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From My Bookshelf: Story Collections by Max Apple and Ellen Litman

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

(cross-posted on My Machberet)

A few weeks back I wrote that Max Apple’s The Jew of Home Depot and Other Stories had caught my attention. Since then I’ve had a chance to read it. And it’s definitely a recommended read.

I’m particularly intrigued by the way Apple handles some potentially dicey cross-cultural issues (black-Jewish relations, in particular). Incidentally, despite the book’s title and coverage in the Jewish press, the opening story, “Yao’s Chick,” is not overtly “Jewish” in terms of its characters or content. Apple is apparently not intimidated to write about characters from different ethnic backgrounds. I think that’s a good and admirable thing, but I can’t help wondering if that’s worked against him in some readers’ eyes.

Another recent read I’d encourage others to pick up is Ellen Litman’s debut collection, The Last Chicken in America. I had the opportunity to hear Litman talk about her experiences shaping this story collection at the recent Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in New York City, so reading the book shortly after that was particularly meaningful.

Litman’s primary subject–running through the linked stories–is life within the Russian-Jewish immigrant community in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Different from Apple’s work, to be sure; reading them sequentially and considering them together I’m reminded of something that’s too often lost in discussions of “Jewish-American literature”–how truly varied it can be.

From My Bookshelf: The Ocean in the Closet

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

(This review was first published in The Chattahoochee Review, Winter 2008.)

A TRANSPACIFIC TRANSGENERATIONAL STORY

The Ocean in the Closet. Yuko Taniguchi. Coffee House Press, 2007. 255 pp. $14.95.

As a reviewer, I try mightily to avoid Those Adjectives. You know the ones I’m talking about, because you see them in blurbs and reviews all the time: “riveting,” or “haunting,” or even “heartbreaking.” I’d love to avoid those adjectives here, too, but the trouble is that they do, in fact, describe quite precisely Yuko Taniguchi’s debut novel, The Ocean in the Closet, a multigenerational story that illustrates, remarkably, how trauma, both political and personal, reverberates through generations. It’s a heartbreaking book that I’ve now read twice—riveted each time—and one that will haunt me for a long time to come.

Nine-year-old Helen Johnson is the daughter of two damaged souls: Vietnam veteran James Johnson and his wife, Anna. Born in Japan in 1946 of a Japanese mother who died during Anna’s infancy, and an American father, Anna spent her earliest years in an orphanage. A missionary couple grew attached to her; by the time they were able to bring her to the United States for adoption, she was five years old, and did not adjust to her new home. The couple could not manage her; another local couple took her in.

Anna marries young, and is barely out of her teens when she becomes a mother herself. (But for a novel very carefully structured around time, the sequence is oddly opaque here: a photograph from Anna and James’s wedding is dated 1966; Helen is nine when the story opens in 1975; a 1967 letter from James in Vietnam indicates that her birthday is February 13. All of which suggests that Helen was either very much on the way, or even already born, when her parents married. In this novel, where parenthood and caregiving are so fraught with complications, the lack of clarity is puzzling.) In any case, in 1975 it’s evident that Anna is not equipped for the role. She regularly locks her children (Helen and her five-year-old brother, Ken) in a closet and frightens them with tales of a ghost that lurks behind the closet wall, waiting to pull them away. Her husband, struggling to deal with the sequelae of his Vietnam experiences, seems helpless to intervene.

History repeats itself when Anna’s children, too, must be relinquished to other caregivers. In this case, James Johnson’s brother and sister-in-law, Steve and Mary, take the children in (as Anna’s own maternal uncle, Hideo Takagawa, and his wife wanted but had been unable to do decades earlier; Hideo, a professor of English literature, had, nonetheless managed to remain a kindly presence in his niece’s life so long as they both remained in Japan), providing them with arguably the most stable and demonstrably loving home they have known.

Almost effortlessly (but smart readers will know better, and admire all the more the author’s accomplishment here), Taniguchi presents and brings together her characters and their connected histories. The novel builds to a visit Helen makes to Japan, accompanied by her Uncle Steve. There, they are the guests of Hideo and his wife. Although Helen does learn more about the culture from which her mother comes, she and Steve are kept from learning the full horror of her Japanese past. The reader, however, is not.

