing just fine.” This trait served Brooks well as a journalist, but eventually, a noticeable conversion came, and he became more in touch with his emotions and more invested in his community and relationships. Yet, as he saw it: “As I was becoming a better human being, America was doing the opposite.”

Nowadays, he claims there are people all around us who feel invisible, unseen, and misunderstood. “There’s an epidemic of invisibility,” and “human beings need recognition,” he explained. He backed up his observations with statistics about American loneliness, such as how results from one survey show that 54% of Americans say no one knows them well. There are also significant increases in depression and suicide rates, in particular, amongst teens.“Persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness” have risen from 26% in 2009 to 44% in 2021, Brooks states. What also worries him is how loneliness leads to sadness, which leads to meanness and dehumanization.

Brooks has a lot of thoughts on how we got here, but at this Center for the Arts, he was more focused on what each of us can do in our lives to improve circumstances. He believes many of us no longer have the social skills to foster deep intrapersonal and community relationships. Fortunately, these skills can be taught “just as easily as you can learn tennis.” For starters, Brooks says, we have to begin asking each other better questions, which is initiated by taking a hard look at how we speak with people. Brooks divides the world into ‘Diminishers’ and ‘Illuminators.’ In How to Know a Person, he explained:

“Diminishers make people feel small and unseen. They see other people as things to be used, not persons to be befriended. They stereotype and ignore. They are so involved with themselves that others are not on their radar screen. Illuminators, on the other hand, have a persistent curiosity about other people…They shine the brightness of their care on people and make them feel bigger, deeper, respected, lit up.” Brooks provided many examples of Illuminators. The novelist E.M. Forster, for instance, was said by his biographer to possess an “inverse charisma,” which gave off “a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best self.” To become Illuminators, Brooks suggested some classic ideas, such as majoring in the liberal arts and reading, but for folks who may already consider themselves readers, what can we do to improve? It’s clear (to me) that reading isn’t enough, or maybe the way we read now isn’t enough. Brooks recommended that we get out of “broadcast mode.” Essentially, we’re speaking more than we’re listening and asking questions. In Brook’s mind, we must see every person as a mystery and remember that every person is smarter and more interesting than us in some way.

“Ask people about their childhoods,” Brooks advised, “People love talking about their childhood.” Or, instead of asking people why they believe something, ask them how they came to believe something. By doing this, you’re asking others to tell a story. “Being a loud listener” is also key; this means that you ask people to set the scene when sharing stories, making them not just a witness to their lives but also an author. If some of these tips seem basic, it’s because they are. But it’s also true that many people don’t ask other people good questions throughout the day. “30% of the country asks questions,” Brooks stated, “and no that’s not a statistic!” But could it be? Brooks says that most of us aren’t as good at reading people as we think. 

Near the evening’s conclusion, Brooks drew on the wisdom of educator and activist Parker J. Palmer, who observed that “the shape of our knowledge becomes the shape of our living; the relation of the knower to the known becomes the relation of the living self to the larger world.” In other words, if you look at the world with generous eyes, the world is generous, but if you look at the world with judgment or fear, the world is full of judgment and things to be feared. Brooks may be full of questions, but perhaps it’s questions themselves that offer a possible remedy for a society divided by fragmentation, injustice, and a surfeit of broadcast mode.

Samantha Neugebauer is based in Washington, D.C., where she is a 2022-2023 D.C. Arts Writing Fellow with Day Eight. She works as a research assistant for Georgetown University in Qatar and a learning support specialist. Previously, she taught at Johns Hopkins and NYU in Abu Dhabi. 

The novelist talks siblings, radicalization, and writing in her native Polish.

By Haley Huchler

This article was originally published in Washington Independent Review of Books, here.

Author Danuta Hinc grew up in the suburbs of Wejherowo, a small town near the Baltic Sea, before the fall of the Iron Curtain. Conversations at her family’s dinner table centered on history and politics, making Hinc acutely aware of the world outside her native Poland — one that promised freedom and prosperity.

This deep insight into the way politics shapes our everyday lives may well have influenced Hinc’s new novel, When We Were Twins, a story of Egyptian siblings Taher and Aisha, whose lives diverge when Taher becomes radicalized, abandons their shared plans to study medicine in Europe, and signs on as a medic for the Mujahideen when the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan.

Did you always know you wanted to be a novelist?

Becoming a novelist happened very gradually for me, almost accidentally, when the subject I wanted to write about was too broad for a short story, too political for a non-fictional piece, and too “out of the scope of my own experience.”

Is When We Were Twins a companion to your first novel, To Kill the Other?

