A Terrible Country, by Keith Gessen

Though it reads very much like a memoir, A Terrible Country is really a semi-autobiographical novel. Author Keith Gessen’s first-person narration sounds so genuinely descriptive that I confess I both loved it and found myself constantly distracted by wondering what was real and what was not. It stuck with me enough that I recommended it to my book club — even though it meant I had to read it a second time — just so I’d have someone to talk about it with. I think they found it to be a mixed bag, too, with responses ranging from depressing to maddening to admirable to compelling. If nothing else, most of us found it engaging and eerily relatable.

The story follows Andrei Kaplan, a struggling Russian-born American academic who returns to Moscow to care for his elderly grandmother, Baba Seva. Seva Efraimovna was closely based on the real grandmother of Keith Gessen and his brother, M. Gessen, Rosalia “Ruzya” Solodovnik. In the novel, Andrei also returns to Russia because he has nothing keeping him in New York. His girlfriend has left him, and his academic career is floundering. He goes to Russia thinking he may be able to find something to write about. He struggles with that, as well as with joining a hockey team, fitting in, speaking the language, connecting to Wi-Fi, getting groceries, and every single other thing. It’s oppressive, but told with self-deprecating wit. I cared for Andrei as a character and rooted for him to succeed.

The parts of the book that portray everyday life are clearly based on Gessen’s real experience caring for his own grandmother in Moscow, and that’s what I found most compelling. The book provides a real slice-of-life view of Russia (or at least that part of Russia in 2008), especially through the eyes of someone who has a strong connection there but is also accustomed to the relative comforts of the US. That’s a rare perspective.

I had always imagined everyday Russian life as stark, and this filled in some details: the brutal cold, expensive goods, difficulty accessing services, imposing blocks of buildings, the feeling of being surrounded by a brutal history, and constant paranoia about people’s motives and intentions. As Baba Seva says repeatedly, it’s “a terrible country.”

And yet, amid the corruption, the tension in the book comes from Andrei’s (and Yulia’s, and Sergei’s, etc.) love for and commitment to the place, and desire to fix it despite all its flaws. We can relate. They eek out a feeling of home and find comfort where they can: camaraderie with fellow dissenters, parties where people share meager food and supplies to create a little joy, and friends finding ways to share cramped living spaces. There are also games of Anagrams, old movies, and cooking lessons. I dare say some of it is heartwarming.

Andrei is a complex character. At times he seems bumbling and clueless, with bad situations continually befalling him, along with plenty that he creates himself. At other times, he seems redeemed by his determination to keep his grandmother in her home despite his scheming brother’s wish to sell out. His good intentions are real, but they don’t keep him from being selfish. And without spoiling the ending for those who haven’t read it, suffice it to say that he never really “gets” what it means to live in a culture of surveillance and fear on the same level as his friends do, and the ending is pretty bleak.

George Saunders said about the book, “A cause for celebration: big-hearted, witty, warm, compulsively readable, earnest, funny, full of that kind of joyful sadness I associate with Russia and its writers.” Our group didn’t have enough experience with Russian literature to make that comparison and didn’t fully agree with calling it funny. For me, the humor was often of the sad variety, where something is so sad that all you can do is laugh. When Baba Seva continually forgets who Andrei is but remembers his absent brother with affection, what else can you do? But it was good fodder for discussion about the characters, the setting, the economics, the politics, and even the writing itself. A unique read, for sure, and I liked it even more the second time I read it.

— Julie Feirer

So Far Gone, by Jess Walter

Rhys Kinnick is like many contemporary journalists—unemployed, cynical, and hyper aware of the chaos of the world. Once a respected environmental investigative reporter, he’s one of the many victims of mass layoffs throughout the media and, in his 50s, has no remotely similar prospects. Add to this a strained relationship with his beloved daughter Bethany, a son-in law who has become a Christian nationalist, a failed romantic entanglement, and the fallout from the 2016 election, and Rhys faces a crisis of sanity. “I felt like the world was drifting in one direction and I was going the other way,” he says.

The final straw is a disastrous Thanksgiving dinner conversation with his son-in-law Shane, in which both men are absolutely right, and Rhys unravels. He drives to his family’s 40-acre sheep farm outside of Spokane, on which sheep likely have never set a hoof, throws his cell phone (“a $600 Pop-Tart of modern science”) out the window, and becomes as close to a hermit as he can manage. For seven years, he lives off the grid, filling his small cabin with hundreds of books and thousands of pages of his own writing.  Outside, he begins destroying outbuildings in an attempt to gradually eliminate all signs of his existence.

Rhys is not a man for subtlety.

When his two delightful grandchildren show up at his front porch, he doesn’t recognize them at first.  Leah, 13, and Asher, 6, are delivered to him by one of their neighbors after Bethany has disappeared. Asher, with his grandfather’s sense of drama, suggests perhaps his father has killed his mother. Nobody believes him, nor should they. Meanwhile, Shane is off being masculine and godly in the woods with like-minded loons at the Church of the Blessed Fire.