Dualities permeate the book. Two first-person narrators (Helen and Hideo) alternate the novel’s telling. Then, the novel is essentially set in two places: Helen’s native California, and Hideo’s Japanese homeland across the ocean. Beyond that, the mid-1970s era of the story’s present is informed intensely by the past, not only by the Second World War and its immediate aftermath, but also by the more recent past of Vietnam. Finally, the author pursues both public trauma and private suffering, and the ties between them, especially as they resonate through families and generations.

The Second World War effectively destroys the Takagawa family. In this, they’re hardly exceptional. Hideo’s recollection of his postwar return to his hometown—Hiroshima—includes a memory of an encounter with a boyhood acquaintance. Burns have disfigured the other young man; in his absence, his mother tells Hideo about her son’s new obsession with flies:

“There were millions of flies in Hiroshima. Thousands of dead and burnt bodies were left for days throughout the city. Flies tried to lay eggs on the open wounds of even the survivors. If the flies left eggs, the wound would become infested with maggots. I stayed up many nights with a rolled newspaper, killing the flies that came after my son’s burnt face. When he got well enough to sit up, he sat with a rolled newspaper and killed flies all day. Now, in February, there are no flies, but Yukio still thinks he hears flies buzzing above his head and wakes up in the middle of the night.”

Japan’s defeat and its consequences afflict the unborn as well. “We think children can’t remember their early experiences,” Hideo muses, “but what we feel through our skin is the soil of our memories, and although we may not have the concrete memory, we remember certain sensations.” He has always feared that his sister’s sufferings “somehow seeped through her skin to Anna’s body.” We cannot know exactly what “seeped through” to infant Anna. But something quite obviously did.

As a fiction writer, Taniguchi has done virtually everything “right” here. Her two narrators have distinctive, age-appropriate voices. In the hands of a lesser-skilled writer, a technique like letter-writing might seem clumsy and artificial, a convenient way to deposit needed backstory straight into the reader’s lap. Here—and perhaps this resonates especially with me because I can remember the 1970s, when, especially if we wanted to communicate with someone overseas, we did in fact pick up a pen and script a letter on that airmail stationery—the letters seem absolutely authentic and appropriate. Throughout, the historical details ring true; both an author’s note and an acknowledgments page attest to extensive research and knowledge.

Although The Ocean in the Closet is the first novel for Taniguchi, who was born in Yokohama in 1975 and now lives in Minnesota, it is her second book. This reader, for one, will soon be looking for the author’s poetry volume, Foreign Wife Elegy (also published by Coffee House Press), and anticipates with eagerness the work Taniguchi will present us with next.

–Erika Dreifus

The Wednesday Web Browser: Brock Clarke Profile, The State of POD Publishing, and Reportage from a January Residency

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Remember when I was planning to read Brock Clarke’s latest novel, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England? Well, I did finally have that pleasure not too long ago. So I was happy to find this profile of Clarke (and his book) online. (But I do have to wonder–since when is Emily Dickinson’s house [in Amherst, MA] so close to “nearby” [that’s the interviewer’s word, not Clarke’s] Dickinson College, which, the last time I checked, is located in Carlisle, Pennsylvania?)
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Calvin Reid takes us behind the scenes in the world of print-on-demand publishing
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Lisa Romeo gives us another glimpse into her January residency experience at the Stonecoast MFA program in Maine.

A Doctor’s Initiation (and an Author’s): An Interview with Sandeep Jauhar

by Erika Dreifus on
3

A DOCTOR’S INITIATION (AND AN AUTHOR’S): AN INTERVIEW WITH SANDEEP JAUHAR

by Erika Dreifus

(This interview was first published in The Practicing Writer‘s January 2008 issue.)

A little more than a year ago, I read an article in New York magazine by Sandeep Jauhar. Since I’d been following his writing with great interest for several years–he is married to the elder sister of one of my own sister’s very best friends–I was delighted to learn in that article’s bio note that he was completing a memoir. I e-mailed him right away, and asked if he’d participate in an interview for The Practicing Writer once the book was published. He responded immediately, and affirmatively, and most graciously.

