Monthly Archives: August 2023

August 25, 2023 · 12:01 am

You Are Here by Karin Lin-Greenberg

book cover

…it’s hard to remember sometimes that no one is only who they appear to be at the moment. It’s hard to remember sometimes all that goes into a life, all the different versions of a person, throughout the years, all the ways in which people are capable of changing.

…sometimes he is utterly exhausted by being an adult, by being someone, expected to explain the world to younger people, as if he’s in possession of the right answers.

Jackson Huang is nine years old. He dreams of being a professional magician. His mom, Tina, does hair at the mall salon in suburban Albany. She is amazing at it. Jackson spends a lot of his afterschool time there. Kevin manages the mall bookstore. He enjoys dressing up in many story-appropriate costumes to read to children at the store. His wife does not understand why he does not complete his ABD (All but Dissertation) doctorate. They live in a tiny house on her mother’s property. Maria is a beautiful seventeen-year-old high school senior. She works at Chickadee Chicks in the food court. Maria wants to become an actress, so is applying to schools with theater programs. Ro is a ninety-year-old widow who still gets around pretty well. Her rep is that of the neighborhood bigot, and there is some truth to that. Ro comes in to see Tina once a week for a bit of work.

I was very interested in showing people who are all different from one another, so I sat down and brainstormed a bunch of different people, who might be working at the mall or go to the mall. I wanted these people to be those whose lives would not otherwise intersect with one another. I also thought about conflict and tension; I have these characters who are extremely set in their ways and believe one thing so strongly. When you put them in scenes with each other, you can see what might happen. It’s also about questioning: are they going to stay static, or is there room for growth? If there is room, how much would feel realistic? With the multiple narrators, I enjoyed being able to get into each of their perspectives. A character might seem a certain way and be really frustrating in one chapter, when viewed through someone else’s thought process. In a later chapter, you might get their own thought process—they might still be frustrating, but you could at least understand why they believe the things that they believe. – from the Electric Lit interview

With the impending closing of the mall as the unifying thread, we get to know each of these five as they work their way through individual conflicts, over ten months, from September to June. Jackson gets hassled at school. Tina, her skills being what they are, can probably get another salon gig when the mall closes, but she has always wanted to be an artist. Maria has a boy who is quite odd interested in her maybe a bit too much. Kevin really needs to decide what he wants to do with his life, whether or not to complete his degree work or something else. He has a scheme for a border collie business that sounds impractical. Ro, after a lifetime of pushing people away, has come to her senses, and is eager to reconnect, to make some amends, regretting her long misanthropy.

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Karin Lin-Greenberg – Image from her Goodreads profile

With alternating chapters, we get to know each of these five, and a bit of the supporting cast as well. Some interact solely at the mall. With others, there is connection beyond. Kevin and his family, for example, live very close to Ro. Maria helps Jackson with a school performance. A friend of Maria’s helps Tina with her artistic hopes.

The promotional material for the book compares You Are Here to Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. That seems a fair comparison.

I wanted there to be ten chapters in the span of ten months, leading up to the mall’s closing. While writing these stories, I was thinking a lot about Olive Kitteridge and Olive Again, by Elizabeth Strout, and how those circled around a particular place, which was a small town in Maine.

As with Strout, Lin-Greenberg offers us a cast of regular people, but finds what is interesting in each of them. I would add Kent Haruf to the comparables list. As in the work of Strout and Haruf, KLG, using the mall, gives us a look at a place, a time, a community, by looking closely at some of the lives it contains.

It is a novel of personal, very human hopes, of dreams. No one here is looking to save or conquer the planet, or even the nearest mall. But some of those hopes and dreams are secret. Tina is a very practical single-mother focused on taking care of her son, drawing on odd scraps of paper when opportunity presents. Some encourage her to take art classes, but she resists, fearing that dreaming too big might endanger her main role as provider. Jackson tries to keep his magical interest on the down-low with Tina, fearing her disapproval. Kevin has feelings about academia that he does not feel free to share with his wife. Ro has been secretive for almost a century. Old habits die hard.

The book has a very quiet timbre to it, one of the things about it that reminded me of Haruf.

“People who often get the most attention are the loudest, but people who are the quietest often have a lot going on inside. I wanted to explore that in this book. Many of the characters I write about are isolated and lonely. Many are not living the lives they had once wished for. As a writer I can explore the interiors of these people. I can go into their minds and show what they’re thinking and how they’re feeling.” – from the Times-Union interview

My first impression was that this was not so much a novel but a book of linked stories. KLG is an award-winning writer of short stories, so this seemed a natural progression.

