David and Kathy in Transit

Posted on March 1, 2026 by Kathy

I first encountered author David Guterson in 1992, when he was a handsome young father homeschooling his children and working as a public-school English teacher on Bainbridge Island in Washington State. In 1992, I was also a homeschooling parent and a once and future English teacher. I read everything about homeschooling back then, including Guterson’s Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense, a personal account of his family’s homeschooling life. He was a clear, appealing stylist, and we shared reservations about the mass education of young people. Like me, Guterson liked teaching and liked his students, but loved watching his kids flourish at home with the attention of both of their parents.

 His 1994 novel, Snow Falling on Cedars, along with a movie deal (the film came out in 1999), made him famous. I read and loved his 1999 novel, East of the Mountains even more. I think I may have read Ed King in 2011, although I don’t remember it.

Since then silence, that is, for me. I didn’t keep up with David. Turns out he’s written thirteen books in all, which I didn’t realize until the other day, when I walked past Evelyn in Transit on the New Releases shelf at the library and thought, “Oh. My old friend David Guterson.”

Evelyn is an odd book. The two main characters, who are featured in alternate chapters, have no connection for three fourths of the book. Guterson, in effect, buries the lede–their surprising connection comes at the end. In addition to this unorthodox structure, the writing style is notably spare, cryptic, and unsentimental.

Thus, I won’t be recommending Evelyn in Transit exactly. It’s something other than a compelling narrative–character-driven and theme-driven instead. Guterson wants to explore how to live a meaningful life and chose to write an unconventional novel to do so. A lot of readers on Amazon and Goodreads have disliked it.

I understand those readers, but I disagree. I like and respect Evelyn in Transit. Pick it up if you’re interested in Tibetan Buddhism, reincarnation, odd-duck characters, and occasional sparks of ironic wit. Guterson has written an economical, meticulous, intentional novel. I’ll use this opportunity to advocate for excellent, interesting midlist books. Not every worthwhile book is reviewed in the New York Times and featured on NPR.

David Guterson’s homeschooled kids are grown up now. He’s a grandfather. My kids are grown up too, and I’m a grandparent. I see on YouTube videos that David’s hairline has receded. I won’t enumerate my own physical changes in the past thirty years, but David likely wouldn’t recognize me. I’m so glad to learn that he’s still writing, and that there are lots of his books to catch up on. Let us know if you’ve read any of them.

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A Lincoln Portrait

Posted on February 14, 2026 by Kathy

Almost ten years after my first attempt, today I finished George Saunders’s 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo, just in time for Lincoln’s 217th birthday. This was my third run at the book, and this time I finally made it through.

I have a distorted memory of my first two efforts, retaining an impression of a lot of bathroom humor and potty jokes, which, even though I’m not prudish (I don’t think), were too sophomoric for me. Turns out I mostly made that up. A single poop appears on page 6. About twenty pages later, there’s a “swollen member,” but, really, such references are scattered and pretty innocuous. It’s a mystery how I so drastically misread the book.

The novel begins with speeches by seemingly random people who inhabit a weird unfamiliar place; an acquaintance described it to me as “almost science fiction.” It reads like a play, a lot of it comic, mostly dialogue and short prose passages, with lots of white space on the page. It goes fast, then, once you get into it and figure out what’s going on. Googling after I finished, I found this brief, genial guide provided by Saunders himself. Check it out if you find the book’s experimental format daunting.

Coincidentally, just as I began Lincoln earlier this week, I received an email from a stranger, a friend of a friend, who loves George Saunders so much that she’s looking for a like-minded fan to communicate with. Our mutual friend thought I might be such a person. I loved Saunders’s short story collection Tenth of December (2013) and his 2021 essay collection A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. Like everybody else, I admire his inspiring Syracuse commencement speech from 2013. I probably haven’t read as much Saunders as my prospective correspondent (I haven’t heard back from her since I responded), but I’m a fan.