So I am thrilled to present this interview, timed to coincide with Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s publication of Intern: A Doctor’s Initiation. Knowing Sandeep (and having read many examples of his excellent prose) before the book’s publication, I suspected he’d have a lot to share with us, especially concerning writing nonfiction about science and balancing writing with another, highly demanding full-time career (plus family life). He hasn’t disappointed.

But before we get to the Q&A, let’s introduce him a little more completely. Sandeep Jauhar is the Director of the Heart Failure Program at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, the largest program of its kind on Long Island. He trained as an experimental physicist at the University of California-Berkeley, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. After earning his Ph.D., he went to medical school at Washington University in St. Louis. He completed internship, residency, and a cardiology fellowship at prominent teaching hospitals in New York City. Since 1998 he has been writing regularly about medicine for The New York Times. He is the recipient of a South Asian Journalists Association Special Recognition Award for outstanding stories about medicine. His first book, Intern: A Doctor’s Initiation, which focuses on a key year in his medical training, has just been published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. He lives in New York City with his wife and their son.

Erika Dreifus (ED): Fairly early in your memoir, you tell us that “journalism had always been a passion” of yours. You mention that you spent the summer before starting medical school on a science journalism fellowship sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. You also mention an internship you undertook–while you were a full-time medical student–with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Please tell us a little about your training and development as a writer–how these (and any other) experiences proved formative.

Sandeep Jauhar (SJ): In high school I always enjoyed writing. But like most budding writers, I didn’t know how to parlay my interest into a career. When I went to Berkeley in 1985, I made a deliberate choice to focus on science and math. My writing interest lay dormant for many years until I came across a brochure advertising the AAAS Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellows Program. I applied and, much to my amazement, got the fellowship. I spent the summer of 1995 at the Washington, DC, bureau of Time magazine.

That experience convinced me that journalism and writing had to be a part of my career if I was going to feel fulfilled. Heeding the advice of journalism mentors, I landed a reporting internship at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch during my second year in medical school. The internship taught me how to write 500-word news stories on deadline. These pieces and some longer feature articles became the portfolio I presented to The New York Times. Cornelia Dean, the science editor, gave me my first big break in 1998 by accepting a query for a 1200-word piece about the closing of a leprosy hospital in Louisiana. I eventually started writing essays about internship and residency for the science section of The Times. (My first essay required 3 or 4 complete rewrites! I remember Cornelia advising me to stop being “writerly” and just tell the story.) After a couple of years I moved on to 3000-word pieces for the Sunday Times Magazine.

ED: Which specific writers, teachers, and other works have influenced you?

SJ: Several doctor-writers have made a strong impact me: Abraham Verghese, Melvin Konner (whose memoir Becoming a Doctor accompanied me everywhere during my first two years of medical school as I looked forward to my clinical rotations on the hospital wards), and Berton Roueche (the old New Yorker writer whose baroque clinical tales inspired a generation of readers). I also enjoy reading Atul Gawande’s insightful essays in The New Yorker.

The non-medical memoir that has had the most influence on me is Stop-Time by Frank Conroy. Conroy, of course, ran the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for many years. His memoir of adolescence is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read. When I first met with my book editor, Paul Elie, he asked me about some of my favorite books, the sort of books that I might aspire to write. When I mentioned Stop-Time, Paul immediately started recounting the prologue, which finds Conroy speeding in a car through the English countryside. (At that point I knew I was working with the right editor.) Other memoirs I’ve especially enjoyed reading recently are James McBride’s The Color of Water and Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone.

ED: What resources might you recommend for those interested in developing their skills in (or simply learning more about) writing about science for a general audience?

SJ: The Mass Media Fellowship is a great way to start for scientists and engineers. For non-scientists, I’d recommend making a habit of reading the science section of The New York Times and science pieces in The New Yorker. The “best science writing” anthologies are also excellent introductions.

