Immersed, Gripped, & Harrowed: Books This Week
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana’s words reverberated in the three books I inhaled this week (total truth: the audio book is still being heard.)
Of course, these times in which we live seem rife with the above truth. Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy by Anne Sebba is drenched with warnings (and yes, tragedy) in this most heartbreaking, gripping, and lacerating view on the Rosenberg case that’s I’ve read (and I’ve read much about this time in history.)
Sebba’s book presents an up-close view while placing the horror of Ethel and Julius’ execution in the context of the politics of the times. The Guardian’s review of this book captured my reaction, writing:
“In the course of her narrative, which clings to the reader like ivy, gripping but suffocatingly horrible, too, she looks at the political hysteria that spread through cold war America like wildfire and at the way in which antisemitism and sexism played their pernicious part in what Sylvia Plath would later describe in The Bell Jar as that “queer, sultry summer”; she also delivers, albeit inadvertently, a powerful denunciation of solitary confinement (Ethel spent two years alone in her cell) and of the death penalty. Above all, though, her biography is a feat of empathy. Ethel’s supposed ordinariness is well known: she was poor, drab, gauche. But Sebba sees that she was extraordinary, too, in her way: ravenous for self-improvement and, at the end, bonded to dignity even as fear rose inside her. How she found the strength to stay calm when her two little sons arrived to visit her in the last hours of her life, and afterwards to write to them so beautifully, I shall never know.”
During an eerie neighborhood blackout on Wednesday night, I finished the two books I’d been reading while intermittently (cleaning, cooking, crocheting) listening to Sebba’s book. (Not simultaneously, just in the weird switching back and forth manner I sometimes adopt.)
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The first finished book was an (honest) companion to the attention-grabbing but facile Inventing Anna (the Shondaland series I’d just finished.) Glorifying con artists is always a danger in writing about them — I faced this when writing The Widow of Wall Street, a roman-a-clef based on the Madoffs (and pray I explored without elevating.)
The show captured me, but they admitted truth wasn’t their guiding force. Inventing Anna made Anna Sorokin/Delvy, a con artist, the star of the show–while relegating those around her to naifs, fools, wannabes, and saints.
Rachel Williams (renamed in the show), conned by Anna, was portrayed in the naif-comical category: starry-eyed by touching Anna’s hem until the cloth flamed.
The rendering seemed off to me (as it was to Williams.) After watching the show, Williams told Vanity Fair she was shocked to see the degree to which the series sympathized with Sorokin (Julia Garner). “I think promoting this whole narrative and celebrating a sociopathic, narcissistic, proven criminal is wrong,” Williams told Vanity Fair in her first interview about the series. “Having had a front-row seat to [the Anna circus] for far too long, I’ve studied the way a con works more than anybody needs to. You watch the spectacle, but you’re not paying attention to what’s being marketed.”
Vanity Fair’s article is a good read — even more is My Friend Anna, William’s book. After reading her memoir (fictionalized and mocked by the show) I think my instinct about her portrayal was on target. Being conned out of money and one’s belief in a friend’s innate goodness is a double whammy of heartbreak. A con artist bilks victims of cash while also breaking their hearts with their insincere friendship. Williams takes us through the story of how she recovered from the emotional and fiscal whiplash of deceit.
Finally, at 2 AM Wednesday, I finished the utterly immersive Yellow Wife by Sadeqa Johnson. I haven’t stayed up reading this late in ages (and then stayed up to inhale her tale of the ‘behind’ the book research, which gifted me with a list of future reads. I read Denny S. Bryce’s review after the fact; reading it made me want to begin again.
Yellow Wife, is a harrowing tale of the life of an enslaved woman in Virginia, beginning in the 1850s. A challenging read but beautifully told, this thought-provoking page-turner is also surprisingly uplifting. And at its core, Yellow Wife is also a story of motherhood and the sacrifices a mother will make to protect her children — no matter how those babies come into the world. . . . Pheby Delores Brown is a fictional character, but she was inspired by a real-life figure, Mary Lumpkin, the enslaved concubine of Robert Lumpkin. He was a notorious white slave trader who owned and managed the aptly dubbed Devil’s Half Acre — also a real place, part of a slave-trading post Lumpkin founded in 1840, a compound that included a guesthouse and barroom and an auction block. As Johnson writes in her author’s note, the jail was an infamous holding pen and “breaking center” for more than 300,000 enslaved people from 1844 to 1865.
All these books require the ability to withstand the truth and pain of a story — but all three rewarded this reader with the eyes-wide-open view needed to work against repeating the past, while also highlighting the courage of those willing to stand up and be counted