When We Were Twins is a phoenix that has risen from the ashes of To Kill the Other, which was published in 2011 and went out of print four years later when the publisher closed its doors. When Plamen Press expressed interest in re-publishing the novel, I seized the opportunity and decided to put out a “new version,” a term coined by my friend Ross Angelella, director of the Jiménez-Porter Writers’ House at the University of Maryland. Apart from rewriting the entire novel from the past tense to the present tense, I deleted many chapters and added new ones. I reimagined the subject and shifted the main focus to different characters, mainly women and children.

What led you to write a book about an Egyptian man who becomes radicalized in his devotion to Islam?

The initial inspiration came from the tragic events of 9/11, when thousands of innocent lives were lost in an unspeakable and unprecedented act of premeditated and synchronized terrorist attacks. I wanted to understand why someone becomes radicalized. I wanted to explore [the question]: Is it possible to see humanity in a person who commits an unspeakable act of terror? It was difficult for me to say yes, and that was my challenge — to construct a character that makes us see his humanity despite his actions. Maybe then we can see the missing link, the moment in life that turns someone into an extremist, a radicalized person.

When We Were Twins was inspired by 9/11, but it is also a story about the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting, Charleston church shooting, Charlottesville car attack, January 6th U.S. Capitol attack, and any other terrorist attack in history, because each is linked by the same idea, in which one grants herself or himself the right to kill others in the name of extreme ideas based in religion or politics. It’s a story about the vicious cycle in human history that radicalizes people and turns them into terrorists.

What so interested you in the connection between twins that you made Taher and Aisha’s relationship central to the novel?

It was the divergence and the question [of] when and why it happens. I was interested in examining two lives that start in the same womb, heartbeat next to heartbeat, and how they become the polar opposites in their lives despite remaining very close. The bond between Taher and Aisha is mystically profound. They stay very close even when their ideals change and diverge drastically. The twins are also a symbol for all humans as brothers and sisters, all born as innocent and turning out differently despite the innate innocence that is initial in everyone’s life.

You wrote To Kill the Other in Polish and then translated it into English. Was that also your method with When We Were Twins?

When I immigrated to the States in my late 20s, I didn’t speak English. I was fluent in Russian, I spoke decent French and German, and I had a good grasp of Latin. English, however, was a language I had to learn. I fell in love with English while translating To Kill the Other, and at the same time, I started writing in English, kind of bypassing my first language. Graduating from Bennington College with an MFA in literature and writing solidified my process even more, and now I write exclusively in English. I wrote When We Were Twins in English, but strangely, I was thinking about translating it into Polish. Because of time constraints, mostly my full-time job teaching writing at the University of Maryland, I don’t think it will happen for now.

Which writers have had the greatest impact on your work?

It would be difficult if not impossible to name all the writers I read and admire. I admire writers whose mastery of the English language is unparalleled. I believe Freud would say that English is the love I am still striving to conquer and make my own. Perhaps I would agree with this.

[Editor’s note: This article was written with support from the DC Arts Writing Fellowship, a project of the nonprofit Day Eight.]

Haley Huchler is a writer from Virginia. She has written for publications including Northern Virginia Magazine and Prince William Living Magazine. She has a B.A. in English and journalism from James Madison University, where she was editor-in-chief of Iris, an undergraduate literary magazine.

by Samantha Neugebauer

This article was originally published in DCTRENDING, here.

Acclaimed author Tim O’Brien sat down with Claiborne Smith, the literary director of the Library of Congress, at Arena Stage to discuss his new novel, America Fantastica. The event, hosted by Politics and Prose Bookstore, was the first stop on O’Brien’s book tour. He used the program as an opportunity to discuss the genesis of his new book, his first in twenty years, and meditate on the state of American culture. 

Since the latter half of the twentieth century, O’Brien has remained a steady presence in American letters. Among other accolades, he received the 1979 National Book Award for his novel Going After Cacciato and the 1995 Society of American Historians Prize for Historical Fiction for In the Lake of the Woods. Yet, it’s his 1990 Pulitzer-Finalist masterpiece The Things They Carried, a collection of linked stories about a platoon of American soldiers during the Vietnam War, that most people know O’Brien for and which earned him his spot in the American literary pantheon. Since its publication, its first chapter has been widely anthologized and regularly assigned in English classrooms across the country, serving as an entryway to understanding the psychology of the soldiers in that gruesome war for generations of American students. The novel’s significance is especially felt for members of my generation (millennials) whose parents may or may not have been deployed to Vietnam and whose high school history classes tended to focus on the domestic transformations occurring during those decades rather than the soldiers’ stories themselves if we reached the back of our textbooks at all. 