ED: One of the episodes in this book that really caught my attention concerns your first visit to the Times offices. I won’t ask you to recount that here (readers, you’ll have to check it out yourself!). But I will ask you to describe a bit about another event: the first Times essay acceptance. As you narrate it, the publication of your essay (a piece of writing whose purpose you characterize as “to warn hospital administrators and future residents to the dangers” of an element of your own training, “caused a firestorm” at the hospital. To put it bluntly, not everyone at the hospital was happy with it. Were you aware of the reaction the essay might provoke ahead of time? And, on a related note, how did you learn to negotiate the particular ethical and professional concerns you have faced as someone whose work as a writer is so entwined with the very personal medical stories of your patients?

SJ: I knew the essay would not be well received, but at that point in my internship, I didn’t care a whole lot about what hospital administrators thought of me. I wanted to see the essay get published, for other residents, and also for myself.

Preserving patient confidentiality is a concern of any medical writer. I believe that my work as a doctor is a part of my story, but obviously this story overlaps with the stories of my patients, so privacy and confidentiality need to be protected. It is probably more difficult to do this in a publication like the Times than in magazines or in books, where pseudonyms can be used and identifying details can be changed. These devices aren’t allowed at the Times, so one often has to leave out interesting details, which isn’t ideal for writing but is obviously the right thing to do.

ED: In the memoir’s acknowledgments, you thank your agent, Todd Shuster, whom you say “knew [you] should write a book well before” you did. That’s intriguing. Tell us more! How, in fact, did you realize that you had a book to write? And how did you come to work with this agent?

SJ: Todd actually contacted me after an essay of mine about mysterious fevers was published in the Times in November 1999. He tried to convince me for many years to try my hand at a book, but I could never find the right subject. Eventually, I proposed compiling the essays I had published in the Times into a book. We circulated a proposal and received interest from several publishers. FSG was interested, too, but not in the book I had proposed. They suggested instead a book about my education as a doctor. That was in August 2003.

ED: Since I know a little bit about you–I know that in addition to treating patients you teach medicine; I know your wonderful wife and son (and I can attest that you are a hands-on dad–I’ve seen you with your adorable little boy at his swimming lessons!); I continue to see your byline in the Times. When on earth did you manage to write this book? Many writers find it tiresome to talk about their “routine,” but I’d really like to know how you’ve been able to nurture your writing career, especially given how consuming a life in medicine, as you describe it in your book, can be.

SJ: People find time for what they enjoy. I write on weekends and at night after my son goes to bed. I sometimes find time at the hospital during the day. Luckily for me, my work informs my writing, so the whole thing is sort of “organic.”

ED: Anything else you’d like to share with us? News on upcoming appearances, for example?

SJ: [In the near future] I have two book readings scheduled: on January 3 at 6 pm at the Corner Bookstore in Manhattan (Madison at 93rd St) [Editor’s note: I attended this packed reading, and it was terrific] and on January 17 at 7 pm at the Barnes and Noble in Manhasset. [Editor’s Note: On December 27, Sandeep and his book were also featured on National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation.”]

ED: Thank you so much, Sandeep.

Visit http://www.sandeepjauhar.com to learn more about Sandeep Jauhar and his new book.

(c) 2007 Erika Dreifus

Friday Find: A Masterful Opening Paragraph

by Erika Dreifus on
5

Setting is not my strong suit. And sensory detail is something I need to work on, too. As I was reminded when I read this opening paragraph to “Bravado,” one of the stories in the new William Trevor collection I referenced last week:

The leaves had begun to fall. All along Sunderland Avenue on the pavement beneath the beech trees there was a sprinkling, not yet the mushy inconvenience they would become when more fell and rain came, which inevitably would be soon. Not many people were about; it was after midnight, almost one o’clock, the widely spaced lampposts casting pools of misty yellow illumination. A man walked his dog in Blenning Road in the same blotchy lamplight, the first of autumn’s leaves gathering there also. An upstairs window opened in Verdun Crescent, hands clapped to dismiss a cat rooting in a flowerbed. A car turned into Sunderland Avenue, its headlights dimmed and then extinguished, its alarm set for the night with a flurry of flashing orange and red. The traffic of the city was a hum that only faintly reached these leisurely streets, the occasional distant shriek of a police siren or an ambulance more urgently disturbing their peace.

And with that beautiful writing, I leave you for the weekend. Have a good one!