The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas
Anand Giridharadas

I saw Anand Giridharadas on a CNN panel one evening several months ago. I marvelled at how articulate he was! I was between books at the time, and when a sign flashed on the screen saying that he was the author of a book called The True American, I went to my computer and ordered  it from my local library.

The True American is the story of Rais, a young Bangladeshi immigrant who worked at a convenience store in Dallas, Texas at the time of 9/11. His life was upended and nearly ended in the month after that disaster took place, by a ne’er-do-well American shit-kicker named Mark Stroman. Mr. Stroman, who also killed two Asian men he also mistakenly believed to be “Arabs,” thought of himself as an avenger of the wrong that had been done to America.

The non-fiction story developed into an obvious gold mine for the right author. Giridharadas researched the material meticulously, and for the most part, does a fine job of reporting. He goes into great detail, with background on both major figures: Rais, who practices “American” values such as resiliency and self-sufficiency, and makes a life for himself after the near-fatal shooting; and Mark, who ends up on death row, where it’s possible (but not certain) that he finally begins to realize the gravity of what he’s done and feel remorse.

Stroman’s life had veered off the rails and into the Texas juvenile correction system during his teens. The wealth of information from its files that documented new beginnings, hopeful observations, and then more acting-out and criminal behaviour will lead many readers into deep contemplation about “nature and nurture.”

One of my other main takeaways from the book came from reading the transcript of Stroman’s initial statement before trial. This twisted document of self-justification displays, for all time, how easily a person can delude himself to the point of insanity. The statement ends: “I, Mark Anthony Stroman, felt a need to extract some measure of equality and fairness for the thousands of victims of September 11, 2001, for the United States of America.”


What makes The True American particularly unusual is that Rais makes a vow just after being shot. He vows that if God allows him to survive, he’ll give his life to the service of others. His service takes the form, finally, of forgiving Mark and trying to prevent his execution.

The author follows the story, beyond Rais’ attempts to save Mark, into his later effort to make a difference with Mark’s children, who are living rather at-risk lives themselves. This last third of the book simply doesn’t have the striking impact of the first two-thirds. But those first two-thirds of The True American amount to a powerful read.
 
News of the World
Paulette Jiles

News of the World, the book I discovered via an Audible.com prompt immediately after completing The True American, is as different from that one as a book can be.

It’s a short historical novel, a period piece about Texas in 1870 during the aftermath of the Civil War, and before “Indian Territory” has been rendered completely safe for whites. The Kiowa and Comanche are liable to raid any party travelling across the state.

The protagonist of the book is a 70-year-old man named Captain Kidd. After several years in military service as a young man, Kidd became a printer. When the economics of the Civil War led to the closing of his shop, he morphed into a sort of performer. At the time in which the novel is set, he travels across Texas giving little “Chautauqua” events, during which he reads excerpts from American and European newspapers to audiences in small theatres and meeting rooms.

The captain is a good man who has seen a lot. His depth of character is one source of the book’s charm. Another is a 10-year-old girl he calls “Johanna,” who was kidnapped when she was four by the Kiowa, and is being returned to a surviving family member, given that her parents were killed in the raid that led to her abduction.

Johanna has lived with the Kiowa for four years and remembers nothing at all about her early life. She’s terrified of the white man, and identifies totally as an Indian. An acquaintance of Captain Kidd, who’s been transporting the girl to the home of an aunt and uncle, but has other commitments he needs to attend to, asks the Captain to take her the rest of the way. The journey entails travelling several hundred miles, from Wichita Falls (near the Texas panhandle) to a small town south of San Antonio, in a small horse-drawn wagon.

The narrative of the dangerous trip and the events that occur after the girl is delivered act as a window into an America that doesn’t often get such skilful literary treatment. In the end, that warms a reader’s heart, too.
 
Love Warrior: A Memoir
Glennon Doyle

Glennon Doyle is a popular motivational speaker, partly because of the impact of this memoir. Several years ago, during some of the hard times that the book describes, she discovered the personal benefits of telling her truth via the written word. When her blog describing her travails went viral, she began receiving offers from publishers. This led to Love Warrior.

The young woman whom we find at the end of the memoir, however, has come a long, long way from her 10-year-old bulimic counterpart and her alcohol-and-sex-soaked adolescence and young adulthood.

She begins realizing, after an abortion followed by another pregnancy, when her loving, doting parents begin threatening to leave her to her self-destructive fate, that she has to change. The step-by-step story of how she finds her way, starting from a life nearly devoid of positive behavioural patterns, is compelling.

Doyle possesses an almost uncanny capacity to bring the reader into the living present that her words conjure. The joy of her account of the birth of her first child, and the moment she and her husband first hear and see their baby laugh, are priceless!
We take Chase for a walk and stop the stroller in front of a bush with a bird in it. The bird chirps, right at Chase’s eye level, and Chase laughs for the first time. Craig and I are stunned. We look at each other with wide, wet eyes. Chase’s laughter sounds like a waterfall of crystal bubbles. ... Before this moment, Craig and I have not truly understood Chase as a whole person, separate from us, capable of being delighted by the world around him.
Similarly, Doyle’s accounts of new travail that emerges, after this Heaven has been reached, bring the reader right there with her. Love Warrior is an intense and discomfiting book, but it has a lot to impart to anyone who picks it up.
 
The Idiot
Elif Batuman

The word “quirky” could’ve been coined to describe this 423-page novel by a young Turkish-American woman who works for The New Yorker magazine.

It begins with an account of the protagonist’s first year at Harvard University. The world, as Batuman describes it, is a place of non sequitur and humorous juxtapositions. It’s also amazingly counter-intuitive and often very disappointing.

The reader sees directly and clearly through the eyes of young Selin, and what he/she sees is pretty absurd at every step of the way. It resonates with the world I see going on around me, and it does with many others, too, judging from the book’s popularity.

In Batuman’s creation, every paragraph is like a new world. Although I wouldn’t call the book “magical realism,” every ordinary happening becomes extraordinary through the author’s and character’s eyes—sometimes just extraordinarily dull or foolish, but always extraordinary.

The author’s powers of observation are keen, and often include details others might not notice. There’s no possibility of imagining where things will go next in the story. The unusual quality of the book also comes, in part, from the author’s keen sense of some of the absurdities of language, or at least the ways people use it.

Harvard and its curriculum seem completely absurd. All the courses that Selin interviews for—apparently, at Harvard, freshmen have to interview for courses before being allowed to take them—are somehow removed from real life. The author manages to convey the impression that nearly every course at the university is about some irrelevant aspect of life, or some intellectual wrinkle on history, society or literature.
It was hard to decide on a literature course. Everything the professors said seemed to be somehow beside the point. You wanted to know why Anna had to die, and instead they told you that 19th century Russian landowners felt conflicted about whether they were really a part of Europe. The implication was that it was somehow naive to want to talk about anything interesting, or to think that you would ever know anything important.
There are, however, some interesting characters, people the protagonist befriends. They manage to transcend the existential vacuum and have real lives that a reader comes to care about.

The second half of The Idiot takes place in Europe. Selin takes a job teaching English in a Hungarian village, in order to follow a love interest who’s going home to his family in Budapest for the summer. On the way, she stops for several days in Paris with her friend and frequent opposite, Svetlana, whose presence in the book generates quite a few lively conversations. Europe is perhaps not quite as absurd as Harvard, but Selin’s unlikely adventures continue to unfold, bringing Don Quixote to my mind more than once.

The book is almost an Alice in Wonderland of realistic or semi-realistic literature. I recommend it highly!

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