During the interview, O’Brien was questioned about the long interlude since his last book, and he explained that he’d started America Fantastica years ago and abandoned it. Although one main character, Angie Bing, haunted his life (including appearing at the dining table with his wife and children), he was more focused on fatherhood than finding the story. He returned to the concept (and Angie) when he could no longer take our lying culture. O’Brien jokingly exclaimed: “It might be my old age, but with everything, our banks, our airlines – everyone is lying. You call anywhere, and they say, Our lines are hectic,’ but that’s not true. They’re always busy. It’s a lie, and we’ve learned to live with it, and all these lies are adding up. That was the germ of the novel.” 

During this incubation time, O’Brien stumbled upon the term ‘mythomania,’ which he described as the epidemic of lying that has infected the American people. “You can’t beat the liars with rationality,” O’Brien said, “Rationality is irrelevant.” For this reason, he decided America Fantastica would be a satirical novel in the tradition of Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain. As an example of the kind of zany, irrational storytelling that he finds persuasive, he retold the story of Swift’s essay “A Modest Proposal,” in which the Anglo-Irish writer recommended that Irish peasants sell their children as food to the rich to ease their economic burdens. In doing so, the author pointed out the hypocrisies of the rich, who blamed the peasants for their financial hardships. It was a “funny response to a serious problem,” he said. 

America Fantastica’s plot hinges on a hyperbolic series of manic choices and events, beginning with protagonist Boyd Halverson’s choice to rob a local California bank. Boyd is a compulsive liar and a disgraced former journalist turned JCPenny employee who decides to use his stolen money for one last road trip across the country, kidnapping bank teller Angie in the process. The novel also features many eclectic characters they meet along the way, including Angie’s jilted fiancé and Boyd’s ex-wife. Throughout the novel, Boyd tries to make sense of his life and separate the lies he’s told from reality. 

Describing his novel, O’Brien seemed more interested in capturing what our lie-drenched world feels like today than parsing out why our culture has become what it has. At one point, circling a kind of diagnosis, he recited a verse from Yeat’s poem “The Snare’s Nest By My Window” concerning the 1922 Irish Civil War, which O’Brien used as one of his book’s epigraphs: “Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”

We had fed the heart on fantasies,

The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,

More substance in our enmities

Than in our love; oh, honey-bees

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

Several times, O’Brien spoke about the role of fantasy in our lives– “We need fantasy to get through the world,” he said. “We need to believe that tomorrow will be better. We all have fantasies about the afterlife. We believe we can live on after death through our children, through our good deeds, and our writing. That’s true in my case.” Boyd is no exception, either. In O’Brien’s telling, Boyd leads a “grim life” and “like a lot of America, he needs to replace his circumstances and his life outcomes with fantasy.” 

Smith asked O’Brien what his novel can bring to this topic that non-fiction can’t. “Story,” replied O’Brien. For O’Brien, being a writer is like “holding a mirror” out to the world, while writing is like a “waking dreaming” where he enters a dream world that inserts itself over him. His writing routine begins early, around two in the morning; he starts by doing the dishes while his family is fast asleep, letting the “bumblebees of memory go through my head. “Some of the best dialogue I’ve written has been delivered to me,” O’Brien said. At the same time, as a novelist, O’Brien said he is thinking about psychology, social criticism, politics, and other subjects all the time. Yet, he also admitted that focusing too much on the topical or the present moment can be “the death sentence of a novelist.” 

During the Q&A at the end of the night, an audience member announced that he had read The Things They Carried five or six times and that his children had read it, too. “It was one of the most important books I’ve ever read,” he said. Another attendee, a high school teacher, asked, “What else, besides your work, should I assign kids to read?” O’Brien’s recommendations were of the classic sort: Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, and Turgenev’s First Love. “Are kids still reading those?” he asked, laughing. His answer and his many other references to classic and ancient writers and thinkers — Socrates, Martin Luther, and the Illiad, to name a few – point to the way reading has shaped O’Brien’s life and worldview.

by Samantha Neugebauer

This article was originally published in DCTRENDING, here.

Angie Kim’s second novel, Happiness Falls, is a mystery novel, and a compassionate story of a family in crisis. Mia’s father, Adam Parson, has disappeared. The last person to see Adam is his fourteen-year-old son Eugene, who has both autism and Angelman syndrome, a genetic disorder in which he smiles constantly and doesn’t speak. Consequently, the rest of the family  can’t know exactly what happened in this last encounter.  Mia, the novel’s twenty-year-old narrator, takes the lead in the investigation. Mia is extremely loquacious, at least in her head. She spends much of the novel relentlessly turning over every interaction in her mind, plowing for hidden clues and potential meanings.

While this novel is a pandemic book taking place while college student Mia is quarantined at home due to Covid lockdowns, Kim doesn’t make the pandemic a crucial component of her story. In fact, even the whodunit at the novel’s center is not necessarily the most important part of the book. Kim is most concerned with showing how this family – Mia, Eugene, Mia’s twin brother John, and mom, Hannah, a linguist, come together to learn what happened with Adam. In the midst of their quest, Mia  learns that her father, Eugene’s primary caregiver, had been secretly studying and testing theories of happiness in hopes of better understanding his own life, and his son’s life. Thus, alongside the mission to find her father, Mia also becomes enmeshed in his research, as do we, the readers.