Saunders’s down-to-earth goodness makes him an ideal conduit to convey Lincoln’s humanity and his profound grief over the loss of his son Willie to typhoid fever in 1862. What do you do with grief? How do you live with loss? Saunders’s imagining of Lincoln’s thoughts reflects his own generosity.

“His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow, toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow, that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would yet be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone and, given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it.”

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Carpe Diem

Posted on February 5, 2026 by Kathy

I didn’t realize when I chose the cover photo for my book Lead Me, Guide Me: The Life and Example of Father Dan Begin that its significance would be lost on many readers—maybe most readers. I should have done more explaining.

The book does provide some context. I explained that Father Dan’s friend, former Cleveland newsman Ted Henry, got married at his farm in Rock Creek, Ohio. It was a second marriage for both Ted and his bride, officiated by a woman friend who acquired a certificate online. At the conclusion of the ceremony, Father Dan removed his jacket and opened his shirt to reveal the “Carpe Diem” tee shirt underneath.

By some lights, I went on, Father Dan shouldn’t even have been there. The Catholic Church frowns on outdoor weddings, and it still frowns, to put it mildly, on divorced Catholics remarrying. But he didn’t perform the wedding, and so, Ted told me, “He really didn’t break the rules. Almost, but not quite.”

That’s where my explanation stopped. I thought the connotations of that picture would be self-evident, but I’ve learned they’re not.

First, not everybody knows that the Latin expression “Carpe diem” means “seize the day.” (More than one person has asked me.) To be precise, “carpe” means something more like “pluck,” as in plucking a grape from a vine. The command is to pluck each day and savor its sweet juices. But “pluck the day” sounds weird in English, so we translate it loosely as “seize the day.”

The phrase comes from the Roman poet Horace’s Odes, published in 23 BCE, that is, before the birth of Christ. His line goes, “carpe diem quam minimum credula postero,” which can be translated as “pluck the day, believing as little as possible in the next one.” Life is short, and you better enjoy it now. Horace was a pagan, and others who’ve celebrated carpe diem are even more pagan, that is, more inclined to, shall we say, self-indulgent behavior.

The sentiment, if not the actual phrase, appears in Andrew Marvell’s poem To His Coy Mistress, for example, in which the poet urges his girlfriend to sacrifice her virginity for pleasure, because time is fleeting. A bunch of Shakespeare’s sonnets encourage the young to procreate. Do it now! You’re aging by the minute! He and other poets often warn the ladies, “You’re not going to be beautiful forever!” Eat, drink, and be merry is the idea.

I’m trying to say that “carpe diem” is not a religious expression. It’s sure not close to anything I learned from the nuns at my parish Sunday school. It’s not inherently scandalous, but it does carry a whiff of secular self-indulgence.

For Father Dan, though, the expression evoked the line from Psalm 118: “This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad.”  The past is over, the future is uncertain, he often said. He strived and mostly succeeded at living intentionally in every moment, and, more important, feeling grateful for it.

To me, that photo and that tee shirt represent so much about him. He was a Catholic priest standing at his divorced friend’s outdoor wedding officiated by a lay woman. He ripped off his shirt and grinned. It’s a beautiful day. Seize it. Enjoy it. Smile (if you can) right now.

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Minneapolis, Deja Vu

Posted on January 25, 2026 by Kathy
Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

On the evening of May 4, 1970, I walked into the kitchen of our home in Canton. My dad was sitting in his wheelchair in his usual spot at the kitchen table, leaning toward the radio. As I approached, he shook his head and said, “This is bad. Really bad.”