All this aside, Asher needs to get to a chess tournament that night because he says he is a prodigy. This is also not true. But the kid loves chess, and Rhys, with a renewed sense of grandfatherly connection, rises to the occasion.

But first, he needs a shower and a haircut because his cabin has only the most basic indoor plumbing. (He will need at least a second shower, plus new clothes, to be minimally fit for civilization.) His friend Joanie will do the cut, but only after her common law husband Brian scuffles with Rhys in the driveway over a slight miscommunication over Rhys’s affection for Joanie. Such is Rhys’s life.

Once somewhat clean and coiffed, he and Leah and Asher head to the Episcopal church for the tournament. But Bethany got the night wrong and there’s no tournament, only Army of our Lord (AOL) thugs waiting for them. Rhys ends up with a fractured zygomatic arch from the butt of a gun. The kids get taken to the Rampart, the cult’s compound and, from there, the caper is on. Rhys eventually rescues the kids and Bethany—or, more accurately, they rescue one another.

The characters in this book are beautifully drawn. Rhys is a multidimensional creature you have to love, while you’re questioning his good sense. Asher lives in his imagination, where he is a soldier leaping a mighty river, while awaiting his chess destiny. He’s disarmingly curious and thrilled when he meets real-life “Indians” in Brian and Joanie.  Leah has her grandfather’s affinity for words—she describes his dirty beige shirt as being the color or “twice-plowed snow” and his hair like “hash browns and country gravy.”  Bethany thinks her dad is disappointed in her, and Rhys is sure he’s the disappointment. Shane is a good father and husband, but fearful for the safety of his family and naïve enough to be susceptible to the lure of a cult.

Rhys faces the aftermath of his own journalistic prowess when the violent man he dubbed the Dominion Eagle Killer in multiple investigative reports ends up a member of AOL, and is especially embittered toward Rhys, who he feels was instrumental in sending him to prison.

Author Jess Walter writes with wit and energy that propels the story forward with an ironic momentum. And his paragraphs can pack a punch:

As a journalist. As an American, as a rationalist, Kinnick had come to terms with the fact that 20 percent of his countrymen were greedy assholes. But then in 2016, the greedy assholes joined with the idiot assholes and the paranoid assholes in what turned out to be an unbeatable constituency. Kinnick realizing that the asshole ceiling was much higher than he’d thought, perhaps half the country. Whatever the number, it was more than he could bear. Especially when they were in his own family.

Walter finds a messy resolution to this chaos, with an explicitly violent passage at the end. Was the violence necessary? It was jarring, and the reality is, we have discovered that some people are so far gone we cannot reason with them.

But who is so far gone here? Rhys? Shane? The Dominion Eagle Killer? The country?  Walter seems to say it’s all the above.

Celia, Rhys’s former wife, dies before the novel begins, but remains a voice of familial love and commitment throughout the book. It’s partially through her spirit that Bethany finally welcomes Rhys back home, each a little less disappointed in the other. As for the rest of the world? Well, that’s still a bit of a mess.

— Pat Prijatel

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, by Nikole Hannah-Jones

The 1619 Project reframes the American origin story by placing slavery at its foundation and tracing how that legacy continues to shape American institutions and society. Expanding on an earlier issue of The New York Times Magazine, the anthology combines essays, poetry, and brief historical interludes to connect the nation’s past to its present.

Across its opening chapters, the anthology argues that slavery shaped not only America’s racial hierarchy but also its democratic ideals and economic practices. The book opens with an essay that partly focuses on the 1619 arrival of a slave ship in Virginia. This arrival marks the beginning of the system of chattel slavery in America. This system would continue for some 250 years, ending in the Civil War, but whose effects would linger long beyond that.

In “Democracy,” Nikole Hannah-Jones contends that Black Americans, rather than the nation’s founders, have repeatedly compelled the United States to honor its stated principles of equality and liberty. In “Race,” Dorothy Roberts examines how racial categories prevented solidarity between white and Black workers and helped preserve slavery, while in “Sugar,” Khalil Gibran Muhammad links the harsh labor practices of American capitalism to the industrial discipline of chattel slavery.

The remaining chapters extend this analysis to politics, citizenship, self-defense, punishment, inheritance, medicine, and other areas of American life. They examine whether Black Americans’ votes are still treated as legitimate, whether the right to self-defense is applied equally, and how racial disparities persist in law enforcement and punishment. The anthology concludes with an essay advocating reparations as a means of redressing the enduring burdens imposed by centuries of slavery and racial oppression.

The 1619 Project challenges the completeness of the conventional American origin story by showing how slavery and racial oppression have shaped the nation’s current political, economic, and social institutions. Its central contribution is to connect that history to persistent inequities, asking readers to reconsider not only how the United States began but also how its founding contradictions continue to influence the present.

— Jim Lynch