Happiness Falls was written in Kim’s house in Northern Virginia, and at the D.C. independent bookstore Politics and Prose, Kim explained that she preferred to write in a closet than any of the empty bedrooms in her house – her three sons are off at school. In the windowless closet, she set up a large screen on which she looped videos of beaches and sunshine.

At a recent book event in September 2023, Kim spoke with historical novelist Louis Bayard at Politics and Prose. Kim stated, “I wanted the mystery at the core of the novel to really be a trojan horse – to get the reader to turn the pages.” Kim certainly succeeded in that regard; while the book’s opening might suggest a traditional mystery, this novel is much more interested in the philosophy of happiness and the way society equates intelligence and communication than Adam’s missing person case. 

Mia’s musings are so protracted that she occasionally resorts to footnotes to explain herself further. Sometimes, these footnotes take on the form of quiz-like questions to the readers: “A quick pause for a thought challenge: What’s your best guess as to why my mom believes this idea? Is it because a) she’s Asian and this we-are-all-connected thing sounds Asian in a Kung-Gu-Panda-ancient-Chinese-secret kind of way? Or b) you remembered her linguistics PhD…?” Other times, the footnotes serve as a kind of informative monologue, where Mia expands on her opinions: “It’s a common mistake, saying verbal to refer to oral speech. It’s a pet peeve of mine when people say, ‘verbal, not written,’ because written is verbal…” Overall, Mia’s verbosity can be its own kind of communication barrier. 

With such a density of shared thoughts and ideas, the reader must shift through Mia’s mind constantly, searching for what is most important and relevant. While this technique creates a hyper-realistic experience of being in a particular brain, it can also feel less artful than a more curated kind of narration style. Despite the exquisite amount of information Mia knows about a variety of subjects and the complexity of her feelings, she can come off as an East Coast version of a Valley Girl: anodyne, yet somewhat immature and spoiled. It’s possible that Mia suffers from a particular, low-viral strand of what Katy Waldman identified as the ‘self-reflexivity trap’ in which self-scrutiny and self-recrimination reign over maturity and growth. Unlike other contemporary protagonists in this trap, Mia does take action – this is a book with plot – however, Mia’s doesn’t grow as a communicator.   

The power of speech to effectively communicate and build relationships with others – especially as it relates to people with special needs–is a major theme of this book and a longtime preoccupation for Kim. Her 2019 debut novel, Miracle Creek, which won an Edgar Award and was translated into twenty languages, also featured a main character with autism. Moreover, Kim herself has also experienced and talked publicly about the problems and shame caused by an inability to communicate with people around her. 

As a preteen, Kim emigrated with her family from Seoul, South Korea to the suburbs of Baltimore. Later, she would attend Interlochen Arts Academy, Stanford University, and Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. She now lives in Northern Virginia. But coming to America was a rough transition at first, as Kim explains in the novel’s Author’s Note. “I was a different person in English than in Korean. Back in Korea, I had been a gregarious girl at the top of my class, constantly talking…in the U.S., I couldn’t understand or say anything beyond the handful of ‘essential English phrases’ … When you can’t speak, others assume you can’t understand and talk about you in front of you.” 

In her conversation at Politics and Prose, Kim spoke with historical novelist Louis Bayard at D.C. independent bookstore Politics and Prose. During their chat, Kim admitted that even though it has been more than forty years, she can still feel the sense of shame she first felt when she moved to America and struggled to communicate her feelings and needs. Kim also wrote a moving essay about the experience for Glamour. It’s safe to say that Kim’s experience, though not the same as Eugene’s, was one influence while writing Happiness Falls. In the novel, Mia and her family must learn to work together and reexamine their beliefs about Eugene’s abilities in order to solve the mystery of Adam’s disappearance. 

The characters who populate Happiness Falls have been with Kim for a long time – about thirteen years. She first created them for a magical realism short story set in Seoul, but over the years, she kept returning to them, or they kept returning to her! While some of the particulars of her characters’ family dynamic have changed over the years, many things have stayed the same, including that Mia has a twin brother and that the family is a biracial Korean-American family. 

Happiness Falls is a novel that will have you questioning yourself about how much you equate effective communication with intelligence and whether that is right. This a book of multiple mysteries. Full of tension, Happiness Falls is a novel for people who like reading about complicated families and personalities. The mystery will keep you guessing, and at the same time, you’ll learn how hyper-analytical Mia, who tells us she doesn’t “believe in optimism” at the beginning of the novel, becomes someone who might just find a reason to be optimistic after all.