In the preceding days, there had been demonstrations and rioting on the Kent State campus and in town. The ROTC Building had been burned to the ground. National Guardsmen, sent by Ohio Governor James Rhodes, had shot into a crowd of protesting students and killed four of them. Alison Krause, 19, and Jeffrey Miller, 20, were participating in the protest. Sandy Scheuer and William Schroeder, both 19, were bystanders observing the demonstration between classes. Nine other students were wounded, including Dean Kahler, who has spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

I was a Kent State freshman, living at home and attending the University’s Stark County campus. I had lived through the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the killings of Reverend Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy, and Malcolm X. I had watched unremitting footage of battles in Vietnam and in our cities on the nightly news. This is to say that I was inured to violence. I understood that it was deplorable, but I was numb. I felt removed from the day’s events.

My father’s reaction broke through to me. My father understood that law enforcement officers should not be shooting down students on a college campus. He also understood, more clearly than I did, that a President elected to end a war in Asia should not be expanding that war into a neighboring country. President Nixon had announced our incursion into Cambodia in a television address a few days earlier.

Other adults, besides my father, impressed me with the intensity of their revulsion, including Channel Five’s news commentator Dorothy Fuldheim, whom we young people used to ridicule as hopelessly out of touch. In her evening broadcast, she asked, tears streaming down her face, “And who gave the National Guard the bullets? Who ordered the use of them? Since when do we shoot our own children?”  Neil Young wrote his iconic protest song “Ohio.” Several weeks after the shooting, the Akron Beacon Journal reported, “The four victims did nothing that justified their death. They threw no rocks nor were they politically radical. No sniper fired at the National Guard. No investigative agency has yet found any evidence sufficient to support such a theory.”

Many news outlets, politicians, and citizens, however, took a different position. In some cases, they had encouraged government’s overreach ahead of time. In April of 1970, while running for Governor, Ronald Reagan made this comment regarding campus unrest: “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with.” Richard Nixon called protesters “bums.” James Rhodes said student protesters were communists and “worse than Brownshirts.”

After the killings, the vitriol continued. The first card that Dean Kahler received in the hospital told him that the sender wished he was dead. The Nixon tapes revealed that the President, about a year later, asking his Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, “You know what stops them? Kill a few. Remember Kent State? Didn’t it have one hell of an effect, the Kent State thing?”

As weeks passed, my sorrow and horror grew. A relative of mine reacted to my emotion by telling me, “They should have killed more of them.” We don’t execute people for protesting, I responded, or even for throwing stones at cops. He answered that maybe we should.

I need to point out that Kent State was not the only locus for campus violence. On May 15, 1970, police opened fire on a Black students’ protest at Mississippi’s Jackson State, killing two (Phillip Gibbs, 21, and James Earl Green, 17) and wounding twelve others. In the intervening years, police shootings have disproportionately affected Black people. In each case, some Americans protest the overreaction of armed officers, while others blame the victims.

Recent events, of course, are prompting these recollections. In today’s Minneapolis, of course, we can watch live video of the shootings, though these videos don’t seem conclusive to everyone. In 2026, it seems that the powers-that-be will fight to prevent investigations. In the 1970s, we had no videos, but American institutions, flawed though they were, conducted thorough investigations.

I’m not going to say that we’ve been here before and that we’ve survived such periods in our history. I am going to say that in similar eras some people have clearly seen that armed, uniformed government agents should not be gunning down Americans who are exercising their free-speech rights. And that other people, apparently always, perennially, despite the evidence and the Constitution, will say that the men with the guns are right and that the citizens who revere the 1st Amendment are wrong.

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Megyn’s Pedantry

Posted on November 18, 2025 by Kathy
A teenage girl. Photo by Janko Ferlič on Unsplash

During the Lewinsky-Clinton scandal twenty-five years ago, I remember parents’ bemoaning uncomfortable conversations with their children about sex acts that might have waited a few years if not for our President’s Oval Office activities. A semen-stained dress was in the news, and children will ask questions.

These days, although I don’t have school-age children or grandchildren, I imagine similar resentment about answering questions about Jeffrey Epstein. Sure, you have to warn kids about stranger danger, but should your ten-year-old need to learn about “massages,” procurement, and grooming? I say, no, they shouldn’t, but, once again, you have to answer kids’ questions.