I had my first sabbatical during the 2018-19 school year, and that’s when I wrote the first draft of my novel. I tricked myself by saying, ‘It’s not a novel. It’s a series of linked stories.’ – from the Times Union interview

It may at first have the feel of a linked short story collection, but the five-strand plaiting of the main characters, the consistent concern with a singular place and its impending demise, and consistent thematic concerns ensure that it is indeed a novel, and a bloody good one. There is a tragic event that occurs toward the back end of the tale. Some repercussions of that are shown.

Over the lead-up to the closing of the mall, we switch among the five main characters as they approach having to decide what they will do with themselves when it does. With their interactions, they form a small community of their own.

You Are Here was not KLG’s first title for the book.

I can’t take credit for it; my agent came up with it. My original title was Those Days at the Mall, which is a character’s line in the very last chapter. Obviously, the mall map says “You Are Here.” But it’s also so much about place and where people spend their time. So, the question behind the title was thinking about where we spend our days. -from the Electric Lit interview

This is a novel that is both incredibly sad and softly uplifting. KLG offers us a look at five ethnically and chronologically diverse ordinary people, ranging in age from nine to ninety, and delivers insightful, empathic looks at them all. (Well, some more than others, of course) We can appreciate both their challenges and their dreams. Even when their obstacles are self-driven, we can see how they came about, and maybe catch a glimpse of what might be possible ahead. You will feel for them, even if some might make you wince a bit at their decision-making. You will want Jackson to have a magical debut on stage. You will want Tina to find a way to respond to her muse. You will want Kevin to figure out what he wants to do with his life. You will want for Maria to get into the theater program of her dreams. You will want Ro to sail past her long-stout boundaries and realize her dream of human connection in the time left in her life.

KLG made her mark, and won awards as a writer of short stories, but when you read You Are Here, you will be exactly there, at the very beginning of what promises to be a long and wonderful novel-writing career.

She stares at her son, willing him to look at her and tell her about the magic tricks he’s been practicing. She wants him to invite her to his school talent show. She wants him to tell her about the videos he’s been watching. But he just keeps reading. Tina looks down at the desk, sees her sketch of the goose, peeking out from under some menus. Jackson shuffled around, and she grabs the sketch, balls it up, and drops it into the garbage can finish the desk. As the crumpled paper falls from her hand, she thinks it’s not just that Jackson is hiding something from her; it’s that he is imitating her. He’s keeping secret something that’s important to him, maybe because he’s afraid he’s no good or it’s silly or she’d be disappointed to know he cares about such a thing. She feels certain he has learned to be quiet and secretive, and to not allow himself to talk about impractical dreams from her.

Review posted – 8/25/23

Publication date – 5/2/23

I received a copy of You Are Here from Counterpoint in return for a fair review, and promising not to shut my doors for good. Thanks, folks.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to Karin Lin-Greenberg’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages

Profile – from Wikipedia

Karin Lin-Greenberg is an American fiction writer. Her story collection, Faulty Predictions (University of Georgia Press, 2014), won the 2013 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction[1] and the 2014 Foreword Review INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award (Gold Winner for Short Stories).[2] Her stories have appeared in The Antioch Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Epoch, Kenyon Review Online, New Ohio Review, The North American Review, and Redivider. She is currently an associate professor of English at Siena College in Loudonville, New York. She has previously taught at Missouri State University, The College of Wooster, and Appalachian State University. She earned an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Pittsburghin 2006, an MA in Literature and Writing from Temple University in 2003, and a BA in English from Bryn Mawr College.

Interviews
—–Times Union – Siena’s Karin Lin-Greenberg breaks into new novel, ‘You Are Here’ by Jack Rightmyer – May 10, 2023
—–The Southern Review – A Writer’s Insight: Karin Lin-Greenberg – primarily about her short-story writing
—–Zyzzyva – Q&A WITH KARIN LIN-
GREENBERG, AUTHORCOF ‘YOU ARE HERE’ by VALERIE BRAYLOVSKIY
—–Electric Lit – The Last Days of a Dying Mall in Upstate New York by JAEYEON YOO

Items of Interest from the author
—–LitHub – excerpt
—–Lin-Greenburg’s site – Links to other on-line work she has published
—–Read Her Like An Open Book – Karin Lin-Greenberg, author of YOU ARE HERE, on patience and publishing

Kent Haruf books we have enjoyed
—–2015 – Our Souls At Night
—–2013 – Benediction
—–2004 – Eventide
—–1999 – Plainsong

My reviews of books by Elizabeth Strout
—–2021 – Oh William!
—–2019 – Olive, Again
—–2008 – Olive Kitteridge

Our Tribal Future by David R. Samson

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Tribalism is governed by a force so motivationally powerful that it predicts more of your behavior than your race, class, nationality, or religion. The formal analysis of this incredible phenomenon has only just begun, but the emerging science reveals that these factors are mere subjugates to our primal instinct to be a member of a tribe. This “Tribe Drive” is an ancient adaptation that has been a prerequisite for survival for 99.9 percent of our species’ evolutionary history. It is a critical piece of cognitive machinery—honed by millions of years of evolution—that gave us the ability to navigate, both cooperatively and competitively, increasingly complex social landscapes. But now that our species spans billions across the globe, does this adaptation continue to serve us, or is it mismatched to its environment? In other words, what happens when humans become either tribeless or destructively consumed by tribalism?