Now, however, even adults are exhibiting a woeful lack of information. Conservative commentator (and attorney!) Megyn Kelly has attracted attention for her weird hairsplitting about the word pedophilia. She seems uncertain about the definition. To be fair, she insisted that Epstein’s behavior was “disgusting.” But she also served up this disquieting word salad:

[Epstein] was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls. . . I’m definitely not trying to make an excuse for this. I’m just giving you facts, that he wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.

He liked girls who looked younger than they were but at the same time looked older? Fifteen-year-olds are “barely legal”?

Megyn went on to say, “I think there’s a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old, you know?”

Sure there are differences, Megyn, but what difference precisely are you referring to?

In fact, language can come to Megyn’s aid, if she really wants to split hairs. There are words for what she’s talking about. The Greek root paedo- means “child,” as in pediatrician and pedagogue (child-leader). The suffix -phile, of course, refers to “love,” as in bibliophile and philosophy (love of wisdom). Technically, pedophilia refers to attraction to prepubescent children, aged anywhere from infancy to thirteen or so. That’s why Megyn references a five-year-old.

Regarding Epstein’s preferences, Megyn’s talking (though she doesn’t know it) about ephebophilia. That’s an attraction to young pubescent individuals, around the ages fourteen to sixteen. Ephebo- refers to a youth, because in Ancient Greece, it usually referred to an older man’s interest in young men. If you want to get really technical, there’s also hebophilia, an interest in younger adolescents. As we’ve all heard by now, Epstein lost interest when the girls turned eighteen or so and passed them along to his rich friends. So he was, technically, an ephebophile or a hebophile.

Here’s the thing, though. Sex with anyone under the age of eighteen is illegal. And everyone knows that a fifty-year-old man raping (or “seducing”) a girl in her teens is not only illegal but wrong. In common usage, pedophilia refers to sexual attraction to children, that is, young people under the age of eighteen. Here’s how Wikipedia explains it.

Although ephebophilia is not a psychiatric diagnosis, the term pedophilia is commonly used by the general public and the media, at least in the English-speaking world, to refer to any sexual interest by significantly older adults in minors below the local age of consent or even people below the local age of majority, regardless of their level of physical and/or mental development.

In other words, we can call Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell pedophiles, without equivocation, to our thousands of listeners. We needn’t appear to question–because maybe people are using the wrong word!–the guilt of people who abused and damaged hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of victims.

Here’s another relevant Word of the Day: cavil, meaning to make petty or unnecessary objections. Megyn’s objections to the term pedophile seem petty, certainly unnecessary, and perhaps, more accurately, sinister.

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It’s about Boxes, not Boxing

Posted on October 22, 2025 by Kathy
Photo by Bogdan Yukhymchuk on Unsplash






Wherein I admit that the terms discussed below were heretofore unfamiliar to me. Be kind.

Homework, a recent memoir by Englishman Geoff Dyer, is endlessly amusing. He’s a witty writer (The Ongoing Moment, The Last Days of Roger Federer) with a great memory, two valuable assets for a memoirist. Because he was born in the fifties, I found we have a lot in common. But because he’s English and Oxford-educated, I was flummoxed by a fair number of words and references.

Etiolated is one of those words I’ve looked up in the dictionary at least a half dozen times. Maybe this time I’ve learned it. Or maybe not. At this moment, I’m aware that it means “feeble” or “bleached” or “deprived of vigor.” Botanically, it refers to plants growing in deficient light. It comes from the French etioler, meaning “to blanch.” Its stress is on the first syllable /ˈēdēəˌlādəd/.

Conkers is an odd game English boys play (or played) in which they attach strings to horse chestnuts, or conkers, and swing them around in an attempt to damage or destroy the other boy’s conkers. As an adult, Dyer reasonably observes that somehow it never occurred to him or other boys that you were just as likely to damage your own conker as your opponent’s. Boys are very weird.

Verrucas is a synonym for warts, which plagued Dyer as a child. It is, in fact, the Latin word for wart, which means that I should know it. In my experience, however, Julius Caesar, Cicero, Ovid, Vergil, Horace, Catullus, and Lucretius neglected to tell us about their warts. Unless I’ve forgotten.

I think I knew the meaning of “taking the mickey ” out of someone, a favorite expression of Dyer’s dad. It means “to ridicule or embarrass.” I wanted to check out its history, though, and found out it’s ambiguous. The best theory is that it’s Cockney slang, based on “taking the Mickey Bliss out” of someone, because bliss rhymes with “piss,” and “taking the piss out” of someone is the older phrase for teasing or embarrassing someone. Or, it might refer to micturition, another word for pissing. Either way, I guess it has to do with urinating.

Finally, I had to check out Boxing Day, celebrated in England and other countries on December 26. Traditionally, it was a day to box up gifts for servants and the poor. Ironically, it’s come to mean shopping at big box stores after Christmas and buying more stuff, kind of like Black Friday in the US. I had a vague notion it had something to do with fisticuffs.

Don’t draw the conclusion that Geoff Dyer’s prose is pretentious or intimidating. True, sometimes his narrative dragged a little as he reaches his teens, when he obsesses over British bands I never heard of, collects Brooks-Bonds tea cards (?), and wants so desperately to insinuate himself with girls. At the end of the book, though, as he leaves home and deals with his parents’ deaths, his experience becomes poignantly universal. It’s a unique and lovely book.

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More about Orwell

Posted on October 10, 2025 by Kathy
Photo by Sandie Clarke on Unsplash

In 1984, George Orwell’s dystopian state created Newspeak, a strictly utilitarian language with a continuously shrinking vocabulary and simplistic syntax. To avoid ambiguity and complexity, Newspeak kills words, limiting the possibilities of thought. Clear victims of this effort are beauty and originality.

Orwell himself employed simple but often startlingly vivid language. In his essay, “Politics and the English Language,” he says that obscure language “falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up the details.” Nature is a fertile source for metaphor.

In Orwell’s Roses, arguing the case for Orwell-as-gardener, Rebecca Solnit catalogues a lovely selection of such images.

The kind of metaphoric, evocative, image-rich speech that Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Newspeak is trying to root out is grounded in the natural, rural, and agrarian world; the language of plowing ahead, having a hard row to hoe, reaping what you sow, making a beeline, going out on a limb, not seeing the forest for the trees, rooting out itself, and all the rest. Orwell in going rural was, among other things, returning to the source of metaphor, aphorism, and simile.

How often are we hoping, outside of the garden, to do some weeding and trimming? We plant ideas, we fertilize and water them. As ye sow, so shall ye reap, after all. Add to my list, and Solnit’s. I love how she got me thinking of gardening language and its fruitfulness.

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Orwell’s Roses

Posted on October 7, 2025 by Kathy
Photo by Nikita Tikhomirov on Unsplash

Both sides of the conservative/liberal divide claim George Orwell for their own, but the left has a better claim. Orwell fought against the fascist Franco revolt in Spain. He sided with the poor and powerless in labor (labour!) disputes and opposed colonialism. He called himself a democratic socialist, so there you go.

His name is bandied about in our current blustery political climate, because, whichever side you’re on, Orwell opposed totalitarian regimes. Many readers are picking up Animal Farm and 1984 these days, some other people are banning them, and Orwell’s essays, especially the great “Politics and the English Language,” are having their day.

Hence, it is an ideal time to read Orwell’s Roses, Rebecca Solnit’s 2021 discursive study of the man and the writer. The roses are on the one hand literal. Eric Blair (Orwell’s real name) planted some by his little house in Wallington, England, and wrote about tending them in his extensive journals. He sought refuge in his garden and in the countryside frequently. Many of Solnit’s chapters begin with this sentence, “In 1936, a writer planted roses.” Solnit made a pilgrimage to his house in order to see if the flowers are still there. They are.