So next time you hear a raving demagogue counseling hatred for other, slightly different groups of humans, for a moment at least see if you can understand his problem: He is heeding an ancient call that—however dangerous, obsolete, and maladaptive it may be today—once benefited our species. — CARL SAGAN AND ANN DRUYAN, 1993

There is a reason birds of a feather stick together, that fish swim in schools, and that gnus migrate in large herds. It increases the survival chances for the group, if not necessarily the individuals within it. So it is with people. We do not have the canines of the saber-tooth, the bulk and muscle of the bear, the speed of the leopard, the poison of the snake or many of the other tools available to creatures eager to dine on the special meat. Even our relatively advanced gray cells were not enough to consistently keep us off the dinner menu. But getting together helped, big-time. E pluribus unum, baby. And grouping together allowed us to hunt in packs, which was much more effective than hunting individually. So, how did we shift from independent contractors to company people?

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David R. Samson – image from his Facebook pages

It is obvious to any observer that we are a tribal species today. Samson looks at the elements that make up this trait. He wrestles with the lion of the issue, why are we the way we are?
And how what he calls our innate tribal drive, which may have served us well on the savannah, serves us less well in the modern world.

The core of the mismatch is that modern society has made us more physically isolated by decreasing our social support; all the while it has made us more mentally unstable by increasing social pressure, tricking us into thinking that low grade online and institutional social interaction is good enough to live a healthy and fulfilling life. In this sense, the people who dwelled in the first tribes were not challenged as much as we are today. Their units were glued together in a common struggle for survival, not the weak ideological grounds many use as the foundation to their tribal social identities today.

Samson begins by looking at how our tribal drive causes more trouble than it solves. Then heads off into the history of how human organization evolved. For example, before there could be tribes there had to be camps. (The People’s Front of Judea?) This material is fascinating, as he builds up the structure of prehistoric human grouping. There are organizational layers that needed to develop and join together in order to make up early human tribes. He goes into what early human needs were, the reason for being of groups, the need for food, shelter, and avoidance of incest. And beyond that, there was a need to cope with ill fortune. Stuff happens, and your group can survive such stuff more robustly if it is larger. Thus tribes, which still carry within them the need for assurance about who is trustworthy. This leads to a need for some sort of recognition mechanism. When a group gets beyond the magical Dunbar number, how do we know if someone is safe? If they are one of us and not one of a potentially threatening them.

The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship. . . . Putting it another way, it’s the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar. — ROBIN DUNBAR, 1996

Well, you can see how this might be endlessly fascinating. And it is. Tribalism is what allowed us to survive as a species. When the going got tough, the tough formed tribes.

He traces the steps that were needed to achieve tribe-dom, and looks at how they functioned once established. He offers considerable intel on how tribalism changed over time, how it developed diverse forms, how we developed ways to tell tribal friend from foe without knowing them personally. Great stuff. I worked my poor mouse and keyboard down to bare metal copying passages from this book.

Part 2 (of two) refocuses on the contemporary. How our need for tribal connection impacts our lives. He talks about how increasing class separation has resulted in the well-to-do being able to buy the social support they need, while us plebes have had to scramble to make do with our declining slices of the national pie. He offers sundry ways in which we can mitigate the impact the world has had on us, how it has deprived us of our tribal needs, primarily of personal contact with a trusted bunch. Samson looks at ways in which we can find a better balance, offering some real-world examples.

There were several times, I was pulled up short by Samson’s social analysis. He quotes Robert Putnam on a decline in family togetherness over the ten year period between 1985 and 1994. Yet he does not seem to consider it worth noting that this corresponds roughly with the Age of Reagan, and a turn away from community and toward the individual. He also does not include any significant discussion on the general decline in religious affiliation, which surely would be relevant to stresses on tribal identification.

A particularly egregious example of both-siderism entails looking at the different responses to a handwriting expert’s analysis of Donald Trump’s signature. The entirety of that can be found under a spoiler tag in EXTRA STUFF, so you can see for yourself. In focusing on how different groups reacted to the analysis, he does zero follow-up to look at whether one group or another turned out, based on observable real-world facts, to have had a better handle on things. That did not kill the book for me, but it was a red flag.