As an aside, you may be familiar with Rebecca Solnit through her connection to the term mansplaining. She didn’t invent it, but it grew out of her 2008 essay “Men Explain Things to Me.” At a party, a man begins discoursing to Solnit and her friend about a “very important” book recently published about Eadweard Muybridge, the 19th century photographer. Both Solnit and her friend try to tell the guy that Solnit herself wrote the book he’s referencing, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, but he won’t stop talking long enough to listen. Her essay references many more such men, and she’s probably encountered plenty more in the intervening years.

Anyway, roses also take on a metaphorical dimension, as in the leftist slogan “Bread and roses!” Roses stand for the beauty and pleasure of life and for relief from life’s travails. Humanity does not live by bread alone. In January of 1944, Orwell wrote, “A correspondent reproaches me with being ‘negative’ and ‘always attacking things.’ The fact is that we live in a time when causes for rejoicing are not numerous. But I like praising things when there is anything to praise, and I would like here to write a few lines—in praise of the Woolworth’s Rose.” And then he praised his roses, purchased at Woolworth’s.

Solnit is so good at just meandering, following the paths that her mind takes her. She writes about the history of the earth and the creation of fossil fuels, the damage wrought by totalitarian regimes, coal mining, poetry, language and nature. She’s trying to present an alternative view of Orwell–the gardener, the tough-minded journalist who found solace and beauty in nature.

We don’t have to spend all our energy fighting injustice. We can do small good things. Solnit finds comfort, as can we, in Orwell’s advice: “The planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root it will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good or evil.”

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Sounds

Posted on August 27, 2025 by Kathy
Gargoyle and heads, Chichester Cathedral
Gargoyle and heads, Chichester Cathedral by Rob Farrow is licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0

I learned two etymologies from my new favorite YouTube Channel, The Salisbury Organist, created by a young Brit named Ben Maton. Actually, one I was reminded of, and the other I learned from Ben.

Ben’s videos include a lot of organ explaining, which necessarily includes a lot about organ stops. If you know the expression “pull out all the stops,” you probably already know its origin. A pipe organ has as many as 150 stops, that is, mechanisms that admit or stop air from moving into a pipe to make a particular sound. If you pull them all out at once, allowing air into all the pipes, you create a blast of sound. In a figurative sense, pulling out stops means increasing effort, making use of all your resources. The English poet Matthew Arnold of “Dover Beach” fame may have been the first to use this expression non-literally:

Proud as I am of my connection with the University of Oxford, I can truly say, that knowing how unpopular a task one is undertaking when one tries to pull out a few more stops in that powerful but at present somewhat narrow-toned organ, the modern Englishman, I have always sought to stand by myself, and to compromise others as little as possible.
— Essays in Criticism, 1865

Nowadays, an athlete, a political party, or Bruce Springsteen might be pulling out all the stops at any given time.

Smarter than I, you may already know the other derivation that Ben shared.

In this recent video, when Ben gets caught in a thunderstorm on his way to a lovely English church, he points out a gargoyle channeling the water from on high, the etymology of which I had never considered. If I had noted that gargoyles have open mouths, the better to channel rain water down from roofs, I might have connected the term with gargle, an onomatopoetic borrowing from French. The sound of gargouiller and our word gargle is roughly the sound we make when we, you know, “hold a liquid in the mouth or throat and agitate it with air from the lungs.” I knew gargling was the sound we make, but I never associated it with gargoyles.

I was thinking that the creature pictured above might, more accurately, make the sound gurgling, rather than gargling. But that would be a a different etymology: gurguliare is Latin for making a gurgly sound. And that would make our monstrous creature a gurgoyle.

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Panning Dwight Garner’s Pan

Posted on August 21, 2025 by Kathy
Photo by Jack Anstey on Unsplash

Dwight Garner begins his recent New York Times review of Ron Chernow’s biography Mark Twain with this inelegant simile: the book “squats over Twain’s career like a McMansion.” McMansion typically connotes size, ostentation, and a lack of style. I’ll grant Garner’s merciless pan a few points here and there, but, overall, I’m left wondering exactly what his beef (pun intended) is. I have a theory, which I’ll get to at the end.

As to the book’s size, I have no argument. Chernow’s text runs to 1,033 pages, with over 100 additional pages of notes, acknowledgments, and index. For comparison, Twain’s autobiography is about 400 pages long, Justin Kaplan’s 1966 work Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography was a smidge over 400, and Ron Powers’s Mark Twain: A Life (2005) was roughly 700 pages. If you want a shorter read, pick one of those highly regarded predecessors.

Filling the thousand pages is a ton of detail, some of it repetitious. Chernow tells us over and over again that Twain was a flawed businessman–gullible and impulsive. In Chernow’s defense, Twain made the same mistakes over and over again, trusting in con men and flaky inventors, determined to get rich. In addition, Chernow returns frequently to the “Angelfish” of Twain’s later years, that is, the young girls and women he befriended and became obsessed with. Chernow is at pains to assure us, repeatedly, that no sexual accusations have ever surfaced about these relationships. But he avers, many times, that Twain’s predilections were at best unsettling. Many, many times, these tendencies and qualifiers are restated.

Could the book be shorter? Yes, it could.

At the same time, I chafed at some omissions. Why doesn’t Chernow tell us what year it is? Often, when I shared an anecdote from the book with my husband, he would ask, “When did that happen?” or “How old was Twain then?” I always answered, “Not sure.” In order to know what year, or even what decade I was reading about, I would have to refer to the endnotes to learn when the quoted letter was sent or when the Twain talk was delivered. Mostly, I muddled through and sometimes resorted to referencing Wikipedia on my phone to find out precisely when Pudd’nhead Wilson appeared. This bio is roughly chronological, but chapter headings, at least, should signify the years or decades they’re covering. I’d add to my own criticisms that occasionally Chernow’s prose is clumsy.

But back to Garner’s McMansion jibe. Maybe the heft of Chernow’s book makes it ostentatious, but I can’t think of any other pretensions. The style is straightforward and mostly readable. Maybe Garner finds readability boring, like a cookie-cutter McMansion? I don’t know.

And I can’t comprehend the need for the insulting verb “squats.” In what way could this thorough and interesting book be squatting over Twain’s career? What a mean sentence.

I’m frankly not sure what Garner’s major gripe actually is, but he asserts that Chernow “misses the man.” He assails the emphasis on Twain’s business failures: “his Twain is fundamentally a dupe, not a genius.” I could add also that Chernow dwells on Twain’s failures as a father and husband. He was loving but inept and often shockingly neglectful. He was vindictive and unforgiving to his perceived enemies. My guess, and it’s only that, is that Garner actually wanted less of the man. He wanted more hagiography and less clear-eyed scrutiny.

Chernow makes clear that Twain was, in fact, a genius. He commends his courage in adopting unpopular causes, such as opposing colonialism and providing reparations to African-Americans. He admires most of all Twain’s wit and energy–his astounding literary creativity. “What any biography of Mark Twain demands is his inimitable voice,” he writes, “which sparkled even in his darkest moments.” Chernow provides a satisfying helping of Twain’s brilliant humor. There’s wit on every page, even, as Chernow says, in Twain’s darkest moments. There were many of those, many of them self-inflicted. Garner says only hardy souls will make it through this “air-conditioned edifice” (whatever that means). This hardy soul made it through with a deeper appreciation of Twain’s gifts as well as his flaws. I accept Garner’s compliment.

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