It is often the case that social scientists do a decent job of examining society, ferreting out specific elements that might be causing this or that bad result. But it is just as often the case that the solutions that are proposed fail the political sniff test. Not political as in party affiliation, but political in the sense that any social change has to be applied in a medium that is comprised of human beings. On the other hand, there are myriad nuggets of information in Our Tribal Future that enrich the reading experience, like his look at the basis of ethics, and a dive on how The Dunbar Number came to be.

For many, these days, much of our political discourse appears to be driven more by tribal identity than by rational consideration of policy merits or disbenefits. I was able to glean some significant bits of wisdom to apply to this from Samson’s discussion of tribal psychology, but I had hoped he would have done more with it. Where he does go is to examine some ways of social organization that offer opportunities for improving our lot.

He is wise in noting that community-level engagement is the best way to not only effect direct change, but to gain links to other nearby people, creating or reinforcing social cohesion, and mental health. But then he ignores what might be done for national issues like abortion, national tax policy, national defense and health care coverage and availability. It is a narrower focus, which is certainly Samson’s right, but there seems to be a pretense that local arrangements exist in a bubble, unimpacted by the larger world.

You may have heard of the uncanny valley. The expression refers to the creeped-out feeling one gets when seeing/interacting with an animation or robot that is intended to be very human-like, but is not quite there. (Ron DeSantis?) Likewise, David Samson’s Our Tribal Future tries to be an accessible, pop-science look at a very significant element of contemporary life, particularly in the political sphere. He mostly succeeds when writing about our deep history. But there is some drift into a more academic presentation that shifts towards the science and a bit too far away from the pop. It is when he tries to look past what is to what could be, that the Philistines of reality swarm him. So, if you are academically inclined, by all means, dive in. There is much of value here. But if the hint of textbook makes your blood run cold, you may want to explore elsewhere. A compromise might be to take in Samson’s wonderful presentation on human historical self-organization, then see how you feel moving forward. But if you are looking for a fully accessible pop-science read, you may find yourself in an uncanny valley.

When we grow, develop, and live in a world where everything is geared toward the individual, how can we help but view the world with a more narcissistic lens? When we live with other people, share resources within the environment, and work through problems together, the outcome is an individual that is less self-centered and more psychologically flexible.

Review posted – 08/18/23

Publication date – 05/30/23

I received an ARE of Our Trtibal Future from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review, and becoming a member of their group. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the Samson’s personal, Instagram, and Twitter pages

Interviews
—–Toronto Star – Creating a better future: How to take our instinct to belong to a group and turn it into a force for good By Brian Bethune’
—–The Power of Us – INTERVIEW: David Samson on OUR TRIBAL FUTURE by Dominic Packer and Jay van Bavel
—–The Gray Area – The Future of Tribalism with Sean Illing – podcast – 51:08

Item of Interest from the author
—–Excerpt

Items of Interest
—–The People’s Front of Judea?
—–Wikipedia – Uncanny Valley
—–Handwriting Analysis… example of mirror game psychology. Michelle Dresbold, a handwriting expert who has been trained and worked with the Secret Service, analyzed Donald Trump’s signature. In her analysis, she described his handwriting as “bold, condensed, angular signature shows someone who is rough, tough, aggressive, competitive, can never relax and is not nurturing.”490 She further expounds that his angular writing style with minimal curves shows up in the signatures of some sharp-minded and competitive workaholics that are prone to anger, hostility, and fear. Whether there is truth to her analysis is beside the point. The insight is how people interpreted her observation about Trump’s signature. Dresbold was shocked by the public response, as conservative audiences (corporations, business groups, and entrepreneurs) reacted positively to her analysis of what she considered mostly negative attributes. However, liberals in the academy, at universities, and other progressive hot spots had mirror opposite responses, using the identical data as proof of Trump’s corruption. Dresbold recalls: “When I say something like ‘his check-mark-like stroke, called a tick-mark [in the bottom left-hand corner of the D in Donald], it indicates that Trump has explosive anger and a very bad temper,’ the conservative interpretation is, ‘Of course, he’s angry about what’s happened to America.’ The liberal interpretation is, ‘Yes, he’s a very angry man with childlike temper tantrums.’” Continuing on theme, if Dresbold remarks that his signature is unreadable which indicates that he keeps his feelings hidden from the public, the liberals’ interpretation is that he’s sneaky and untrustworthy, whereas the conservative interpretation is that it he is intelligent because he doesn’t want our enemies to know what is in his mind. Same data, same analysis, two different universes of interpretation.